The Masked Witches

by Richard Lee Byers

  The sword bit deep, but the giantess still wouldn’t fall down. Though the wound must have hurt her, she repeatedly tried to stamp on Aoth, and to stab the top of the stone tree down on his head. She alternated those tactics with an attempt to scramble far enough away so that his sword couldn’t reach her, while at the same time sweeping him away by swinging her makeshift weapon. He dodged, pursuing doggedly whenever she tried to open up the distance, and cutting at her whenever she gave him a chance.

  Meanwhile, something started pounding on the other side of one of the arches that Jhesrhi had sealed with her wizardry. So far, Aoth and his comrades had held their own, but it seemed unlikely that even the elementalist’s mastery of earth and stone could keep the rest of the giants out for long.

  Which meant they had to end the fight quickly. Aoth had to, for he’d taken the critical task upon himself. Everyone else was essentially just keeping the cyclopes from swarming on him.

  Grontaix tried another retreat, and pursuing more slowly, trying to look fatigued—it shouldn’t be difficult—he let her open up the distance. She screamed and whirled the stone tree—the silver pears all fallen away, many of the branches snapped off short—in another sweeping horizontal stroke.

  Aoth didn’t try to dodge. He’d let her open up the distance precisely so she could attempt another of those arcing blows—they took longer to travel to the target. With luck, they even afforded the time for a spell. He rattled off words of power as the stone tree spun at him, and he slashed in its direction with his sword.

  A shaft of green light blazed from the blade and struck the onrushing makeshift weapon. The whole tree glowed emerald for an instant and then simply disappeared.

  The sudden absence of its weight threw the fomorian off balance. Aoth charged and cut at her nearest leg like a mad logger frantic to fell a tree.

  He slashed repeatedly, inflicting new wounds on a limb that, like its mate, was already a gory, tattered mess. Blood spurted. Grontaix roared, stumbled, and fell headlong. When she slammed down, it jolted the floor, and Aoth nearly lost his balance, too.

  He sprinted toward her head, grabbed the edge of an ear, and pressed the point of his sword against a pulsing artery in the side of her neck. “Don’t move!” he gasped. “Tell the cyclopes to stand down! Now, or you’re dead!”

  She hesitated for a moment, then cried, “Everyone, stop!” It gave him a vague sort of satisfaction that she sounded as winded as he did.

  When he felt confident that she really had stopped fighting, he risked a quick glance around. To his relief, all of his allies appeared to be all right. In fact, they’d killed two more cyclopes: one that Jhesrhi had apparently burned to death and another that looked like it had succumbed to a combination of sword cuts and bites from large fanged jaws. The bites didn’t look like the results of any spell that Jhesrhi or Cera used, and Aoth could only assume that some magic Zyl commanded was responsible. The surviving retainers were lowering their weapons and backing away from their opponents.

  Suddenly the stone plugging one of the arches flew apart with a flash of silvery light and an echoing boom, and more cyclops warriors scrambled through the breach. Fortunately, they faltered when they saw Aoth’s blade at Grontaix’s throat.

  “Good,” he told the giantess. “Now, everyone’s going to stay calm, you’re going to answer some questions, and then you’re going to escort my friends and me safely out of here.”

  “That’ll be a good trick,” she gritted, “considering that I’m bleeding out.”

  He realized that might actually be true. “Cera, if you have any power left, keep her alive,” he said.

  “All right,” the priestess replied. She stanched the rhythmic arterial spurting with a prayer and a gleaming touch of her hand.

  “There,” said Aoth. “You see, this doesn’t need to turn ugly. Well, uglier.”

  “Who are you people?” the fomorian growled.

  “Agents of the Iron Lord and the Wychlaran,” Aoth replied.

  “Well, not all of us,” said Zyl. “It looks like my disguise has outlived its usefulness, so these oafs might as well know who outwitted and defeated them.” His body contours flowed as he started shapeshifting.

  Though he didn’t consider himself a fanciful man, Aoth imagined his new ally might now stand revealed as a sinisterly handsome dark-elf wizard or a notably hideous devil. That, after all, was the sort of transformation that happened in stories. Thus, he felt a mixture of anticlimax and amusement at his own romanticism when the black rat flowed into the shape of a black hare.

  But if he wasn’t impressed, Grontaix was. “You!” she snarled.

  Zyl laughed as he said, “Yes. I’ve been hiding right here in your palace for months now.”

  “And I imagine you have some things to say about it,” said Aoth to his captive. “But they’ll keep. Right now, you need to tell me about the undead durthans, and don’t bother denying you know what I’m talking about. I’ve already questioned your warrior Choschax.”

  The fomorian spat. “I curse the night the durthans came back!” she said.

  “The hathrans aren’t too happy about it, either,” said Aoth. “But why—apart from your present situation—do you say that?”

  “When my folk first allied with the durthans, we were supposed to help them cast down the hathrans, and they were supposed to help us crush our foes in the Feywild—”

  “Like me!” Zyl interjected.

  “—and Shadow alike. But the so-called ‘Witch War’ was a disaster. The hathrans annihilated the durthans, and our enemies humbled us. There may be some among my people who are eager to try exactly the same thing again in precisely the same way, but I’m not one of them. That’s why I live apart: because I can’t abide the company of fools.”

  “So why,” Cera asked, “did you help the durthans recruit werewolves to their cause?”

  The giantess snorted. “The curs are nothing,” she said. “Just a convenience we in this stronghold created to keep true humans off my land.”

  “So by parting with something of little value,” said Aoth, “you satisfied the durthans and bought yourself time to decide whether you really want to throw in with them again or not.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s bringing the durthans back?”

  “Other undead, supposedly from somewhere far away. I don’t know where, exactly. I’ve only met with the durthans, not with the ones who called them from their graves.”

  “If they’re from so far away,” Vandar asked, shivering and ashenlipped now that his rage had passed, “what do they care about Rashemen?”

  “I can’t tell you why they chose to come to this land in particular,” Grontaix said. “But I do know their intent is to establish some sort of hegemony of the dead. The durthans will rule here as they desire, but their dominion will be part of something greater.”

  “Like the tharchs that make up Thay,” said Aoth.

  “I suppose,” replied the formorian.

  “And that explains why these invaders are so concerned about Szass Tam and his lieutenants finding out about them. Thay’s already an empire of the undead and necromancy. I doubt it wants a rival, and it may well have the power to destroy this one before it really gets going.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “And when the undead rule Rashemen, what do your people get out of it?”

  The fomorian sneered. “Those who came to visit me gave essentially the same pledges as before,” she said. “The undead will rule in the mortal world, and my folk will rule in the spirit realms.”

  “How do the durthans and the other undead travel around Rashemen without the hathrans’ watchers spotting them?”

  “I can’t say, but it’s a useful trick.”

  “What else do they have in their quivers? What’s their grand strategy for winning a new war?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “You must at least have some idea where they’ve based their command.”
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  “Is it Citadel Tralkarn?” Vandar asked, referring to the ruin that had once been the durthans’ greatest stronghold.

  The fomorian snorted. “Do you think they’re stupid enough to establish themselves in the first place so that you berserkers and such would come looking for them?” she said. “No, the invaders visited Citadel Tralkarn early on, before you had any idea that anything was amiss. They reanimated those they could, looted what remained to be looted, and moved on.”

  “Where to?” asked Aoth.

  “I don’t know that all their captains are there, or even the chief one. But they’re gathering strength at the Fortress of the Half-Demon,” Grontaix said with a smirk. “Enough to slaughter your little band, I’m sure.”

  “Isn’t that a Nar ruin?” Cera asked. “Are the newcomers bringing back dead Nars, too?”

  “Ask them when you meet them, assuming you’re fool enough to go,” the formorian replied.

  “We won’t look foolish with my lodge behind us,” Vandar said. “This is what my brothers and I have been waiting for. Now that we know where to find our enemies, we can kill them.”

  “Not a chance,” Zyl said. “Or at least, not unless my people help.”

  “Will they?” asked Aoth.

  “They might,” said the hare. “A squabble between humans and their dead grannies is no great matter to us. But if these invaders are giving our enemies among the fey silly notions, and if they’re tampering with the fiends the Nars left locked in pentacles and the like, that could be a problem. We could certainly ask my prince to send warriors to look into the situation. One of you could tag along with me to help explain it.”

  While others, Aoth thought, fly back to the lodge house in Immilmar. Then the two forces will rendezvous near the haunted fortress.

  “It sounds like you have it all figured out,” Grontaix growled. “So why not go away and leave me in peace?”

  “I told you,” said Aoth. “We’re going to keep you hostage until you and you alone have accompanied us back aboveground. Unfortunately, I need to keep a weapon at your throat, so you’ll have to put up with me riding on your shoulder. That is, unless you’d rather crawl.”

  S

  I

  X

  It wasn’t much of a village, just a cluster of huts in the rugged hills between Lake Ashane and the Urlingwood. In such a backwater, there were relatively few people to kill, and even fewer who could put up a fight against the dead. By the time Dai Shan’s shadow arrived, the massacre was nearly over, but not quite. It felt the survivors before it actually saw them, as points of warmth in the cold and dark. It sensed its peers, too, as something colder than cold and emptier than empty.

  As the shadow came loping down the slope, one grinning corpse gripped a little boy’s ankles, and another, his wrists. They pulled in opposite directions, and if they were hoping to rip him in two, they were disappointed. But he screamed as his arms and legs came out of their sockets.

  A ghoul clawed a woman to rags, and then, when the victim stopped struggling, took an experimental bite out of her shoulder. It spat the bloody flesh out again, dumped the body on the ground, and, swinging itself along on its knuckles, scuttled toward the tiny graveyard.

  A man drove a spear into a thing so decayed that the shadow couldn’t tell if it had originally been male or female. Though it had no eyes left in the dark and mushy wreckage for a head, the creature looked down at the weapon, then grabbed its attacker by the neck.

  The shadow needed to decide how best to approach the killers. It was still pondering in its murky way when a hathran in a white tabard, cloak, and single-horned mask and a unicorn suddenly appeared among the carnage.

  Together, they shed a silvery glow that burned and dazzled the dead like sunlight. While the creatures were still reeling from that, the unicorn whipped its head and tore the mushy thing in two with its horn. The hathran chanted a prayer that turned the left half of a ghoul’s body to dust. After the part that was left fell down, it tried feebly and futilely to crawl.

  Perhaps because the shadow hadn’t hurt anyone, the priestess and the unicorn didn’t appear to notice it. It realized it had an opportunity to win the trust and attention of its fellow undead. It circled around behind the unicorn and the hathran. Then it charged.

  When it got close enough, the pale light seared it, too, but the pain was bearable. It pounced like a cat, landing on the unicorn’s back, and plunging its freezing, insubstantial hands into the sacred animal’s flesh. The unicorn jerked and screamed.

  Raising her scimitar, the witch pivoted toward her ally. But before she could strike or cast a spell at the shadow, an imp the size of a hawk, with beating batlike wings, pointed ears, and a mouth full of needle fangs, appeared in the air directly behind her. It whipped its tail, and the stinger at the end of it, at the back of her head.

  The sting didn’t seem to penetrate her woolen cowl. But she whirled to defend herself from the hovering devil and left the unicorn to look after itself.

  The shadow pummeled the sacred beast repeatedly, as fast as it could. But the animal simply vanished out from underneath its attacker.

  The shadow spilled to the ground like water. The unicorn popped back into view on its flank and instantly leaped, its shining horn leveled.

  The shadow threw itself to the side, and the thrust missed. The unicorn pivoted, reared, and battered at it with its front hooves. One blow plunged through its arm, and it felt a shock of pain.

  A burst of dark red, somehow filthy-looking flame splashed across the unicorn’s side. The animal screamed and staggered, dropping back onto all fours. As it struggled to recover its balance, an undead stepped in and clubbed it in the head with a war hammer. Blood splashed and bone crunched. The unicorn collapsed and lay motionless. The haze of silvery glow surrounding it and the hathran dimmed.

  The animal’s slayer was a walking corpse with three fleshless skulls on his shoulders instead of one. Judging from his mail, his faded, rotting, but ornately embroidered surcoat, and his manifest power, he was almost certainly the captain of the raiding party.

  With the unicorn slain, the undead leader rounded on the hathran, but needlessly so. The holy woman was collapsing under the stinging, biting onslaught of half a dozen imps. In another moment, the pale ambient glow blinked out of existence entirely, extinguished along with her life.

  The leader looked around, and darkness seethed in the eye sockets of the middle skull. The entity’s fallen minions stirred as an infusion of strength repaired the harm the unicorn and the witch had done to them.

  The leader whistled and raised a hand that wore a bulky gauntlet resembling a falconer’s glove. Snarling and gibbering, bloody-mouthed, the imps rose from the hathran’s corpse and flew to their master. As each swooped close to the gauntlet, it disappeared.

  The three-headed creature then turned to peer at the shadow. “You’re not one of mine,” said the middle skull. “But you can be. You can join us.”

  But the shadow knew that wasn’t so, because its will wasn’t its own. It was a bound thing, made for one specific purpose, and it was time to fulfill it.

  The shadow took all its strength and turned that power to a final purpose. By so doing, it perished, and Dai Shan appeared in its place.

  Well, not really, the Shou thought as he offered the three-headed undead a deep and courtly bow. He was still a shadow, or perhaps at that point it was more apt to call himself a reflection. Either way, he too would cease to be when the magic that had created him ran its course. Until then, though, he could think and speak like the original, and the original would know what he accomplished thereby.

  “I take it,” said the leader, his tone less cordial than before, “that you fancied yourself the master of the shadow that just sacrificed itself so you could appear before me.”

  “Yes,” said Dai Shan, taking care not to risk giving offense by reacting to the stinks of corruption and burnt unicorn fouling the cold night air. “I created and commanded
it. I’m Dai Shan of the House of Shan in Telflamm, if those names mean anything to one so venerable as the august magus I see before me.”

  “It’s a crime for any of the living to seek to control an undead,” the leader said.

  Dai Shan arched an eyebrow. “Even one that would never have existed in the first place had the living man not shaped it from a wisp of himself?” he asked. “I’m not sure that’s incontrovertibly rational or incontestably fair. Still, I humbly apologize for inadvertently offending against your customs.”

  “It’s not a ‘custom.’ It’s a law,” the creature replied.

  “As you say,” Dai Shan said. It really was cold here, and the Shou instructed himself not to shiver. Not only would it disgrace him, but it might lead the thing with three heads to imagine he was afraid, and that in turn might elicit aggression.

  “But sadly, it’s too late for the enforcement of any law to benefit the shadow,” Dai Shan continued. “As you so astutely observed, it’s already gone beyond recall, and the actual person who made and directed it is beyond your reach. Might it not be more productive, then, for you and his proxy to discuss matters of mutual import in the time remaining before I, too, disappear?”

  The undead leader grunted, or perhaps it was a single grudging beat of laughter. “What do you want, ‘Dai Shan of the House of Shan in Telflamm?’ ” it said.

  “The valiant captain’s name, for a start, if you see fit to honor me with it,” replied the Shou.

  “Falconer will do. What else do you want?”

  “Griffons.”

  The undead hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean,” it said.

  “Then please, allow me to enlighten you.” Dai Shan said. He told the undead about the captured beasts, Yhelbruna, and the competition she’d proclaimed.

  When he had finished, Falconer said, “Then it sounds like you—or the phantom that was here before you—should have fought on the unicorn’s side.”

  “Only if I thought that my agents and I could contribute significantly to the hathrans’ victory,” replied Dai Shan, “But what if I question whether such a victory will even materialize? What if I think that you risen Nars and durthans have a better chance of prevailing? Then it would be prudent to throw in with you. That is, of course, if you’re willing to part with the griffons to compensate me for the assistance I would provide.”