The Masked Witches

by Richard Lee Byers

  Even though the griffons were gorging on putrescence—and likely had been all along, with only illusion making it appear otherwise—their riders still couldn’t compel them to stop. Thus the soldiers’ only option was to stab at the undead horses with their lances. They set about it with fierce determination, oblivious to the other tattered, shambling forms rearing up out of the snow all around them.

  Jet streaked beyond the edge of the battle. Cera looked over her shoulder but could already see little of the rapidly dwindling figures at her back.

  “Turn around!” she said. “We have to help them!”

  “They’re our rivals,” Jet replied. “We want them to fail.”

  “Turn!” she said, then realized that despite his protest, he was already wheeling. As he lashed his wings and flew back at the combatants, she reached out to the Keeper and prayed for all the strength that he could give her. The magic flared inside her like the Yellow Sun itself, filling her with an ecstasy that nearly washed away her ability to think. Almost, but not quite. She still remembered her purpose.

  She swung her hand over her head, and golden light blazed down from the black starry sky to illuminate the field below. The undead cringed, and rotten flesh sizzled and crisped like bacon frying in a pan. But those effects were incidental. Cera’s actual intent was to free every griffon from the enchantment trammeling its mind, and she shouted with joy when the mighty beasts started to spring away from the horse-things and shake out their wings.

  One griffon leaped but fell back down onto the ground. Another started to trot and then staggered off balance. A third gave a strangled cry and vomited.

  Cera realized the rotten horseflesh had poisoned the griffons, and they could no longer fly. She snarled an obscenity.

  The things that had hidden under the snow—Cera thought they were mostly ghouls, although the dark made it difficult to tell for certain—lunged at their prey from all sides. They clawed at the stricken griffons and reached to drag the riders from their saddles.

  Cera asked Amaunator for more power. Somehow seeming both to descend from above and to rise from deep within her, it came in the form of the deity’s wrath, of his loathing for creatures that made a mockery of the natural progression from life into death and what came after. The magic was as hot as a cauterizing iron, but she held it without discomfort. It made her feel as taut as a drawn bow ready to drive an arrow.

  She swept her hand over her head and downward. Light blazed from her fingers. One of the ghouls crumbled to dust in an instant. The Keeper’s power burned holes in two more, and still others cringed, dropping onto their bellies and hiding their fanged, vaguely canine faces in the gory snow.

  But those were the only three that fell. For a moment, she wasn’t sure why, because it had certainly felt like she’d hurled a prodigious flare of the sun god’s power. Then she spotted the grotesque figure looking back up at her with three pairs of empty eye sockets.

  She’d never encountered such an undead before. But from Aoth’s tales of the War of the Zulkirs, she recognized the armored figure with the war hammer in his hand and the three skulls perched on his one set of shoulders as a skull lord. Such beings possessed arcane abilities, and it was likely his power was shielding the lesser undead from the full effect of Cera’s magic.

  Looking back at her, the skull lord tossed an arm that wore a bulky gauntlet like a falconer’s glove. Vague, murky shapes, somewhat manlike but with long, curved horns and batlike wings, burst into existence above his hand. They flew at her and Jet.

  The griffon instantly started flying faster and veering back and forth and up and down. Cera didn’t have the skill—or the psychic link—that would enable her to anticipate the sudden shifts, and they whipped her around in the saddle. Even worse, Jet’s headlong progress carried them away from those on the ground who so urgently needed their help.

  “The Aglarondans!” she gasped.

  “We have to protect ourselves first!” Jet rasped. “We can’t help anybody else if shadow demons are tearing us apa—”

  One of the ghostly creatures suddenly appeared on the right. It slashed with a clawed hand and just missed the familiar’s wing, at which point Cera belatedly realized the point of his racing, seemingly erratic progress. Jet knew shadow demons had the ability to shift through space. Thus, an unpredictable, constantly changing course was the only hope of avoiding them.

  Jet wrenched himself to the right, leaving the spirit behind. Unfortunately, it was still close enough to try a different form of attack. Though she couldn’t define precisely what she perceived or how, Cera suddenly sensed its malice stabbing at her like a dagger leaping at her eye.

  She felt her spirit separating from her body as it had when she and Aoth had performed the ritual of discovery in the temple garden in Soolabax. But then it had been of Cera’s own volition. There, above the Hurong’s Road, some power was dragging her out, and the shadow pounced at her to pierce her material form to its core and fill the void.

  “Keeper!” she cried. The god’s power thrust her soul back into its proper place. The demon splashed against an invisible barrier, its limbs and horned head losing all definition.

  Despite Jet’s dogged efforts at evasion, another demon appeared right in front of him, so close he had no hope of avoiding it. The spirit plunged its claws into his shoulder, holding on with one hand and raking with the other. Meanwhile, another shadow materialized above the griffon’s left wing and snatched hold of that.

  Cera drew another measure of Amaunator’s power, pressed her hand to Jet’s back, and made him shine like he himself was a piece of the sun. Creatures of living darkness, the demons released their holds and flung themselves away from the holy radiance.

  They still weren’t done, however. The glow flickered and dimmed as bursts of shadow threatened to taint and drown it. The invasive gloom came with freezing cold that made Cera gasp and Jet’s body jerk beneath her.

  She channeled still more of Amaunator’s strength and poured it into her enchantment. Jet’s body burned brighter and brighter, although the glare never hindered her vision or his, until finally the blasts of frigid darkness stopped.

  For a moment, she felt fierce satisfaction. Then she remembered the Aglarondans and looked down.

  Though Jet’s light was dimming as she’d stopped channeling strength into it, it was still bright enough to reveal the scene below in gruesome detail. Every griffonrider and every one of the steeds lay mangled and motionless; only the undead were moving. Those that subsisted on flesh gobbled it as greedily as the griffons had earlier devoured the poisonous filth. Others continued slashing and pounding their fallen foes, either because they enjoyed it or because no one had told them it was all right to stop. Some were violating Aglarondan corpses in stranger and even more sickening ways.

  The skull lord stood amid the carnage. Cera made out a pair of shadow demons hovering above him. The undead captain beckoned, challenging her.

  She yearned to accept. It was a sunlady’s duty to destroy the walking dead, and in that instance, the obligation meshed perfectly with her desires. She hated the things below her. For massacring the Aglarondans in such a foul and treacherous way. For nearly killing Jet and her. For making her fail when she’d wanted so desperately to succeed.

  Still, she recognized that it would be suicide to continue a fight against such overwhelming odds, so she didn’t protest when Jet wheeled and fled. She simply used more of her rapidly diminishing mystical strength to close his wounds.

  After a time, she said, “That was a trap. A trap for the griffonriders specifically.”

  “I think so, too,” said Jet. “The horses gave it away.”

  “But does that make sense?” she asked. “How could the enemy be sure of catching them and no one else?”

  “You humans with your kinked way of thinking are better at figuring out things like that,” Jet said with a grunt.

  Maybe they were. But no matter how Cera turned the matter over in her mind, a
ll she could see was that five groups of outlanders had taken up Yhelbruna’s quest, and there were only four remaining.

  * * * * *

  Dai Shan had observed long before that the important moments in life weren’t spaced out evenly. Either nothing happened, or situations that demanded attention arrived in quick succession.

  So it was that night. He’d only just dismissed the shadow he’d created to spy on the Griffon Lodge, when the thing he’d retrieved from the spot where Falconer had instructed him to look for it gave a little bleating cry from the brassbound leather chest where he’d hidden it.

  He crossed the chamber to the chest, unlocked it with the proper word, and opened it. Raking aside layers of clothing, he lifted out the undead demonbinder’s gift—if gift was the appropriate term for such a grotesquerie. Though Dai Shan too had studied what many considered to be an unsavory form of the mystic arts, as well as the techniques his family used to interrogate and chastise prisoners, touching the thing made his skin crawl.

  It looked like the right-hand side of a baby that had been split lengthwise, a freakish baby born under a curse. What there was of the head was abnormally big and bulbous, and patches of its skin were as scaly as a snake’s. The body’s three fingers and two toes ended in black claws. When Dai Shan had smuggled it into the castle and hidden it away, it had seemed dead, as by all rights it should certainly have been. But it squirmed feebly and opened an eye that, though it rolled from side to side, was all bloodshot sclera, with no discernible pupil or iris.

  Dai Shan assumed that once the creature had been a complete imp. Falconer had presumably called it forth from one of the lower worlds, cut it in two, kept one half for himself, and had some swift, stealthy servant carry the other to Immilmar.

  The half-imp’s eye stopped moving, presumably because it was looking at Dai Shan, although it was impossible to tell for certain. Then it spoke his name in Falconer’s deep, hollow, oddly accented voice.

  “Noble captain,” Dai Shan replied, and imagined his own voice issuing from the mouth of the half-imp still in the undead mage’s keeping. “I trust you have good news.”

  “The Aglarondans are dead,” Falconer said.

  “Excellent,” the Shou replied. “I told you my drug would make the griffons particularly susceptible to enchantment.” And it hadn’t even been especially difficult to contaminate the winged steeds’ food supply. While it would be an exaggeration to say that Folcoerr Dulsaer had come to trust him, once they had sealed their pact, and the griffonriders had grown used to seeing him in their encampment, the opportunity had almost inevitably presented itself.

  He wished it was as easy to juggle the half-imp. Dai Shan needed to hold onto it to strengthen the magic, but he couldn’t find a way to keep the cold, slimy exposed organs from coming into contact with his skin.

  “I suppose it did,” the skull lord said. “But something else happened that we didn’t foresee.”

  Dai Shan frowned slightly. “And what was that?” he asked.

  “There was another griffonrider there, a sun priestess on a black mount,” Falconer said. “And she got away.”

  “Interesting,” said Dai Shan. And it was. He hadn’t realized that anyone else who’d undertaken the “quest” was spying on the competition, and his respect for Aoth Fezim and his compatriots went up a notch. “But if the Aglarondans didn’t tell her I sent them to their doom, that shouldn’t be a problem. And apparently they didn’t, or by now someone would have called on me with inconvenient questions.”

  The thing in his hands jerked and shuddered like an epileptic in the throes of a seizure. To his disgust, its convulsions squeezed out fluid and sludge to stain his hands and sleeves. Then the fit subsided.

  “Who can you kill next?” Falconer asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dai Shan said. “Do the worthy magus and his circle trust me now? Do we have an arrangement? If not, then I fear the answer must be no one.”

  “Yes,” Falconer said. “We have an agreement. Continue helping my allies and me, and when we win, you can have the griffons.”

  “That’s splendid,” replied the Shou. “It would also be splendid if my new partner would tell me at least a little more about himself and his comrades. Such a display of trust would make me feel even more confident about the commitment I’ve made. It might also give me added insight into how I can best assist you.”

  The half-imp convulsed again, biting down so hard that one of its jagged teeth cracked. Squeezed out of its body cavity, a little green egg of an organ fell and splatted on the floor.

  “Undead have come to these lands from somewhere far away,” Falconer said at length. “I myself don’t understand where exactly. I gather that the face of the world has changed significantly since my former master made me as I am and charged me with my thankless tasks. But the newcomers are waking and rallying all those who once craved dominion, even the filthy Raumvirans.”

  Dai Shan considered himself an expert on many things. The history of long-dead empires was not among them. Still, he knew enough to ask, “And are the proud and valiant Nars pleased to welcome such wretches into the ranks?”

  “For now, they serve a purpose,” Falconer said. “We look forward to the time when that will no longer be that case.”

  Dai Shan smiled. “I fully understand,” he replied. “And I thank you for all the information you’ve confided so far. But I’d also appreciate one or two details. Perhaps the mighty and sagacious captain will tell me where he’s established his stronghold.”

  “You don’t need to know that,” said the skull lord.

  “Your trick with the imp is ingenious,” said Dai Shan, “but my half is deteriorating rapidly, and I suspect yours is as well. We can’t count on being able to use this form of communication whenever we need it. If I know where you’re based, I can dispatch a messenger.”

  Falconer hesitated before saying, “All right. I see your point. Rest assured, it’s not the only stronghold my army has occupied. But I’m based in the Fortress of the Half-Demon.”

  And the warriors of the Griffon Lodge were sneaking north. Dai Shan had their destination, although how they knew to go there and the current whereabouts of Aoth Fezim and Jhesrhi Coldcreek remained unclear.

  He considered telling Falconer to expect callers. But he quickly decided against it for two reasons.

  The first was that he’d already done the undead marauders one service tonight. It would be wasteful to perform another so quickly. Doling them out in a measured fashion was the way to keep Falconer from feeling beholden to him.

  The other was that he might decide he actually wanted the Griffon Lodge to take the fortress by surprise. In the multilayered game of Stones he was playing, there was no reason to close any line of development prematurely.

  After a moment or two, Falconer spoke again and roused the Shou from his contemplation. “Does that satisfy you?” he asked.

  “For now, brave champion, it does indeed,” said Dai Shan. “And I thank you for the honor of your confidence.”

  “Then let’s get back to my question. Whom do we kill next?”

  “I’ll have to explore the possibilities. Most of your enemies are less gullible than Folcoerr Dulsaer.”

  “Well, then, while you’re exploring, maybe you can do something else for us.”

  Falconer then proceeded to explain, and Dai Shan found himself intrigued. Because, despite his own expertise in the mystic arts, he didn’t understand what the point of such an operation would be.

  And unfortunately, his trader’s instincts told him it would be futile to ask for explanations. For the time being, he’d extracted everything from Falconer that he was going to get.

  E

  I

  G

  H

  T

  If anyone were to catch Dai Shan exploring the cellars under the Iron Lord’s citadel, the results could be unfortunate. But the Shou soon decided detection was so unlikely that he didn’t even bother exerting his
mystical abilities to hide from prying eyes. He simply prowled along like a mundane, but exceedingly accomplished, sneak thief.

  Some of the cold, echoing vaults were storerooms, and others, merely empty. Noting the lack of dungeons, Dai Shan wondered what Mangan Uruk did with captured outlaws and other prisoners who fell into his hands. Maybe, like the barbarian he was, Mandan slaughtered them on the spot, without even considering the potential advantages of keeping them alive.

  If so, then Dai Shan definitely wanted to avoid discovery. He wanted to find what Falconer claimed was here for the finding and return to his quarters and his bed before anybody missed him.

  Before long, he left kegs, crates, sacks, and the dim, wavering glow of the occasional oil lamp behind. In order to investigate the chambers beyond the uttermost reach of the light, he would require one of his arcane talents, the ability to see in darkness.

  The chambers appeared, despite what Falconer had said, to be empty of anything but dust and spider webs. Dai Shan felt a twinge of impatience. He took a breath and exhaled it. He reminded himself to search calmly and methodically, and, whatever he discovered, to devise a way to turn it to his advantage.

  Yet, when at last he came to something promising, he nearly passed it by. Someone had done a good job of sealing the archway with blocks of sandstone to match the ones that made up the surrounding wall. Still, there was a subtle variation in the color and an interruption in the regular spacing of the mortared cracks.

  Dai Shan placed his hands against the obstruction and gave it an experimental shove. It felt quite solid, which was unfortunate. He had the tools, mundane and otherwise, to open almost any door, but passing through a wall was more challenging.

  Although such a feat was possible, of course. He opened one of the concealed pouches contained in his belt, took out a bit of glowing quartz, and set it on the floor. To exploit his power over shadows, he first needed to create one, namely, his own.

  The light from the quartz splashed his shadow across the floor and up the wall. He focused his will and said, “Wake.” The shadow sprang away from where it lay.