The Masked Witches

by Richard Lee Byers

  As it did so, Dai Shan felt a jab of pain behind his solar plexus. Evidently, he’d been overexerting that particular talent. But it wasn’t easy keeping tabs on everyone and everything of potential interest in Rashemen all by himself.

  And at any rate, all was well. His heart was still beating, and he hadn’t reduced himself to one of the mad, maimed wretches called the Shadowless. “Go through,” he said. “You know what I’m looking for.”

  The shadow ran its hands over the stonework, plugging the arch. Its fingers occasionally seemed to snag on the blocks and mortared cracks, stretch, and then snap back to a more normal length when they pulled free.

  Dai Shan knew that the entity was seeking some tiny hole or fissure that extended all the way through. Writhing through a gap would make the barrier easier to penetrate.

  It didn’t find one, but fortunately for an agent that lacked physicality in the truest sense, an opening was merely a convenience, not a necessity. The shadow drew back a pace, then lunged at the obstruction.

  Dai Shan felt a stunning jolt, as if he’d thrown himself headlong at a solid barrier. The shadow vanished. Apparently some long-dead hathran had cast a ward on the wall to prevent such entities from passing through.

  Dai Shan examined his face by touch. Despite the throbbing, his nose was not broken, nor did he find any scrapes or cuts. The impact had only occurred in his mind. He’d suspected as much, but it made sense to be sure.

  Dai Shan could only think of one other way to get through the barrier, and it required a certain amount of risk. Was his particular ploy truly that important? Couldn’t he simply tell Falconer that he’d been unable to access the proper part of the cellars? By the Black Moon, it would even be the truth.

  And perhaps everything would work out thereafter. But once Dai Shan set his mind to a task, he preferred to accomplish it, in part because of a conviction that success bred further success, and failure, only failure. And the thought of failing in Rashemen and returning home without the griffons, of his father’s gibes and sneers, of being consigned to trivial matters while his brothers swaggered like princes and steered the destiny of the House, was insupportable.

  When the affair is over, he thought, I’ll keep the blue-eyed griffon for myself. That will be my reward for daring what I’m about to do.

  He took another look at the hidden arch. It was fairly wide. He estimated that four smallish men like himself could stand shoulder to shoulder in front of it.

  He turned to the shadow he was again casting. “Wake,” he said.

  The pain in his chest lasted longer, as if some tormentor were taking his time sliding in a knife. But he endured it, and the shadow leaped up.

  As soon as it did, another lay in its place, as was the way of shadows. Dai Shan animated that one, too, and had to grit his teeth to hold in a cry. Regrettably, he couldn’t do anything to restrain the tears that ran down his cheeks.

  Blinking, he regarded the two living shadows awaiting his command. A voice inside his head whispered that surely two were enough.

  But that was the voice of fear, and a Shou gentleman couldn’t heed it. Dai Shan had decided that three minions would maximize his chances of success, and three it would be. “Wake,” he said.

  He’d expected the final act of creation to be the most agonizing of all, and probably it was. But when he woke sprawled on the floor, he couldn’t truly remember it, or passing out, either, although he felt like a gong shivering its way to silence a moment after the beater’s stroke.

  He tried to lift his hand and found that he could. The crystal’s glow made the extremity’s gray, flat counterpart slide up the wall.

  I’m still alive, Dai Shan thought, and still myself. A wild laugh tried to bubble up from the center of him, and he smothered it as dignity required.

  He resolved that however urgent the need, he wouldn’t bring any more shadows to life for a tenday. Happily, that ability was only one of his strengths. He possessed many others, including the physical vitality that returned to him quickly.

  He stood up and said, “Change.”

  The shadows did, instantly, and suddenly it was like peering into three mirrors, except that each of the reflections stood in a different attitude, none of them precisely matching their creator’s stance. Their thoughts and perceptions stabbed into his own, overlaying his awareness with jumble and cacophony, and he exerted his will to block them out. He didn’t want to live through any of them as he’d lived through the agent that first made contact with Falconer. Rather, he wanted to multiply his innate abilities by four.

  When the intrusions had faded, and his mind had cleared, he stepped up to the barrier and put his hands on it. His counterparts did the same. Then they all began to shove.

  The wall stood as solid as a mountainside.

  With his jaw clenched and sweat sliding down his face, Dai Shan shoved harder. He focused on the action until he became it. Until he no longer remembered why he’d undertaken it, nor cared about its success or failure. All that mattered was its perfect articulation.

  The surface under his palms shivered, then shifted. With a scraping, banging clatter, a tier of stones fell inward.

  With their purpose accomplished, Dai Shan’s shadows withered from existence in quick succession. Their creator listened for any indication that the sound of the breach had attracted attention. Except for the thump of his own heartbeat in his ears, the cellars were silent.

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Plucking a silk handkerchief from his sleeve, he used it to dab first the sweat from his face and neck and then the drops of blood from the scrapes on his palms. Then he picked up the crystal and climbed through the hole.

  On the other side, a staircase descended deeper into the earth. As he stalked downward, he watched for carved sigils, listened for the rustle of leathery wings or the click of claws on stone, and sniffed for the scents of brimstone or putrefaction. It seemed likely that if the ancient Nars had left any demon watchdogs behind, their Rashemi successors had cleared them out. But then again, since the witches and their followers had seen fit to seal off the lower vaults, they must not have considered them entirely wholesome.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Dai Shan suddenly felt the inner jolt that came with sensing he was being watched. He dropped into a fighting crouch and peered about.

  The vault before him had five walls with a doorway in the center of each, and a five-pointed mosaic star in the middle of the floor. Smaller geometric figures and words in an unfamiliar language filled the spaces between the radiating arms.

  A later hand, working just as meticulously, had painted another layer of glyphs and symbols over the original pentangle. Thanks in part to his sojourn in Rashemen, Dai Shan was able to interpret some of the newer signs. The spiral horns represented Mielikki; the crescents, Selûne; the roses and scythes, Chauntea; and the triangles, all three goddesses together.

  After a few moments, Dai Shan stepped through the arch that connected the stairs to the pentagonal chamber. Even when he set his foot on the edge of the mosaic, nothing leaped forth from the empty air to menace him, and he permitted himself a slight smile when he concluded that nothing would.

  The Nars had indeed left demons behind, and the hathrans hadn’t cleared them out. Instead, they’d taken the same approach here as with the Raumathari spirit traps in the High Country. They’d wrapped additional bindings around the originals to make certain the tanar’ri would rot in their cages for all time.

  Increasingly confident that he was in no danger, but nonetheless proceeding cautiously, Dai Shan prowled onward into a labyrinth of oblique angles and pentagonal forms. At one point, he felt that something else was watching him with the same profound but impotent malevolence as whatever was chained in the star mosaic. At another, he suddenly imagined himself an eight-legged creature crawling down a colossal spider web toward the beautiful winged woman stuck in the strands below. When the fancy passed, he suspected he’d just shared the dream of a demon t
hat had gone to sleep in its prison.

  But of course, the Nars hadn’t left fettered fiends along every inch of the dark and silent maze. Much of the time, Dai Shan found himself exploring spaces that, with their dusty altars, and faded, flaking frescoes depicting the lower worlds, had plainly once served the purposes of spell and ritual but were simply left to inspire a forlorn feeling of abandonment.

  Occasionally, despite the gulf of ages and the lack of a common language, he recognized a glyph or image connected to the esoteric disciplines he himself had mastered. He felt the temptation to linger, to try to decipher the overall message and see what secret knowledge he could obtain thereby. But that wasn’t why he’d come, and so he kept moving.

  Moving and looking for the burial crypts that Falconer claimed were here, Dai Shan just hoped that, despite his ignorance of the customs of the ancient Nars, he’d know them when he saw them. He reassured himself that there couldn’t be all that many ways to lay a corpse to rest.

  And indeed, he recognized the tombs instantly when a turn brought him to another pentacle mosaic painted over with hathran symbols. On the other side was an arch sealed with a wrought-iron gate, and beyond that, stone sarcophagi, and jars and urns in niches in the walls.

  Very well, Dai Shan thought. I found it. I can carry out Falconer’s instructions forthwith. The question is, do I want to?

  On one level, the answer was, surely not. No rational man would be eager to do the bidding of an undead creature when he didn’t even understand what would ensue as a result.

  But it was also true that in a game of Stones, a player sometimes found himself obliged to take his turn without sensing how the opponent would respond or what overall strategy he was pursuing. One placed one’s stone anyway, because the only alternative was to forfeit.

  Till that point, Dai Shan had promised aid to several of the other players in the game that was Rashemen without doing too much—except for facilitating the murder of the Aglarondans—to assist anybody. But clearly, with Falconer making demands of him, and the berserkers of the Griffon Lodge marching on the Fortress of the Half-Demon, the overall situation was evolving, and mere pledges wouldn’t serve much longer. If Dai Shan didn’t make himself genuinely useful to someone, he was going to lose everybody’s trust. So he would. He just had to proceed in a manner that still left room to prevaricate, maneuver, and betray.

  The Shou walked around the edge of the design on the floor. He trusted the ancient hathrans’ arts, but still, why walk across the center of the demon cage and so make all but certain that the thing within knew someone was outside? He climbed the wrought-iron gate like it was a ladder, and then, not needing to cling with his hands to keep his balance, removed a mallet and chisel from inside his coat. Reciting the words that Falconer had taught him—by rote, disclosing nothing of their meaning—he hammered the first of three vertical notches.

  * * * * *

  It seemed a wooded slope like any other, until a dark, droning cloud rose from the leafless trees at the top. Some of Vandar’s lodge brothers exclaimed in alarm.

  They might have turned to run, too, except that the onrushing insects closed the distance before they could shake off their astonishment. Buzzing, the flies and other creatures bit, stung, clung, and crawled. As he flailed at them, Vandar was nearly unmanned by the unreasoning fear that they’d crawl into his nose and ears, and he’d never get them out.

  Sliding and almost falling in the snow, he turned and blundered back down the hillside. It was all he or any of the berserkers could do against such an attack.

  His eyes were all but closed to keep the insects out. But despite that handicap, and the swirling haze of the swarms on every side, he glimpsed flickering forms appearing and disappearing in the pale winter sunlight. And as the buzzing waxed and waned, it sometimes articulated words. He couldn’t understand them, but he felt the weight of anger they carried.

  He prayed the attack would stop once he and his comrades blundered off the slope. It didn’t. He supposed the insects couldn’t keep it up forever, but there was no way to guess just how long they’d persist or how far they’d give chase.

  “Torches!” he cried, half choking on the creatures that instantly flew into his mouth. Only the Forest Queen knew how long it would take to gather wood and set it aflame with the swarms tormenting them, but if they could—

  “This is winter!” Cera cried from somewhere overhead. She and Jet had been scouting from on high and had evidently observed their comrades’ distress. “The Keeper commands you to go back to sleep!”

  The sunlight shone brighter, and the insects dispersed. Had he been a weakling, Vandar might have wept with relief at their departure. Instead, he spat their bitter taste out of his mouth, scooped up snow, and rubbed it on the burning, itching bumps where he’d been stung. Meanwhile, with a final beat of his wings, Jet settled on the ground.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” Cera said, fumbling with the harness that secured her to the griffon’s saddle.

  “We flew down as soon as we noticed,” the griffon rasped. Vandar had heard enough of Jet’s inhuman speech to start to pick up emotion, and he wondered if the familiar had found the warriors’ plight humorous. But no, surely not. The griffon was their totem, after all.

  “If everyone will gather close,” Cera said, swinging herself off Jet’s back, “I’ll ask Amaunator to ease your hurts.”

  She recited a prayer and swung her gilded mace in an arc above her head. The pain of Vandar’s tiny wounds diminished, and other men sighed as they experienced the same relief. The lumps on their faces shrank.

  “Is that better?” Cera asked.

  Vandar nodded. “Much,” he replied. Other berserkers grumbled the same and thanked her.

  “Then explain what happened,” the plump little priestess said.

  “My guess,” Vandar said, “is that we trespassed on territory that is protected by some spirit or fey.”

  “Because it’s allied with the durthans?”

  “Not necessarily. Not this far out from the fortress. I think it’s likely the hill before us is a fey mound.”

  Other men muttered, and spat and sketched signs in the air to ward off bad luck.

  “We scarcely have fey in Chessenta,” Cera said, “at least outside the Sky Riders, but I take it you’re talking about a burial mound? Sacred earth?”

  “Yes,” Vandar said. “They’re generally marked, too, with rings of strangely colored mushrooms or stones laid out in patterns. But with all that buried under the snow …” He shook his head in disgust. In large measure, it was disgust at himself.

  A road led straight up the lakeshore from Immilmar almost to the Fortress of the Half-Demon. But if he and his brothers took it, everybody and his nanny goat would spot them on the march. The alternative was to swing well to the east, thus avoiding both well-traveled paths and the forbidden reaches of the Urlingwood.

  But that meant traversing country Vandar didn’t know particularly well, certainly not well enough to have learned the location of every fey mound and other potential hazard. Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that he’d led his friends badly and they’d suffered as a result.

  “What’s wrong with you all?” asked Jet. “You look like frightened kittens. This isn’t tricky. If it’s not safe to go over the hill, go around it.”

  Vandar forced a smile. “That does sound like the answer, doesn’t it? All right, brothers. It looks like the going might be easier on the right. Let’s try that way.”

  They did, with Cera and Jet opting to hike along with them, and for a few paces, things were all right. Even after the healing prayer, Vandar’s stings and bites still throbbed and itched a little, but it was a trivial discomfort.

  Then, however, a space above his left eye started throbbing, too, and his joints ached. Queasiness churned his guts. Wondering if he was coming down with a winter fever, he heard retching behind him. He turned to see a fellow berserker doubled over, puking.

&nb
sp; The other lodge brothers looked sick, too: pale, sweaty, and unsteady on their feet. Only Cera and Jet looked well, presumably because they hadn’t set foot on the mound.

  Her eyes narrowing, the sunlady peered at her comrades. “It can’t be the venom,” she murmured. “The healing neutralized that. It has to be a curse.”

  “A curse?” a warrior echoed, an edge of shrillness in his voice.

  “Yes,” Cera said, “but don’t worry. The Keeper has granted me the power to lift curses before. Everybody, gather in again.”

  When they did, she recited another prayer. In fact, she recited it thrice. Each time, the sun shone brighter, and its warmth soaked into Vandar’s body and made the aches and nausea fade. But only for a heartbeat or two, after which the malaise returned as strong as ever. He looked around and could tell that it was the same for everyone.

  Cera could tell, too. Brushing a blonde curl out of her eye, she said, “Let me meditate for a while. Then I’ll try again.”

  “We need a real hathran,” a warrior said.

  “So we backtrack to Mulptan,” said the fellow next to him. “Or better yet, Urling.”

  “No,” Vandar said. “If we do that, news of our whereabouts could reach the Halruaans or the Shou. Besides, our allies are expecting us to join forces with them.”

  “But even berserkers can’t fight sick,” said the man who wanted to go to Urling. “Or at least, we won’t fight and win.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” rasped Jet, shaking out his wings with a snap. “Give Cera another chance to break the curse. If she can’t, I’ll fly to the top of the mound and make the fey or whatever it is release you. Or I’ll kill it and see if that helps.”

  “No,” Vandar said.

  Jet’s red eyes glared. “Don’t you think I can do it?” he said.

  “I think you might,” Vandar said, “but only if you can find the fey. They’re good at hiding, and at the moment, you don’t have Aoth Fezim’s eyes to look through.”