The Masked Witches

by Richard Lee Byers

  Streaking on past the hawk, the vrock snatched for Jhesrhi, and, still dazed as she was by the demon’s cry, she found that at that instant, even fire magic was beyond her. She evaded the attack the only way she could, by throwing herself off the other side of her steed. As she did so, the bird vanished, either killed or hurt so badly that it could not maintain a constant, solid shape.

  As Jhesrhi plummeted, she strained to focus and articulate a cry for help couched in the language of the wind. After an instant, she managed to gasp it out, and another friendly gale blasted straight upward to slow her descent.

  She took a breath and reached for its mind with her own, so it would know where to carry her without her needing to speak the words aloud. Suddenly, a white, slimy-looking hand at the end of an inhumanly long arm shot up from the mass of foes in the courtyard below. It clamped shut on her wrist and jerked her down.

  * * * * *

  Standing in the searing sunlight, feeling hot to the point of actual pain but enduring it as best he could, Falconer congratulated himself that he’d taken the time to climb to the roof of the donjon. It had delayed his entry into the fight but had also provided him the proper perch to oversee the entire battlefield and contend with a flying foe. Namely, the blonde wizard riding the hawk.

  Falconer’s vrock had disposed of her steed and made her fall far enough for an ice troll to jump up and drag her the rest of the way to the ground. By rights, that should have been the end of her. But she was plainly dangerous, so he decided to order the demon to descend and help the troll finish her off.

  He was just about to give the command via his gauntlet when he spotted the second winged beast and its riders wheeling to rush to their comrade’s aid. The priestess and griffon were the same meddlers who’d escaped him before. He’d been hoping for a second chance at them, and he had it.

  Focusing his will on his gauntlet, he sent the vrock flapping toward the griffon. Then he called forth the first of his imps.

  * * * * *

  Columns of smoke were rising from inside the Fortress of the Half-Demon, and creatures roared and yelled beyond the gate. But so far, no one was shouting that a band of berserkers and stag men were creeping up on the castle from the east.

  Plainly, Aoth and the other outlanders had furnished as effective a distraction as they’d promised. Despite everything he knew about the Thayan, Vandar had to admire the daring and skill that the trick had required. He wondered again if Aoth truly meant to betray him. He didn’t act like that sort of blackguard, but it was just as difficult to imagine that the spirit of the mound would lie.

  A goblin on the wall-walk finally bellowed a warning, yanking Vandar’s thoughts back to the task at hand. He leaped up, screeched like a griffon, and gave himself over to the rage of a berserker. As it awoke, he charged; around and behind him, his brothers did the same.

  He noticed that only his fellow Rashemi were keeping pace with him, or nearly so. The Stag King’s warriors were coming on more slowly. But that didn’t bother him. In his exalted state, he would have raced in and started killing even if he were alone.

  As he neared the walls, he sprang from side to side without slowing, and arrows and javelins stabbed into the snow around him. Instinct, or some perceptual faculty inherent in the red weapons, enabled him to dodge the attacks even though he wasn’t consciously aware of them.

  Shadow swallowed him for a heartbeat as he ran through the opening in the wall. Metal clanked under his boots when he lunged back out into the sunlight.

  Goblins, ice trolls, and a miscellany of other creatures were running at him. They were trying to form the tight ranks that might still enable them to hold the attackers out. He resolved that he wasn’t going to let them.

  Bellowing, he drove the red spear all the way through a hobgoblin. As he yanked it out again, a second swung a scimitar at his neck, but the horizontal stroke seemed slow, and he had no trouble dropping underneath it. When he had the long spear free, it was easier to jab with the butt than bring the point to bear, so that was what he did. The attack caught the hobgoblin on the jaw. Bone snapped, and the creature flopped backward with a broken neck.

  An ice troll reared up from its usual hunched posture to swing a battle-axe straight down on Vandar’s head. He sidestepped the chop and drove the spear into the troll’s belly. When he jerked the weapon free, it tugged a loop of gut out with it.

  It seemed to Vandar that combat was both easier and more of a joy than it had ever been, and he sensed he could do things he couldn’t have done before. He gripped the crimson spear with his off hand alone and found that he could still manage it easily despite its length. He whipped the red sword from its scabbard.

  The troll was stuffing the bulge of torn intestine back inside its body. Vandar slashed one leg out from underneath it, then beheaded it before it could finish falling down.

  Pivoting, he knocked aside a spear thrust and slashed the green hands that had attempted it, the parry and riposte a single blur of motion. He sensed something rushing in on his flank, and, without even needing to look, flicked the spear into line to catch the attacker in the chest. At the same time, he twitched his head back, and a flail made of braided rawhide and bits of sharp steel whirled past, half a finger length in front of his nose. He sprang and cut down his bugbear attacker before the shaggy, hulking warrior could ready the flexible weapon for another swing.

  Vandar grinned. He was dropping a foe with every attack, while his opponents seemed no more able to touch him than they could have grabbed a wisp of smoke. When his brothers hurled themselves, screaming, at the goblins and their ilk, he almost regretted them claiming a share of the fun.

  The defenders’ lines buckled before the fury of the assault, and for a moment or two, Vandar wondered if they were about to break. Then a fell troll shambled forward, knocking its own comrades aside in its eagerness to join the fight.

  The two-headed thing was three times as tall as Vandar, with a bumpy, mottled gray-green hide. Its fleshy, wormlike strands of hair writhed of their own accord, and its fangs and hooked claws were long enough to cut a man to pieces with a single bite or slash.

  Vandar wasn’t afraid of it. With anger singing inside him and his fey weapons in his hands, he wasn’t afraid of anything. But he recognized that the fell troll was a foe capable of slaughtering men by the dozen and repelling the attack. So he scrambled to intercept it.

  He threw the long spear like a javelin, and, reacting faster than anything so big should have been able to move, the creature twisted out of the way. Vandar rushed it. A couple of his lesser foes struck at him, and he ducked and slipped the attacks but didn’t pause to riposte.

  The troll’s enormous hands raked and slashed at him. Twisting and sidestepping, Vandar counterattacked, gashing them, breaking talons, and even lopping off fingers. But the damage didn’t slow the giant down, and it didn’t really even need claws or fingers to hurt him. If one of its swings connected, it would still do so with bone-shattering force.

  Vandar had to get inside the reach of the long arms so that he could strike at the troll’s vitals. He dodged two more blows, then, hoping he saw an opening, lunged.

  It proved to be a mistake. An instant later, the troll’s hands caught him from behind and gathered him in. Stooping in the hunchback manner of its kind, it opened its two mouths wide.

  Deprived of his balance, Vandar somehow still managed to thrust. The red sword drove into the gaping mouth on the right and out of the back of that head.

  Unfortunately, the fell troll still had another head, and even a wound that terrible only made it falter for an instant. It dragged Vandar on toward its other snapping, slavering mouth.

  Vandar planted his off hand on his foe’s forehead to hold himself clear, and immediately felt the giant’s strength overwhelming his own. He let go of the red sword—even if it hadn’t been stuck, it would have been difficult to use at such close quarters—and snatched the dirk from his belt. Screaming, he drove it repeatedly into
the head that was still trying to bite him.

  He half severed the troll’s warty spike of a nose, popped an eye, and then stabbed the blade deep into the gory socket. The troll jerked and pitched forward, carrying Vandar to the ground beneath it.

  He struggled to crawl out from under the creature’s bulk, noticing as he did so that his leather armor was shredded and his skin was torn and bloody where it had grabbed him. But, still berserk, he didn’t feel any pain or care that he was hurt. The only things that mattered were making sure the fell troll didn’t get up again and then kill the next foe, and the one after that.

  A hobgoblin raised a battle-axe to strike him before he’d quite squirmed all the way clear. Fortunately, another brother of the Griffon Lodge rushed in and slammed his own axe into its torso before it could swing. Vandar jumped up, yanked the red sword out of the troll’s right head, and chopped both of its skulls to pieces. Even that might not keep it down forever. But with luck, it would at least neutralize the creature until someone had a chance to set it on fire.

  He glanced around and grinned to see that the enemy appeared to be falling back. Maybe the loss of the fell troll had weakened their resolve, or maybe the arrival of the Stag King’s warriors was responsible. For they were finally there: fighting alongside their human allies, loosing arrows, jabbing with spears, and dipping their heads to gore with their antlers. The light, cheerful sound of their bells made a strange counterpoint to the shouts, screams, and clashing of blades on armor and shields.

  Vandar screeched like a griffon to urge his brothers onward. As he did so, a silvery ripple of power stabbed down from somewhere overhead. It didn’t splash over him, but it chilled him even so. However, the berserkers and stag men it did engulf cried out, convulsed, or collapsed. A scant instant later, a horned, bearded demon leaped in among them and laid about with a glaive.

  Folk who weren’t berserkers imagined that once a warrior had evoked the rage, he couldn’t really think at all. But that wasn’t altogether true, at least if the berserker in question had mastered the art as well as Vandar had. He discerned that, although he and his brothers were overcoming the foes in front of them, it was taking too long. More and more undead spellcasters were emerging from the interior of the fortress to attack from the wall-walks, and it was difficult for the embattled men on the ground to do much about it.

  The attackers needed their own spellcasters to counter the threat. Where in the name of the Golden Horn were they?

  T

  E

  N

  As it thumped back down to the ground, the ice troll grabbed Jhesrhi’s other arm, immobilizing it as well. She cried out in dread and revulsion. The creature opened its reeking mouth wide and lifted her toward its glistening, crooked fangs.

  With a thought, she brought the fire that was a part of her leaping forth to cloak her body. The troll howled and flung her away.

  Foes were still pressing close on either side. Keenly aware of the danger they represented, full of sheer loathing at their proximity, at the possibility that they too might touch her, she told the wind that still hovered close to her to whisk her back up into the air.

  It tried. Her feet left the ground. But a mesh of thick gluey strands like a giant spider web appeared on top of her to stick her to the earth. The wind strained but couldn’t break the adhesion.

  Sneering, she called forth her flame once more, for as every apprentice knew, that was the counter to such a trap. But the mesh didn’t burn.

  But at least fire could protect her from the ring of foes that were about to strike at her from every side. Crying a word of power, and straining to shift her entangled staff sufficiently to write a rune on the air, she hurled flame in all directions.

  The blast threw some of her assailants off their feet and sent others reeling backward, burning and screaming. But one remained: a scaly, reddish, long-eared thing that only looked a little singed. Leering, it reached to claw her through the mesh.

  Suddenly the beast staggered and fell to one knee as Vandar drove his sword into its back. He hacked repeatedly at its neck, and with the third cut, the lump of a head with its wide fanged mouth and round yellow eyes fell off.

  Vandar sawed at the mesh, and the red sword parted the sticky cables easily. Jhesrhi rattled off a counterspell and finished what the blade had begun. The net vanished.

  Flinging drops of blood and pale ichor off his weapon, Vandar slashed it through the air to indicate the battlements. “Kill!” he snarled. Maybe, with his rage possessing him, that was as much speech as he could manage.

  In any case, it was enough. She understood what he wanted to convey. Despite the attackers’ best efforts, there were too many undead up there. Masked, cloaked durthans were summoning translucent telthor wolves and bears. Nar demonbinders were drawing fiends from talismanic disks of iron, brass, and silver. There were even a couple of Raumvirans—or what she suspected to be Raumvirans—with magic leaping and sparking between their fingers. Insectlike mechanical creatures crouched on their shoulders and at their feet.

  Vandar was right: Such creatures couldn’t be allowed to work their magic without interference. Hoping that she was casting at the same magus who’d dropped the mesh on top of her, Jhesrhi hurled flame at the battlements. Meanwhile, Vandar and two of his brothers surrounded her to shield her from enemies on the ground.

  * * * * *

  The vrock dived, then beat its charcoal-colored wings that glinted an odd magenta color when they caught Amaunator’s light exactly right. Climbing once more, it wheeled toward Cera, Aoth, and Jet.

  Beneath it, flame leaped forth seemingly from nowhere to shroud Jhesrhi’s willowy body from head to toe. The ice troll that had been about to bite her roared and flung her away instead.

  Cera was glad to see that, because she and her companions wouldn’t be able to immediately help the elementalist. The vulture demon meant to intercept them, and they were going to have to deal with it first.

  Cera asked the Keeper for strength and swung her weapon in an arc to point at the vrock. A flying, glowing mace appeared and bashed at the creature’s head. Aoth pointed his spear and rattled off words of power, and a shrill whine covered the roar of battle for a heartbeat or so. Even though the noise was prodigiously loud, it somehow didn’t hurt Cera’s ears, but it slammed the vulture demon lower and made it flail like someone had stuck a sword in it.

  Jet instantly furled his wings and dived. Astride his back, Cera couldn’t see everything that happened next, but she felt the thump as the griffon’s eagle talons stabbed into the demon, then felt the muscles in his hindquarters working as the leonine hind feet raked and raked and raked.

  As the griffon clung to the tanar’ri in his attack, they plummeted together. Though Cera trusted him, she gasped when it looked like they were going to crash down among the frenzied combatants below. But with a sudden heaving motion, Jet flung the vrock off his talons, extended his wings with a snap, and leveled off. Cera slumped and closed her eyes in relief just for an instant. When she opened them again, the air was gray with some sort of dust.

  In another heartbeat, the wind Jhesrhi had conjured before the berserkers and stag warriors advanced on the fortress, a wind that was still howling and gusting, blew the stuff away. But even as it did so, Cera was jolted by terror. What was she doing there, high above the ground on the back of a fearsome beast? If Jet smashed to earth, she would be killed, and that had nearly happened just moments before. She let go of her mace, and only the leather thong that looped it to her wrist kept her from losing it—not that she would have cared if she had. All that mattered was freeing up her hand to unbuckle the straps that kept her from jumping to safety.

  Hurrying made her hands clumsy, and she fumbled with the harness. In front of her, Aoth thumped his chest and made his mail clink. Despite her panic, Cera realized he was invoking the magic of one of his tattoos.

  Then he reached behind him and gripped Cera’s thigh. “We’re poisoned!” he shouted. “Purge your
self, and Jet, too!”

  His words didn’t take away her fear, but they pushed it down enough so that she was able to think and to remember the dust. The vulture demon must have somehow released it into the air even as Jet was ripping it apart.

  She calmed and centered herself as best she could, then drew down the light and warmth of the Yellow Sun. It filled her and quelled her fear, and then, with a touch, she passed the blessing on to Jet.

  The griffon stopped veering madly back as forth as though trying to dodge a peril that only he could see. Instead, he screeched a challenge and lashed his wings as he tried to rise above the half a dozen entirely real imps that, Cera observed, had come flying at him and his riders while they were all distracted.

  Blue and green shimmers rippled along the head of Aoth’s spear. He snarled a word of power, jabbed the weapon through the air, and darts of light leaped from it to pierce two of the imps. Screaming shrilly, they dropped.

  Another imp flew at Cera, its fanged mouth open wide, and its prehensile tail cocked to stab with the sting at the tip. She would have had to strike across her body to bash it with her mace, so she swatted it with her buckler instead. The gilded steel clanked, and the little devil tumbled away.

  Meanwhile, Jet snapped another in two with his beak.

  The remaining imps vanished, and Cera instinctively winced to imagine them flitting at her like angry wasps when she couldn’t see them to protect herself. But Aoth could see them, and since he could, Jet could, too. With his spear crackling with destructive power, the war mage thrust to the right, and the two pieces of a dead imp appeared in midfall. The griffon caught another in his clashing beak, gnashed it up, and spat it out.

  As best as Cera could judge, that was the last of the vile little things. “The skull lord!” she gasped, for it seemed almost certain that he was the one who’d summoned them.