M'Lady Witch

by Christopher Stasheff

  "Let us go see." Geoffrey turned to the door.

  They ran through the hallways with no sound but the rustle of their garments, staying to the shadows (and there were a lot of those). Down below the Great Hall, down in the basement of the manor house, there where there should have been storerooms, they found an oaken door with men in livery standing sentry.

  Geoffrey slipped his dagger out of its sheath, but Cordelia stayed it with a hand. "They are weary already, brother. They have watched through the night." She stared at the two men for a few seconds.

  One of them raised a hand to stifle a yawn. As he finished, the other began.

  "Stay awake," the first growled. "No, you stay awake."

  "I need to..."

  "I just got to..."

  Then both slumped to the floor. After a minute, each snored.

  Cordelia and Geoffrey stole silently around the corner and up to the door.

  "Softly," Geoffrey whispered. "Let us take them unawares."

  Cordelia glared at the lock until it turned itself. Then she gave the door a gentle push with her hand, and it swung open silently, on well-oiled hinges.

  There was only the one candle, but its glow reflected off data screens, holo-cube readers, holo-cube files—and an improvised bed, cushions clustered together, and on them, snorting and heaving, shuddering and gasping ...

  Cordelia froze, wide-eyed. She would have turned on her heel if she could have, but the sight held her, horrified, fascinated. She was intruding on a very private moment, but ...

  "Take your enemy while you can," Geoffrey breathed in her ear. "In fact, as she would have done to me." He stepped past her, gliding toward the bed like a shadow left by a moonbeam.

  Cordelia shook off the spell, remembered the sleeping assassins and the bloodstains on Alain's floor, and followed.

  Geoffrey levelled his sword and spoke very loudly. "Hold!"

  Cordelia stood by, reaching out with her mind, ready to throw every movable object at ...

  (The man lifted his head, shocked, and found himself staring at a sword's tip.)

  ...at Forrest.

  Cordelia stared, appalled. Inside her, she felt something sicken and shrivel.

  The bandit chieftain saw it in her eyes. He scrambled out of the bed, remembered himself just in time, and whipped a corner of the sheet over his midriff, then raised his hands to Cordelia. "My lady, forgive! A moment's impulse ... I weakened ... Never again..."

  His voice ran down as he saw the look on her face. Beyond him, Delilah lay back against the pillows, halfcovered by the rest of the sheet, watching Cordelia with a vindictive, triumphant smile.

  Cordelia stood, stunned.

  Delilah's gaze flicked to Geoffrey, filled with malice, one finger drawing a circle on the sheet over her breast, spiralling in. "Come, seize the moment—and me. You knew me for what I was; use me now, for you'll never have another chance."

  Geoffrey's sword point swivelled to her throat.

  She stared at him, indignant, affronted—for the look on his face was only one of amusement.

  Forrest bowed his head, shamefaced.

  But Delilah's eyes glinted malice at Geoffrey, and she laughed, low in her throat.

  Geoffrey shrugged.

  Suddenly, Cordelia was aware that she might not have been the only one who had been hurt by the scene. Her gaze darted up to her brother's face in concern.

  Then she saw how the smile on his face widened, showing teeth. "I knew you for what you were, aye, and was quite willing to take you on those terms—nay, and still would be, for a night or two—but for nothing more."

  Storm clouds began to gather on Cordelia's brow. Geoffrey's swordtip moved slowly down Delilah's body, as though seeking the best point.

  "Thrust, then," she said with contempt, "at least with the symbol, since you are too much afeard to use the referent."

  "Geoffrey!" Cordelia cried, appalled.

  Geoffrey gave her a quick glance before he looked back at his target. "Sister, I hope that you did not think that Forrest was anything more than Delilah was."

  Cordelia's head snapped back, as though she had been slapped.

  Geoffrey went on, circling his sword tip carelessly, nearer and nearer to the smooth skin. "Nay, the two of them are well matched, indeed."

  Forrest rose to his knees; hands upraised in pleading. "Lady Cordelia! Sweet lady, forgive!"

  "Never could I forgive such a lapse as this!" Cordelia retorted, infuriated. "How could you seek to humiliate me so?"

  "To put you in the same class as myself?" Delilah said sweetly. "That is no humiliation, sweet innocent, but a compliment of the highest order."

  "Speak not to me, lightskirt!" Cordelia turned on her, enraged. "Were I ever like you, I should wish to die ere I was thrown on the trash heap as a worn-out plaything for any man who wished!"

  "Say rather, any man whom I wish!" Delilah writhed out of the bed and up to her feet, her eyes sparking with anger. She slipped past the sword's point, and her open palm cracked across Cordelia's cheek.

  "Oh!" Cordelia pressed a hand to the hurt, indignant, anger building to an unprecedented explosion.

  "Oh,' indeed!" Delilah stepped back laughing, leaning back, hands on her hips, naked and glorious in the candlelight. "Yes, any man I want, even yours! Any man of yours! Stay awhile, while I go to claim your Prince!"

  Cordelia sprang forward, spitting, "False and hollow shell!" hands reaching, fingers hooked to scratch. Alarmed, Forrest caught her, holding her wrists. "No, lady! You shall be hurt!"

  "Let me go! Oh, let me go!" Cordelia raged, twisting and thrashing about in his hold.

  "Aye, let her go!" Delilah taunted. "Let her follow! I shall have her Prince grappling me ere she can come!" Catching up her garments, she sprang to the door and ran out, bare feet pattering on the floor.

  "Will you let me go!" Cordelia cried, still raging. "I must catch her, stop her, ere it is too late!"

  "Why, lady, why?" Forrest implored. "You shall only go to your own hurt—for surely, Alain is no better than I!"

  "Yes, sister, let be," Geoffrey said gently. "I would not wish you hurted more, if she is right—and I would not wish to spit Alain on my sword, if..."

  "But do you not see?" Cordelia cried. "She knows he is the Prince!"

  Geoffrey stared.

  Forrest frowned. "What matters that?"

  "That her men tried to assassinate Alain this night!" Geoffrey snapped, the implications immediately clear to him. "And if she knows who he truly is, it is sure that we guessed aright—it is she who set the assassins upon him! It is not his virtue or his heart that is threatened, but his life! Let be!"

  Astounded, Forrest loosed his hold, and Cordelia sprang free.

  They leaped after her, out into the hallway ... It was empty save for the two snoring sentries.

  They stood, absolutely still, and heard the muffled sound of bare feet padding away, somewhere out of sight ... "The stairs!" Geoffrey snapped. "She can only have gone upward!"

  "That would be novel," Cordelia said acidly, but she ran after Geoffrey.

  Up the stairs they flew, into the entry hall, where they halted, looking about. There was no loose clothing on the floor, no hint as to where Delilah had gone—only the doors to the solar on the one side, and the Great Hall on the other.

  Geoffrey strode toward the Great Hall. "She will be here, if she is anywhere. 'Tis the seat of power for a country squire."

  They threw open the doors and strode in ...

  And armed men stepped out from the walls. A thicket of swords surrounded them.

  At the end of the hall, on the dais, stood Delilah, clothed again now, hands on her hips, head thrown back, laughing long and loud.

  Cordelia looked about her, stunned. The trestles and tables had not only been folded and set aside—they had been taken out of the hall completely. The fire was dead, the hearth cleaned and swept. The torches were gone from their sconces, and the decorations had disappeared. Only bare wal
ls and bare floor met her gaze, bleak in the light of the false dawn filtering through the tall windows.

  Delilah laughed and laughed, revelling in their surprise. "There is nothing here to throw, witch! How shall you fight now, when there is nothing for your mind to move?"

  Cordelia stared, aghast, realizing that she had walked into a trap, and Geoffrey swore. "By Blue, and by all the obscene slitherings from the dawn of time! You have laid your snare carefully and well, lady!"

  "And you are caught within it!" she cried in glee. "You have been planning it long and well."

  "Aye, since first I learned that Their Majesties would command their son to wed! And you are caught, ensnared more thoroughly than you could have imagined! Know that you shall die this night, Sir Geoffrey!" Delilah's voice suddenly softened, cozening. "Yet the condemned man may have his last wish." Her hands went to the laces of her bodice. "Come, take what you have sought so hard! You may at least die in ecstasy."

  Cordelia stared at her, horrified—but Geoffrey only shook his head a little, with a knowing smile.

  "Oh, do not fear for your manhood!" Delilah mocked. "I well and truly do lust after you, and shall have my fill of you soon enough, I warrant—you shall know a glorious death."

  "I think I shall know no death at all," Geoffrey purred. "No? Surely you do not think you can fight one against fifty, and win! And you shall not disappear from our midst, for your sister cannot, and you are too concerned with your piddling honor to leave her! There is nothing here for your mind to throw, no weapons but your single sword and dagger. How shall you fight?"

  "With me at his back!" Alain burst out of the wainscotting, the hidden door slamming open. He leaped, sword slashing, to wound the nearest guardsman. The man cried out, and Alain parried a cut by another guard with his dagger, then drove home with the sword. The man screamed and spun away, clutching at his side—but Alain had already whirled away, stabbing and slashing. Ten men near him shouted, and jumped on him.

  Geoffrey roared, and his sword spun, dagger stabbing with inhuman speed and force. Three men fell back, fountains of blood; a dozen more leaped away from the berserker. That opened the path to Alain, and the Prince was beside him in an instant, taking station between Cordelia and the armed men, setting his back against Geoffrey's, who was still weaving his web of steel. "To the death, old friend!"

  "If die we must, Geoffrey!"

  "No, not our deaths—theirs!"

  But while they had been doing that, Cordelia had been busy with the others. A guardsman shot up ten feet off the floor, crying out in alarm. He had good reason; Cordelia's eyes narrowed, and the man hurtled straight toward Delilah. She sprang aside with a cry of fear, and two more men rocketed into the air and spun toward her.

  "Nothing to throw, you say?" Cordelia cried. "Then have at thee!" And both soldiers slammed down onto the floor; Lady Delilah barely stepped aside in time.

  Five men shouted and leaped at Cordelia—but this time, it was she who shot up into the air astride a spear, and the soldiers' swords slashed at one another. Shocked, they cried out, then turned to parrying—and from parrying, to cutting and thrusting at one another.

  Cordelia's eyes narrowed.

  Suddenly, swords all over the room slashed at the men next to them, as though they had taken on lives of their own. Their owners shouted with fear—but so did their targets. In moments, the whole room was a vast melee of ringing steel and cries of anger.

  "Out upon them!" Delilah cried.

  That brought her men to their senses; with titanic heaves, they wrestled back control over their weapons and leaped to strike at the Gallowglasses and the Prince. Alain and Geoffrey met and blunted their rush, protecting Cordelia—and leaving her free to tend to Delilah. Her heart swelled with joy at their loyalty, even as she focussed her mind on her fingertips, thinking of thickening air, molecules crowding more and more closely together, moving faster and faster—so that by the time she swung her arm down, throwing, it was a ball of flame that leaped from her hand.

  Delilah dodged it easily, laughing, even as her hands described a circle—and a ring of fire sprang up about Cordelia. She cried out in alarm, then bit it off, thinking of rain, a cloudburst.

  Brief as it was, her cry was drowned in the howls of pain from the guards, servants, and knights who were battering at Alain and Geoffrey. They leaped back, and the two young men gasped for breath, grinning. "The Lady Delilah fights well ... for us," Geoffrey panted.

  Apparently she realized it, too. The ring of fire died down as suddenly as it had sprung up, but Delilah's men hung back, wary, for a moment. Geoffrey grinned and swished his blade through a sword drill, but Alain only glared and held his on guard.

  Cordelia, though, was ready the second the flames died. A cloudburst broke right above Delilah, appearing from nowhere, drenching her. Delilah coughed and spluttered in sheer surprise, then wiped her hair out of her eyes just in time to see a circle of rope whirling down to settle around her. She gasped and glared at it; it burst into fire before it could tighten, and was gone.

  The response had been too quick; Cordelia hadn't been working up her next spell.

  They were all illusions, of course. The trick was to make them seem so real that the other witch's mind would accept them subconsciously, and really feel the heat from the flames and see the burns blistering her skin, even though her conscious mind knew better. Delilah, for example, was really wet—her hair hung lank and dripping, her clothes plastered to her body; her own mind was cooperating in keeping her so. But she knew the moisture was harmless, and ignored it as she hurled a fireball at Cordelia.

  It was an empty gesture, of course—Cordelia damped the flames before the sphere was halfway there. It faded into the thin air it had been made from—but it had given Delilah time to work up something more subtle.

  Alain lurched back against Cordelia, snarling—and throwing her off balance for a moment. His sword flashed like a heat-haze, his opponents dropping back with wounds—but more jumped in, in their place. There were at least three for each of her guardians, and they were hard-pressed indeed. She realized they couldn't last much longer ...

  A high, shrill battle-scream sounded, and the great black iron horse reared up behind the men who were slashing at Geoffrey. Fess's steel hooves lashed out, felling Delilah's men. He had heard the row, and broken from the castle stables, Cordelia realized just in time to even the odds.

  The men around Alain looked up, saw what was happening, and some of those at the back ran to attack Geoffrey, then leaped aside as steel teeth snapped at them.

  Welcome as Fess was, he had distracted Cordelia too long. Suddenly, a huge snake was coiling around her. Its coils tightened; she couldn't breathe! Then the wedgeshaped head hovered in front of hers, and she would have screamed, if she had had breath. Its jaws opened, fangs curving down to tear ...

  But constrictors don't have viper's fangs, and pit vipers aren't big enough to wrap and squeeze. The fangs themselves made her realize all over again that the snake was only an illusion, projected by a master directly into the back of her mind; the fangs broke her unconscious belief in its reality more effectively than anything she could have thought of. She held her breath, eyes narrowing, glaring into that putrid maw, thinking of another form, another shape ...

  The snake sprouted hairs, hairs that thickened even as its head melted and shrank, reforming into the dead, sculptured face of a fox—and it was only a fur wrap made of a dozen foxes, each biting the other's tail, that coiled around her. She looked up at Delilah in triumph .. .

  And saw a small snake, only three feet long, but one with a spreading hood and curving fangs, rearing up to strike at her.

  Cordelia realized, in a way she never could have otherwise, that Delilah was a Futurian agent, raised in a modern culture, no matter where she had been born—for no native of Gramarye knew about cobras. Even to Cordelia, they were things from books—and she didn't doubt that they were so to Delilah, too. The woman probably didn't have any
of the details right. It was a pitiful attempt at persuading her hindbrain, and she ignored it, knowing that its venom couldn't really hurt her. She thought at it, and it struck—but curved away from her, sailing back toward Delilah, and as it went, its head shrank into a handle, its body lengthened, its tail slimmed into a lash—and a bullwhip cracked over Delilah's head, then lashed about her shoulders.

  Unprepared for it, Delilah cried out in pain; then she narrowed her eyes, and the bullwhip disappeared. She, too, had remembered that it was an illusion, though Cordelia noticed that the rents in her dress did not heal themselves.

  Delilah glared, and a giant spider scuttled across the floor—but there was no Cordelia for it to frighten away. Delilah stared, lost for a moment, looking wildly about the hall, trying to find her adversary.

  She never thought to look at her own men, of course, and didn't notice the guardsman in her livery who was working his way down the line of fighters, staying behind and only trading an occasional blow with Alain or Geoffrey—until he turned on Delilah and struck at her with his sword.

  She screamed in fear, falling back, bleeding from a cut in her arm.

  The guardsman swung his blade up for another slash. Delilah realized who he must be, and glared at the man. Sure enough, his tunic stretched down, changing back into the tan and russet of Cordelia's riding dress. His face fined down, his helmet disappearing, and it was Cordelia who glared at her, eye to eye. The sword shrank and dwindled; it was only her extended index finger.

  But Delilah had spent her time and effort in undoing Cordelia's illusion. The screech of rage from overhead took her by surprise, and the eagle that plunged to seize her gown in its claws as it buffeted her head with its wings made her shrink back with a scream of terror. Its dagger of a beak thrust right at Delilah's eyes ...

  ...but a huge tawny paw reached up and swatted the eagle aside, and a lioness pounced to tear the eagle apart with one quick rip of its huge jaws. Then it turned on Cordelia, leaping ...

  And caromed off the belly of a huge bear, waddling toward Delilah on its hind legs, roaring in anger, its claws raised to slash.

  The lion roared right back and sprang, teeth reaching for the bear's throat, but the bear swatted it aside and plunged after it. There was a moment's flurry of fur and claws ... then the bear rose, its jaws dripping blood, its eyes afire with rage, a snarl ripping loose from its throat ...