Witch Wraith

by Terry Brooks

  Remembering this, it occurred to him that what was happening here was very like what had happened in the Duln when he and Redden were boys. He was discovering all over again that there were limits to what magic could do. Not just the wishsong, but other magic, as well. These limits were defined by the nature of the magic, but also by the character of the user. The tanequil, though it had the power to help him by using its magic to free Grianne, might not have the inclination to use that magic.

  It also occurred to him that this was the longest period of time that he and Redden had ever been separated.

  When he arrived back at the bridge just after sunset, he slowed to a stop and stood staring out across the ravine to where he had left the others. There was no sign of them, not from where he was standing. He was certain they were there, however. What he was less certain about was whether he was ready to face them. A part of him wanted to remain where he was, waiting to see what would happen with Grianne, hoping against hope that the tanequil would grant his request and set her free, at least long enough to come back and help his brother. Another part of him felt he should cross over and tell the others what had transpired and face up to the strong possibility he had failed and this entire expedition had been for nothing.

  –Cross–

  Once again, the decision was made for him. The aeriads whispered the word in the still evening air, and without even pausing to think about doing otherwise, Railing Ohmsford walked to the stone arch and began to climb the steps leading to its broad span. He had gotten halfway across when he saw Mirai jump up from the bench on which she had been sitting to give him an encouraging wave. He saw Skint and Challa Nand, too, all of them on their feet and moving toward him.

  He made himself return the Highland girl’s greeting, trying to look encouraging and feeling anything but.

  “What happened?” Mirai asked as soon as he was standing in front of her once more. “Did you find her?”

  He was grateful for her restraint. She hadn’t tried to hug or kiss him in front of the other two. She was keeping her voice level and direct. If she was excited or anxious, she wasn’t showing it.

  “I found her. She’s alive. But she won’t come back.” He paused. “She’s an aeriad. She serves the tanequil, so really it’s the tree who makes the decision about what’s going to happen next.”

  Mirai stared. “The tree is deciding what she will do?”

  Close enough, Railing thought. “I spoke to it. I made all the arguments. I gave all the reasons. But I don’t know. It didn’t seem persuaded. If anything, it seemed reluctant. It kept telling me that even if it decided to grant my request, I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. I don’t know what that means.”

  But he was thinking that it was surprisingly close to what the King of the Silver River had told him, and he wondered if that might be a harbinger.

  “But she’s still alive? She could actually return with us?” Skint shook his head. “I would never have believed it. Not really. Even though I came on this journey with you, Railing Ohmsford. Even though.”

  “She isn’t here yet,” Challa Nand mumbled.

  Mirai took hold of Railing by his shoulders and turned him so they were facing each other. “You did what you could. You couldn’t have done more.”

  He smiled bitterly. “I could have tried harder.”

  They sat down together on the stone benches and talked about it for a while longer. Railing filled in the details, even the ones that were so painful he could barely speak of them—the tanequil’s seeming indifference to the fate of the Four Lands, Grianne’s deep commitment to her life as a spirit of the air that precluded disobedience to the tree—because it seemed to lessen the hurt he was feeling when he did so.

  They were quiet for a time after that. Skint wandered off to study the walls of the gardens. Challa Nand stretched out on one of the benches and fell asleep.

  Mirai moved over to sit close to him. “I am proud of you, Railing,” she said. “Proud of you for trying. Proud of you for risking so much to see if there was something that could be done. If it doesn’t work out the way you want it to, I want you to know that I will still stay with you until we find Redden and bring him home. No matter what.”

  It was exactly what he had needed to hear, and his relief was so strong that he couldn’t manage a reply. He only barely managed to keep from crying.

  So they sat in the gardens of Stridegate and waited for something to happen. Dusk deepened into night, and more than once Railing thought just to go and be done with it. Grianne wasn’t coming, they were wasting their time hoping she would, and the matter was decided. He kept waiting for one of the others to suggest they leave, but none of them did. They simply waited with him, staying silent, their thoughts kept to themselves.

  The stars were twinkling brightly overhead when Mirai, standing a few yards off, said softly, “Railing?”

  He glanced over and saw that she was staring at the bridge. He leapt up at once.

  A figure was crossing the high span, moving slowly and deliberately toward them. Hooded and cloaked, its features were concealed in the dark, but Railing felt a surge of excitement. It could only be one person. Grianne Ohmsford.

  They watched her come, all four of them clustered together by now, measuring her progress as she made her way toward them, her footsteps painfully slow, her efforts extreme. Her garments were old and frayed, the ends ragged and the fabric tattered. In the moonlight, she had a spectral look to her—as if she were one of night’s shadows, a wraith come out of the darkness. For just an instant, Railing wondered if she might be no more than a shade and that this was what the tanequil had been trying to tell him, but he dismissed the idea as absurd. Why would she return to him as a shade? She was still alive, wasn’t she?

  But as the figure drew closer, he saw that something was seriously wrong. In the look and the walk and the posture—everything was just slightly skewed from what it should have been. He exchanged an uneasy glance with Mirai. She saw it, too.

  The figure came to a stop in front of them.

  “She released me, Railing. I am here for you.”

  Grianne Ohmsford pulled back the hood, and the four standing in front of her recoiled in shock. Her face was ravaged by age and time so that she seemed more a haggard crone than simply an older woman, more skeleton than flesh and blood. Her features were twisted and hard, her hair white and stringy, and her skin devoid of color, washed of all but a faint gray cast. Her hands and arms, where they were revealed, were withered and spotted. She was—it was apparent, even within the cloaking—no more than a shadow of the woman she had been, and that shadow only a single step from the grave that must already be reaching out to claim her.

  But it was the eyes that told Railing everything he needed to know about who she was and what the tanequil had been trying to warn him of. Her eyes were filled with a hatred and rage that ran so deep, it had no bottom. They glittered with the intensity of it, and in that glitter there was the promise of pain and suffering. There was inexorable purpose.

  What you need is not what you seek.

  “You have me back,” she hissed at him. “What do you intend to do with me?”

  It wasn’t Grianne Ohmsford that Mother Tanequil had returned to him.

  It was the Ilse Witch.

  Fifteen

  The demon attack, when it finally came, caught everyone defending the city of Arishaig—and Keeton especially—by surprise.

  All night he had waited for it, his soldiers stationed on the west wall, listening to the howling and shrieking of the creatures massed in the darkness just beyond the glow cast by the torches on the battlements. Midnight came and went. The night rolled on toward early morning and the approach of dawn.

  But just before the first brightening of the sky east, while it was still too dark to make out anything clearly, the demon hordes attacked.

  Not at the west wall, but at the south.

  Somehow during the night, under cover of darkness, the attacke
rs had managed to maneuver a second attack force into the lowland hills that rippled below the city. While the defenders’ attention was focused on the creatures massed at the west wall, thousands of their fellows had circled silently around from where they had been hiding earlier behind the ridgeline until they were in position.

  When they attacked, no one inside the city was ready for it. There were soldiers on the south wall stationed at regular intervals with orders to keep watch and be ready, but larger numbers occupied the west battlements because all the enemy activity of the previous day had been centered there.

  To Keeton’s credit, he did not panic. The fact that the initial attack had come from the south did not mean that those creatures gathered below the west wall were no longer a threat. The first attack could be a ruse to draw his soldiers away; the west wall could still be the main point of attack. So he took every third soldier out of the defensive line and sent them to reinforce the south wall and followed them over to see for himself how bad it was.

  It was much worse than he had imagined. The army below the south wall mirrored the one threatening the west in size and ferocity. The attackers were already swarming the gates, surging up against them and hammering on the ironbound timbers with clubs. Dozens of creatures were climbing the walls, finding grips in the rough surface of the stone that would never have served ordinary men and women.

  The defenders seemed stunned. A few were reacting to the assault, manning the fire launchers, training them on their attackers, but too many were just standing in place, waiting for the attack to come to them.

  Keeton snatched the closest torch from its rack and dropped it into the oil trough, igniting the flammable liquid and instantly setting fire to dozens of attackers. Racing down the wall behind his soldiers, he slapped them on the shoulders and screamed at them to fight back, snapping them out of their shock, propelling them into action. New soldiers from the west wall appeared in droves and suddenly everyone was responding to the threat. Spears were used to dislodge the creatures climbing the walls when they got within range. Pitch was poured out of barrels onto the assailants massed at the gates and torches dropped to ignite it. Archers rushed to fire their arrows down into the hordes trying to scale the walls.

  It was chaos, but the effort of defending against the surprise attack was working. The assault might have reached the south wall, but it had failed to force the gates, and fire launchers had cleared away most of those attempting to climb the walls.

  Then the first of the warships was aloft, circling over the massed attackers through a wash of hazy light, everything misty and surreal but clear enough for rail slings and fire launchers to find targets. Keeton watched as the vessel roamed back and forth through the gloom, bursts of fire erupting from the launchers, the deep hum of the rail slings reverberating in the brume.

  Then, abruptly, everything changed.

  The dragon they had seen circling overhead the previous day materialized out of the concealment of the mist, swooping into view above the warship. The airmen were concentrating their efforts on the creatures on the ground and never looked up. Even the lookouts failed to spy the danger in time, caught up in the excitement of the moment, their eyes directed out and down rather than up. Although Keeton and dozens of others on the wall screamed in warning, their efforts were to no avail. The dragon attacked, its maw opening wide as it did so, raking the vessel end-to-end with fire, which burst in a steady stream from its great throat. In seconds ship and crew alike were aflame and falling earthward.

  When it crashed, the diapson crystals that powered the ship and launchers erupted in a series of massive explosions that consumed the wreckage in seconds.

  The attackers on the ground who had fallen back in the face of the fires from the trough oil and the fire launchers returned, carrying makeshift ladders that they threw up against the walls. Then they began to climb. Again the defenders used poles and spears to try to push the ladders off, but attackers still on the ground held the scaling equipment in place while those clinging to the rungs grappled with the implements being shoved at them and wrenched them away. Fire launchers and rail slings were brought into play, and archers sent arrows raining down on the climbers. Many were stricken and dropped away, but some got through and, once on the wall, became almost unstoppable. Heedless of their own safety—or their very lives—they tore at the defenders like animals, leaving them shredded.

  The battle seesawed back and forth as dawn broke and the sun rose into the morning sky from behind the eastern mountains. The gloom faded, but the haze remained, thick and swirling in the rising heat and the slow approach of a storm coming down out of the north. Screams and shouts reverberated across the city, and men and women died with the passing of every minute as the struggle intensified.

  An hour after sunrise, the army massed at the the west wall attacked.

  Keeton, still rallying his soldiers on the southern battlements, left for the west instantly. By then Sefita Rayne had four warships in the air, two flying into each battle. It made all the difference. Fighting as a pair so that one vessel warded the other and both had sentries aloft in the crow’s nests watching for the dragon’s return, they hammered the attackers on the ground with onslaughts of rail sling missiles and fire launcher flames alike.

  It became a war of attrition on both walls, but the deciding factor was the presence of the warships. The dragon returned briefly, but was sighted quickly in the improving light and met with intense weapons fire from each pair of vessels when it tried to approach. Only once did it get close enough to set fire to one of the light sheaths, but the sheath was cut loose quickly and dropped away before the fire could spread.

  On the ground, the defenders kept control of both the south and west walls, and the gates held firm against any number of efforts to force them open. As noon approached, the demon army began to withdraw, leaving their dead and wounded where they had fallen. They turned away with studied indifference to the arrows still tracking them, their rage undiminished. Keeton was appalled that his soldiers had killed so many of them and still the creatures seemed as numerous as ever. He called for a cease-fire from his defenders, not wanting to waste resources that would be needed later.

  Below the west wall and on the approach road winding between the now abandoned watchtowers, scavenging beasts from the demon army caught hold of the bodies of fallen defenders and dragged them far enough away that they could feast on them, still within view of those soldiers manning the city walls.

  Standing with Wint, peering through the smoke and ash rising from the last of the oil burning in the trough, Keeton watched the remnants of the demonkind slowly disappear into the distance.

  “They’ll be back, Commander,” his second said quietly.

  Keeton nodded in agreement. “They’ll be back.”

  Seersha was exercising on the Home Guard practice field, using various members of the elite corps as sparring partners, when the messenger arrived. He stood to one side looking flushed and impatient until there was a pause in the fighting, then he rushed over.

  “The King wishes to see you immediately,” he said.

  No matter its portent, this was welcome news. The Druid was eager for anything that would break the monotony of her current life, of endless hours spent waiting for the King to mount an Elven advance into the deep Westland to monitor the prospect of an anticipated demon breakout. She had thought it would happen long before this. She had been certain, after Aphenglow and Arling departed with the Ellcrys seedling, that their grandfather would move quickly to advise the High Council of the danger and then act on it.

  She had been wrong.

  The old King had waited two more days before telling the High Council of the collapse of the Forbidding, of the fate that had befallen the Druids and their companions, of the warnings given by the Ellcrys of its failing, and of the need to prepare for war.

  But the members of the High Council had split into two groups, and the one led by the King’s son Phaedon had urged
restraint, arguing that no one really knew anything, as yet. A breakout could be weeks away; the words of a young girl who might or might not have fully understood what the Ellcrys had told her were no reason to dispatch an entire army into the wilderness of the Westland. Better that flits be sent to skim the countryside and search for signs of a breakout. Better that the army be properly mustered and prepared. Better that everyone know more than they did at the moment about what was happening.

  In spite of support from both Emperowen and his brother Ellich, the younger Elessedil carried the majority of the Council. Heads in the sand, the lot of them, Seersha had thought at the time. It was especially disappointing when the old King went along with this nonsense. Seersha had been enraged, but resigned to waiting them out. What else could she do? She could take Crace Coram and fly back into the Westland, just the two of them, searching for a way back into the Forbidding. But what she needed was a strong military force so they could withstand an encounter with the Straken Lord and his demonkind.

  Admittedly, she kept thinking the King would change his mind, that he would grow impatient and realize that delay in this matter could prove fatal and he must act, High Council support or no. But days went by and nothing happened, and she lacked a way to force the issue. She was a Dwarf, not an Elf—an outsider and a visitor of limited status in Elven country—and all her allies had gone elsewhere save for Crace Coram. More to the point, she was a Druid, and the prevailing view on Druids was that they could not be trusted.

  No one was going to listen to her.