The masked witches
( Brotherhood of the griffon - 4 )
Richard Lee Byers
Richard Lee Byers
The masked witches
PROLOGUE
Vandar Cherlinka hefted the straw-wrapped earthenware bottle. The lack of weight made it plain that only a few swallows of jhuild remained inside, and he wished he could keep all the tart red firewine for himself.
Only for an instant, though, and then he pushed the thought firmly out of his mind. For no man rose to lead a berserker lodge without training himself to be as generous as he was valorous. He told himself that he never would have felt the selfish urge at all if his traveling companion weren t so uncompanionable.
The problem wasn t that Lady Yhelbruna reputedly the oldest hathran in all Rashemen never removed her brown leather mask and gloves or even pushed back the cowl of her robe in Vandar s view. As curious as the next fellow, he d wondered if at some point during the trek, he might discover if the witch was a magically preserved beauty or a hideously wrinkled crone the only possibilities that gossip and rumor entertained but he hadn t really expected it. No, what rankled was her cheerless taciturnity for mile after hard, clambering mile, the silence broken only by her incomprehensible murmurs to herself and the occasional terse command.
Still, he wouldn t let her haughty aloofness turn him into a bad companion. He pulled the cork, and it came out with a little popping sound. He offered the bottle. Instead of taking it, she suddenly twisted away from him, and the campfire, too, to peer at the black masses of the mountains rising against the night sky. The patches of snow on the peaks were pale smudges in the moonlight.
Vandar s heart beat a little faster. He cast about but saw nothing. Which didn t necessarily mean they were alone on the mountainside. The High Country possessed more than its share of dangers, and it was possible a hathran had sensed what even an experienced hunter couldn t have.
What is it? he whispered.
Be still, she replied in her steely contralto, and you ll hear.
He strained to listen, and after a moment he caught the noise. There was a pounding to the east, farther up the mountain they d been climbing before making camp.
Yhelbruna sprang to her feet, as though still youthful and spry.
Pick up your sword and javelin, she said.
Why? Vandar asked, reaching for the weapons that lay within easy reach of his hand.
Because you need to kill something, and it will be better if it doesn t hear us coming, she replied. So close your mouth and follow me.
Swallowing an exasperated retort, he obeyed.
The High Country could be treacherous even by day. In addition to trolls, kobolds, and other such creatures waiting in ambush, a wayfarer had to be wary of scree that would crumble under a body s weight, and crusts of snow concealing sheer crevasses. But Yhelbruna strode along through the chill autumn air as though such hazards were of no concern. Vandar could only hope that her magic encompassed the ability to see in the dark like an owl.
Maybe it did, for they reached the top of a ridge without coming to grief. They started down the other side into a sort of notch in the mountainside, a long, narrow pocket where snow lay unmelted from winter to winter. The steady beat of the knocking was louder, and Vandar caught the soft chant that accompanied it. He couldn t understand the words, but the power in them twisted his guts and put a metallic taste in his mouth.
Yhelbruna raised her hand to halt his advance. She pointed with her bluewood wand.
Peering, he made out what she was indicating despite the gloom, which was even deeper than on the slope they d scaled to find the little valley. The backdrop of snow helped. A menhir rose from that white carpet, and a cloaked figure was hammering the rock with a crooked staff. A pair of goblins looked on, recognizable by virtue of their stunted frames.
Yhelbruna waved Vandar onward with little flicks of the wand.
He was not averse to going. A berserker leader never shrank from a fight. Still, he gave her a look that asked if, her powers notwithstanding, she intended him to handle all three foes by himself. She responded with a nod.
Typical, he muttered.
Half annoyed and half amused, Vandar skulked on down the slope. As far as he could tell, none of the trio below had a bow, a sling, or anything else to strike a man down from a distance. Yet even so, he might as well sneak in as close as he could.
His approach worked until he reached the snow. Then, despite his efforts to stay silent, his steps made tiny crunching sounds, and eventually the goblins and the cloaked figure pivoted in his direction.
Stealth had pretty much served its purpose. A few more strides would carry him close enough to cast his javelin. Vandar started running, and then an earsplitting screech stabbed into his head.
He knew or a part of him did that the scream only lasted for a moment or two. But it seemed to echo on and on inside his skull, terrifying him and smothering his ability to think. Indeed, it nearly blinded him to anything but his own excruciating sensations.
Nearly, but not quite. He registered the goblins floundering toward him through the snow, and he knew he had to ready himself to fight. Like a drowning man struggling toward the water s surface, he strained to banish fear and confusion, to silence the howl inside his head. After a moment, the phantom noise abated.
When it did, he saw there was something wrong with the goblins. They moved in an awkward, shuffling fashion, and they stank of rot. The yellow gleam in their sunken eyes had nothing to do with the moonlight.
Zombies. Vandar smiled because that didn t scare him. Like every Rashemi warrior deserving of the name, he d fought the legions of Thay the land of necromancers and the undead many times.
He no longer held his javelin. He must have dropped it when he d been staggering and flailing around. With no reason to delay, he visualized the mighty winged totem of Griffon Lodge half eagle and half lion and willed himself to go berserk.
Power blazed through Vandar like a thunderbolt. It was as overwhelming as the shriek had been, full of strength and joy, but most of all fury, a lust to kill.
He screamed his own battle cry, an imitation of a griffon s screech, and sprang to meet the undead goblins. He saw their weapons at last a scimitar and a spear as they struck at him, and he smashed them both out of line with a single sweeping parry. He riposted at the zombie on his right, and his broadsword split its skull. The yellow gleam guttered out in its eyes, and its knees buckled.
Grinning, Vandar tried to jerk his sword free. But it stuck in the wound. Meanwhile, the other goblin s scimitar flashed at him. He leaped back and avoided the stroke, but had to let go of the hilt of his own weapon to do it.
The second zombie advanced and made another cut, pushing Vandar farther and farther away from his own blade. He rushed his foe before it could poise the scimitar for a fourth attack, bulled the reeking creature over, and dumped it on its back. He dropped to his knees on top of its chest and hammered both fists down into its face. Bone crunched, the piss-colored glimmer went out of the creature s eyes, and it stopped moving. A small part of Vandar, the bit not yet transported by the fury, recognized that he, too, might have just hurt himself. He might even have broken a finger bone or two. But for the moment, he couldn t feel it.
He was free to retake his own familiar sword, but his rage begrudged the moment it would take to scramble around and pull on the weapon. Instead, the zombie s scimitar was ready to hand. Vandar grabbed it, leaped to his feet, and whirled toward the cloaked figure.
From a closer distance, Vandar could see that she was one of the womanlike creatures known as hags. She was more humanlooking than some, no taller than he was. And before undeath had claimed h
er, mottling her leathery hide with decay and kindling a sickly amber glow in her eyes, she could possibly have passed for human as long as she kept her twisted hands with their long talons hidden inside her mantle.
He charged her, and she screamed again. The noise stung his face and chest like a barrage of pebbles, but it didn t addle him. His fury armored him against it.
Unfortunately, shrieking wasn t her only trick. The hag thrust out her hand at him, and a freezing wind howled and shoved him from the side. Caught in the vortex that had sprung up around her, snow swirled up from the ground.
Thrown off balance, Vandar fell. Instinct warned him that he mustn t stay where he d dropped, so, impeded by the snow, he flung himself to the side. Thunder boomed, and a dazzling flash lit up the notch in the mountain, robbing him of his night vision. A hint of the lightning he d just dodged stung him through the ground.
Prompted by instinct again, he heaved himself to his feet and cut at a shadow. The curved sword sheared into solidity. At the same instant, something snagged in his vest of boiled leather. The hag s claws ripped away the protection and scored his flesh beneath.
Vandar ripped the scimitar out of the place where it had lodged and cut at the murky form before him. But the hag was too close for him to use the unfamiliar blade to best effect. Even the strength of a berserker couldn t make it bite deeply. Meanwhile, the creature scrabbled at him, tearing his armor to shreds.
He cut low, trying for a knee, and felt a jolt as the scimitar met flesh and bone. The hag s raking, ripping assault abated, but surely not because she was trying to escape. The undead were fearless. She must be trying to circle around behind him, Vandar thought, or open up some distance between them to facilitate the use of her magic.
Battered by the howling wind and squinting, he turned and sought her. As he did, a measure of his sight returned, enough to spot her a few paces away. She was favoring the leg he d cut and had a horizontal gash across her belly. Her cowl had slipped backward off her head, and her long white hair lashed and streamed in the whirlwind like her ragged garments. A glimmering flickered inside her gnarled fingers, intermittently revealing the shadows of her bones, like streaks of infection in her flesh.
With a bellow, Vandar threw himself at her, and she sprang to meet him. He cut at her neck, and an instant later, she drove the talons of both hands into his chest.
Something crackled. A sensation of fire along his nerves made him jerk like a man suffering a seizure. Then the hag s claws slipped out of his pectorals, and she collapsed. When she hit the ground, her head, nearly severed by the scimitar, tore away completely from her neck. The yellow gleam in her eyes went out, and the unnatural wind sighed away to nothing.
With all three of Vandar s foes destroyed, the berserker fury drained away. He felt weak and shaky, and the sudden throb of pain in his blistered, bleeding chest and bruised hands made the sick feeling worse. Panting, he flopped down to sit in the snow.
He heard stone cracking and crunching. He twisted his head and looked around.
It was the first time he d taken a close look at the menhir. Strings of small, jagged-looking runes extended from the top of the granite shaft to the bottom. Though he couldn t read them, Vandar recognized the writing of the Raumvirans, who d lived throughout those lands in ancient times and had left ruins and monuments to prove it.
Though a wooden staff should have been incapable of breaking granite, the hag had succeeded in effacing some of the symbols, and even with her body lying headless on the ground, her work continued. More patches of stone chipped away, seemingly of their own accord. Hairline cracks snaked out from the disappearing runes, and the entire menhir shivered.
It s like an egg hatching, Vandar whispered. He couldn t explain exactly how he knew that, but he did just as he sensed that whatever was about to emerge would make even an undead hag seem like a trivial annoyance by comparison.
Still trembling, he dragged himself to his feet and poised himself to go berserk a second time. It would be a strain to do it again so soon, particularly when he was wounded. But he didn t see that he had a choice.
Yhelbruna was advancing on the stone, although not in a straight line. Her path weaved from side to side and even doubled back at certain points, as though the footprints she left in the snow were themselves a form of writing. She swept her bluewood wand up and down and side to side as she chanted rhymes in a tone that reminded Vandar of someone snapping commands at an unruly dog.
The menhir shuddered harder. More of the sigils crumbled. Though he was no mystic, and unversed in any mysteries save those of his own lodge, Vandar suddenly felt the elation of another mind. The psychic intrusion was so powerful that, for a moment, he shared the emotion, even as he also discerned that as soon as the thing in the stone achieved its release, it intended to kill him and Yhelbruna, too.
Yhelbruna sang words in a different rhythm. Her voice reminded Vandar of a bugle blowing on a battlefield. She pressed her hands to the sides of her face.
The hathran s leather mask burned like the sun. The radiance it shed lit up everything in front of her, but seemed to fall most intensely on the disintegrating menhir.
Its cracks closed, and new stone formed to seal over the broken places. Glyphs rewrote themselves.
The alien exultation that had intruded in Vandar s mind gave way to rage and determination. The creature in the shaft made a supreme effort, and for a moment, a huge and shadowy form, with horns curling upward from its two reptilian heads and several tentacles writhing from each shoulder in place of arms, loomed above the standing stone. Then, in a paroxysm of hate and frustration, it disappeared. To his relief, Vandar s link to its psyche vanished with it.
Yhelbruna flopped down in the snow. He hurried toward her and saw that her mask was gone, perhaps fading from existence once she had used up every bit of magic stored within it.
Her heart-shaped face was youthful, with smooth skin and apple cheeks. It was more girlish and less queenly than he could have imagined, with a largish nose and a hint of humor at the corners of the wide mouth.
He kneeled beside her. Are you all right? he asked.
Just tired, she said, smiling. Now you ve seen my face, and, under the circumstances, there s no sacrilege in it. But you won t tell anyone what you saw.
He wondered how she knew he d hoped to see her unmasked.
I swear I won t, by the totem of my lodge, he replied. But can you tell me what just happened? What was that thing?
Ah, Yhelbruna said. The Raumvirans who once lived in these mountains were enemies to the Nars, and the Nar wizards were masters at summoning devils and demons to do their bidding. They sent such fiends to trouble the High Country, and the Raumathari mages coped by erecting traps like this one. A spirit that wandered too near was pulled inside.
And held, said Vandar. Until something set it free.
Exactly, replied the hathran. We Wychlaran inspect and maintain the stones every year. That s enough to counter the effects of simple weathering and the like. But obviously, it can t prevent tampering.
By filthy Thayan hands, Vandar said.
I would assume, Yhelbruna replied.
Curse it, he said. It s not even an act of war, because we re not at war right now. It s just evil. Setting a demon loose to wander around and hurt anyone unlucky enough to run into it.
Her smile widened slightly. I m sorry if the Thayans have disappointed you, she said.
The joke surprised a chuckle out of him, which made his gashed, burned chest ache worse. That s all right, he replied. To tell the truth, I never did have a very high opinion of them.
Nor I, even a hundred years ago when Thay was a cruel, wicked foe, but nowhere near as vile as it is now, she said, as she touched her face. It felt strange to have it exposed to the chill mountain air. I think I ve recovered enough of my strength to heal your wounds. After that, I d like very much to share that firewine you offered.
Yhelbruna s friendliness lasted for the remainder of the nig
ht. But in the morning, to his disappointment, she tied a scarf around the lower portion of her face and seemed to shroud herself in severity again. They climbed the trail in silence, just as they had before.
Midday brought them to the flat, oval tabletop of a summit. To the south, the Sunrise Mountains, of which the High Country was the northernmost part, marched away as far as the eye could see. In the opposite direction, the mountains jutted out in the near distance, but sharp eyes could make out the spot where they gave way to flat land that was mostly uninhabited desolation. To the west lay the green and silver heart of Rashemen, with its forests, rivers, and lakes; and to the east, the endless steppes called the Hordelands.
Yhelbruna looked around, muttered under her breath, and slashed her wand through a Z-shaped figure. I ll perform the ritual here, she said.
Vandar smiled. You didn t tell me the journey was nearly over, he replied.
Because I didn t know this was the spot until I saw it, she said.
What can I do to help? he asked.
For now, stay out of my way and be quiet, she replied.
Vandar did his best to comply while the hathran walked around and around the summit. Alternately silent, chanting, and sometimes crooning, she stopped periodically to swirl her bluewood wand in figures like intricate knots. She was asking the help of the local spirits. And, one by one, they flickered in and out of view: an enormous raven perched on an outcropping. A doll-sized man of living stone. A ghostly wolverine.
When Yhelbruna had finished her preparations and consultations, she beckoned to Vandar with an imperious twitch of her wand. He joined her beside the jutting piece of granite where the raven spirit had appeared.
Give me your hand, she said.
When he did, she turned it palm up and brushed the tip of the wand across it. The rounded bluewood slit his skin like a razor. Though it didn t hurt and it would have shamed him to flinch even if it had he caught his breath in surprise.
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