The masked witches botg-4

by Richard Lee Byers

  Wheezing, with her legs wobbling, all but giving way under the weight of her armor, Cera waited to see if someone or something would strike back at her. Nothing did.

  The throbbing pain in her face eased a little, and blinking, she made out a smear of light. She swiped away the blood running down from gashes on her forehead, and she could see more. Obviously, the demon hadn t actually ripped out her eyes after all. It was venom in its talons, or some magical effect, that had extinguished her vision temporarily.

  There was nothing left of the skull lord but ash and cinders, and no sign of the demon whatsoever. Either it was fighting elsewhere in the roaring frenzy of the battle, or it had fled the scene when its master died.

  In any case, it wasn t flying around Cera anymore, and for that, she was grateful. She had nothing left to fight it with, either physically or magically. Still flanked by her phantom bodyguards, she retreated toward the relative safety of a section of the crypt her comrades controlled, before noticing a surging confusion in one of the doorways.

  The glabrezu aimed a pair of its oversized pincers at Jhesrhi. Pulses of purple light lit the black claws from within.

  She threw herself to the side. A blast of toxic force pounded the spot she d just vacated, cracking that piece of the floor and flinging bits of stone into the air.

  What does it take to kill the thing? she wondered. She d already burned most of the fur off the top of it and charred the flesh underneath. A dozen of Vandar s berserkers had given their lives to help him cut its legs to ribbons. But it still wouldn t fall down.

  She lifted her staff in both hands and called to the stone in the ceiling. For centuries, she told it, the demon tormented you and made you sick. Now you can take your revenge. I ll help you.

  The ceiling extruded a pair of enormous hands. They clapped shut around the demon s head and squeezed.

  The glabrezu thrashed and beat uselessly at the clenching, grinding trap with its claws. I ve got it! Jhesrhi thought. But suddenly the glabrezu vanished and reappeared just to the left of where it had been, which was to say, free of the hands. The fiend smashed the rocky appendages with a sweep of its arm. Still attuned to the stone, Jhesrhi heard it cry out in pain.

  In need of a moment to center herself and refocus her energies, she backpedaled. As she did so, she noticed the warriors stag men, mostly pouring into the vault through the same arch that had previously admitted her and the rest of their comrades.

  There was nothing inherently wrong with that. The crypt was where Aoth had wanted to make a stand, and all troops were supposed to make their way into it as expeditiously as was consistent with good order and protecting their rear. But she could tell the stag men weren t hurrying in to fight. They were fleeing, bumping into their allies, knocking them down, and trampling them in their haste, spreading alarm and disarray.

  Their little army obviously didn t have much of a rearguard anymore. Something was routing it, and that same something threatened to stab into the very heart of the company just as soon as the fleeing stag men cleared the way.

  Jhesrhi decided that the dismantling rearguard was an even bigger problem than the glabrezu. But what could she do about it when she was on the wrong end of the passageway?

  She cast about and saw that Vandar s berserkers had successfully defended another of the doorways leading into the chamber, killing or repulsing the enemy who d attacked from that direction. There were just a couple of Rashemi there, keeping watch.

  Jhesrhi reached out again to the stone around her. Upset that it had taken harm at her behest, its mind tried to tug away from her own.

  I m sorry, she told it, but for something as big as you, that hurt was just a tiny scratch. I need you. Show me how that tunnel connects to the one next to it.

  The stone didn t answer for a moment. Then a diagram of sorts flowed into view before her inner eye.

  Thank you, she said.

  So far, so good. She knew that no one soldier, even a wizard, should venture through any part of the maze alone. She looked for warriors to accompany her, but most of the berserkers were already engaged in one vital struggle or another. The only exceptions were casualties, pale and shaky from pain, blood loss, and the sickness that overtook them when their rage had run its course. Several of the least enfeebled were shouting and waving their arms in a futile attempt to bring the influx of frightened rearguarders under control.

  For want of anyone better, Jhesrhi strode in the direction of the stag men. They spotted her, first one and then another, and her approach did what the Rashemi couldn t. The creatures stopped struggling to shove farther away from whatever was behind them and peered at her with brown, shining eyes.

  What is it? she wondered, unsettled. What is it they think they see?

  But she knew it wasn t the time to ponder the question. Hoping it would further impress them, she cloaked herself in flame.

  During her time with the stag men, she d learned that although they couldn t speak, they all understood at least a bit of Elvish. So she switched to what she knew of that tongue, shouted for the stag warriors to follow her, and reinforced the command by sweeping her staff at the archway that was clear. Then she strode in that direction.

  For a heartbeat, the stag warriors stayed right where they were, and she thought that, whatever the basis of their interest in her, it wasn t profound enough to overcome their fear. A moment later, their bells chiming and hooves clattering on the floor, they trotted after her, between the surprised berserker sentries, through the litter of bloody corpses, and on down the passageway.

  She wanted to tell them to silence their bells but didn t know the right words to give the order. The glow of her fiery mantle would likely alert the enemy that they were coming in any case, and she wasn t willing to douse that for fear that it would undermine the confidence of her troops.

  Voicing a dozen screams and snarls at once, a fiend or an undead creature at first glance, Jhesrhi couldn t tell which scrambled out of the mouth of a branching tunnel. The thing was a head taller than she was, and almost as broad as it was high, with dozens of grimacing, mad-looking faces protruding from its slate-gray skin. The visages on its torso might have been flayed from adult men and women, while the ones running down its thick, knotted limbs dwindled in size until they were as small as the faces of newborn babies. It rushed at her with its hands outstretched.

  She met the creature with a flare of flame that produced a kind of hollow pang in the core of her. The creature staggered and shrieked from its various mouths. Although covered in burns, it caught its balance and kept shambling forward. She prepared to cast another spell, but four of the stag warriors streamed past her, intercepted the thing, and drove their spears into it until it collapsed.

  She supposed that was just as well, because the twinge of almost-pain had been a warning that she d already expended a considerable amount of her power. She was likely to need the remainder for what was to come.

  Two more turns brought her and her comrades into the tunnel behind whatever was putting the remnants of the rearguard to flight. She squinted, trying to make sense of the scene before her even though the figures in the foreground nearly blocked out everything behind them.

  It looked like a force of undead had come up behind the rearguard as she and her companions had similarly come up behind it. Some of the revenants were witches, and they d apparently panicked the rearguard by killing the Stag King and regaining mastery of the telthors he d previously wrested from their control.

  Jhesrhi was able to infer so much in just a heartbeat because, as she d feared, the enemy had heard her and her stag men approaching, and the durthans had left off assailing the rearguard to turn and confront the newcomers. A witch in dark robes and a black mask that might be tarnished silver held the Stag King s antler weapon like a staff. A wise woman in red dangled his severed head. Their eyes gleamed like stars, and phantom wolves and badgers crouched at the witches feet.

  The durthans pointed their arcane weapons and rec
ited incantations. The virulence of their curses swept down the passage in a wave of greenish phosphorescence. Patches of the stonework cracked and crumbled as it passed.

  Jhesrhi rattled off words of defense. Her own power manifested as a burst of flame that met the oncoming shimmer and burned the poison out of it.

  She struck back by calling for fire to leap up from the stones beneath her opponents. But the witch in the silver mask nullified the spell before it had even started to manifest with a contemptuous-looking flick of the antler-axe. The weapon was no doubt a powerful talisman.

  The two sides traded attacks for a while, with neither able to penetrate the other s arcane defenses. Jhesrhi decided that she was a more powerful wizard than any of those standing against her, but the weight of their numbers offset that advantage.

  While she dueled with her sister mages, spirit animals and undead pounced out of the archways in her vicinity, or simply lunged from solid stone. Stabbing with their spears and slashing with their swords, the stag warriors protected her from them.

  Darts of ragged darkness pierced her cloak of fire, and a stab of chill made her clench and gasp. She tried to bring the ceiling down to bury the witches, but nothing happened. Not, she perceived, because the undead had countered the magic, but because the spell had simply fumbled its grip.

  This failure was a warning that her current approach couldn t win the fight. Her foes were wearing her down. While still attacking and defending furiously, she tried to think about the situation as her friends might see it.

  Aoth and Khouryn would say her current objective wasn t to destroy the creatures who were striving so doggedly to kill her. It was to keep the force they commanded from punching through what little was left of the rearguard and taking the Rashemi by surprise. And Gaedynn, grinning his crooked grin, would tell her that when neither skill nor strength could prevail, it was time to bluff.

  Jhesrhi did her best to arrange her mouth into a convincing sneer, like a cruel goddess in mortal disguise who d tired of toying with her puny opponents and was ready to demonstrate the full measure of her power. She made her corona of flame burn brighter, cast fire before her in a continuous, roaring flare, and marched forward.

  Advancing into the teeth of the enemies curses made it even harder to blunt and deflect their force. Her limbs throbbed and cramped as more and more of the embodied malice slipped past her guard. But she didn t allow the pain to show in her face, make her break stride, or interrupt the steady outpouring of fire from the head of her staff. Instead, she shaped portions of the blaze into the semblance of furious griffons made of flame.

  As she and her flare drew steadily closer, the telthors clustered around the witches. They cringed and peered up anxiously at their mistresses. And after another stride or two, the durthans began to fall prey to the same anxiety. Despite the masks and voluminous robes, Jhesrhi could see their fear in the way they tensed and balked.

  The witch in the silver mask snarled, This way! She scrambled into a side passage, and her companions scurried after her. An instant after the last of them had disappeared, an enormous spider web burst into existence in the mouth of the tunnel, no doubt to prevent pursuit.

  Panting, profoundly grateful and somewhat surprised the bluff had succeeded, Jhesrhi allowed her flare to gutter out. She leaned on her staff and, with an aching, trembling arm that felt almost too heavy to lift, waved the stag warriors on to attack the lesser undead still trying to cut and claw their way into the glabrezu s crypt.

  Vandar had given himself over so utterly to rage that it was like the feeling was the living creature, and he, just a weapon in his grip. And that was fortunate. It kept him cutting, lunging, leaping, and dodging, when by all rights, his limbs should have been feeble and slow with exhaustion. It kept him attacking past the point where a sensible man might have succumbed to futility and despair.

  Yet despite his fury, a part of him noticed as his most formidable allies dropped out of the struggle. At the start, while he and his brothers had assailed the glabrezu with swords, axes, and spears, the outlanders had seared it with thunderbolts, flame, and shafts of burning light. But those blasts had stopped coming. Unable to divert his attention from the fiend, Vandar didn t know why. He wondered if the glabrezu s magic had killed Aoth, Jhesrhi, and Cera, too.

  Whatever had become of them, it was his fight his and the Griffon Lodge s. And despite the evidence of the pulped and dismembered Rashemi bodies scattered about the floor, Vandar still believed they could win it. Surely the enchantments in the red sword could kill the giant, but not as long as it was only cutting up the creature s extremities. He knew he had to find a way to reach its vitals.

  He shouted to attract its attention and rushed at its right foot. It struck at him like he d hoped it would, but not in the way he had wanted. Instead it bellowed a word of power. The magic stabbed pain through the core of him and made blood stream from his nose.

  He snarled the pain away and lunged again. Then, as he d hoped, a pair of huge pincers plunged down from on high to catch him and snip him to pieces. He jerked himself out of the way, and when the demon started to pull its extremity back, he sprang and wrapped his arms around the nearer of the claws.

  The sharp edges cut him, and if the demon simply snapped its pincers shut, it would shear his arms off. But he d taken it by surprise, and instead it completed the action it had initially intended. It lifted its claws back into the air, and him along with them.

  The glabrezu started to close its pincers, but, riding the rage, Vandar was a hair too quick for it. He heaved and swung himself onto the top of the claw, where he was still only an instant away from death. The fiend needed only to flip its arm to toss him up and catch him in its pincers or to hurl him across the vault to smash against the wall. But before it could do either, the beserker stood up and leaped at its chest.

  The red sword drove into the glabrezu s burned, blackened flesh almost up to the hilt. For an instant, Vandar hung from the weapon like a mountaineer hanging from a piton. Then his weight pulled it sliding out of the wound.

  He snatched frantically with his off hand and caught hold of a tuft of long, coarse hair that his spellcaster allies hadn t burned away. Dangling from that, he managed another thrust, then sensed or maybe it was the red sword perceiving it immense pincers reaching from behind him to pick him off his perch like a nit.

  But the claws never closed on him. Instead, with a seeming slowness that reminded him of the start of an avalanche, the demon crumpled to its knees. Screeching, his lodge brothers scrambled to stab and cut at the lower part of its torso.

  Trying to control his breathing, Aoth knew he was tiring and his undead opponent wasn t. He needed to end the confrontation. He let his targe drop a little to invite a cut in the high line.

  The blaspheme obliged, or at least it seemed to. But as Aoth shifted to avoid the blow, he saw it was only a feint. The true attack had looped low to slice his leg out from underneath him.

  Because his shield was on the wrong side of his body, he had to parry the attack with his spear. Shouting a word of defense, he stopped the life-drinking weapon a finger-length short of his flesh, although the clanging impact jolted his arm all the way up to the shoulder.

  He set his spear ablaze with chaotic force and thrust at the blaspheme s flank. The point split the creature s mail shirt and pierced the gray, ridged skin inside.

  But at the same moment, the blaspheme cut and caught the side of Aoth s head. His helmet clanked, and, stunned, staggering, he reeled off balance.

  Frantically, he struggled to prepare for what was coming next. Swaying, he was actually recovering his equilibrium, and shifting his targe and sword into a proper guard, but oh so sluggishly, compared to the speed with which the blaspheme was presenting its blade.

  But as the undead warrior made a horizontal cut, one of the ice trolls it had led into the vault lunged between it and Aoth. Intent on closing with some Rashemi or stag man, it apparently didn t notice it was rushing r
ight into the middle of somebody else s fight.

  The greatsword bit deep, and the troll collapsed, its flesh shriveling. The blaspheme yanked on the hilt of its weapon to free it from the corpse.

  By the Luckmaiden s grace, it took a moment. Time enough for Aoth s thoughts to snap back into focus and for him to rattle off a spell.

  Nearly as long as the blaspheme s weapon, a blade made of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being. It flew at the undead and cut at it. It parried, and the greatsword rang.

  Fence with that for a while, thought Aoth. Meanwhile, he d take the blaspheme apart with further spells.

  But as he took a breath to begin, the patchwork warrior snarled a single word. Aoth had never heard it before, but the charge of power it carried set his teeth on edge and made his battered head throb anew. It also prompted the corpse of the ice troll to make a grab for his ankle.

  Aoth barely managed to jump away. The reanimated ice troll heaved itself up off the floor.

  All right, he thought, it s a race. I need to get rid of you before the blaspheme finds a way to get rid of my flying sword.

  Suddenly, a disembodied female voice sounded across the vault, magic making it audible despite the roar of combat. Uramar! it called. Fall back! Everyone, fall back!

  Still defending himself against the sword of light, the blaspheme started to do precisely that, and its troops with it. It occurred to Aoth that a prudent man might be glad to let it go. But he was certain that the blaspheme was a leader maybe the leader of the undead conspiracy threatening Rashemen. He set about stabbing and burning the ice troll out of his way as quickly as he could.

  Unfortunately, it took a few heartbeats, and after that, he found himself facing clanking, steaming boarlike constructs of articulated steel and brass products of Raumathari sorcery, probably that the enemy had deployed to recover their retreat. Once he and his allies destroyed those, the vault was theirs, but the blaspheme had long gone.