She took up her staff, and it urged her to set something ablaze. Not tonight, she thought, not in this downpour. That would be far too much work and too suspicious as well.
She opened the casement. The rain battered her. She spoke to the wind, and howling, it picked her up off the little balcony.
She wasn’t worried that anyone would see. She was just a dark speck moving against the black sky.
Despite the weather, it was exhilarating to fly again, although not as exhilarating as it would have been on Scar’s back. She felt a fresh pang of loss for the steed who’d given his life to save hers, and wondered if she’d ever ride a griffon again. Then she scowled as she recognized the thought for what it was: a tacit admission of the fear that she’d never escape her current situation.
The wind carried over the precinct being demolished to clear a space for Tchazzar’s temple, then to the encampment beyond. In some portions, the tents stood in orderly rows, while in others a person would have to weave his way through. Jhesrhi suspected that the lower sorts of sellsword, the undisciplined ruffians who gave them all a bad name, were responsible for the areas of disarray.
She landed in the shadow of one of the outlying houses the camp had grown up around. It was late enough that no light showed through the windows shuttered against the storm. She walked on, her feet sliding in mud and slopping through puddles. Sensing that she still had work for it, the wind that had borne her aloft lingered close to her, gusting in one direction, then another. It made her cape swing back and forth like a bell and kept threatening to shove her cowl back off her head, not out of prankishness or resentment, but simply because it didn’t know any better.
She spotted a sentry huddled under a tree and passed within a stone’s throw of him. He didn’t challenge her. With a flicker of a smile, she decided that she probably would have needed to brandish a severed head and scream “Death to Chessenta!” to draw him out from under the meager shelter of the dripping branches, especially since, in a patchwork army, strangers were constantly wandering around.
In time she stopped under a tree of her own, as anyone who needed a respite from the drenching sting of the rain might. She stared out at the supply tents and wagons a short distance away, shifted her grip on her staff, and spoke to the wind again.
What she said was an incantation of sorts, possessed of a precise cadence and punctuated with words of command. But she didn’t feel like she was giving orders. Prior to the war with Threskel, she’d spent enough time in Luthcheq to get acquainted with the breezes and gales hereabouts, and it was more like asking help from friends.
It was help they proved eager to give. The wind roared and threw the wings of her cloak out in front of her like flapping banners. She had to snatch at the tree to keep from falling. And she wasn’t even the target of the blast. She was simply standing at the fringe of it.
It shoved the tents out of shape and sent ripples streaming through the canvas. A wagon rocked sideways, then settled back on all four wheels.
“More,” Jhesrhi murmured, and the wind wailed louder. The raindrops caught in the surge almost seemed to be hurtling horizontally, not falling from the black clouds on high.
A piece of tent ripped loose from the rope and stake holding it in place and flapped wildly. Other sections did the same until one tent flipped over, exposing its contents to the wind and rain. For a few heartbeats, the lines on the far side of the neatly stacked supplies anchored the canvas like a leash holding back a frantic dog. Then it tore loose and flew away.
One by one, the other tents pursued it into the night. Meanwhile, the piles of foodstuffs and other items essential to an army on campaign blew apart. Kegs tumbled over the ground until they ruptured and spilled the ale inside. Bags split and surrendered their contents to the gale. The flour looked like a band of ghosts put to rout, while the fletchings were too small for human eyes to make out in the rain and the dark. Had Jhesrhi not been attuned to the wind and perceiving partly as it perceived, with a sort of touching at a distance, she wouldn’t have noticed the bits of feather flying away.
With a crash, a first wagon overturned. Others followed. She couldn’t tell how badly they were damaged, but at least their contents came tumbling out of the cargo beds for the elements to scatter, pilfer, and foul.
Eventually she decided she’d done all the harm she could at that particular site. She considered turning the wind on some of the other tents nearby, the ones that had soldiers inside them, but decided against it. She’d taken enough risks for one night.
She thanked the winds and told them they could stop generating the magical gale. It started subsiding immediately, although the violence of the hammering rain, blazing lightning, and booming thunder remained impressive in its own right.
Jhesrhi glanced around, making sure no one was watching, then asked the particular wind that had carried her there to return her to Tchazzar’s palace. As she floated upward, she wondered how much she’d actually accomplished.
She’d likely delayed the start of the Red Dragon’s campaign but possibly not by more than a day or two. Was that enough to matter? It all depended on how Gaedynn, Aoth, Khouryn, and the others were faring, and she had no way of knowing that.
She sighed. As much as she felt ill equipped to deal with all the subterfuge and intrigue, in one respect, the game she and her comrades were playing was like the sort of war to which she was accustomed. A soldier focused on his own particular task, often with no knowledge whatsoever of how a battle or campaign was progressing overall. He just had to hope that everybody’s efforts would add up to victory in the end.
In her imagination, Gaedynn smiled crookedly and responded to her thought: Right you are, Buttercup. It’s chaos and mass confusion every time. But don’t tell anybody, or how will Aoth peddle our alleged expertise?
You have my word, she thought, smiling, missing him. Then she felt a light tactile sensation like the brush of a hanging leaf, although it was almost lost amid the cold, wet drumming of the rain.
It startled her, and it took her a moment to figure out what had happened. Because of the magic she’d worked to destroy the supplies, she still had some residual connection to all the currents of air at play in her vicinity, some ability to sense what they were sensing. She hadn’t been conscious of it while it was simply validating what she perceived with her natural senses, but it was alerting her to something she hadn’t noticed.
She rattled off a rhyme to strengthen the bond, then reached out as if she had a hundred invisible hands attached to arms dozens of yards long. And so she found the creature.
It was flying some distance behind her, its leathery wings bouncing raindrops back up into the air with every beat. Like many creatures of the netherworld, it was somewhat manlike but possessed of an elongated, half-bestial head, clawed, four-fingered hands, and spines growing over most of its hide like a porcupine’s, although not so thickly as to obscure the essential gauntness of its frame.
It was a spined devil. Jhesrhi had encountered them on the battlefield when some enemy sorcerer or priest summoned them. But she’d never run into one that could make itself invisible, and she had no idea why one was shadowing her.
Maybe she could force it to explain, but probably not by mystically shackling its will. That wasn’t her kind of wizardry. She’d likely have to beat the answer out of it.
She warned the wind that when she turned, the devil was likely to hurl some of its spines at her. It should be prepared to shield her with a vigorous gust. Her staff urged her to blast the spinagon with fire, and she told it to stop its nudging and do as she commanded. Then she spun in the air, raised the weapon over her head, and spoke the first word of an incantation.
The spined devil lashed one arm at her, just as though it could strike her a backhanded blow from far away. And in a sense, it could, for a flare of crimson force exploded from the ring she belatedly noticed on its forefinger. The blaze spiked pain through her head and collapsed her thoughts into confusion. Perhaps it hurt and
addled the wind that was carrying her too, because it dropped her and she plummeted toward the ground.
She wrenched her mind back into focus and cried a word of command that was exactly that. The wind scooped her up just a few feet shy of the top branches of an elm tree.
Visible, the spinagon snarled, snatched quills from its shoulder, and threw them. They hurtled at Jhesrhi like arrows and, despite the rain, burst into flame in midflight.
She sensed that the wind was still recovering from the first attack. It couldn’t hold her aloft and shield her from the missiles too. She gasped a word of warding and lifted one wing of her cloak in front of her.
For an instant the wool became as strong as mail. Two quills punched all the way through anyway. One pierced her sleeve too and pricked her arm. A wave of dizziness assailed her.
No, curse it! Surely only a tiny drop of the devil’s poison had entered her blood, and she refused to let it stop her. She snarled a word intended to produce a surge of vigor, and it steadied her to a degree, enough to take in the fact that her cape was on fire.
She snapped the garment to shake the spines out of it. Then she grasped the flames with her will. From her staff’s perspective, controlling fire wasn’t as good as making it. But it was something, and the pseudo-mind inside the weapon crowed in satisfaction.
Guided by instinct as much as arcane knowledge, she drew the fire out of the cloth, into herself, and streamed it on into the staff to add to the rod’s store of power. As it passed through her, it painlessly burned away the rest of her vertigo and weakness, a benefit she hadn’t anticipated.
She peered around, using both her own eyes and the wind’s tactile way of seeing. She found the spinagon hovering not far from where it had been a moment before. When it recognized that its first barrage of spines hadn’t incapacitated her, it hurled a second.
But like her, the wind had recovered from that initial assault. Without even needing to be prompted, it howled and sent the quills tumbling off course.
The devil wheeled and fled in the direction of the heart of the city. Jhesrhi gave chase.
As she did, she asked another favor of the winds. Bellowing, they whirled themselves into a spinning column, visible by virtue of the dust and litter caught in the spin.
The spined devil was caught in it too. The whirlpool of air sucked the nether creature down, or perhaps, tumbled and buffeted, the thing simply found it impossible to fly. Either way, it slammed down on the ground, and Jhesrhi allowed the vortex to disperse.
The spinagon glared up at her. It occurred to her that a winged predator probably wasn’t used to crouching on the ground while an enemy hovered overhead.
“You see how it is,” she called, raising her voice to make herself heard over the hiss and rattle of the rain. “I can kill you if you force the issue. But I don’t especially want to. Tell me why you’re here.”
The spined devil snarled.
“Someone sent you after me, didn’t they?” Jhesrhi persisted. “Why? What were you supposed to do?”
“All right,” growled the spinagon. Its guttural voice sparked a disorienting sort of synesthesia. Jhesrhi heard the words, but they also filled her nose with a smell like hot metal. “I’ll tell. For all the good-”
The creature exploded into motion. It lashed its wings and threw double handfuls of quills.
Fortunately Jhesrhi and the wind were ready. A blast of air tumbled the spines backward and smashed the devil back down onto the ground. Jhesrhi spoke to the earth and water that had blended to form mud, and the muck became even softer and sucked the spinagon down. The nether creature floundered, struggling to drag itself clear.
It likely could, too, but not for a few moments. Jhesrhi judged that she had time enough for a longer incantation.
Though her skill at binding devils and demons was rudimentary at best, she was somewhat more proficient at countermagic. She might be able to dissolve the constraints that the spinagon’s summoner had imposed, the compulsions that forbade it to answer her questions. And if she restored its free will, the fiend might see that it was in its best interests to do so.
She chanted percussive words full of hard consonants, and gripping her staff in both hands, swung it like a mallet she was using to break down a wall. The raindrops pouring down on the spinagon glowed white and steamed and sizzled on its hide.
That seemed promising, but it was still no guarantee that she’d overcome the other spellcaster’s power. She supposed she’d know in a moment. “Now will you talk to me?” she asked.
Still wallowing in mud, the creature was appeared to be trying. Its mouth moved but no sound came out, or at least, none she could hear through the clatter of the rain. Then it shrieked and snatched out two more handfuls of its quills.
Jhesrhi prepared to defend. But the spinagon stabbed the spines deep into its own torso and pitched forward onto its face.
Well, that settles that, she thought. Scowling in annoyance, she floated to the ground and kneeled down to inspect the iron ring that had enabled the spinagon to hurl its own burst of countermagic and probably to become invisible before that. Presumably the creature’s master had given it the talisman, but there was nothing distinctive about the design to suggest who that person was.
Not knowing made returning to the War College an even less appealing prospect than it would have been otherwise. But that was where Aoth’s strategy dictated Jhesrhi should be. So she murmured to the mud, and it churned, sucked down the spinagon’s body, and buried it completely. Then she flew back toward the fortress.
*****
Like many mages, Oraxes had trained himself to be cognizant of his own internal states, and as a result, he often recognized a dream for what it was. Such was the case currently, and he was enjoying it. When he’d lived through the “raid” in reality, he’d been dry mouthed with anxiety that the ruse wouldn’t work. No longer. He could bask in his own cleverness as the pantomime unfolded.
He’d masked himself in Aoth’s appearance and made a common griffon look like Jet. Occasionally he even made it talk. Maintaining the illusions was tricky, but as he and his companions flew through the night toward the proper hillside in the Sky Riders, he knew that Meralaine had an even more difficult task. She had to make it look as if she were attacking to some effect while simultaneously controlling her puppets on the ground, the zombies and skeletons masquerading as a coven of traitorous necromancers and their undead minions.
She managed it, though. Swooping on the back of her griffon, stabbing with her wand, she actually threw the first attack, and jagged shards of something blacker even than the night rained down on the figures below.
The sellsword archers started loosing an instant later. As befitted supposed wizards, the zombies struck back with flares of power from the miscellany of arcane weapons and talismans Oraxes had found among Aoth’s belongings. And as instructed, the dead aimed the blasts at the drakkensteeds and the wyrmkeepers astride them. If anyone was going to get hurt, let it be them.
Throughout the action that followed, Meralaine managed to create the appearance of such fierce, fanatical resistance that when the battle ended, it seemed credible that the attackers hadn’t succeeded in taking any of the coven “alive.” The wyrmkeepers weren’t happy about it, but Oraxes mollified them by “discovering” folded papers in the pocket of a zombie’s robe. The ambiguous but suggestive jottings looked like just the clues to lead the Brotherhood on to other enemies of the Crown. It would simply take a little study.
It was all Oraxes could do to keep from laughing as Sphorrid Nyra congratulated him on the success of the assault. He took a breath to steady himself and started to reply with the same cordiality. Then, suddenly, something covered his mouth.
That jolted him awake, to find that he really did have a hand clamped over his lips and a dagger at his throat as well. It was dark in Aoth’s tent, with just the first gray hint of dawn light seeping through the canvas, but he could still tell it was Sphorrid and the other wyrm
keepers standing over him and Meralaine. One of the priests was covering the necromancer’s mouth and holding a big, curved knife with a single-edged blade to her neck as well.
“Don’t struggle,” Sphorrid said. “Don’t raise your voice above a whisper. Don’t say anything that even sounds like it might be the start of a spell. Otherwise, I swear by the Five Breaths that we’ll kill you both immediately.”
He nodded to the priest restraining Oraxes, and the man uncovered his mouth.
“I never did meet the real Aoth Fezim, did I?” the wyrmlord continued. “It was you all along. That’s why you’re sleeping in his pavilion and his bed, to keep up the imposture until we leave camp.”
Oraxes kept silent.
“Why was it necessary?” Sphorrid asked. “Where is Fezim?”
Oraxes groped for a credible, useful lie. He couldn’t think of any.
Sphorrid shrugged. “Suit yourself. If you won’t talk here, I guarantee you will when we get you to Luthcheq. Let’s get them up and dressed. Make sure they don’t have any weapons or charms hidden in their clothes.”
The wyrmkeeper with the dagger threw the sheets back and dragged Oraxes up off the cot, and the one with the knife did the same to Meralaine. Oraxes felt a flash of anger that the priests were seeing her naked, but there was nothing lewd in their demeanor. They were intent on their business, and that, he realized, was worse. Had she been able to distract them, perhaps it would given him a chance to… do something.
But since that hadn’t happened, maybe he could serve as a distraction for her. As the third acolyte started pawing through their discarded garments, he asked, “How did you know?”
Sphorrid sneered. The filed teeth made the expression jarringly ugly. “You aren’t nearly as clever as you imagine. Wyrmkeepers are priests. Did you think you could pass reanimated corpses off as living men and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference?”
“We hoped,” Oraxes said. The acolyte tossed him his clothes. “We were high above them, and it was dark. Why didn’t you confront us on the spot?” He already knew the answer, but it was the only thing he could think of to say to keep the conversation going.
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