The masked witches

For a heartbeat or two, the enemy floundered in confusion, and Jhesrhi thought the fight might already be as good as won. But then Choschax bellowed, Parothor, the sun priestess! Wolves, the griffon and the berserker! I ll kill the wizard! And his underlings, cyclopes and lycanthropes alike, oriented on the targets he d chosen for them.

Choschax s crimson gaze jabbed at Jhesrhi once again. To her relief, it wasn t as devastating that time. It didn t have the power of three other cyclopes eyes reinforcing it, she d warded herself, and she knew better than to meet it squarely. But even so, it rocked her backward and made her head throb.

She was still off balance when Choschax produced a javelin that seemed to simply appear in his hand, and threw it. She jerked up her staff and gasped a word of command. A disk of red light blinked into existence between them. The javelin banged into the shield and fell to the ground.

Choschax charged. His lumbering strides ate up the distance, and his axe was upraised. Jhesrhi realized that her corona of flame hadn t dissuaded him from fighting at close quarters. Maybe he thought that with his long arms, leathery hide, and gauntlets, he could strike her down and come away with nothing worse than blistered hands.

She spoke to the wind, and it blasted into Choschax s face, slowing his progress to a stagger. In other circumstances, she might have asked the spirits of the air to whisk her beyond his reach, but the terrain was too clustered for flying. She didn t want to bang into a tree or entangle herself in branches.

The cyclops drove into striking distance. The malice in his eye was like a pounding hammer, and his arm shifted as he aimed his black axe at her head.

She asked the wind to stop shoving him, and it did. As he pitched forward off balance, she stepped forward and to the side. She was close enough for her fire to sear much of his body, but she saw no reason to leave it at that. The end of her staff burst into flame, and she jabbed it at his eye. He flinched. She missed her mark but charred his jaw, cheek, and ear.

Choschax screamed and reeled sideways. She hurled a fan-shaped burst of yellow fire at his feet. If it burned them, so much the better, but her real objective was to melt the snowdrift he d stumbled into. As soon that happened, she rattled off a rhyme, pointed her staff, and hurled a blast of pure cold.

The meltwater froze into ice around Choschax s boots. He backed up another step, and his legs flew out from under him. He hit the ground with a crash of battered armor.

Jhesrhi gri

A lycanthrope in true wolf guise had attacked her. Her halo of fire was burning away its fur and the skin beneath, but it was still snapping and gnawing in a frenzy. It left off gnawing at her war boot to lunge for her throat.

Jhesrhi jerked her staff across her body, and the brass rod caught the werewolf at the base of its neck. The shapeshifter strained to reach her with its slavering jaws, and she struggled to hold them away. The beast s paws pummeled her torso. Its raking nails tore her robes.

Her arms were hitched backward as the werewolf s strength overcame her own an inch at a time. The gnashing, foaming jaws and the glaring eyes behind them lurched closer. The creature s burns were ghastly, but it didn t even seem to feel them, or anything but the need to make its kill.

Jhesrhi struggled to simultaneously hold the werewolf back and recite an incantation with the precise cadence required. On the final word, a portion of her mantle of fire streamed into her attacker s gaping jaws. The lycanthrope screamed once and collapsed, burned from the inside out. Some of its ashy substance crumbled instantly, and more dropped away from the central mass as, in death, it reverted to human shape.

Enough of the charred form remained intact to show that Jhesrhi had just killed the daughter, the child werewolf. With a gasp of revulsion, she rolled the flaking corpse off her chest.

Choschax loomed over her, his glare pi

Snarling, Jhesrhi broke free of her paralysis but knew she only had time for the simplest of spells. She jerked her staff into line and cha

The power shot out as a ball of solid light. It smashed Choschax in the mouth and shattered into shards that vanished before they could tumble all the way to the ground. The cyclops fell and lay motionless.

Sometimes, Jhesrhi thought, the simplest magic did the trick. Although it helped if you d already kicked the enemy around for a while.

As Aoth had taught her, she glanced about, making sure no new threat was about to strike at her. She clambered to her feet. Choschax was still breathing, but a final burst of flame would remedy that. She steadied her breathing and raised her staff.

No! Cera called. Jhesrhi turned to see the priestess hurrying toward her. She appeared disheveled but unharmed, which presumably meant she d disposed of the cyclops that Choschax had ordered to kill her.

Aoth wants a prisoner to question, Cera continued, and this is the one who knows the most.

She was right, of course, but Choschax was also the one who d struck Aoth down. That, far more than the cyclops s attempt to kill her, made Jhesrhi want to burn his life away. If the war mage wasn t all right, she would, too. To the Abyss with the mission, Yhelbruna s griffons, and Rashemen s problems.

For the moment, though, she and her comrades needed to finish the fight so Cera could tend to Aoth. Watch him, then! she told the sunlady, pivoting and looking to see where a spell would help the most.

For a heartbeat or two, she saw no reason to cast one at all. A griffon was slightly less deadly fighting on the ground than in the air, but even so, Jet had plainly had little trouble a

With his teeth bared and his eyes glaring, Vandar pushed a wolf-man backward. The berserker s style was all offense: a relentless onslaught of slashes and cuts. He scarcely even maintained a guard, or seemed aware that his opponent had the ability to hurt him.

No sellsword in Aoth s company would have fought so recklessly, if only because the drillmasters would have trained it out of him. But it was working. The bloody gashes on the werewolf s torso showed that Vandar was hurting it faster than it could heal. Whenever it lashed out with its claws or fangs, the beserker somehow contrived either to meet the attack with a stop cut or to twist aside.

Suddenly a four-legged werewolf lunged out of the darkness toward Vandar s back. Jhesrhi leveled her staff and shouted a word of command. The resulting darts of scarlet light pierced the creature just as it started to leap, turning what could have been a deadly spring into the flopping tumble of a lifeless body.

Without seeming to even realize there d been anything behind him, Vandar kept pressing his foe until his sword cut halfway through the werewolf s neck. The creature s legs buckled, and it dropped to its knees, clawing feebly at the blade. When the berserker yanked his weapon out of the wound, the beast toppled onto its face, and the fight was over.

Cera instantly abandoned the fallen Choschax to rush to Aoth and kneel down beside him. Jhesrhi guessed that meant it was her turn to stand guard over the cyclops. She positioned herself accordingly, but found it difficult to pay attention to anything but what the sunlady was doing.