The masked witches

As best as Cera could judge, that was the last of the vile little things. The skull lord! she gasped, for it seemed almost certain that he was the one who d summoned them.

Yes, Jet rasped, where is There!

Because he was wheeling to aim himself directly at the creature in question, Cera had no difficulty seeing where he meant. The three-headed skeleton with the war hammer and bulky gauntlet was standing on the roof of the donjon.

Aoth looked down into the courtyard, and Cera realized with a pang of guilt that he was making sure Jhesrhi was all right. She herself had forgotten all about their friend, even though they d all been intent on rescuing her mere moments before. The frenzy of what followed had wiped the thought from her mind.

All right, said Aoth. Let s do it!

Jet hurtled at the top of the keep like an arrow. The skull lord tossed his gauntleted hand. A bat-winged devil somewhat like the imps, but man-sized and covered in quills, appeared above him. The spinagon instantly lashed its wings and flew out over the courtyard. It whipped its arm and threw a volley of quills, which burst into flame as they shot through the air.

Jet raised one wing, dipped the other, and dodged the attack. Aoth growled a rhyme, pointed his spear at the spined devil, and a thunderbolt boomed from the point to blast it apart.

Jet jerked, and Cera realized that something had hurt him somehow. But his wings beat as smoothly and as strongly as ever, sweeping them all toward their foe as swiftly as before, so evidently it hadn t been bad.

Aoth recited the words to conjure more lightning. Cera drew down the Keeper s power and flung it from the head of her mace in a blaze of brilliant light. The two attacks struck the armored skeleton simultaneously and blasted him apart.

We got him! Cera cried.

Not yet, Aoth said through gritted teeth, and Jet kept on driving at the rooftop as fast as before. She realized they understood something she didn t. And an instant later, she saw what it was.

The skull lord s charred, splintered form flew back together, reassembling him, although for the most part, his broken bones didn t whisk their bent, smoking scraps of armor along with them. That wreckage still lay where it had fallen. But other than that, the undead Nar appeared restored except that he had only two skulls instead of three.

As the skeletal mage sprang to his feet, a crimson light glimmered in the eye sockets of the skull on the right. A great flare of dark red, foul-looking flame leaped forth, and, just a heartbeat short of the rooftop, Jet had to lash his wings and wrench himself off course to dodge it. By the time the griffon had corrected, the skull lord was scrambling through a door that likely opened onto stairs leading down into the keep.

Still, the creature was only a moment ahead of his pursuers. Jet thumped down on the rooftop, and, responding to Aoth s will, the saddle straps instantly unbuckled themselves. He and Cera leaped out of the saddle and ran toward the door.

With a deafening bang, an even larger blast of red fire blew the entrance apart, staggering everyone and jolting the whole roof. When Cera approached the wreckage, coughing and her eyes stinging from the haze of grit now fouling the air, it was plain the detonation had collapsed the stairwell and rendered it impassable. She spat a curse she d heard some of the coarser members of the Brotherhood use: a reference to Lady Firehair s anatomy as blasphemous as it was obscene.

Easy, said Aoth, we ll kill the thing. Just not right now.

Don t you have magic that will she began.

Aoth waved his spear to indicate the rest of the castle and the battle still raging there. For now, the fight is here, he said. Our allies need us to kill the creatures on the wall-walks. And now that we control the highest point in the fortress, we re in a good position to do it.

Bugles blared. Welvelod sensed surges of motion on every side.

The horns were sounding the retreat. Casting about, the undead Raumathari warrior saw that his allies were doing their frantic best to disengage from their foes and scurry toward the various doors that led into the interior of the fortress. Someone Uramar himself, most likely must have decided that their side was losing.

Welvelod whirled and bolted for one of the doors into the keep. A stag man jumped in his path and tried to spear him in the chest. He slipped the blow and stabbed at his attacker s flank as he sprinted on by.

Something thumped him between the shoulder blades, pitching him forward into a stumble but not quite making him fall. He didn t know what had hit him a missile or a handheld weapon and he didn t bother looking back to find out.

He tripped over the twitching body of an ice troll, and again had to fight to regain his balance. Reeling onward, he saw that the keep, and safety, were just ahead. A Nar demonbinder, his withered gray limbs covered in tattoos and a round brass amulet hanging around his neck, was holding the ironbound door as a pair of goblins scurried through.

The wizard looked straight at Welvelod, then gave him a grin and slammed the door with a bang like a thunderclap.

You filthy Nar bastard! Welvelod thought, just as something rammed into the back of his knee. He fell forward onto the ground. As he rolled over, a second spear thrust caught him in the face.

ELEVEN

The various doors around the castle slammed with a series of thunderous bangs. Gazing down from the rooftop of the keep, Aoth tried to judge if any of the enemy were left trapped in the corner towers or any of the smaller structures along the walls.

No, rasped Jet. According to the Rashemi, the Fortress of the Half-Demon is famous for the dungeons and tu

You re probably right, Aoth said.

Curse it, anyway.

Did you think we could stop them from locking themselves in the donjon? Cera asked, breathing heavily. Despite the cold, her round face was sweaty, and she looked like she was feeling the weight of her mace and armor.

Not really, said Aoth. Given the haphazard way we tackled this, it went as well as we had any right to expect. He took another look over the battlements. There were a couple of living or undead foes still left out in the open, but none that looked worth a burst of his magic. The men-at-arms could deal with them. Come on, let s get down there.

He swung himself onto Jet s back, and Cera climbed up behind him, buckling in. The griffon lashed his wings and leaped over the row of merlons.

As Jet swooped downward, Aoth looked for Jhesrhi. Still unharmed, she d already set about the task of burning fallen trolls and the undead. Vandar and the Stag King were all right, too, and it seemed that neither the stag warriors nor the berserkers had suffered an inordinate number of casualties.

The latter were pounding at the castle doors with any makeshift battering ram they could find. But a door wasn t a foe, and without flesh to cut and blood to spill, the berserker rage had little to feed it. One or two at a time, they abandoned the futile assault and stumbled away, gray-faced and shivering.

The Brotherhood, thought Aoth, would still have been strong and ready for another fight. But he knew he wasn t being altogether fair. Even Khouryn s infantry couldn t have managed that mad charge into the castle any better than Vandar s lodge brothers. In fact, despite all their training, they might not have managed as well. There was a time for discipline and tactics and as far as Aoth was concerned, it was most of the time but a time for sheer fury as well.

As soon as the saddle straps had unbuckled, Cera jumped off Jet s back and went looking for those who needed her healing ministrations. Aoth took another glance around, just in case something was apparent at ground level that even fire-kissed eyes had missed from the air, and spotted the butt of Vandar s red spear peeking out from under the dead bugbear that had fallen on top of it.