Witch Wraith

Unable to do anything else without appearing as frightened as he felt, he moved forward and sat down beside her.

  “Don’t get too close to me,” she said out of the shadow of her cowl. “You don’t want to breathe the air I exhale.”

  He looked down at his hands, rain dripping off them. “Are you alive now? Are you a living creature?”

  Her laugh was harsh and bitter. “A fair question. I have asked it of myself. Am I? I breathe air. I move about. Is that enough?”

  “You have thoughts and the ability to reason? You can see the truth of things when others speak to you?”

  She turned her head slightly, part of her ruined face peering at him from out of the shadows. “My thoughts and my reasoning and my truths would burn the skin from your body should you study them too closely, Valeboy. They would burn you like acid.”

  He was silent for a long time. “I am sorry I had to bring you back,” he said finally. “I did not know it would be this way.”

  “Yet here I am.”

  “My brother, your great-nephew, your own flesh and blood, is in the hands of the Straken Lord and will die if I do not free him. I did what I had to.”

  Her hands, gray and gnarled, clenched before her like great claws. “Even though, by freeing him, you doom me?”

  “I didn’t know that would happen.”

  “But you suspected. Do not deny it. You were warned. The King of the Silver River. The Grimpond. I heard them speak. Their words were carried to me by the wind, and their warnings were clear enough. I would not come back as I was, they said. You ignored those warnings. Self-indulgent, heedless, prideful boy, you ignored what you were told would happen.”

  Railing felt shame and anger burning in his chest. “I would do anything to save my brother. Even give up my own life.”

  The clenched hands disappeared back inside the sleeves of the gray cloak. “You may get your chance to test that boast, for I care nothing for you or your brother. That is the stark truth of things. You brought me back to serve your own purposes, but I have no interest in them. I have my own purpose to serve. I have my own path to follow. Do you know what it is?”

  He shook his head, words failing him.

  “I am the Ilse Witch reborn. I must sate my rage and satisfy my bloodlust. I must rid myself of the memories of what I was as Mother Tanequil’s child, an aeriad, a spirit of the air. All that is lost to me. I was at peace and free, and you took that from me. I had a life of tranquility and purpose, and you stole it. You took what I was and you gave me back what I now am. I can feel myself continue to change, to adapt. Do you know what that means?”

  “That you can never go back? That you are fated to remain as you are?”

  She was silent then for a long time without answering. Then he heard her sigh. “I found my way to what would comfort me when I became Mother Tanequil’s creature. I left behind my human self with all its history of madness and violence and hatred. I shed my body and earthly connection and became a creature of the air, a spirit with no past and only a present. I found friendship and love and contentment in my sisters and in my freedom.” She glared out at him from within her cowl’s shadows. “And, no, I can never go back. And yes, I must remain as I am.”

  He stared out into the rain, feeling empty and despairing. “When this is over, I will go with you to speak to the tanequil and ask that she reconsider your dismissal. I will help you become again what you were before. I will admit what’s happened is entirely my fault, and I was foolish to disrupt things. I will offer myself in your place, if it will help.”

  She emitted a long peal of ragged laughter that ripped through the winds and rain. “Oh, you foolish boy! She knows all this, and she has made her choice, and there can never be a reckoning that would give me back what I lost.”

  One clawed hand reached out and seized his arm in a grip of iron. “Do you not yet see? I am beyond all that! I do not seek to go back to what I was no matter what happens. I feel that slip away with every passing second, and soon it will be gone entirely. I want something else, something much more satisfying.”

  “But maybe I can …”

  “You don’t understand,” she snapped, yanking him closer. “You don’t begin to understand. What has been done cannot be undone. You’ve brought me back as something other than I was because that was what Mother Taneqil saw that you needed. But there was no provision made for me. There was no consideration given to how I would endure and adapt to this thing I now am.”

  She turned full on him, and he saw the red fire in her eyes and felt the burning hate of her glare. “Now I am evolving still, and there is only one direction I can go—into such madness that there is no way back. Into an insanity that will make me much worse than the thing you have brought me to destroy. Oh, I will do what you wish, Valeboy. I will find the Straken Lord and do battle with him. I will see him vanquished. But what will happen then, do you think? What end will you have achieved?”

  “My brother will …”

  Her hiss cut him short and left him cringing from her. “Your brother? Your brother is nothing to me. Look beyond his worthless life and your own, as well. Look to the wider world and the future and then ask yourself again. What will you have achieved?”

  Railing started to speak and then found he could not. The words were so terrible he could not speak them.

  The Ilse Witch grinned, her teeth sharp and her face taut. “You know now, don’t you? You see it clearly.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He did see it.

  “Ponder it, then. Consider it. Mull your choices and prepare yourself for what waits. In this new world of yours, young Ohmsford-who-would-save-them-all, what fate will you embrace?”

  Ah, shades! He howled it in the silence of his mind. “There must be another way!”

  “There might have been once, but you did not choose it. You chose this way, and now you must follow its thread to wherever it leads.” She turned away from him, disappearing back into the shadows of her cowl. “Now get away from me and stay away.”

  What have I done?

  He sat for a moment longer before rising and moving away, no longer able to stay in her presence. Of all the outcomes he had imagined, this one had never occurred to him. He had believed she would do what was needed to help the Four Lands because that was what she had done in life as the Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order. He had been so sure she would set everything else aside so that she could save the world into which she had been born. She might not be happy about what he had done or eager to embrace his insistence on bringing her back from the life she had chosen for herself, but she would still do the right thing because that was what she had been trying to do ever since she had ceased to be the Ilse Witch.

  He had never imagined she could come back as the very thing she had sought to escape. He had never imagined Mother Tanequil would return her as such.

  Or that she would embrace this new identity and willingly become the very thing she hated. Or that she might have plans of her own that would be more terrible than the plans of Tael Riverine.

  But she did, and they were.

  He caught Mirai’s eye where she stood behind Austrum in the pilot box and signaled for her to join him. She came down quickly, moving through the steady rain across the windswept deck to where he waited at the port rail.

  “What is it?” she said on seeing his face. “What did she say?”

  He leaned close. “It wasn’t what she said, it was what she intimated. She is enraged at what has been done to her, but she is caught up in the persona she has been given and feels her former self being stolen away. She has become the Ilse Witch reborn, and she hasn’t the strength or the means or even the will to change.”

  “But she will stand with us and fight the Straken Lord? Or does she refuse us completely?”

  He closed his eyes, wiped the rain from his face, and looked at her anew. “She does not refuse us, but she does not ally with us, either. She cares nothing if we live or die. She will stand against
Tael Riverine, and she says she will destroy him. But even that will not be enough for her.”

  “Then what?”

  He gripped her shoulders. “She intends to take his place.”

  Eighteen

  The second attack on Arishaig by the demon hordes was launched just before midnight on the same day as the first. It came against the south and west walls once again, but with fresh ferocity. The creatures swarmed out of the darkness bearing grappling hooks and scaling ladders and threw themselves against the stone and iron of the fortress with such determination that, for a few terrible moments, Keeton thought his soldiers would be overwhelmed. Setting fire to fresh oil in the ditches, forming tall walls of flame, failed to deter them. Even the presence of the warships attacking from overhead did little to slow their assault. They came at the walls in wave after wave, shrugging off arrows and spears and missiles fired from slings and launchers. They fell dying and their fellows simply climbed atop them, lifted a little closer to their goal atop the piles of bodies.

  But Keeton had brought flash rips to the walls and mounted them at regular intervals. They were illegal everywhere, but there wasn’t an army that didn’t possess them. And since the Federation had pioneered their manufacture, they had them stockpiled in secret caches throughout the city. Conventional weapons, however powerful, had not proven strong enough during the previous attack, and Keeton was not about to let legalities and Druid prohibitions stand in the way of saving his city and its people.

  His decision was quickly vindicated by the results. When the flash rips fired on the attackers, dozens of the creatures simply vanished in ash and smoke and flame, disintegrating under the concentrated power of multiple diapson crystals. Strikes into the thickest clusters broke the momentum of the attack and sent it reeling away in spite of its vast numbers. Keeton thought maybe this would be enough to put an end to the attack for the night.

  But the demons had other plans. After the oil fires burned themselves out and enough time had passed to persuade the defenders that the attack had been broken, the creatures returned. And this time they came from the air, borne in baskets carried by winged creatures that resembled giant bats and dropped onto the walls close by the flash rips and their crews. Hurtling themselves on both, the demonkind tore the men to shreds and disabled the weapons by smashing both the barrels and the swivel stands that were used to support and direct them. In a matter of minutes, all the weapons and mounts were destroyed and the creatures still alive had gone back over the walls and disappeared into the night.

  Then the dragon reappeared, as black as its rider, little more than a shadow against the night, sweeping above the battlements, breathing flames on the defenders, and leaving everything dead in its wake. It happened so swiftly there was no time to use the few rail slings and fire launchers that remained intact or to bring to bear the weapons mounted on the warships that warded the corners of the fortress.

  This time after the demonkind retreated, howling and screaming as they went, they did not come again right away, leaving the defenders sitting in the darkness and carnage to wonder, through the remainder of the night, when they would reappear next.

  Keeton was angry and frustrated when Wint found him. “Tell me how many we lost?”

  His second shrugged. “Can’t be sure. At least several hundred. Likely more. All the flash rips are destroyed. We have more, but the mounts are another matter. We can fasten the rips to the walls in some makeshift fashion, but we can’t replace the mounts.”

  “Because we didn’t think to make more than a handful of those—am I right? We manufactured all the weapons we could ever need, but forgot about the importance of the mounts. Shades!” Keeton looked away, glowering at nothing in particular. “Do the best you can to find a way to secure a fresh supply of the rips to the walls south and west. They know that’s where we’re weakest now. That’s where they’ll keep attacking.”

  Wint disappeared without a word. Keeton stared out into the dark for a few minutes longer, then went to speak with Sefita Rayne. He found the Federation fleet commander standing above the gates talking with several of her warship captains. When she saw Keeton, she broke off the conversation and came over to him. “I saw,” she said.

  He shook his head in disgust. “What can we do? What can you do to help us with this?”

  “Good question. Not much seems to help. I’ll move the warships off the corners and place them just outside the walls where they can better support the soldiers on the battlements. I’ll take them straight out at the first sign of an attack and try to disrupt it before it reaches the city.”

  “But you’ll have to watch for that dragon.”

  She nodded. “Our weapons aren’t quick enough to track it; it’s too agile for us. Then again, we might get lucky. Do you think the attack will come against the south and west walls again?”

  “After the damage that’s been done? I can’t imagine they would bother attacking anywhere else. A bigger problem is the oil for the trenches outside the walls. We’re running out.”

  She was silent a moment, considering. “Have you spoken with the Prime Minister about any of this?”

  He exhaled sharply. “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Then maybe it’s time.”

  He nodded. “Past time.”

  He went down off the walls and into the city, making his way through the streets to the offices of the Coalition Council and the Prime Minister. He was admitted immediately and went straight to Edinja Orle’s quarters, only to be told she wasn’t there. No one had seen her since the previous night.

  He left for her home after that, not eager to venture into that black den of rumors and strangeness but unable to do anything less if he wanted to find her. He reached it quickly enough and pounded on the door. A servant spoke to him through a slit in the door and told him her mistress wasn’t there, either. She had been gone all day.

  Keeton tried to think where else to look, but didn’t know enough about Edinja even to make an educated guess. He considered speaking to members of the Coalition Council, but what would he say to them that would make a difference?

  He went back to the walls, resigned to pursuing the matter in the morning. For now, he needed to sleep. He trudged through the darkened streets, plagued by the nagging feeling that events were overwhelming them and their chances were slipping away. This enemy seemed unstoppable, its size and the alien nature of its creatures beyond anything they had ever encountered. Traditional tactics weren’t going to be enough to stop them. In the end, they were going to break through and the city was going to be overrun, and all the weapons and warships in the world weren’t going to be enough to prevent it.

  Worse, he believed now that he wasn’t the man for the job he had been given. He wasn’t trained to command an entire army. He had never envisioned he would be the one made responsible for the defense of a city of thousands against an enemy no one had ever before encountered. He was a tactical commander of First Response, a small elite unit designed to execute surgical strikes and provide brief but intense defensive fire on larger enemy forces. He wasn’t trained for what was happening now.

  But then, who was?

  All this was something more than anyone he knew was equipped to handle.

  He reached his quarters and went to bed, exhausted and dismayed.

  When he woke, the sun was just rising. He washed, dressed in fresh clothes, and went out to find Wint. His second was still sleeping, so he let him be. The city was quiet, the walls manned but unchallenged since the previous night. No further attacks had been launched. Peering out over the surrounding countryside, he found bodies and scorched earth, but not much else.

  He asked after Sefita Rayne and was told she was sleeping but had asked to be woken if he needed her. He shook his head and said to let her be. As with Wint, there was no reason not to let her sleep. Even this small respite might be of some help. With no immediate sign of the enemy, he could assume the next attack would come with night’s return.
>
  Although he hadn’t been able to correctly anticipate the timing of anything the attackers had attempted so far, he reminded himself quickly.

  He ate breakfast with some of his men, and then took his place on the wall to keep watch. He was feeling better rested than he had thought he would, and his mind was already hard at work turning over possibilities for improving their situation.

  He was still struggling with that effort when drums began to boom from somewhere off to the west. They began all at once—a thunderous sound that broke the stillness of the morning with a steady pounding that reverberated all across the city. Keeton and those standing with him on the walls stood in silence and stared out across the flats leading off toward the ridgeline where the demons had first appeared two days ago.

  Within minutes, Wint appeared at his elbow. “You should have woken me.”

  Keeton nodded. “I suppose.”

  They watched the ridgeline, waiting. The minutes slipped away, the drumming continued, but nothing else happened.

  Then, abruptly, a long dark line of bodies surged over the crest of the ridge, trudging toward Arishaig’s walls. They did not march or attempt to keep cadence, but simply moved in a huge wave that washed over the ridgeline and down onto the flats. Keeton peered north and south to measure the length of the line and could not find its ends. He waited for the wave to trickle off, but it continued to flow like a living thing—thousands of bodies of all shapes and sizes, churning and roiling toward the city and its defenders.

  When the wave had gotten to within five hundred feet of the wall, it stopped. Keeton could just see the last of its stragglers as they came into view over the crest of the ridge. Were there even more beyond that? Keeton couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered. The numbers he could see were more than enough to engulf the city and its defenders and put an end to both.

  “That’s an awful lot for us to stop,” Wint whispered.

  Keeton nodded. “You must be reading my mind.”

  The attack force paused a few moments longer as the drums beat on, then it swung left as if become a single body and began to move clockwise around the walls in a slow, steady surge. It made no effort to come closer or to employ any weapons. It showed virtually no interest in the city at all. It simply began circling the walls, a huge silent snake winding about its prey.