The Masked Witches Read online

  Aoth, however, didn’t seem to believe that. Though he hadn’t said so, she knew he’d brought her along partly because he suspected she was in despair and needed tending—a solicitude that irked and touched her in equal measure.

  At any rate, she was glad to escape Chessenta. She’d hated the place as a child, and with the reinstitution of the Green Hand laws designed to constrain and marginalize those with arcane talents, she hated it again. Perhaps, despite its barbaric reputation, Rashemen would prove more congenial.

  On first inspection, however, there was little that was cheerful or welcoming about that particular fortress. It was all gray stone and black iron—surely enchanted to stave off rust—with long icicles hanging from the undersides of the battlements. Across the courtyard, the sentries and servants eyed the newcomers warily.

  Aoth’s appearance might be partly to blame, Jhesrhi thought. He had the frame and coloring of a Rashemi, but his shaved scalp and the tattooing that crawled up his neck and even made a mask of sorts around his luminous blue eyes were characteristically Thayan.

  Plump and pretty, with a head of blonde, wind-tousled curls, and clad in yellow vestments, Cera gave the onlookers the kind of lavish, ingratiating smile that Jhesrhi could never have managed on her happiest day.

  “The Keeper’s blessing upon you all,” the priestess said, and swung her hand in an arc that suggested her deity’s passage across the heavens. For a moment, the afternoon sunlight brightened, and warmth banished winter’s chill. The Rashemi onlookers visibly relaxed.

  “We’re peaceful travelers from Chessenta,” Cera continued. “I’m Cera Eurthos, sunlady of Soolabax. My friends are Aoth Fezim, the sellsword captain; and Jhesrhi Coldcreek, one of his chief lieutenants.”

  “And we’re here to see the Iron Lord,” said Aoth, arching his back to stretch muscles stiff from the saddle. The action made his mail coat clink. “Immediately, if possible.”

  To Jhesrhi’s surprise, one of the spearmen flanking the door that led inside the castle smirked.

  Aoth noticed it, too. “Did I say something funny?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” the guard replied. “It’s just that all of you are in such a hurry when you arrive, and then … well, it’s not my place to explain it. You’ll find out soon enough for yourself. Come with me, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  “Thanks,” Aoth said. He turned back to Jet. “Fly around and find out where they’re keeping the griffons. See how many they really have, and what kind of shape they’re in.”

  “Right,” Jet replied. With his scarlet eyes burning in his black-feathered head, the familiar turned, trotted several paces with the uneven stride of his kind, lashed his wings, and leaped into the air. A woman with a bucket in her hand let out a little squawk, even though Jet wasn’t springing in her direction or threatening anyone at all.

  Aoth looked back to the soldier who’d offered to conduct them all inside. “We’re ready,” he said.

  The inside of the castle was somewhat less forbidding than the outside. The Rashemi had softened its stark lines and cavernous gloom with wood carvings, murals mostly innocent of perspective, and hunting trophies. Unimpressed, Jhesrhi cast about for graven sigils, an altar, or some other relic of ancient Nar demonbinding. But she couldn’t find any. Maybe the Rashemi had deliberately expunged all such disquieting traces of their predecessors.

  But if they had, it wasn’t because they were like Chessentans, fearful of any manifestation of the arcane. Periodically, as the sentry led Jhesrhi and her companions deeper into the castle, they encountered women masked in stiff, lacquered cloth, leather, wood, glazed ceramic, copper, or silver. For the most part, the ladies—the famous hathrans, Jhesrhi assumed—carried staves like her own, or wands, orbs, or other implements of the mystic arts. As often as not, they gave her and Cera looks of cool appraisal. They seemed less interested in Aoth, even though he appeared to be the strangest and was at least as formidable a spellcaster as either of his companions.

  After one such meeting, Cera elbowed the war mage in the ribs. “See?” she whispered. “It’s like I’ve always heard. The women run things, and the men know their place. I should have come here a long time ago.”

  Aoth snorted. “I don’t see you being happy anyplace where you have to cover that pretty face,” he retorted.

  “Hm. Should I take that as a compliment on my looks or a criticism of my vanity?” she replied.

  Listening to them banter, Jhesrhi pictured Gaedynn’s crooked grin, and something twisted in her chest. She clamped down on the feelings that were trying to flower inside her and squeezed them until there was nothing left.

  As she attended to that, voices echoed up ahead. Steel rang on steel.

  Jhesrhi and her companions entered a spacious, high-ceilinged chamber, lit and warmed by a crackling hearth at either end and filled with a miscellany of folk. There were almond-eyed Shou clad in flowing silk garments and armed with oddly curved blades and halberds. Others, dark-haired, ruddy-skinned humans and slender half-elves, wore the trappings of Aglarond’s griffonriders, including winged pewter brooches, and dangling straps that would buckle to their saddles. In contrast to the other groups’ uniformity, Bez’s sellswords sported whatever clothing, armor, and weapons suited them, although each displayed the red and yellow of the skyship’s flag somewhere about their persons. The stocky Rashemi seemed poorly equipped compared to the rest, with only boiled leather vests for armor, but they had plenty of spears, axes, war hammers, and even a fair number of swords.

  The clanging came from two fellows practicing cuts and parries using live blades. Swordsmen with more bravado than sense, thought Jhesrhi. Bone dice clattered, and an empty bottle crashed against the wall. A circle of listeners groaned and jeered at the end of a joke or story, and a couple of men even lay snoring on the floor.

  Jhesrhi knew little about Rashemen and even less about Thesk. Yet despite the exotic armor, weapons, and styles of clothing on display, and the oddly accented speech that filled her ears, the scene seemed familiar enough to make her feel at home. During her years as a mercenary, she’d often watched soldiers-at-arms lounging around trying to fend off boredom while they were waiting to fight, march, or perform some other task.

  By the looks of it, some folk had been stuck in the keep long enough for a degree of friendly feeling to develop among the groups. One of the fencers was a Shou, and the other, a sellsword. Other mercenaries were gambling with griffonriders. Only the Rashemi appeared to be keeping wholly to themselves while glowering from the quadrant they’d claimed as their own.

  “By the Black Flame,” said Aoth, his tone disgusted.

  “Wait here,” the escort said. “I’ll ask the Iron Lord if he’ll see you.” He headed for a door in the far wall that had its own rather bored-looking sentry.

  “Fezim!” called a jovial bass voice. Jhesrhi turned to see Mario Bez rising from the circle of dice players squatting on the floor.

  Bez was a strapping middle-aged man who would have been handsome if not for a bumpy beak of a nose. He wore his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. The rapier and dagger hanging on his hips had arcane sigils both incised in the pommels and guards, and running down the scabbards. Jhesrhi suspected that, like Aoth’s spear, they served both as weapons of the mundane sort and mystical foci.

  “It’s grand to see you,” said Bez, strutting closer. “Although it’s sad that you’re still as greedy as when we squabbled over loot down in Turmish.”

  “Meaning?” Aoth replied.

  “You already have griffons of your own, yet you’ve come to steal this … flock? No, that can’t be the proper term. This pride away from me,” said Bez, “And not content with the company of one beauty, you arrive with two. Ladies.” He reached for Jhesrhi’s hand, leering. To bow over it and kiss it, she surmised.

  She allowed the fire inside her to leap out and set her hand ablaze. Bez snatched his fingers back.

  “Sorry,” she said, without
bothering to try to sound like she meant it. “I’m just not fond of being touched.”

  “But I am,” Cera purred, proffering her own hand, and sure enough, the sellsword gave it a kiss that lingered a heartbeat longer than necessary. She gave Aoth an impish grin over the top of the other mercenary’s head, and he grunted in return.

  “All right,” said Aoth once Bez had straightened up. “Let’s talk business. I need new griffons, and my men and I know how to train them. You have a skyship, and I suspect you don’t know how to break a griffon to the saddle, or even how to care for one or ride one.”

  “I can learn,” Bez answered. “Would you and the ladies like some firewine? Rashemen is where it comes from, and one thing I’ve learned during my stay is that the locals hold the best of it back for themselves.” He waved the newcomers toward a table with bottles and cups on top of it.

  Aoth picked up an open bottle, filled pewter goblets with the dark red wine, and handed them to Cera and Jhesrhi. “But why undertake such a complicated enterprise?” he asked. “Why empty your coffers paying what’s bound to be a high price, given the number of bidders? How about if I pay you to climb back aboard the Storm and fly away?”

  The sellsword shook his head. “Sorry, can’t do it,” he said. “You know that my crew and I comprise one of the Five Companies of Yaulazna?”

  “Yes,” replied Aoth. Yaulazna was an earthmote, an island in the sky, afloat over the Great Sea far to the south. Five sellsword bands, each possessed of a skyship, shared it as their base of operations.

  “Well,” said Bez. “It seems to me that the Five Companies could improve their fortunes by merging into one under the command of their ablest captain.”

  “And your thought,” Cera said, “is that a company of griffonriders will help prove you are that captain.”

  Bez smiled. “I might have expected a sunlady to prove as insightful as she is lovely,” he replied.

  Not bothering with a cup, Aoth swigged from the neck of the bottle in his hand. “All right,” he said. “If I can’t bribe you to go away, how about any of these others? Have you tried?”

  “No,” replied Bez. “Because as it turns out, all of us who traveled so long and so hard through the winter cold to get here were laboring under a misconception. This affair isn’t a simple matter of bidding and dickering.”

  “Then what is it?” asked Aoth.

  “It’s a sacred matter,” a new voice growled.

  Surprised, Jhesrhi turned, tensing. Sensitive to anyone approaching too near, she generally felt it when someone came up behind her. But the room was so boisterous and crowded that she’d missed it that time.

  The voice belonged to a Rashemi warrior, half a head taller than many of his comrades, with a square, clenched jaw and glaring brown eyes. He was wearing some sort of multicolored beadwork regalia, every piece of it sporting a griffon motif. Rearing processions of the beasts ran around his headband and armbands, while one big one leaped from the mountain scene on the front of his vest.

  Jhesrhi wondered why he looked so angry.

  “This is Vandar Cherlinka,” said Bez. “I expect you’ll meet any number of hospitable Rashemi during your stay. He’s not one of them.”

  Vandar scowled at the gibe, and Jhesrhi thought she knew why it had hit the mark. As she understood it, the Rashemi held hospitality sacrosanct.

  “And what is your story?” asked Aoth, addressing himself to the newcomer.

  Perhaps surprised by the other man’s mild, reasonable tone, Vandar blinked. But the Rashemi’s voice remained as gruff as before. “The griffons are a miracle of the Three,” he said. “Never in memory have they bred in such numbers. I lead the Griffon Lodge, and I helped bring the beasts down from the mountains. Nothing could be plainer than that the spirits mean for my brothers and me to ride them in Rashemen’s defense. They surely don’t intend for the Iron Lord to barter them away to outlanders for mere coin. Especially for filthy Bane-worshipping Thayans to turn against us!”

  Aoth snorted. “You think I’m Szass Tam’s emissary?” he asked. “How would that work, exactly, at a court where any such agent could only expect to be killed on sight? It’s true, I was born in Thay, but I renounced that allegiance a long time ago, and the lich would have me tortured and killed if I ever fell into his hands. Now, if the spirits are supposed to decide who gets the griffons, how’s that going to happen?”

  “What it really means,” said Bez, “is that the hathrans will decide whose offer to accept. The Iron Lord is just their intermediary in the matter. Rumor has it that they’re waiting for a sign.”

  “I assume,” said Aoth to Vandar, “that the Wychlaran have their own seat of power somewhere in town.”

  The Rashemi’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. The Witches’ Hall,” he replied.

  “Then I don’t know why all of you are loitering here when you could be making pests of yourselves there instead,” said Aoth. “Cera, Jhes, drink up, and we’ll pay them a call.”

  Bez laughed. “They won’t see you,” he said. “They’ll only mark you down as impudent and impious.”

  Aoth grinned. “Maybe they wouldn’t see you,” he retorted, “but I had the foresight to bring a female priestess and a wizard to Immilmar along with me. We’ll improvise some masks for them if we have to.”

  “This might work,” Jhesrhi said. She willed a caul of flame to spring forth from her face.

  Vandar recoiled a half step before catching himself with a scowl. Evidently a lodge chieftain wasn’t supposed to show fear. Jovial until that moment, Bez narrowed his dark, somewhat bloodshot eyes as though he suddenly believed that Aoth might well succeed in claiming the griffons.

  The door in the far wall banged open, and a dozen men, including the guard who’d escorted Jhesrhi and her companions to the hall, swept through. The one in the lead was as tall and as muscular as Vandar, but older, with a sprinkling of white in his close-cropped beard. He wore an iron circlet on his head, a fine leather doublet with an intricate design hammered in, and deerskin boots that cross-laced up to his knees.

  He was almost certainly Mangan Uruk, the Iron Lord. A smallish Shou in a long green gold-trimmed coat and an Aglarondan officer headed straight for him. Ignoring them—and Aoth, Cera, and even Jhesrhi with her mask of fire—he strode straight up to Bez, who tried not to look as surprised by it as everyone else was.

  Bez bowed. “Highness—” he began.

  “Your ship,” Mangan rapped. “How soon can it take flight?”

  “As soon as I give the order,” Bez replied. He was plainly exaggerating, but Jhesrhi suspected only by a little. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” the warlord said. “How badly wrong remains to be seen. A sparrow that brought word died while it was still trying to explain. Either it strained its heart struggling to reach us, or something poisoned it.”

  A sparrow that brought word, Jhesrhi thought, marvelling. According to travelers’ tales, Rashemen was supposedly as full of talking animals as it was of Nature spirits. Maybe the stories were true.

  “Well,” said Bez, “don’t you worry. I’ll soon have you there to see for yourself.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Storm of Vengeance! Get up, you lazy bastards! His Highness needs us!”

  Even the more inebriated sellswords scurried to attend their captain. At a shout from the scar-faced half-elf who had to be their commander, the Aglarondans made haste to bestir themselves as well. Though the Iron Lord hadn’t asked them for transport, they plainly meant to accompany him anyway, in the hope of finding a way to ingratiate themselves. Lacking his own means of flying, the Shou in the green and gold coat pleaded with Bez and then the half-elf for a ride. Both ignored him.

  Aoth turned to Jhesrhi. “Can you make the wind carry all three of us as you did that night in Luthcheq?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she replied, frowning.

  “Good,” Aoth said. “It seems Bez and the Aglarondans mean to make themselves useful and ingratiate themselves with the Ir
on Lord—and thus, I assume, the witches, too. We need to fly along with them and do our part.” People were already streaming out of the chamber. “Come on.”

  “Take me, too!” Vandar said.

  “Sorry,” said Aoth. “It would be stupid of me to help a rival.”

  “All you outlanders are jumping at the chance to serve,” Vandar called. “But there are a lot of sellswords in Bez’s crew, a lot of Aglarondans, and only three of you. How can you expect to accomplish anything the others can’t do better, unless you have a companion who knows this land to help you?”

  Aoth hesitated. “There’s no way of knowing if that will make a difference,” he said.

  “But it might,” Vandar replied. “Are you afraid that one Rashemi berserker will outshine all you ‘sophisticated’ southerners?”

  Aoth chuckled. “When you put it that way, I don’t suppose I am,” he said. “Ever flown before?”

  “No,” Vandar answered.

  “Then I should bring you along,” said Aoth. “Afterward, you may not even want the griffons.”

  T

  W

  O

  Jet hadn’t seen any of his own kind since departing Luthcheq, and the prospect of doing so pleased him. Although to give them their due, humans made for decent company. Indeed, he shared things with them that he never could with his less intelligent kin. But he also possessed nonhuman feelings and perspectives that even Aoth, with their psychic link, could only partly understand.

  Spiraling out from Immilmar, Jet found a pride of griffons quickly enough, in a snowy field just north of town. But he also found the soldiers who were tending the beasts; their tents and the banner of Aglarond were planted in the frozen ground. Jet inferred that the simbarchs had dispatched an envoy and his escort to try to buy the wild griffons, and those folk had left their winged mounts just far enough out of town to spare them the constant temptation of horseflesh on the hoof.

  As usual, Jet reflected sourly, Aoth had landed them in a situation that was proving to be more complicated than expected. He considered advising the war mage of his discovery, then decided that Aoth had probably already found out this particular bit of bad news for himself.