Ideally, the breathdrinker should then have gone after Yhelbruna without another instant of delay. But, succumbing to its urges in a way any vampire would recognize, it grabbed one of the paralyzed women, tore her brazen mask off, and kissed her.
The hathran flailed, struggling to break free, but not for long. It took her attacker only a few heartbeats to suck all the breath from her lungs.
Its thirst assuaged, the breathdrinker whirled back toward Yhelbruna, and Nyevarra was glad to see that the latter lay motionless on her back in a snowdrift. Apparently that initial blow had landed hard.
Amid another howl of wind, the breathdrinker sprang in Yhelbruna’s direction. Some of the other hathrans cried words of power to protect their fallen sister.
But those hathrans lacked Nyevarra’s extensive experience in battle, and when, still whispering, she rattled off a spell to counter their efforts, she finished ahead of them. Terror jolted them and in some cases made them recoil from the breathdrinker, while even those whose wills were strong stumbled over their incantations. Nyevarra could feel their half-made magic dissolve.
But as the breathdrinker plunged down at Yhelbruna, the hathran’s eyes popped open. Yhelbruna spoke a word of power and jabbed her staff at her foe.
A streamer of snow leaped up from the ground and in the process hardened from powder into ice. Pointed and straight, its base frozen to the ground, it jutted upward at the perfect angle to catch the elemental.
Stabbed through the torso, the breathdrinker slid partway down the icicle spear. Screaming in the way a wind screams, it thrashed but seemed unable to free itself. An ordinary spike wouldn’t have impaled a creature made only of air and malice, but the magic infusing this one accomplished what mere solid matter couldn’t.
Yhelbruna scrambled back from her foe. Its misty arm stretching, the breathdrinker struck another howling, openhanded blow. But the hathran did something to ward herself-even Nyevarra couldn’t tell what, though she felt power surge at the living witch’s behest-and the blast of air simply failed to find its target.
Chanting, Yhelbruna spun her staff and then jabbed with it. Darts of emerald light leaped from the head to riddle the spirit’s form, blinking out of existence as they hurtled through.
With another shriek, the breathdrinker resumed its whirlwind form as snow spiraled up from the earth. The frozen spike shattered, freeing it, and it gathered itself into its transparent, red-eyed feminine form once more.
Yhelbruna started reciting another spell and shifting her staff back and forth in time to the cadence. The breathdrinker shot forward and slapped.
The witch sidestepped, and once again, the spirit’s blow didn’t quite connect. But it did tear the staff from Yhelbruna’s hands, and Nyevarra grinned because that ought to be good enough. It should ruin the spell the hathran was attempting to cast, and with the enraged breathdrinker right on top of her, she didn’t have time for a second try.
Except that the loss of the staff didn’t spoil the casting. Yhelbruna didn’t stumble over the incantation, and she moved her empty hands like a weaver working at a loom, improvising a conclusion to the pattern the rod had begun.
Snow exploded up around the breathdrinker and, in that same instant, hardened into an enormous hand of ice. The clawed fingers grabbed the spirit and squeezed.
Shrieking, the breathdrinker became invisible. Perhaps that was an instinctive response, but the defense couldn’t help it when the hand already had it in its grasp.
Next, Nyevarra sensed the elemental trying to blow out through the cracks between the fingers, then seeking to become a whirlwind and shatter its prison, but the strength of Yhelbruna’s spell prevented either. The hand kept squeezing until the howling died, and the breathdrinker with it.
A hathran in a white unicorn mask hurried toward Yhelbruna. “Are you all right?” Mielikki’s servant asked.
“Yes.” Not even bothering to retrieve her staff, Yhelbruna strode past the other witch to the woman the spirit had drained of breath.
Kneeling, Yhelbruna held her hand in front of the fallen hathran’s nose and mouth and touched her fingertips to the side of her neck. Then she sighed and closed the corpse’s eyes. “Go to our mothers, Sister. Blessed be.”
As she rose again, the other witches clustered around. “What happened?” whined one of the younger ones.
“I don’t know,” Yhelbruna answered, and for once, a trace of distress compromised that steely voice. “I don’t understand why the wind was angry.”
If not for the need to keep up her impersonation, Nyevarra might have slumped and heaved a sigh of relief. It was regrettable that the breathdrinker hadn’t succeeded in putting an end to Yhelbruna, but if the hathran didn’t comprehend what had gone awry, then things were still under control.
“I don’t know why a number of things aren’t happening as they should or just seem off,” Yhelbruna continued, and already she was all cold strength once more. “But I’m going to find out.”
And left to her own devices, she just might. She could conceivably have figured it out this very night, or at least taken one step closer to the truth, if she and Nyevarra hadn’t ended up in the same circle, and no one could count on that kind of luck all the time.
Which meant Yhelbruna still needed to die. But Nyevarra hesitated to make a second attempt on the foul woman’s life herself. Loath as she was to admit it, the most formidable hathran of them all might survive again and in the process discern who was attacking her.
Unfortunately for Yhelbruna, though, Nyevarra saw an alternative.
Aoth reflected that if he’d wanted to clamber up and down mountains in the cold wind and the snow, he wouldn’t have become a griffon rider.
Still, it would have shamed him to grouse aloud. He had tattoos to warm him, stave off fatigue, and blunt hunger pangs. Orgurth didn’t, yet the green-skinned warrior wasn’t complaining.
The orc did grunt in surprise, though, when the trail they were following took them to the crest of a ridge where the snow bore a plenitude of tracks. A number of folk-or a number of somethings-had marched along the trail from south to north.
“Well,” said the orc, “I guess we’re not the only people in these wretched peaks. Maybe they’ll share their rations and their fire …” His voice trailed off as he registered something in Aoth’s expression. “But you’re thinking they won’t.”
“I’m thinking they won’t.” Aoth led Orgurth forward and pointed with his spear to something few folk would have spotted at a glance but that his fire-kissed eyes had noted immediately. “Look at this pair of tracks. The one boot looks like it had a big hole in it, and the other foot, the unshod one, might have been left by partly naked bone. What leaves prints like that?”
“Zombies.”
“Right. And this wasn’t the only one.” He stooped, picked up a decayed, frozen, broken-off toe, proffered it for the orc’s inspection, and tossed it away.
“So has Thay sent troops over the border,” Orgurth asked, “or are these more of the undead you fought at your Fortress of the Half-Demon?”
“The latter.” Aoth indicated deep marks shaped like cloven hooves and the clawed feet of reptiles as well as a tiny spitter of oil. “Constructs made these tracks. Lots of constructs. There may have been more of them traveling in the column than there were undead.
“And some of our enemies in the castle used constructs against us,” he continued. “As wizards go, I’m a poor student of history, but I believe those particular ghouls and such were reanimated Raumvirans.”
“So you and your friends didn’t really end the threat to Rashemen.”
“Apparently not.” That might conceivably mean Mario Bez hadn’t managed to steal the wild griffons after all. But it might also mean Cera, Jhesrhi, and Jet were in even more danger than Aoth had imagined.