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  Once she got out of earshot, and down to the banks of the stream she had smelled, she put it all out of her mind. She had far more pressing things to think about.

  Now if I were a witch, and I wasn’t planning on fighting my way to power, where would I go?

  Chapter 5

  At some time near midnight she stopped.

  Before her, silver with the moon etching a path across the mirror-smooth waters, stretched a truly beautiful lake.

  There was not even a breath of breeze to ripple the glassy surface, and Katya stared at the pure, clean water longingly. It would be cold, of course, but for the Sea King’s children—

  Well, they swam through, and fought in the waters of the Arctic. This lake was not that cold. And there would be so very many advantages to being in her proper form, not the least of which was that she would be able to interrogate every water spirit there was hereabouts.

  She stared at the moon path for a long time, then sighed. She felt sticky and dirty. It was one thing to be able to disguise one’s self as a person of rank, comfort, and privilege. It was quite another to experience life as a Drylander as a peasant. Not that she hadn’t done that before but…it made the task less of a pleasure and far more like work.

  It didn’t take a great deal of thought to convince herself; after a thorough check to make sure she was not being observed, she reverted and slipped under the water.

  Quickly, she swam down to conceal herself in a kelp forest and sent out the silent call. As her father’s daughter and a princess of the Royal Blood, she could summon and direct any creature of the water, whether it be natural or magical in nature. Some, she could even coerce, though she rarely did so. Although they were by no means as mobile as air spirits, the little creatures of the water did go many places unseen and unheard, and if the witch was anywhere about, they would probably know something about the creature. Her movements at least, if not her motives.

  She expected some information. She did not expect to be virtually mobbed by the little water creatures of this Kingdom.

  The moonbeams piercing through the surface of the lake illuminated a horde of creatures large and small, in a bewildering variety of forms, which homed in on her as if she were a loadstone and they were bits of iron. Some were actual fish, frogs, and turtles. Others were pure spirits of the water, tiny water-fairies in the form of impossible fish-like creatures, wildly colored and with a vast variety of fins, spines, and crests. Others were strangely transparent snakes, or miniature dragons.

  Some were ghosts—which rather startled her, as in the lands where she was accustomed to walk, ghosts were a rarity. Some of the ghosts were true haunts, spirits that, for whatever reason, were unable or unwilling to pass on—those were generally the spirits of people who had met with an untimely and water-related end. Some were guardians to their families of fisher folk. Some…their motives were unclear to her, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to probe any further to find out.

  All of them were desperate to tell her about the witch. And very, very quickly indeed, she got the sense that the seabirds had not been crying doom frivolously.

  Gradually, as she listened to them, she got a sense of what the witch was up to. It was a diabolically clever scheme, for it was always more difficult to remove someone who was the power behind the throne rather than the power on it.

  Despite her acquisition of the stone, she still wasn’t all that powerful, not by the standards of a great Wizard or Sorceress. But she was certainly powerful enough to cause a ripple across the land. And it was entirely possible that this talisman, this artifact, was not one that granted overt power, but rather one that granted something more subtle.

  That was going to make Katya’s job infinitely more difficult.

  As for what the witch was doing…

  “She appeared at the lord’s gate in her litter,” fretted a childlike ghost with hair that pooled on the ground at her feet. “The litter-bearers were all demons, of course. She said she had been sent, as a gift, and one look at her and the lord was under her spell.”

  That seemed to be her pattern. She appeared on the very doorstep of powerful lords. She said she had been sent as a gift; Katya could only assume she was posing as a courtesan of some note. The moment that the lord saw her, he was under her spell, dismissing other concubines, sending his wife away, and generally acting besotted. She would consolidate her hold over him, then move on to the next conquest.

  And then…nothing. One would think she would then urge her conquest to some conflict with his neighbors but…not.

  In fact, it seemed she actively discouraged any such thing. She merely consolidated her position, then moved on to the next lord.

  Katya pondered all of this and frowned, as agitated water spirits circled her. Others might view this differently, but she saw a pattern.

  Once she had all the warlords in this place following her will, she could choose one to become the figurehead, and take the Kingdom. Since this Kingdom had no Godmother, it might be a very long time before she found herself challenged. And if this Kingdom possessed some powerful magical artifacts besides the one she already had—she could challenge the Sea King.

  That…would be bad.

  As it happened, since this lake was very large indeed, the witch was not far by a straight swim. Katya pushed off from the kelp bed, invoked the webbing between her fingers and toes, and set off at a pace that left most of the water dwellers behind.

  And before she was halfway to her goal, it became obvious that this time, the witch was not going to have it all her own way—for flashes of magical power were lighting up the night sky.

  Katya put on an extra burst of speed.

  She leaped out of the water, but did not bother to change to a more human form. Looming above the water was a Palace—for that was all that such a huge and ornate building could be—and it was from within this structure that the signs of a magic struggle in progress were coming.

  As Katya sprinted up the path to the Palace itself, it became very obvious that the witch was taking no chances on unexpected friends or allies showing up and weighing in on the side opposing her. The path was strewn with the apparently lifeless bodies of the Palace guards….

  Katya stopped dead in her tracks beside the first one and frantically felt for a pulse. To her intense relief, the man was still alive. So it was the usual trick of shutting the inhabitants of an entire area in sleep.

  She wouldn’t be able to wake them until the witch was defeated, but at least they were still alive.

  And there was this much. At least they wouldn’t be either at the command of the witch, or able to spring to their mistress’s defense.

  Katya hoped not, anyway.

  Up a flight of stairs to a stunningly beautiful wooden porch, she ran. The porch was strewn with flat, square pillows, and she guessed that it was a favorite place for the warlord and his family to spend time. Nothing in sight that she could use as a weapon, though, not even a chair or a stool.

  The doors were wide open, and she charged inside.

  Katya got only the vaguest of impressions of the place—that it was huge, that it was as barren of furniture as the porch—when her attention was riveted by the two combatants and their hostage.

  He had to be a hostage. The combatants wouldn’t have left him standing there unattended otherwise.

  His eyes were glazed over and he swayed a bit where he stood, which was off to the side of the room. He was in no danger yet, but it was possible that once the witch saw a new element enter the affray, she would cut her losses, kill the warlord, and vanish.

  So as her first act, Katya leaped across the room as she drew her sword out of the ether, and interposed herself between the warlord and danger. At the moment, she couldn’t tell who was who, except that the warlord was the only “innocent” here.

  Only then did she stop to really look at the two mages.

  Both were female. Both were stunningly beautiful. Both were clothed in more practic
al versions of the robes Katya had conjured when she’d first arrived; the brocades and embroideries were just as elaborate but sleeves, sash, and hemlines were nowhere near as exaggerated. One was all in blue; one was all in red. The one in blue had white hair, the one in red had red hair, and by now Katya knew enough to know that on a young woman, white hair was not an auspicious color, and for the uniformly black-haired people of Nippon, red hair on anyone was the sign of a something not of this world.

  It was entirely possible that not one, but two inhuman women had their sights on this particular warlord. That would make things…interesting.

  But it was also possible that the motives of one of these two were, if not pure, at least benign.

  When you don’t know, you wait.

  There were no other entities visible right now, and the witch, at least, had been reported as being served by demons. That could mean that the witch was withholding her demons for a later strike, or that they had all been defeated. It was possible that the witch had already lost that part of this battle. But in case they were in hiding somewhere, Katya needed to be alert for a possible attack.

  Meanwhile, although this might not have been one of the most spectacular mage battles that Katya had ever seen, some of which had involved the wholesale destruction of entire fortresses and villages, it was definitely one of the more colorful. The woman in red was using a fan to direct her powers. As Katya stood guard over the rigid and unresponsive warlord, the woman in red made an attack. A backhanded flip of her unfurled fan sent a wave of daggers of white light singing toward her opponent. The woman in blue hastily scrawled a glowing glyph in the air with both index fingers that deflected the daggers to either side, where they struck the wooden walls and vanished. The woman in blue cast something invisible at the one in red, and a moment later, a gigantic, transparent serpent formed out of the air itself, materializing in a loose coil around the feet of the woman in red. It reared up until its head was higher than hers, and stared down at her out of cool, translucent eyes. Then it wrapped itself around the one in red and began to squeeze. With a contemptuous sniff, the one in red bent her head down and blew on the coils, a long, foggy breath that sparkled with frost crystals. The serpent stiffened, and a thin rime of ice and frost spread across its body with unbelievable swiftness. The serpent stiffened further, then stopped moving altogether. The woman in red stamped her foot, and with the sound of breaking glass, the serpent shattered, the pieces of it raining down around the woman in red, then vanishing. The woman in red was already making the next move. A forward flip of the fan created a wash of fire that raced toward the woman in blue and engulfed her. She was hidden from view by the flames for a moment, then with a thunderous crash that shook the floor, the flames were extinguished by a blast of wind. She retaliated with an overhand throwing motion; halfway between herself and the woman in red, a hundred spears manifested. The woman in red spun, literally like a top, and the spears splintered as they touched her. She spun to a halt, then fluttered the fan to and fro faster than a bird’s wings in flight, as if she was trying hard to cool her opponent off. But that action created a whirlwind that, even as Katya watched, blew her opponent nearly off her feet. The blue woman braced herself against it, a frown on her face, then her eyes flickered toward the warlord.

  She opened her mouth. The sound that came out of it was like nothing Katya had ever heard before. The word scream did not even begin to describe the mind-breaking, ear-shattering howl that emerged from this lovely white-haired woman’s throat.

  The sound was enough to send Katya to her knees with her hands clamped over her ears, her sword dropping to the floor. But its fall somehow shattered the howl.

  The woman’s mouth snapped shut, leaving an echoing silence as Katya and the woman in red both shook their heads, trying to clear their minds. Then, in the next moment, the woman in blue made that same “throwing” gesture, and a thousand spears flew toward Katya and her charge.

  With a cry of horror, the woman in red flung herself between both of them and the spears, spreading her arms wide and making a shield of her own body.

  “Nyet!” Katya cried, and slashed her hand down. Water burst up out of the floor just in front of the woman in red, in a geyser that deflected most of the spears up and to either side. Only one got through, pinning one of the woman’s long sleeves to a pillar.

  Well, now she knew which of the two women the witch was. The witch would not have interposed herself, but would have taken the attack on the warlord as an unexpected opening for an attack of her own.

  As the woman in red yanked the spear from her sleeve and cast it aside with a snarl, Katya made a fist and jerked down, and water poured straight down on the witch from the ceiling, exactly as if she were standing under a powerful waterfall.

  It knocked the witch off her feet, giving the woman in red time to make a slashing movement with her fan. A line of force split the air between them, sending the witch tumbling. Katya closed off the torrent as her ally made a second slashing motion, this time upward, which sent the witch against the wall.

  But the witch recovered faster than Katya would have thought possible. She whirled, her face contorted with rage, and made a clawing gesture with one hand. It looked as if she was seizing something with that hand, and with the other, she snatched open the neck of her robes. A strange, blue-black gem, oblong, and strung roughly on a cord, gleamed for a moment at her neck before she clutched it and hid it. And now she summoned her demons, with a single screeched word.

  They were like no demons Katya had ever seen before.

  They were nothing but heads. Horrible heads that flew through the air, laughing and howling and spitting curses.

  They had horns, as many as three, curling horns like a ram, nubbins like a young goat, long spikes, ridged, ringed, and spiraling. Some of them had worms for tongues, or snakes, or no tongue at all. Their eyes bulged, red eyes or yellow. Some were fanged, others had the teeth of wolves or sharks. The heads dove at them, and Katya was the first to react.

  She swung at the first head to dive at them, with the flat of her sword, for she was not at all certain she could cut them, but she knew she could certainly hit them. She connected with a solid thud, and with a wail, the head careened into the wall, where it smashed, and vanished.

  And now the woman in red unwrapped her sash. Her robes slid from her shoulders and dropped to the ground, leaving her wearing the same sort of thin, white silk trews and wrapped shirt that Katya had found underneath all the robes she’d been in. She kept the sash though, and passed it around behind her back, wrapping each trailing end around her arm three times, leaving a puddle of scarlet, rust, cream, and burgundy silk on the floor below both wrists. And then…

  Then she began to dance.

  But what a dance!

  She moved like nothing Katya had ever seen before, except, perhaps, her brother and sister in full battle fever. She spun, she kicked, she flipped. She tumbled in midair and on the ground. She ran up the wall and cartwheeled off it. She did moves that Katya had never seen anyone do before, and every time she moved, one end of the sash lashed out. When it did, it generally connected with a head. Where the sash struck, it left a bleeding gash. Or took out an eye. Or sliced off a horn, or smashed in teeth.

  Soon there was not a single one of the demons that were unmarked. They wailed in protest, voices shrill and unearthly, and a glance at the witch proved that she was having difficulty controlling them. Her hands moved in the air in stiff, frantic gestures, and her brow was beaded with sweat. Her hair lifted, as if being pulled by invisible hands, and when Katya squinted her eyes—in between devastatingly effective swats with the flat of her sword at the demon heads—she thought she could make out more of the heads, so transparent as to be just this side of invisible, with strands of her hair in their mouths. They were lifting it, tugging at it. Katya wondered why.

  The sash lashed out again, and for one moment, Katya thought it was one of the red-haired woman’s rare misses.
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br />   But…no…

  The end of the sash licked across the witch’s forehead.

  The witch shrieked at the top of her lungs, a blood-curdling sound that made Katya’s hair stand on end. The witch’s hands were a blur of motion, the demon heads were clearly fighting her control, none of them were coming anywhere near Katya now, and the strange stone burned a terrible blue at the witch’s throat.

  And now Katya saw what the demon heads were doing. They were holding her, keeping her from running. Did they know that if she got the chance, now that she was losing, she would run and leave them to face the red-haired woman alone?

  But this was providing something else. Something that Katya had been hoping for since this fight had begun.

  She turned her concentration to the red-haired woman’s dance, tracking the rhythm, the moves. She was still being swarmed by demon heads, and some of them were getting through to her. The white silk of her garments was spotted with red, and not all of it was from the demons.

  But that shot to the forehead was not the only mark that the red-haired woman had put on the witch. So if Katya could time this just right…

  The opening she was hoping for came. The creatures tangling themselves in the witch’s hair gave a pull back. The red-haired woman scored a cut to the witch’s cheek. The witch screamed again and winced back, her eyes closing involuntarily.

  And Katya dropped her sword and pulled her short dagger—

  She dashed in, seized the stone in her left hand, and lifted her dagger in the right—

  And with a single, swift slash, Katya cut the stone from the witch’s neck.

  A scream literally split the air, joined a moment later by a disharmony of howls from every part of the room. The witch made a snatch at her, hands outstretched, turning into claws, into talons, elongating in a way that made Katya gag even as she spun away.