Troy Denning - Beyond the High Road

The phantom’s wings pounded the air, catapulting it over the caravan toward Tanalasta’s hiding place. Already, the princess could see a pair of naked female breasts and ten ebony talons curling from the ends of the thing’s slender fingers. A small flaming orb sizzled up from Vangerdahast’s direction to strike the creature full in the flank. It veered slightly, then lowered its dark wings and streaked away, leaving the wizard’s sphere to explode into a roiling ball of flame. As the thing drew closer, the princess could make out the narrow blade of a nose and a long haggish chin smeared with red gore.

An unaccustomed fury rose up inside Tanalasta, and suddenly she could think of little more than slaying her foe. She jumped to her feet and thrust a hand into her cloak pocket, in her excitement fumbling for the steel Peacemaker’s rod Vangerdahast had given her. To her amazement, she felt no fear at all, only a thrilling bloodlust that filled her with a strange euphoria and muddled her thoughts. Could this be the battle rapture Alusair was always talking about?

One of Tanalasta’s guards grabbed her collar and pushed her toward the horses. “Run!”

The dragoneer’s shove brought Tanalasta back to her senses, and she was seized by a queasy terror as she recalled how easily the phantom had slain Vangerdahast’s escorts. She stumbled back two steps, then stopped when her guards drew their swords and stepped forward to meet the phantom at the edge of the cliff

“Don’t be fools-retreat!” Tanalasta yelled. She released the steel rod and pulled her hand from her pocket, then began to fidget with one of the rings Vangerdahast had given her in Arabel. “Now!”

The guards did not obey. They merely roared their battle cries and raised their swords, and it was too late. The phantom swooped over the rim of the outcropping, impaling one man on along talon and batting the other off the cliff and continuing toward Tanalasta at lightning speed.

She pointed her ring at the ground, commanding, “Dragon’s wall!”

Tanalasta felt a sharp pain in her finger, then a shimmering wall of force sprang up between her and the phantom. A muffled whump reverberated across the outcropping, and the creature was hanging in the air before her, its night black wings spread across the horizon on the other side of the magic barrier.

The phantom gave an ear-piercing scream, and its white eyes turned human and ladylike. The darkness drained from its face, revealing the visage of a handsome noblewoman about the same age as Queen Filfaeril. Tanalasta staggered away from the inexplicable apparition, so shocked and terrified that she forgot to run.

Vangerdahast’s voice came to her. Tanalasta?

The phantom pulled its head free of the magic wall and turned toward the wizard. Tanalasta’s heart sank as she realized the implications. The creature could hear their thought-talk.

Answer me!

The phantom pulled a wing free of the barrier, and Tanalasta’s sense of danger came flooding back.

Quiet, you old fool! The princess turned toward the horses.

Then suddenly Vangerdahast was there before her, sitting on his stallion between her and her own horse, swaying and blinking with teleport after daze. Tanalasta glanced back and saw the phantom springing over the top of her magic wall, its face once again a mask of gore-dripping darkness. Tanalasta spun around, stretching an arm in its direction and slapping the opposite hand down on her wrist bracer.

“King’s bolts!”

A searing pain shot through her hand, and four bolts of golden magic streaked toward the phantom’s chest.

The creature’s wing curled around in a blur of darkness, and the bolts erupted against it in a series of dazzling yellow flashes. The appendage turned briefly translucent, revealing a fanlike network of finger-thick bones, then began to darken again.

Vangerdahast’s staff tapped Tanalasta’s shoulder. “You have proven your point, Princess,” he said. “Now why don’t you leave your old fool to have his fun with this nasty wench?”

Too tired to trade banter, Tanalasta merely nodded and sprinted to her horse, pulling herself into the saddle as the wizard’s first spell cracked across the outcropping behind her. She leaned down to free the reins of the dead guards’ mounts, then glimpsed the phantom hurling toward Vangerdahast in a blazing ball of white fury. He turned his staff horizontal and raised it in front of him. A hedge of silver-tipped thorn bushes sprang up to intercept his shrieking attacker.

Tanalasta started to turn her mount toward the rest of the company, but saw a horde of orcs streaming up the mountain and realized she would never reach them alive. Praying to the goddess that Ryban could see what was happening on the outcropping, she turned in the opposite direction and urged her mount to flee.

The terrified beast sprang up the rocky slope as though it were a mountain goat, and the last thing Tanalasta heard behind her was Vangerdahast’s astonished curse:

“What gutterspawning succubus hatched you?”

The royal wizard was frightened, of course-only a fool wouldn’t have been-but he was also mad with fury. His heart was hammering in his chest, pounding like it had not pounded in seventy years. Every beat urged him to battle, to pelt the phantom with bolt and blaze, to attack and keep attacking until he reduced the thing to a scorch mark on the cliff top.

Never before had Vangerdahast experienced such a combat rage, and he did not understand where it came from now. Vangerdahast had warned Azoun a dozen times that battles were won not through anger, but through cold, emotionless calculation, and now here the wizard was himself, fighting as hard to control his own emotions as to defeat the enemy. It was unnerving, really. The remnants of his last harmless lightning bolt were still tracing crooks of transparency across the phantom’s leathery wing, and the wizard caught himself lowering his staff to cast the same useless spell again. Damned unnerving.

Vangerdahast threw his staff down and slipped a hand into the sleeve of his robe. In the second he needed to find the tiny pocket where he stored his spider web, the phantom peered over its furled wing and sprang. Vangerdahast’s mount bolted, nearly catapulting him from the saddle. The phantom banked, herding the terrified horse toward the rim of the cliff. The wizard pulled his hand from his sleeve, flicking a ball of web in the dark thing’s direction, then yelling his incantation.

At the first sound of Vangerdahast’s voice, the phantom furled its wings and dropped to the ground. As it fell, a huge tangle of sticky fibers blossomed around it, completely engulfing the creature in an amorphous mass of white filaments.

Vangerdahast’s horse drew up short at the edge of the outcropping, pitching him forward out of the saddle. Cursing his mount for a witless coward, the wizard made a desperate grab for the beast’s mane as he tumbled over its head, then found himself plummeting toward a sandy dune a hundred feet below.

Vangerdahast experienced a fierce nettling as his weathercloak’s magic triggered itself, then the cape’s lapels spread outward to create a sort of crude sail. He fluttered to the ground not far from the guard who had been batted off the outcropping earlier. The poor fellow had landed headfirst in the sand, burying himself to the shoulders, then snapping his neck as he fell onto his back. A bloody crease angling across his breastplate marked where the phantom’s powerful wing had struck.

Vangerdahast spun away and pulled a wing feather from inside his robe. Still consumed by his strange fury he uttered a quick spell and extended his arms, then sprang into the air, telling himself that be had a good reason for returning to the battle before checking on Tanalasta. He needed to know where the phantom had come from. He needed to know why it had aided a petty tribe of orcs. He needed to kill the thing before it shredded his magical web. He needed that most of all.