The Vampire & Her Witch

”Announce me, Rastlan, and let’s see what sort of welcome the Mother of Trees has prepared for us...

Rastlan’s smile showed the points of his teeth, bright white against the tawny gold of his mane. The jewels stitched across his tunic, the constellation of the First Hunter picked out in diamond and citrine across his broad chest with three more constellations wheeling across his shoulders, caught the light of the setting sun and burned with an inner light all their own.

”Do you still wish to be announced as a friend, Highest One? Or shall I announce you as a stranger?”

”I am a stranger to the Mother of Trees,” Dirar said blandly, though a slight smile tugged at the corner of his lips. Before his disagreement with the Harbinger of Death last night, he would have kept things simple and restrained. Now, however, he’d changed his mind.

”Since we’re meeting in a city that she’s only recently conquered,” the High Lord added as the smile on his lips grew. ”It would be rude if we didn’t put forth our best efforts at our first meeting, wouldn’t it, Rastlan?”

”Teach them who we truly are,” Dirar said, folding his arms across his chest as his tail swished in anticipation. ”Teach them well...”

”Your words are as Heaven’s will, Highest One,” Rastlan said, bowing deeply with the tips of his claws pressed across his chest before he walked several paces away, rejoining the members of the Stone Guard who had traveled more than a thousand leagues from their herds to serve as Dirar’s honor guard, and if necessary, the point of his spear.

Rastlan’s orders were quick and precise. His soldiers knew their duties well, and the dry, cold air of a winter night in Lothian offered them the same opportunities for spectacle as the arid, dusty land of the Western Maw.

”A greeting even those blind rats could understand,” Rastlan said, flexing his claws as his men sprang into action. ”How fitting to use it here...”

The horns of the Steppe were intricate instruments, and the sound that filled the air didn’t just blare or moan as a trumpet would; it raced and danced like the wind between a hundred thousand blades of grass, growing louder and louder as the musicians summoned their herd to war.

In the distance, Dirar could already see the figures gathered atop the city wall going still as the first notes of the song filled the air, and the smile on his lips grew wider as he recognized the song Rastlan had chosen to herald his arrival.

Then the Swift Hooves charged.

They went down the hill in two columns of five, and they charged with a speed that only the best racehorses in the stables of human lords could match. Their tails streamed behind them while their forelegs became a blur pulling them over the white, snow-covered ground. The drum of their hooves arrived a heartbeat behind the sight of them like thunder trailing lightning.

The columns ran at a gallop, and as they ran, they added their own voices to the music of the horns, blending the powerful percussion of their hooves with the deep, resonant timber of a chant the scholars attributed to the First Musician.

Five hundred paces from the gates of Lothian City, well within the range of a skilled sorcerer’s spells, the columns still moved at a gallop. Two hundred paces, easily within bowshot of the walls, they still showed no sign of slowing. Instead, their chanting grew louder as they crossed an invisible line a hundred paces short of the walls; they split to the left and right of the road leading to the gate like water flowing around a boulder.

They ran their circles in the snow to either side of the road, their hooves thundering against the frozen earth as they ran in tighter and tighter spirals. It was an impressive feat of coordination that human riders would struggle to match, and Dirar could see a few people on the walls clapping in appreciation until their hands went still as the elements answered the Swift Hooves’ call.

Within each circle of warriors, a wind arose, carrying with it the snow churned up by their hooves. The wind swirled, and the snow danced, rising higher and higher into twisting columns of white that crackled with bolts of barely contained electric fury. Ten paces high. Twenty. Thirty. The columns rose higher and higher until they were twice as tall as the Lothian walls, looming over the gates like blue-white pillars holding up the sky.

Then the song of the horns changed, dropping in pitch and taking on a deep, growling tone as if the earth had rolled over beneath their hooves. This time, it was the Long Horns who answered its call.

Six of them, in two columns of three, and where the Swift Hooves had come down the hill like arrows from a bow, the Long Horns moved like a landslide. Each of them stood half again the height of a warhorse at the shoulder, and their torsos were covered in silk-wrapped plates of brigandine armor. Their great sweeping horns were tipped in bronze, and they did not gallop so much as they fell forward endlessly, and the hill shuddered under them.

Dirar felt it through his own hooves, the deep, satisfying drumbeat of it, and he watched with a flicker of true pleasure as long combs of snow shaking loose from the battlements of Lothian City, pouring down the wall-face like spilled flour.

The six halted a long bowshot from the gates, stopping at a point where they could still be seen from the walls, and they reared back as one, pulling banners from among the spears they carried on their backs. Each drove the banner’s pole into the frozen ground like a spear, setting six banners snapping open in the winds summoned by their Swift Hooved companions: green, gold, silver, black, blue, and yellow. The colors of the Six Jewels of the Southern Sea.

Once they’d planted their banners, all six of the Long Horned soldiers stood perfectly still behind their banners, holding their arms out before them with hands clenched into fists as if they were waiting for an invitation or an order to brawl.

Into that stillness, gleaming, rolled a single gilded chariot....