Cordelia stared at her, horrified—but Geoffrey only shook his head a little, with a knowing smile.
"Oh, do not fear for your manhood!" Delilah mocked. "I well and truly do lust after you, and shall have my fill of you soon enough, I warrant—you shall know a glorious death."
"I think I shall know no death at all," Geoffrey purred. "No? Surely you do not think you can fight one against fifty, and win! And you shall not disappear from our midst, for your sister cannot, and you are too concerned with your piddling honor to leave her! There is nothing here for your mind to throw, no weapons but your single sword and dagger. How shall you fight?"
"With me at his back!" Alain burst out of the wainscotting, the hidden door slamming open. He leaped, sword slashing, to wound the nearest guardsman. The man cried out, and Alain parried a cut by another guard with his dagger, then drove home with the sword. The man screamed and spun away, clutching at his side—but Alain had already whirled away, stabbing and slashing. Ten men near him shouted, and jumped on him.
Geoffrey roared, and his sword spun, dagger stabbing with inhuman speed and force. Three men fell back, fountains of blood; a dozen more leaped away from the berserker. That opened the path to Alain, and the Prince was beside him in an instant, taking station between Cordelia and the armed men, setting his back against Geoffrey's, who was still weaving his web of steel. "To the death, old friend!"
"If die we must, Geoffrey!"
"No, not our deaths—theirs!"
But while they had been doing that, Cordelia had been busy with the others. A guardsman shot up ten feet off the floor, crying out in alarm. He had good reason; Cordelia's eyes narrowed, and the man hurtled straight toward Delilah. She sprang aside with a cry of fear, and two more men rocketed into the air and spun toward her.
"Nothing to throw, you say?" Cordelia cried. "Then have at thee!" And both soldiers slammed down onto the floor; Lady Delilah barely stepped aside in time.
Five men shouted and leaped at Cordelia—but this time, it was she who shot up into the air astride a spear, and the soldiers' swords slashed at one another. Shocked, they cried out, then turned to parrying—and from parrying, to cutting and thrusting at one another.
Cordelia's eyes narrowed.
Suddenly, swords all over the room slashed at the men next to them, as though they had taken on lives of their own. Their owners shouted with fear—but so did their targets. In moments, the whole room was a vast melee of ringing steel and cries of anger.
"Out upon them!" Delilah cried.
That brought her men to their senses; with titanic heaves, they wrestled back control over their weapons and leaped to strike at the Gallowglasses and the Prince. Alain and Geoffrey met and blunted their rush, protecting Cordelia—and leaving her free to tend to Delilah. Her heart swelled with joy at their loyalty, even as she focussed her mind on her fingertips, thinking of thickening air, molecules crowding more and more closely together, moving faster and faster—so that by the time she swung her arm down, throwing, it was a ball of flame that leaped from her hand.
Delilah dodged it easily, laughing, even as her hands described a circle—and a ring of fire sprang up about Cordelia. She cried out in alarm, then bit it off, thinking of rain, a cloudburst.
Brief as it was, her cry was drowned in the howls of pain from the guards, servants, and knights who were battering at Alain and Geoffrey. They leaped back, and the two young men gasped for breath, grinning. "The Lady Delilah fights well ... for us," Geoffrey panted.
Apparently she realized it, too. The ring of fire died down as suddenly as it had sprung up, but Delilah's men hung back, wary, for a moment. Geoffrey grinned and swished his blade through a sword drill, but Alain only glared and held his on guard.
Cordelia, though, was ready the second the flames died. A cloudburst broke right above Delilah, appearing from nowhere, drenching her. Delilah coughed and spluttered in sheer surprise, then wiped her hair out of her eyes just in time to see a circle of rope whirling down to settle around her. She gasped and glared at it; it burst into fire before it could tighten, and was gone.
The response had been too quick; Cordelia hadn't been working up her next spell.
They were all illusions, of course. The trick was to make them seem so real that the other witch's mind would accept them subconsciously, and really feel the heat from the flames and see the burns blistering her skin, even though her conscious mind knew better. Delilah, for example, was really wet—her hair hung lank and dripping, her clothes plastered to her body; her own mind was cooperating in keeping her so. But she knew the moisture was harmless, and ignored it as she hurled a fireball at Cordelia.
It was an empty gesture, of course—Cordelia damped the flames before the sphere was halfway there. It faded into the thin air it had been made from—but it had given Delilah time to work up something more subtle.
Alain lurched back against Cordelia, snarling—and throwing her off balance for a moment. His sword flashed like a heat-haze, his opponents dropping back with wounds—but more jumped in, in their place. There were at least three for each of her guardians, and they were hard-pressed indeed. She realized they couldn't last much longer ...
A high, shrill battle-scream sounded, and the great black iron horse reared up behind the men who were slashing at Geoffrey. Fess's steel hooves lashed out, felling Delilah's men. He had heard the row, and broken from the castle stables, Cordelia realized just in time to even the odds.
The men around Alain looked up, saw what was happening, and some of those at the back ran to attack Geoffrey, then leaped aside as steel teeth snapped at them.
Welcome as Fess was, he had distracted Cordelia too long. Suddenly, a huge snake was coiling around her. Its coils tightened; she couldn't breathe! Then the wedgeshaped head hovered in front of hers, and she would have screamed, if she had had breath. Its jaws opened, fangs curving down to tear ...
But constrictors don't have viper's fangs, and pit vipers aren't big enough to wrap and squeeze. The fangs themselves made her realize all over again that the snake was only an illusion, projected by a master directly into the back of her mind; the fangs broke her unconscious belief in its reality more effectively than anything she could have thought of. She held her breath, eyes narrowing, glaring into that putrid maw, thinking of another form, another shape ...
The snake sprouted hairs, hairs that thickened even as its head melted and shrank, reforming into the dead, sculptured face of a fox—and it was only a fur wrap made of a dozen foxes, each biting the other's tail, that coiled around her. She looked up at Delilah in triumph .. .
And saw a small snake, only three feet long, but one with a spreading hood and curving fangs, rearing up to strike at her.
Cordelia realized, in a way she never could have otherwise, that Delilah was a Futurian agent, raised in a modern culture, no matter where she had been born—for no native of Gramarye knew about cobras. Even to Cordelia, they were things from books—and she didn't doubt that they were so to Delilah, too. The woman probably didn't have any of the details right. It was a pitiful attempt at persuading her hindbrain, and she ignored it, knowing that its venom couldn't really hurt her. She thought at it, and it struck—but curved away from her, sailing back toward Delilah, and as it went, its head shrank into a handle, its body lengthened, its tail slimmed into a lash—and a bullwhip cracked over Delilah's head, then lashed about her shoulders.