Trying to fight back a wave of nausea, Tristan notched an arrow on the string of the longbow and aimed it at the thing’s breast. Others of the Guard followed suit. Immediately he let the arrow fly, and it coursed in a true line, striking the monster exactly where the prince had estimated its heart to be. But the arrow did not penetrate very deeply, and the creature simply looked down at the shaft in its breast as if it were a mere nuisance. It extended its wings and screamed, dropping the lower torso of the soldier upon the wall next to it. Bending down its awful woman’s face, it gripped the arrow with its teeth, pulled it out, and spat it away. More arrows lodged in the seemingly impenetrable feathers, but none seemed to be having any effect.
It began to eat the soldier’s head now, drooling bits of bone and brain out of its awful mouth and down its chin.
A lieutenant of the Guard suddenly appeared before Tristan. The prince recognized him as Lucius, one of Frederick’s best. “Your Highness, what are your orders?” he pleaded. “Nothing we do seems to harm it.”
But Tristan was given no time to answer. The creature jumped into the midst of the soldiers to capture another one, but this time it missed, tearing the man’s arm off at the shoulder. It quickly reached down, took the bloody stump in its claws, and then, screaming in defiance, launched itself back to its gory perch on the stone wall.
As if in a dream, Tristan watched Lucius and some of the other officers pull the poor mangled soldier back to the relative safety of the crowd. And then, purposely, he began to walk across the bloody ground, moving closer to the wall.
Several of the soldiers shouted to him to return, but he held up one of his hands, indicating silence. Oddly, even the creature grew rather still as it watched Tristan walk so deliberately toward it. The monster stretched its wings in defiance, screaming even louder, its awful woman’s face contorting and its stench now becoming even more unbearable.
Just three more paces should do it, Tristan thought. There are only two vulnerable targets. I beg the Afterlife, let my aim be true.
His right foot touched the ground twice more, and the moment he stopped, his right arm became a curved blur of speed, reaching up and over for the first of his dirks. It came into his hand like second nature, and then almost before he knew he had thrown it, he saw the knife twirling toward the creature. For a bare second he held his breath. Then, as he watched, the blade sickeningly buried itself to the hilt in the left eye of the horrible woman-face.
It was said for decades afterward that the scream the men heard in the courtyard that day was unlike any sound that had ever been experienced in all of Eutracia. In a shrieking combination of insane pain and anger, the thing reached up and used its dark talons to pull the dirk from where its left eye used to be, blood and vitreous matter snaking crazily down its face.
Then it jumped from the wall to the courtyard, almost unfazed, and faced the prince.
Just as Tristan was about to throw another dirk he felt strong hands on both of his arms, pulling him back to the crowd. He tried to turn and face whoever it was, but he had never felt such strength before, not even from Frederick, and he was being literally hauled back to safety on the backs of his heels. When he was released at last, he found himself looking into the stern face of Wigg.
Wasting neither time nor words, Wigg bullied past the prince and began to walk toward the wounded beast with slow, measured steps. A deadly silence began to overtake the courtyard—even the monster made no sound. It’s almost as if the two of them recognize each other, Tristan thought.
Suddenly Wigg stopped and raised his arms.
“Once again we meet,” he said to it in a quiet voice. “You and your kind have avoided death far too many times. But not today. Today you are mine.”
As the creature began again to scream, bolts of azure light shot from Wigg’s hands. The light coalesced upon reaching the monster and began to surround it, trapping it within a brilliant blue cube. Wigg then lowered his hands and the cube began to change, bands of empty space alternating with the bands of glowing blue light, creating a cage of iridescent azure bars.
Tristan realized that for the first time in his life he was witnessing the creation of a wizard’s warp.
The desperate creature began to smash its body violently against the sides of the warp in panic, apparently realizing what was happening. But no matter how furiously it fought, the warp never moved.
Wigg slowly began to join his hands together, and Tristan’s mouth dropped open as he saw the warp, with the awful thing still inside it, begin to collapse. The creature screamed out in agony as the walls of the warp began to crush it. Its head was forced over to one side as the left hand wall closed in on it and first broke its neck, then crushed its skull. The screaming stopped. When the walls of the warp were a little more than a yard apart, Wigg stopped joining his hands. Tristan saw the life finally go out of the thing’s remaining eye, its blood and crushed organs pushed out between the slender bars of glowing light in a sickening mixture of red and pink.
And then came another horrible sound. An incredible din far more overwhelming than the awful screaming of the bird.
The sky darkened momentarily and then lightning shot across the sky in that Tristan had never dreamed possible. The thunder boomed until he thought his eardrums might burst, forcing him to place his hands over his ears. And then, as quickly as it had come, the sky lightened, and all was quiet.
Stunned, Tristan slowly walked up to where Wigg was standing and stood next to him, looking at the mangled remains inside the amazing, glowing azure box.
“A screaming harpy,” Wigg said simply, without looking at the prince. “That was going to be your first question, wasn’t it?”
In fact, that was not what Tristan had intended to ask first. He was much more interested in the glowing azure box than the monster. He turned to Wigg.
“The magic that you used to kill it—that was a wizard’s warp, wasn’t it?” he asked the old one.
“Yes,” Wigg replied as he began to walk closer to the carnage. Reaching between the glowing azure rods, he carefully pulled Tristan’s dirk out of the harpy’s eye. The old wizard turned the throwing knife this way and that as he examined it in the afternoon sun. When he finally looked back at the prince there was a modicum of respect in his eyes. The old one also noticed that the glow that had surrounded the prince since his visit to the caves had blessedly disappeared.
“Warps are very useful, Tristan,” he said, turning his attention back to the knife. “They are, simply put, powerful fields of protection and containment that can be modified at will.” He looked at the dead thing inside the glowing box before turning his infamous eyes once again upon the prince. “After your reign, I will teach them to you.”
After your reign, Tristan groaned to himself. That day seemed hundreds of years away to him. He decided to ask the second and perhaps more obvious question. “Why is it I have never heard of a screaming harpy before?”
Wigg let out a long sigh. First a blood stalker, and now a screaming harpy, he thought, his face unable to hide his concern. And both of them appearing so close to the day of the abdication.
“Harpies are indigenous to Eutracia,” he told the prince as the men behind Tristan began to crowd closer to get a look at the awful thing that they had been unable to kill. “They have been in this land since long before the Sorceresses’ War, and originally made their nesting places in the southern reaches of the Hartwick Woods, where the forest borders the plains of Heart Square.”
Tristan knew the Hartwick Woods well enough but had spent little time in the larger, grass plain that was shaped in a square, thus earning its name.