Body and face were gray as a slate tombstone. Feet were white hot and spilled yellow flame. Flaming mane and tail trailed out behind like a burning paper kite.
It had risen from the other wizard's bonfire as if launched from a catapult. Now it arced across the sky, painful to watch with eye-smarting brilliance, paddling its hooves above the treetops. They drummed on the ears and air, though they touched nothing. Nostrils snorted fire and snuffled gouts of black smoke.
Was it alive or dead? Gull wondered. Was it even a horse? "Riding the night mare" was what a mother called bad dreams, yet never had Gull imagined that a real demon haunted the dark hours.
Then there was no time for supposing, for the flaming monster dived straight at Towser's ruptured wagons.
"Greensleeves!" yelled the woodcutter.
He clutched Lily around the waist, kicked the horse toward camp. But the flesh-and-blood animal balked, either at the fire or the brassy alien smell of the phantom horse. After three tries to force it forward, Gull gave up, slid from the saddle, and dragged Lily stumbling along.
"Come on!" But what he expected to do in camp he couldn't guess. He'd even tossed his axe away, was completely weaponless. The most he could hope was to grab Greensleeves and run like hell.
Whistling from the sky, like a hawk upon chickens, the nightmare swooped in a tight circle over the tumbled wagon train. The camp was clearly illuminated by its light. Gull saw women and bodyguards cringe. Even brash Kem and Chad curled into balls and covered their heads, like children afraid of a parent's wrath.
All of them, within the wagons and without, screamed for dear life.
Terror, Gull thought. The thing spreads terror. It causes bad dreams you can't wake from.
Without realizing it, he slowed, as if fear were a plunging tide to wade.
Concentrating, he almost fell as Lily suddenly gasped and yanked his hand. They were still hundreds of feet from camp. "What-"
Then he saw. By the flickering light of the nightmare, he discovered twisted shapes littering the forest floor at their feet.
The Zombies of Scathe, Lily had called them.
They lay like reaped corn stalks, every which way. Facedown, heads back, on top of one another. Threescore or more, unmoving except for fistfuls of writhing maggots.
Their rotten, bloated stink was almost palpable, like a fist in the face. Gull caught his nose and backed up. Gasping, gagging, he and the dancing girl stumbled wide around.
Despite the horror, Gull found the scene familiar. People sprawled like jackstraws. As in White Ridge.
Villagers, including his parents and siblings, had fallen near the end of the wizards' duel. A mysterious weakness, unseen, unheard, only felt, had leached the strength from their bodies. Gull himself had collapsed. Only the hale and hearty survived. Young, old, weak died. Many others had never recovered their strength, had lain unconscious until they expired, wilted like cut flowers.
And if that weakness spell-if this was it-felled zombies here, then the same wizard must have cast it in White Ridge.
Towser.
Gull stopped in shock. Towser had felled his family and neighbors?
Or did every wizard know such a spell?
If it were Towser, he grated, he'd pay with his life. Gull would kill him. Gull would break his bones one by one, all the while reciting the name of every White Ridger who'd fallen to his magic.
"Damn all wizards! And damn me for working for one!"
Screaming arose from the distant camp.
Gull waggled his head. Lily's red nails cut into his arm. "Let's get away from these-dead!" Yet camp would be little sanctuary, beset by a flaming phantom "Look!" called Gull. "Something's stopped it-"
Dancing on air higher than anyone could reach, the nightmare stopped circling. Instead, it stamped the air skittishly, swished its fiery tail so globs of flame spun off like sparks from a grindstone. Where the blobs landed, they burned and winked out amidst new greenery, for nothing was left to burn in this twisted nightmare forest.
Yet it seemed the nightmare might dash off, for something held it at bay. By spitting crackling light, Gull saw Towser's lateral stripes standing on the wagon seat.
The wizard wasn't attacking much tonight, Gull thought savagely. He was hard put to defend the camp, keep his followers alive from the varied assaults.
Yet Towser held aloft a stone crock as for ale or moonshine. He gabbled some spell, honking lilting music.
Gull had seen this before, too.
From the mouth of the crock spewed a cloud that puffed and billowed, yet kept a shape like an inflated bladder. Gradually, it swelled like a soap bubble, snapped together to hover in the air.
And take the shape of a man.
A tall man, blue, so muscled he appeared fat, with a black topknot of hair and a tight vest and wide bloomers like the dancing girls'. Like a bubble in water, the blue man rose and faced the nightmare, which now stamped just outside the wagon circle.
The entourage stopped screaming. That alone, Gull noted, was a good reason to conjure the cloud-man. "A djinn," Lily breathed.
Like an animated cloud, the blue djinn wafted forward, slow as a fogbank. The nightmare swished its flaming tail, skipped on burning hooves -bared yellow teeth and charged.
Gull and the girl held their breath as the phantom leaped at the blue cloud.
And through it.
The results were nothing they could have predicted.
Fire met water, it seemed. A tremendous whoomph! shook the air, beat upon the ears as if boxed.
The djinn exploded into errant puffs of steam. They dribbled upward like smoke from a doused fire.
The nightmare skidded to a halt, shook itself like a dog from a pond. Its fire had dimmed until the night was almost black, but now it reignited.
High above, the dribs and drabs of smoke re-formed, coalesced, became a magic man again.
Snorting fire, the nightmare attacked. The very air sizzled from the fierce blaze. Where its hooves tipped burned trunks, the wood crackled and caught fire.
Its power increased as it attacked, the woodcutter saw. So did its flame. So far, only the fact the forest had already burned saved them from a conflagration. But if the flaming beast burned hot enough, the heat might scorch even these charred trunks of fire-resistant bark, ignite their heartwood.
"Come, Lily!" he tugged her. "We need to get inside the circle!"
She didn't resist, just hesitated. Over the noise of burning wind she asked, "But… what's happening over there?"
Gull gaped. He'd forgotten the other wizard's camp. Now the bonfire burned higher. He stepped past a trunk to see better. Silhouetted before the blaze, the siver-armored figure issued orders.
Only now it was bigger. Closer.
Striding great lengths, swinging gold-chased armored limbs, the wizard was so massive and heavy, it sank to its ankles in the soft forest loam.
And around its legs capered a horde of skeletons.
The skeletons were small, no taller than children, of slight build. Their jaws were long and lined with pointed teeth. The spiny silhouettes jiggered before the distant bonfire, impossibly thin and disjointed, yet alive.
Skeletons of goblins, Gull realized. Those vicious, conniving, skulking thieves. Alive, they were useless. Perhaps they served better dead…
With a shrill neigh, the captured cavalry horse reared, jerked the reins from Gull's hand. He let it go. "We should run too! For the camp! And don't stop!"
They heard the skeleton army now. Piercing piping cries, like a colony of bats, carried on the thick night air. Overhead, the nightmare rushed the cloud-man again.
Of a sudden, Gull's mind couldn't encompass the strangeness. Phantom horses, armored titans, squeaking skeletons, cloud-people, dead and undead zombies, all haunting a blasted forest. If he dwelt on them, he'd panic or go mad. He forced them from his brain. Get Greensleeves, he told himself. Get his sister and run as if devils pursued. For probably they did, somewhere in this vast mad landscape.