Free Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey Page B

and spitting curses.
    They had horns, as many as three, curling horns like a ram, nubbins like a young goat, long spikes, ridged, ringed, and spiraling. Some of them had worms for tongues, or snakes, or no tongue at all. Their eyes bulged, red eyes or yellow. Some were fanged, others had the teeth of wolves or sharks. The heads dove at them, and Katya was the first to react.
    She swung at the first head to dive at them, with the flat of her sword, for she was not at all certain she could cut them, but she knew she could certainly hit them. She connected with a solid thud , and with a wail, the head careened into the wall, where it smashed, and vanished.
    And now the woman in red unwrapped her sash. Her robes slid from her shoulders and dropped to the ground, leaving her wearing the same sort of thin, white silk trews and wrapped shirt that Katya had found underneath all the robes she’d been in. She kept the sash though, and passed it around behind her back, wrapping each trailing end around her arm three times, leaving a puddle of scarlet, rust, cream, and burgundy silk on the floor below both wrists. And then…
    Then she began to dance.
    But what a dance!
    She moved like nothing Katya had ever seen before, except, perhaps, her brother and sister in full battle fever. She spun, she kicked, she flipped. She tumbled in midair and on the ground. She ran up the wall and cartwheeled off it. She did moves that Katya had never seen anyone do before, and every time she moved, one end of the sash lashed out. When it did, it generally connected with a head. Where the sash struck, it left a bleeding gash. Or took out an eye. Or sliced off a horn, or smashed in teeth.
    Soon there was not a single one of the demons that were unmarked. They wailed in protest, voices shrill and unearthly, and a glance at the witch proved that she was having difficulty controlling them. Her hands moved in the air in stiff, frantic gestures, and her brow was beaded with sweat. Her hair lifted, as if being pulled by invisible hands, and when Katya squinted her eyes—in between devastatingly effective swats with the flat of her sword at the demon heads—she thought she could make out more of the heads, so transparent as to be just this side of invisible, with strands of her hair in their mouths. They were lifting it, tugging at it. Katya wondered why.
    The sash lashed out again, and for one moment, Katya thought it was one of the red-haired woman’s rare misses.
    But…no…
    The end of the sash licked across the witch’s forehead.
    The witch shrieked at the top of her lungs, a blood-curdling sound that made Katya’s hair stand on end. The witch’s hands were a blur of motion, the demon heads were clearly fighting her control, none of them were coming anywhere near Katya now, and the strange stone burned a terrible blue at the witch’s throat.
    And now Katya saw what the demon heads were doing. They were holding her, keeping her from running. Did they know that if she got the chance, now that she was losing, she would run and leave them to face the red-haired woman alone?
    But this was providing something else. Something that Katya had been hoping for since this fight had begun.
    She turned her concentration to the red-haired woman’s dance, tracking the rhythm, the moves. She was still being swarmed by demon heads, and some of them were getting through to her. The white silk of her garments was spotted with red, and not all of it was from the demons.
    But that shot to the forehead was not the only mark that the red-haired woman had put on the witch. So if Katya could time this just right…
    The opening she was hoping for came. The creatures tangling themselves in the witch’s hair gave a pull back. The red-haired woman scored a cut to the witch’s cheek. The witch screamed again and winced back, her eyes closing involuntarily.
    And Katya dropped her sword and pulled her short dagger—
    She dashed in, seized the stone in her left hand, and lifted