Free Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 by C. Dale Brittain, Brittain Page A

the darkness.
    This couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare. But waking or dreaming I had to do the same thing: defend the castle of Yurt.
    I shouted spels in the heavy sylables of the Hidden Language, and the first warriors stopped as though they had run into a wal—which indeed they had. But their feet kept on moving as though trying to push themselves through. Their eyes stil glowed and their swords were ready if my spels weakened for even an instant.
    Someone ran into the little room by the gate where the bridge mechanism was worked and cranked the wheel to raise the drawbridge. Beyond its end, I could see in the dim light more warriors advancing.
    The ones on the bridge slid off into the moat as it rose, but the ones behind them kept right on marching, straight into the water as though not even noticing the bridge’s absence.
    The portculis slammed down as I started looping binding spels around the warriors trapped between the gate and my magical barrier. One by one they stopped moving as my spels caught and held.
    I paused to catch my breath. Magic is hard physical as wel as mental work. It had been very close, I thought, but I had gotten out into the courtyard with my spels in time.
    There was a shout from the wal. “They’re coming up!”
    Swords and glowing eyes loomed against the starlit sky. Knights with lances swarmed to the battlements to thrust back into the moat men—or monsters—that seemed to have no individuality, no awareness of their surroundings, only a need to keep on coming.
    They appeared to have marched underwater across the floor of the moat and be coming straight up the wal by finding fingerholds among the stones. The knights’ lamps made crazy patterns of light and shadow among the castle’s defenders and whatever was clambering up toward them.
    I would have to wait to catch my breath. The thought flitted through my mind that Hildegarde would be very sorry to have missed al this.
    “By the saints!” someone shouted. “It’s as though they’re directed by the devil himself!”
    King Paul was in the middle of it al. I threw spel after spel onto the advancing warriors, raw terror lurking just beyond my shoulder. “Shal we make a sortie, Wizard?” the king asked me quietly.
    “Magics stopping them,” I gasped. “Don’t try fighting them with steel—they look like they’d keep on fighting even with their heads cut off. Where’s the watchman?”

    “That dark shape on the ground just inside the gate,” said Paul. “He’s not moving.”
    I paused for a second to wipe my forehead and cautiously lowered the magical barrier I had thrown up around the first warriors through the gate. They were now al secured by binding spels. Several people rushed to examine the watchman.
    “He’s dead!” said a knight in amazement. I was not amazed. If the watchman had not blown his horn with his final breath, if I had been only a few seconds slower getting to the gate, there would have been a whole lot more people dead by now. Yurt had always been a very peaceful kingdom. It looked like it wasn’t anymore.

    IV
    It took me half an hour to get al the warriors, both inside and outside the wals, immobilized with magic. We lowered the drawbridge again, and knights carried the ones who had made it into the courtyard back outside. They used grappling hooks to retrieve the rest from the moat; being underwater had not taken the light from the creatures’ eyes. The swans from the moat had al retreated to dry land, hissing and flapping their wings menacingly if anyone came near.
    Though the knights tried to pry the swords from the warriors’ grips, they held on far too tightly, even encased in my binding spels. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least a hundred of them.
    Whatever they were, I thought, studying them by lamplight with fists on my hips, they weren’t human. Human in shape, holding swords in human hands, they had no minds inside their heads or souls behind their eyes. The