She dismissed the Salamander with her thanks—it was clearly growing terrified at the feel of the terrible Earth power outside the shields, and she didn't blame it. With infinite care, she pulled the stick out from the undergrowth, little by little, until, with a sigh of relief, she got it free.
She turned around with it in her grip in time to see something wispy, sinuous, and pale blue streaking away from Reggie's hands. She hadn't gotten a good enough look at it to tell what it was, but she hoped he was sending for help. She tiptoed back to him and handed him the stick. With a look of relief, he took it gladly and used it to get himself—with her help—to his feet. "Now which way?" he whispered.
She shook her head. "I don't know!" she whispered back. "I never saw anything!"
She might not have been unconscious when she was brought here, but she had been bundled in a blanket. Truth to tell, she hadn't a clue which direction to go in.
Reggie clung to the rough staff Eleanor had found for him and tried to think. Had the path into this place been between those two flat stones he was facing now, or—
"Mother!" shrieked a young female voice behind him. "They're awake! They're trying to sneak away!"
Too late.
A soundless explosion of sickly yellow light impacted against their shields; he felt Eleanor react just in time to strengthen them, and a second later, he was reinforcing her. Fire magic was better for shields anyway; you couldn't wear away at Fire shields, the Fire just ate everything you threw at it. Even nasty stuff of the sort that Alison was throwing at them now; Fire just purified it, then consumed it. You could smother them, drown them, or blast through them if you were powerful enough, but you needed either to be extremely powerful in the first place, or to make an all-or-nothing commitment to the attack to do so, and Alison hadn't yet made that kind of attack.
Following directly on her attack came Alison herself, her face a mask of fury, with her solicitor Warrick Locke right beside her. He seemed to be unarmed, but she had a wicked-looking knife in one hand—a ritual blade, maybe, but it was also a real weapon, and he and Eleanor were unarmed. He gripped his stick like a quarterstaff, but he knew that he wouldn't be of much help with his leg ready to give out at any moment.
Real fire, physical fire, suddenly sprang up in a circle around them, following the line of the shields and setting fire to the undergrowth. It was a waist-high perimeter of flame that kept Alison and her minions from getting at her victims physically.
Reggie couldn't do exactly the same thing—but he could call a storm-wind, to lash at their adversaries with the branches of trees and bushes—and he did. Carolyn shrieked with indignation, and Warrick Locke ducked.
"Get them!" Alison shouted furiously over the howling wind, as her hair escaped from its pins and whipped in tendrils around her head, like the snakes of a Medusa.
Reggie expected another attack on their shields, and indeed, one came, a dull blow that actually drove the shields back a little. It didn't matter; the Elemental Fire devoured the rest of the attack, and the line of physical fire simply followed the shields, and Locke shook his head, when Alison gestured furiously at him.
And the glow of power faded a bit from the megaliths. He felt his heart leap—either she was losing control of it and it was sliding back into quiescence, or else she was draining it with her attacks. In either case, unless she found another source of power soon, she would be reduced to her own resources—
That was the moment when she seized Warrick Locke's wrist, shouted something incomprehensible—
And Locke screamed in fear and pain, falling to his knees, as he aged fifty years in a handful of seconds. A few seconds more, and Alison dropped his wrist, and the lifeless, withered hulk of what had been a man fell to the side, no longer moving.
Where did she get that? He knew what it was, in theory. Earth Masters healed—and so could harm. They grew—and so knew how to destroy. They could give life—and take it. It was what made them so dangerous when they went to the bad. Shocked to the core, Reggie just stared.
Both her daughters were equally shocked, and as a consequence, didn't react quickly enough when their mother seized both of their wrists. "No!" he shouted—not that he cared for them, and they had certainly been ready to consign him to whatever fate Alison had prepared for him, but no one should die like that—
But Alison was evidently not ready to kill her own flesh and blood. Quite.
Though the creatures she cast aside, first Carolyn, then Lauralee, were never going to attract anyone's attention again, except as objects of pity.
Alison turned towards them again, her eyes glowing with rage and power, her hands crooked into claws. And all around her, the stones were incandescent with terrible power.
She gestured with a crooked finger, and the earth rose in a wave and crushed out the physical fire over half of the periphery of the shields, leaving behind only the shields of Elemental Fire and Air themselves as protection.
Eleanor swallowed down fear and nausea, and tried to think. Their shields weren't going to hold, not for long, since they were feeding off nothing but her own strength. There had to be a way to stop her!
She held onto Reggie's arm, and backed up a step, so that he did the same. A slow, terrible smile stretched Alison's lips in a dreadful mockery of pleasure. She gestured again, and this time it was a horde of those horrible gnome-things that rose up out of the raw earth and flung themselves at the shields.
Eleanor gathered her wits, and called her Salamanders.
Once again, faithful and protective, they came, leaping out of the flames of the dying fires, dashing towards Alison's gnomes.
But they were joined by something Eleanor had never seen before; slender, sinuous things like legless dragons. They didn't seem to have much in the way of attacking ability, but whenever they whipped themselves around a Salamander, the Fire Elemental grew markedly larger or brighter—or both.
The Salamanders reached the line of gnomes, and this time, the gnomes didn't run.
There were more of them than there were Salamanders, and they swarmed the Fire Elementals, threatening to pull them down. But whatever the Salamanders came into contact with burst into flame.
The Salamanders weren't getting off unscathed, however; the gnomes had heavy clubs and spears, and they were perfectly prepared to use them.
Then a dozen of them got through, and Reggie lurched forwards to interpose himself between them and her. Two frantic Salamanders raced towards them, and a Sylph, a delicate, winged creature, suddenly popped into existence, hovering in midair. The Salamanders got one each, and the fairy-like being might have looked delicate, but she accounted for the other four with her bow and arrows.
But not before two of the got to Reggie, and while he was fending one off with his staff, the second ducked under a blow and smashed into Reggie's bad knee with his club.
Reggie toppled over with a choked-off cry of agony, as the winged girl filled the evil creature with three swift arrows in succession.