It shoved the tents out of shape and sent ripples streaming through the canvas. A wagon rocked sideways, then settled back on all four wheels.
“More,” Jhesrhi murmured, and the wind wailed louder. The raindrops caught in the surge almost seemed to be hurtling horizontally, not falling from the black clouds on high.
A piece of tent ripped loose from the rope and stake holding it in place and flapped wildly. Other sections did the same until one tent flipped over, exposing its contents to the wind and rain. For a few heartbeats, the lines on the far side of the neatly stacked supplies anchored the canvas like a leash holding back a frantic dog. Then it tore loose and flew away.
One by one, the other tents pursued it into the night. Meanwhile, the piles of foodstuffs and other items essential to an army on campaign blew apart. Kegs tumbled over the ground until they ruptured and spilled the ale inside. Bags split and surrendered their contents to the gale. The flour looked like a band of ghosts put to rout, while the fletchings were too small for human eyes to make out in the rain and the dark. Had Jhesrhi not been attuned to the wind and perceiving partly as it perceived, with a sort of touching at a distance, she wouldn’t have noticed the bits of feather flying away.
With a crash, a first wagon overturned. Others followed. She couldn’t tell how badly they were damaged, but at least their contents came tumbling out of the cargo beds for the elements to scatter, pilfer, and foul.
Eventually she decided she’d done all the harm she could at that particular site. She considered turning the wind on some of the other tents nearby, the ones that had soldiers inside them, but decided against it. She’d taken enough risks for one night.
She thanked the winds and told them they could stop generating the magical gale. It started subsiding immediately, although the violence of the hammering rain, blazing lightning, and booming thunder remained impressive in its own right.
Jhesrhi glanced around, making sure no one was watching, then asked the particular wind that had carried her there to return her to Tchazzar’s palace. As she floated upward, she wondered how much she’d actually accomplished.
She’d likely delayed the start of the Red Dragon’s campaign but possibly not by more than a day or two. Was that enough to matter? It all depended on how Gaedynn, Aoth, Khouryn, and the others were faring, and she had no way of knowing that.
She sighed. As much as she felt ill equipped to deal with all the subterfuge and intrigue, in one respect, the game she and her comrades were playing was like the sort of war to which she was accustomed. A soldier focused on his own particular task, often with no knowledge whatsoever of how a battle or campaign was progressing overall. He just had to hope that everybody’s efforts would add up to victory in the end.
In her imagination, Gaedynn smiled crookedly and responded to her thought: Right you are, Buttercup. It’s chaos and mass confusion every time. But don’t tell anybody, or how will Aoth peddle our alleged expertise?
You have my word, she thought, smiling, missing him. Then she felt a light tactile sensation like the brush of a hanging leaf, although it was almost lost amid the cold, wet drumming of the rain.
It startled her, and it took her a moment to figure out what had happened. Because of the magic she’d worked to destroy the supplies, she still had some residual connection to all the currents of air at play in her vicinity, some ability to sense what they were sensing. She hadn’t been conscious of it while it was simply validating what she perceived with her natural senses, but it was alerting her to something she hadn’t noticed.
She rattled off a rhyme to strengthen the bond, then reached out as if she had a hundred invisible hands attached to arms dozens of yards long. And so she found the creature.
It was flying some distance behind her, its leathery wings bouncing raindrops back up into the air with every beat. Like many creatures of the netherworld, it was somewhat manlike but possessed of an elongated, half-bestial head, clawed, four-fingered hands, and spines growing over most of its hide like a porcupine’s, although not so thickly as to obscure the essential gauntness of its frame.
It was a spined devil. Jhesrhi had encountered them on the battlefield when some enemy sorcerer or priest summoned them. But she’d never run into one that could make itself invisible, and she had no idea why one was shadowing her.
Maybe she could force it to explain, but probably not by mystically shackling its will. That wasn’t her kind of wizardry. She’d likely have to beat the answer out of it.
She warned the wind that when she turned, the devil was likely to hurl some of its spines at her. It should be prepared to shield her with a vigorous gust. Her staff urged her to blast the spinagon with fire, and she told it to stop its nudging and do as she commanded. Then she spun in the air, raised the weapon over her head, and spoke the first word of an incantation.
The spined devil lashed one arm at her, just as though it could strike her a backhanded blow from far away. And in a sense, it could, for a flare of crimson force exploded from the ring she belatedly noticed on its forefinger. The blaze spiked pain through her head and collapsed her thoughts into confusion. Perhaps it hurt and addled the wind that was carrying her too, because it dropped her and she plummeted toward the ground.
She wrenched her mind back into focus and cried a word of command that was exactly that. The wind scooped her up just a few feet shy of the top branches of an elm tree.
Visible, the spinagon snarled, snatched quills from its shoulder, and threw them. They hurtled at Jhesrhi like arrows and, despite the rain, burst into flame in midflight.
She sensed that the wind was still recovering from the first attack. It couldn’t hold her aloft and shield her from the missiles too. She gasped a word of warding and lifted one wing of her cloak in front of her.
For an instant the wool became as strong as mail. Two quills punched all the way through anyway. One pierced her sleeve too and pricked her arm. A wave of dizziness assailed her.
No, curse it! Surely only a tiny drop of the devil’s poison had entered her blood, and she refused to let it stop her. She snarled a word intended to produce a surge of vigor, and it steadied her to a degree, enough to take in the fact that her cape was on fire.
She snapped the garment to shake the spines out of it. Then she grasped the flames with her will. From her staff’s perspective, controlling fire wasn’t as good as making it. But it was something, and the pseudo-mind inside the weapon crowed in satisfaction.
Guided by instinct as much as arcane knowledge, she drew the fire out of the cloth, into herself, and streamed it on into the staff to add to the rod’s store of power. As it passed through her, it painlessly burned away the rest of her vertigo and weakness, a benefit she hadn’t anticipated.
She peered around, using both her own eyes and the wind’s tactile way of seeing. She found the spinagon hovering not far from where it had been a moment before. When it recognized that its first barrage of spines hadn’t incapacitated her, it hurled a second.
But like her, the wind had recovered from that initial assault. Without even needing to be prompted, it howled and sent the quills tumbling off course.
The devil wheeled and fled in the direction of the heart of the city. Jhesrhi gave chase.
As she did, she asked another favor of the winds. Bellowing, they whirled themselves into a spinning column, visible by virtue of the dust and litter caught in the spin.
The spined devil was caught in it too. The whirlpool of air sucked the nether creature down, or perhaps, tumbled and buffeted, the thing simply found it impossible to fly. Either way, it slammed down on the ground, and Jhesrhi allowed the vortex to disperse.