Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [25]
The doors were wide open, and she charged inside.
Katya got only the vaguest of impressions of the place—that it was huge, that it was as barren of furniture as the porch—when her attention was riveted by the two combatants and their hostage.
He had to be a hostage. The combatants wouldn’t have left him standing there unattended otherwise.
His eyes were glazed over and he swayed a bit where he stood, which was off to the side of the room. He was in no danger yet, but it was possible that once the witch saw a new element enter the affray, she would cut her losses, kill the warlord, and vanish.
So as her first act, Katya leaped across the room as she drew her sword out of the ether, and interposed herself between the warlord and danger. At the moment, she couldn’t tell who was who, except that the warlord was the only “innocent” here.
Only then did she stop to really look at the two mages.
Both were female. Both were stunningly beautiful. Both were clothed in more practical versions of the robes Katya had conjured when she’d first arrived; the brocades and embroideries were just as elaborate but sleeves, sash, and hemlines were nowhere near as exaggerated. One was all in blue; one was all in red. The one in blue had white hair, the one in red had red hair, and by now Katya knew enough to know that on a young woman, white hair was not an auspicious color, and for the uniformly black-haired people of Nippon, red hair on anyone was the sign of a something not of this world.
It was entirely possible that not one, but two inhuman women had their sights on this particular warlord. That would make things…interesting.
But it was also possible that the motives of one of these two were, if not pure, at least benign.
When you don’t know, you wait.
There were no other entities visible right now, and the witch, at least, had been reported as being served by demons. That could mean that the witch was withholding her demons for a later strike, or that they had all been defeated. It was possible that the witch had already lost that part of this battle. But in case they were in hiding somewhere, Katya needed to be alert for a possible attack.
Meanwhile, although this might not have been one of the most spectacular mage battles that Katya had ever seen, some of which had involved the wholesale destruction of entire fortresses and villages, it was definitely one of the more colorful. The woman in red was using a fan to direct her powers. As Katya stood guard over the rigid and unresponsive warlord, the woman in red made an attack. A backhanded flip of her unfurled fan sent a wave of daggers of white light singing toward her opponent. The woman in blue hastily scrawled a glowing glyph in the air with both index fingers that deflected the daggers to either side, where they struck the wooden walls and vanished. The woman in blue cast something invisible at the one in red, and a moment later, a gigantic, transparent serpent formed out of the air itself, materializing in a loose coil around the feet of the woman in red. It reared up until its head was higher than hers, and stared down at her out of cool, translucent eyes. Then it wrapped itself around the one in red and began to squeeze. With a contemptuous sniff, the one in red bent her head down and blew on the coils, a long, foggy breath that sparkled with frost crystals. The serpent stiffened, and a thin rime of ice and frost spread across its body with unbelievable swiftness. The serpent stiffened further, then stopped moving altogether. The woman in red stamped her foot, and with the sound of breaking glass, the serpent shattered, the pieces of it raining down around the woman in red, then vanishing. The woman in red was already making the next move. A forward flip of the fan created a wash of fire that raced toward the woman in blue and engulfed her. She was hidden from