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The central pair, a man and a woman judging by the outlines of their bodies, were also tall. The woman wore a long robe dress, brown with a broad strip of white in the front and thin red symbols woven into it. The man had a matching outfit, although his robe was more square-cut. They wore identical overcoats, a kind of half-jacket, solid over their chests but which split toward the bottom into long ribbons of white fabric that fell below their knees. Each ribbon bore more red symbols and ended in an amulet of golden metal. If they spun, the ribbons would fly around them, forming perfect circles.
A two-inch-wide band of braided cloth crossed the woman’s forehead. A fringe of thin fabric strips, each ending in a large gold bead, dripped from the band all the way to her nose, obscuring her eyes. The man wore a human skull over the top half of his face, studded with fangs from some sort of huge predator. All visible skin was smeared with the same bluish clay, but their hair was clean and pulled back from their faces into tight horse tails. Both held staves, and the brown stains on their shafts looked suspiciously like blood.
“What are they?” Troy murmured.
“Mages or priests,” I said. “The ruling caste. No collars.”
The two mages stood still. They were probably staring at us, but it was hard to tell. At five hundred yards, they were well outside of bow range.
Humans liked to see each other’s eyes. Hiding them was usually done for three reasons: to protect someone’s face, to obscure their identity, or to be seen as a personification of something greater than themselves. A conduit for the spirits, an embodiment of justice, a force rather than an individual.
“Nice skull.” Troy’s face was a harsh mask.
“I feel like he’s trying to tell us something,” I said. “Not sure what it is. He’s so subtle about it.”
Owen chuckled.
The skull mage raised his staff and tapped it on the ground. Two hunters stepped forward and unfolded another tapestry between them. Twenty red figures.
“They doubled their ask,” Troy said.
“Punishment,” I told them.
The skull mage pointed his staff at me and then at the tapestry.
Ah. It was my doing so I had to atone by being one of the twenty.
I crossed my arms on my chest. That should be clear enough.
The fringe mage stepped forward and spun, twirling her staff. She did it in complete silence. The creep factor was high.
The mage turned and twisted. There was a definite pattern to her dance. I couldn’t feel her magic from this distance, but she was cooking something nasty.
“Troy,” I said, “Go get my husband, please.”
Troy turned and took off down the stairs at top speed.
The skull mage stepped aside and spun as well. His staff work was less fluid, more abrupt, as if he was trying to rip through the air. The two mages whirled, but not in unison. Their movements weren’t coordinated. Whatever they were doing was similar but separate.
“You can ring the bell now,” I told the guard.
The kid grabbed the rope attached to the clapper and shook it hard. The bell rang out in a hysterical frenzy.
The fringe mage thrust her staff up and plunged it into the ground. Thunder clapped. A huge creature landed in the grass in front of her, swirling with dark smoke. Massive and shaggy with brown fur, it stood eight and a half feet tall on four thick, sturdy legs. A big hump protruded between its shoulders. Its head was pure rhino, bearing a single enormous horn, five feet long and at least a foot thick. It curved like the blade of a scythe, jabbing upward.
Every bit of the rhino’s bulk bore thick bone plates with foot-long spikes: its back, its sides, even its head. Gold-colored veins crisscrossed the plates, fusing them together. A broad bone carapace protected its forehead, and a segmented metal and bone collar shielded its neck.
The bone wasn’t a natural part of the creature but armor added to it.
I couldn’t see any belts or harness straps. The armor seemed stuck to the rhino, as if glued onto the animal’s hide. Magic rolled off it, like hot air from asphalt, a shimmering, transparent corona that turned into coils of dark vapor and melted into the air.
That was a hell of a summon. And there was a second one coming as soon as the skull mage finished his dance.
The beast sighted our gate with its mean black eyes.
“Owen, how much do you think it weighs?”
“I’d say he’s about five of me. Without armor.”
An adult bison weighed about two thousand pounds. If that thing hit the gates at full speed, it would rip right through them and probably take a chunk of the wall with it. Shit.
The monster rhino dug into the ground with his foreleg like a bull.
