Some of the palace guard fingered their weapons and looked sullen, but there were good reasons for standing still. The first was the pile of ash where the Master-At-Arms had stood, the second was Will Spearshaker’s cries of mingled pain and relief as the moat cooled his hot armor. The third and fourth good reasons were the gleam in each of the dragon’s eyes as her snout swung back and forth across their ranks in continued threat. Hal followed up his advantage.
“Two of you, get your cloaks off and give them to the girls.”

Hal’s hand pointed towards Caelia and Chelinde, huddled together in their nakedness and staring at their father’s powdery remains gently blowing away in the wind. An upsetting sight, slightly softened by the fact that the Master-At-Arms had always been a total bastard to everyone who’d had the misfortune of knowing him, especially his own family. But before anybody could move a patch of air between the soldiers and Hal clouded over as though a tiny fog patch was forming there, no bigger than a man — and forming into the ghostly outline of a man’s figure.

An old man, a hunched man, a man with no hair above his ears and a white beard down to his belt, holding a long staff and wearing furs that belonged to no animal that had ever prowled in these mountains. Gaunt Gregory, Chief warlock to King Argud, somehow appearing to them all as a shadow of his real self. Instinctively, every soldier glanced at the castle, where the warlock had lived as long as any could remember, as homebound in his tower chamber as a miller’s donkey tethered to a grinding stone.

There, on the nearest wall, was the hulking figure of the King, waving his arms in great excitement, and beside him stood the dwarfish figure of his warlock. They saw the smaller man lifting his staff, as tall as himself, and point it down towards the moat. At the same moment the warlock’s apparition also raised its staff and pointed. At the place where both staffs were aimed was a head and flailing arms, the arms desperately struggling to support their owner’s head above the filthy ooze of the moat. None of the witch’s supernatural skills seemed to avail her now as she fought to keep her mouth and nose out of the squalid slime she was slowly sinking into.

Gaunt Gregory’s words came not through Hal’s ears, but like something felt in the twilight time between sleeping and waking, some message shining from snows on a mountain peak no mortal could scale: “Save her, boy, save her! The King commands it!”

Not only was Hal made aware of the warlock’s appeal, so were the soldiers. They stared at him, then snapped to attention, as though the fools expected Hal to start drilling them. What orders did they think a bollock naked shitbucket emptier could give them? Yet suddenly he was doing exactly that.

“Who’s senior rank leader?”

A gray mustached veteran clapped a hand to his cross-bow. “I am, boy.”

Corporal Clint O’The East Wood would have died rather than take orders from Hal but that wasn’t an option on offer. Subjects who failed both the King and the Chief warlock in important matters suffered far worse fates than simply ceasing to exist.

“Get that net. Use your swords to cut it apart. Tie three of the long lengths of rope together. Then give me one end with a loop in it. I’m going to try to walk out far enough on Josephine’s tail to throw it to the witch. Keep hold of the other end and when the witch has hold of the loop, haul her in. You understand?”

“Aye, boy, aye.”

It wasn’t in the Corporal’s training to throw a weapon onto the ground but he put down his crossbow with the greatest possible speed, pulled out his blade and went at the net as though it were a living enemy. Hal turned to Josephine, pointed at the witch, and then at the dragon’s tail.

“Can I walk along your tail to help the woman?”

Josephine growled, then snorted, a hint of flames as insubstantial as the warlock’s ghost flickering at her nozzles. The dragon was usually in a good humor, but apparently not where witches were concerned. Not witches who handled their broomsticks like a tipsy gipsy aloft on an unbroken colt, nor yet witches who treated anything on the wing as unfortunate flying objects. Josephine was still deeply in the grip of sky rage.

“Please, Josephine, the King and the Chief warlock have commanded me to help the witch. Can you help me?”

A sickly shade of green appeared on her skin: Hal understood her doubts only too well. The further he moved down her tail, the harder it would be for Josephine to support his weight on it.

“Well, the best you can do, my lady. And quickly!”

Her colors flickered and changed on her coat of scales again, and then she was backing her haunches over the edge of the moat, then her back legs, reluctance showing in every moment as she came into contact with the filth. Her tail she held as high as she could until she was half lying on the bank and half floating in the moat, and then she let it drop straight down on top of the partly dissolved turds floating in the scum. Hal noted with surprise the depths and intensity of the shades Josephine was now displaying: he couldn’t imagine where a nice young female dragon had learnt so much bad language. Then his attention was broken by two men-at-arms running up to him with the looped end of a rope between them. With them was Corporal Clint.

“All ready, sir.”

“Get your men to on the other end and to be ready to haul like carthorses. I need a man here at the moat’s edge to put a turn of rope around one of the dragon’s back spikes if you need her help in hauling the witch out.”

“Aye, boy.” Corporal Clint O’The East Wood turned and pointed to one of the soldiers. “You, when I shout, go ahead — make my belay.”

Hal grabbed the loop and stepped onto the base of Josephine’s tail. Which was a big problem itself. The needle sharp spikes that ran down her back extended along her tail as well, gradually getting smaller but no blunter. Right here they were as long as dagger blades and he had to step between them with his toes pointed inward like a pigeon’s. An uncomfortable position, rendered much more uncomfortable by the thought that if he slipped and fell astride the dragon’s tail the spikes would instantly make sure that Caelia and Chelinde would not only be the first girls he’d ever fucked, they’d be the last ones as well.

“Fria and Odon, Fria and Odon, help me, please!”

He began moving. One step, two steps, three, with the slime of the moat lapping around his ankles, the dragon’s scales becoming slippery underfoot. Exactly as they had both feared, the further along Josephine’s tail he went, the harder it was for her to keep it up above the moat’s surface.

Hal stopped to regain his swaying balance and stared slack jawed at what was happening out in the moat. For now the warlock’s mirage was hovering directly in front of the witch, arm and staff outstretched above her.

Somehow he seemed to be supporting her because both her arms were raised above the mire, one pointing towards the castle and one towards Hal. And close to the castle wall her broomstick was rising again. Splintered and broken in the middle, the front half drooping down, its bundle of twigs mostly burnt off, spattered in filth, but still rising up into the air as lightly as a feather above a fireplace. The broomstick stopped at knee height above the moat and swung around as slowly as a rusty weathercock touched by a summer breeze.

Then, close to Hal, a great bubble of air burst amidst the floating scum, hard by where the witch’s cat was still buried, the tom’s tail marking its last resting place. Hal hoped so anyway, since it was his fist which had sent the feline familiar tumbling down into the deep shite, and the memory of its malevolent green eyes would haunt his nightmares for many nights to come. Yet even as he looked the thickly furred tail began to disappear into the moat as if it were a plant which was shrivelling instead of growing. Perhaps it meant the final destruction of the savage creature which had torn his flesh and nearly done much worse to his balls.

As the tail vanished more bubbles broke on the surface of the moat like farts from a carthorse’s bum, each one releasing a tiny rainbow of color and smells which were far worse than any privy bucket Hal had ever emptied. Then a head appeared in amongst them and green eyes opened which turned towards Hal in pure hatred again. Yet this wasn’t a cat which had surfaced, but a toad: a toad as big as the cat had been, a toad of brown and yellow, with masses of red tinged warts and spikes, an apparition so unlike anything in nature that one look was enough to know it as a perverse parody of anything the Gods had intended to live on earth.

Hal shivered in fear as he realized that nightmares were nothing compared to seeing a terrible enemy resurrected. The toad came swimming and slopping on its belly towards him, as near to being in its own element as any creature could be in this foul bog. It stopped about four paces from Hal and opened a mouth which seemed to be the ugliest part of the whole swollen monstrosity. A sack of living venom perched on a lake of poison, and a pair of emerald eyes looking at Hal with a promise of agonizing revenge. He longed to run home. But he could run nowhere from where he was and instead waited like a pig penned for slaughtering as a tongue as long and red as a scarlet tippet flicked through the air — and stopped short of the loop of rope in Hal’s hand. Again, the same thing happened. And this time the toad raised a webbed paw and pointed towards the witch.

Suddenly, and incredibly, Hal felt almost gratitude towards the hideous creature. Because now he knew what it wanted him to do. Much more importantly he knew what he might no longer have to do himself. As well as he could he threw the loop towards the toad, watching as it landed just short of the witch’s creature. It went forward in one quick movement before picking up the rope in its mouth as carefully as a cat holding a kitten. Then it turned and began dragging the rope behind it as it paddled towards the witch. Hal paid out the slack, swaying on Josephine’s trembling tail, still terrified but at least hopeful that he need go no further into this shit filled slough.

The remains of the broomstick reached the witch first, the upright handles on the broken front piece bent down towards her like a grazing deer’s horns. At the same instant the dim figure of Gaunt Gregory disappeared, as if the two magics could not exist together. The witch began to sink again, her hands shot up over her mud choked hair and grasped the broom between the twigs and the break in the handle. Then the broomstick bobbed up and down in her desperate grip, as though it was floating on rippling water, but to no avail in lifting the witch from the clinging mud. A handhold on life she had, but nothing more. Unless her familiar could reach her with the rope. And, as big and strong as it was, the toad seemed to be struggling to pull out the ever increasing length of rope between it and Hal.

In desperation he hauled out yet more line from the hands of the soldier on the bank and took another step along Josephine’s tail. The dragon groaned, a startling thing for somebody so used to her normal silence. Nothing could show more plainly how difficult it was for her to keep supporting him on her tail: it was as if Hal was trying to hold aloft a horseshoe on his little finger. He felt her trembling underfoot and the tail sink lower, so that he was up to his knees now in filth. But the toad had reached its mistress!

Hal thanked his Gods as he saw her take one hand off the broomstick in a hasty snatch at the rope and then lift up the dripping loop. With one deft movement she dropped it over her head and wriggled the free arm through it before seizing the broom again in a double handed hold. Then she removed her other hand, pulled down the free arm and slipped it up through the other side of the loop whilst grabbing at the broom again. The loop was safely under her arms and now they could act!

Hal waved to the Corporal and the soldier on the bank. A twirl of rope around one of Josephine’s spikes and she was pulling on it, and so were the soldiers, stamping their feet into the turf as though they were trying to pull the castle walls down. The problem was that everybody was worried about the witch, not about Hal, and even Josephine moved so quickly he was left behind in the mire as her tail jerked forward. He lifted his feet clear of her spikes, then toppled sideways with a cry of despair and grabbed at the rope. It was certainly moving, moving too quickly, piling up waves of slime and shit into his face as he clung on to the slippery strands. The only recourse left to him was to roll onto his back and clutch the rope desperately to his chest, the back of his neck then taking the impact of the crusted filth.

A brief glimpse of the witch behind showed her in much the same situation, but at least luckier than him by being able to lift her upper body higher because the broomstick was travelling with her, still offering the woman as much support as it could. Not that anybody could have recognized her as a man, woman or demon, not with the slime plastered over her limbs, her face, and her hair — and Hal was in no much better condition when the Corporal’s men hauled him onto the bank. The expressions of their faces as they had to touch him showed that: not that he had any sympathy for their fastidiousness; they should try his privy bucket emptying job once in a while.

On the other hand he had every sympathy with the reluctance the soldiers showed in hauling the witch out of the midden. A dislike of scraping shit off somebody is one thing, getting up close and dirty to an enraged witch was akin to putting a muzzle on a mad dog. Worse, in fact, much worse. A mad dog might bite your balls off, but with a mad witch you might end up pissing out of your ear for the rest of your life. Which is an embarrassing place to carry your wedding tackle. But already the King was galloping out over the drawbridge on his white stallion and, whatever the witch might do, everybody else knew what Argud the Defiler would certainly do if his orders weren’t carried out to the letter. So the soldiers helped the woman out onto the turf, where she shook them off her arms as easily as if they were playful puppies. Then she strode across the lumpy turf to Hal, the broomstick drifting after her at waist height and two steps behind.

Like a dutiful wife following her husband in a public place, Hal thought, a hurt wife yet silent and submissive in showing off her injuries.