Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 by C. Dale Brittain, Brittain

A magic lamp made a point of light within. Elerius sat reading, and beyond him I could just see a rounded shape on the couch that must be Antonia, asleep. Elerius lifted his head a moment, but I was fairly sure that even he, with al his abilities, could not see me. I flew upwards again and back to my slowly disintegrating phoenix.
    The hours of the short midsummer night seemed to drag on forever. From being keyed up with anticipation of a magical attack, I went to being tired and bored. I replaced the phoenix with a pair of dragons who placed their claws on each other’s shoulders and did a tango, but my heart wasn’t in it. As a test, this seemed a dismal failure. I stared vacantly and gloomily out into the darkness beyond my fire. Whether aimed at the Lady Justinia or aimed at me, it looked like the next attack would not come for a whiles—just long enough to give us a false sense of security.
    I had falen into a doze shortly before dawn when I was abruptly brought back to ful consciousness by the crack of a broken stick. My fire had burned down to cold ashes, and al my ilusions were long gone. I spun toward the sound to see a huge, dark shape coming over the hil, silhouetted against the eastern sky.
    It was in the form of a man, a man who walked heavily and awkwardly with his arms straight in front of him, a man ten feet tal.
    I shot away, my heart hammering. The creature folowed me, with a drag in its step like something dead that had forgotten how to walk, watching me with yelow eyes the size of saucers. There was an inteligence behind those eyes I did not recal seeing in the warriors. The creature’s heavy footfals seemed to shake the earth.
    Al right, I thought. We know then that I’m the target. The test is a success. We can stop now!
    The creature showed no sign of stopping. I kept ahead of it, but it moved surprisingly quickly for something so awkward. Elerius might have been able to help me against it, but I didn’t dare head back to the castle, trailing a creature of nightmare, to get him.
    Hovering just ahead of it, I madly tried both binding and dissolution spels, but al were ineffective. Years ago I had been pursued by a creature something like this and had found a way to improvise; desperately I tried to remember the words of the Hidden Language that had worked then. But nothing seemed to work now, and it kept on advancing. When I glanced over my shoulder to see that it was indeed maneuvering me toward the castle, I darted off in a different direction.
    “Come on,” I muttered toward the dawn. If this creature was made with the same magic of blood and bone that had held the warriors together only as long as darkness lasted, I should be safe in another few minutes.
    The creature, ignoring my change in direction, continued toward the castle. I dropped to the ground, yeled to get its attention, and very slowly backed away on foot: slowly enough, I hoped, to focus it on me again.

My foot caught on an uneven tussock just as it made a spring at me. I ducked and roled, suppressing a scream of terror, and shot up into the air an inch ahead of its grabbing hands. The yelow eyes seemed to be considering me in thoughtful assessment.
    Twenty feet above it, I tried taking deep breaths. Showing no more signs of starting toward the castle, the creature watched me patiently. The mouth, a slit in the face, opened in what might have been a smile.
    Inside were quite real teeth.
    I tried probing the spels that propeled it, hoping that if I could discover their structure I might find some way to reverse them. Slipping into the stream of magic, I probed there, and there—and came back to myself to find that my flying spel was disintegrating, and that I had descended almost within reach of the creature’s outstretched hands.
    Again I dodged away just in time. Sweat poured down my face, both at the closeness of my escape and at what I had found. My quick magical probe had shown me no way that this creature could be