Spawn of the Winds by Brian Lumley

beautiful. Beautiful and regal—and powerful.
    Now she moved her arms out toward the six white titans that threatened her with their spinning, nodding heads, palms flat against them, denying them—and they paused in their forward motion as if suddenly come up against an invisible wall. Trembling and swaying wildly, fighting to move forward against the will of that Woman of the Winds, the great spinning tops strove to obey the ecstasies of the priests behind them. But her will was stronger than theirs, stronger than the combined wills of all the priests of Ithaqua together.
    Faster the tornadoes whirled, frenziedly battering themselves against the invisible wall of Armandra’s will, gyrating erratically and losing all of that precision with which they had marched across the plain. Their end was quick; unable to move forward they began to
sway from side to side, falling one against the next like dominoes tumbling in a row, and since they could not tumble forward they fell back the way they had come.
    And that was a sight to remember, the tumbling and crashing of those nearly solid inverted cones of snow and ice. An avalanche from the sky, the collapsing columns smashed down to raise a thick haze of ice-dust that momentarily obscured the panic gripping the wolf-warrior army. How the Priests of Ithaqua escaped with their lives in that shattering deluge I could never say, but escape they did, for when the white haze began to settle they were already aboard their sledges, and Boris Zchakow with them, rushing back across the white waste toward the distantly towering pyramid altar.
    With my binoculars I found the mad Russian, saw him turn to glare, eyes bulging, at the figure of the woman in the sky, mouthing some unheard obscenity and shaking a fist at her in lunatic fury.
    Ah, the fool—for Armandra saw him too!
    The flaming hair of that fantastic figure billowed up on her head and seemed to glow with an unnatural light, turning her whole body and the simple garment she wore a peculiar copper color, like frozen gold. Slowly, deliberately, she reached up, one slender arm above her head and the chill copper glow extended from her pointing hand to spiral upward to the great disc of black cloud that yet whirled and roared above her, a primal watchdog guarding its mistress.
    She began to rotate her arm, the circle rapidly growing wider as it she twirled the rope of some enormous lasso. And the cloud-dise the loop of that lasso, spun with her arm, speeding up until its edges became a wispy blur laced with flickering traceries of electrical fire
    Now the wolf-warrior army was in full flight, hurtling away down the slight slope toward the distant circle of totems and its central altar. Totally disarrayed, chaotic, theirs was a panic flight which, like a stampede, would not be checked until men and beasts had run themselves out. They were done with fighting for this day, hurrying home to lick their wounds and count their dead; and riding with them in their midst went Boris Zchakow, head and shoulders taller than the three men who rode his sledge with him.
    From this fleeing rabble back to the Woman of the Winds my binoculars flew, and now I could almost feel the anger radiating from her where she stood in coppery splendor atop the very air. “ Zchakow ,” I told the distant madman under my breath, “ Russian—if you think
you have an enemy in me, you don’t know the half of it. Human enemies you can possibly afford, but not such as this Woman of the Winds! ”
    And oh, I was right.
    Now the figure in the sky seemed to swell outward, burning bronze to match the billowing tresses that crowned her—and for a moment I thought I knew where I had seen a similar expansion before. But then, in another moment, the shape was human again, only human.
    Human? I laughed at myself derisively. There must be that in this being which was human, yes, but there was more, much more than that to her. There was this