Spawn of the Winds by Brian Lumley Page A

power of hers over the elements—and there was her anger.
    Now she lowered that slender arm of hers to a horizontal position, and the great disc above her head tilted forward, dipped, slid down the wind, rushed like some gigantic discus thrown by a god in the Games of Heaven—or a demon in hell’s chaos. Leveling out over the white waste, it rushed after the fleeing army of wolf-warriors.
    Tracy clutched my arm, her breath pluming faster as she watched that incredible scene. “Oh, Hank—how could she?”
    It was one thing to be engaged in a fight for one’s life with fallible, mortal enemies, but another thing entirely to see this Woman of the Winds, this being who fought with weapons fashioned of the forces of nature, ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly destroy a small army.
    And surely that army, or what was left of it, would be destroyed if the whirling juggernaut Armandra had unleashed upon it were allowed to run amuck through its scattered, fleeing ranks.
    â€œI—I don’t know,” finally I answered Tracy’s question, surprised to find that my throat was dry and my voice cracked.
    â€œThey are terrible people,” Tracy continued, “but they are people!” Then she closed her eyes and turned her face to me as the great disc caught up with the hindmost of the fleeing wolf-warriors.
    Unable to tear my eyes away from the scene, I felt my lips draw back in a gasp of horror as the disc struck, tearing into and ripping through men and beasts as the blade of a circular saw rips wood, flinging the debris of its passing hundreds of feet into the icy air and across the white waste. And then, even as I watched, the disc paused, hesitated.
    With shaking hands I focused yet again upon the Woman of the
Winds. Now she had thrown up an arm before her eyes, her other hand thrust out before her as if to ward off some unseen horror—the horror of her own inhuman anger unleashed. In the next instant she shook her head, sending her magnificent red tresses billowing, then waved her arms outward in a sharp, clear sign of dismissal.
    And suddenly there was a tremendous roaring from the plain, such as a tidal wave might make breaking on some unsuspecting promontory. The weapon she had hurled at the fleeing army flew apart, disintegrated, returned in the space of a few seconds to its elemental form, lay inert over the plain as a gray cloud! A cloud that settled to a ground haze, revealing at last the hundred or so remaining wolf-warriors racing frenziedly on beyond its drifting, curling tendrils.
    Faintly, breaking the sudden silence, reaching us on a mournful wind that sprang up in the wake of all that had passed, came a distant rumbling and hysterical screaming from the spared, fleeing wolf-warriors. For certainly Armandra had spared them, and I knew now that there was more of the human in her than I had suspected.
    â€œShe let them go!” breathed Tracy.
    â€œLet them go!” Jimmy Franklin gasped, echoing her, his voice clearly displaying relief.
    â€œYes she did,” said another well know voice, edged now with pain, from behind us.
    It was Whitey, hobbling on one leg, his arm around the fat neck of a grinning Eskimo. “She did, so there’s hope for her yet,” he finished.
    â€œWhitey, what do you mean?” I asked.
    He nodded grimly in answer, eyebrows lowering, staring at the figure of the woman in the sky. “See for yourself,” he said.
    As a tremendous accolade of cheering, whooping, and the rattling of hundreds of weapons on shields went up from the victorious army of the snow-ships, I looked up and saw—and understood. I understood this woman’s power over the elements of the air, her ability to walk on the wind, her inhuman anger and her all-too-human anguish.
    For now she had turned to face her people, and hearing their wildly clamorous applause she held out her slender arms to them. Her marvelous hair swirled above her and her eyes shone