The Iron Tempest by Ron Miller

proved that her original low opinion of the brute had been justified. The curses changed to wheedling pleas when he saw that she meant to abandon him, but she paid these no more attention than she had the curses.
    She had indeed forgotten Brunello as thoroughly as she had King Sacripant before her horse had even begun to pick its way down the boulder-strewn slope—her mind was too busy anticipating the imminent release of Rashid.
    She arrived at the base of the towering rock and, shading her eyes against the glare of the summer sky, craned her neck in an effort to see the gleaming fortress where it disappeared into the clouds, one of which it skewered like a needle. The rocky pinnacle seemed every bit as impregnable as advertised: it offered not so much as a fingerhold let alone a path or stairway. If the magician chose to ignore her, there was little, it seemed, that she would be able to do. So, she decided, she would make herself hard to ignore.
    Thinking that what had worked for the unlucky Gradasso ought to work for her, she took a curled brass hunting horn from where it hung on her saddle and gave it a hearty, if tentative, blast. Its yelping whoop reverberated from the walls of the crater. The second time she took as deep a breath as she could hold and tried to force all the air in her lungs through the coiled tube instantaneously. Her face purpled, tears squirted through her tightly-squeezed eyelids and she thought that she was for sure straightening the brass coil by sheer force of air pressure. The rocky amphitheater quivered as though in pain and the great tower itself seemed to twitch a little, as though wincing at the horrible, discordant blast. She did it a third time and then a fourth. Perspiration poured down her face, which was red as a pomegranate from the strain. Even when she was not blasting away with the horn, the sound continued almost unabated, rebounding from rock to cliff like a tennis ball. The pinnacle quivered like a tuning fork and tiny rocks rained all around her in a lithoid hail.
    She had to take a long pause after the fourth hoot; she had grown so dizzy from hyperventilation that she feared she would pass out. As the cacophonous echoes damped, she heard a tiny voice crying out, like a distressed ant. Looking up and straining her eyes to the utmost—she had extraordinarily perfect vision—she could just make out an infinitesimal figure at the parapet of the castle, the frantically waving arms heightening its resemblance to an ant.
    She pulled her sword from its sheath and waved it over her head; it flashed in the sunlight, sending the magician an unmistakable heliographic challenge.
    The distant figure stopped waving its tiny arms and disappeared behind the parapet. A moment later a larger blackness appeared. Bradamant’s hooked brows clenched in puzzlement for a moment, then she realized that she must be looking at the hippogryph—at the same moment the monster launched itself into space. It hovered directly over her head, so that she had to lean far back in her saddle, bracing herself with one hand, in order to see it. It was so far away and the sky was so bright she could make out few details; the hippogryph looked like an eagle or an osprey lazily searching out a rabbit or fish. Suddenly its wings folded and it plummeted like (if she only knew it) a Stuka upon a Polish village. Bradamant stood her ground, holding her sword rigidly above her head, like an accountant’s spike waiting for its first invoice. In her peripheral vision she could see the hippogryph’s shadow racing across the floor of the crater toward her.
    The monster had grown so large and close that she could clearly see its eyes, glittering like oiled ball bearings, and the armored man perched behind that great head. She had the presence of mind, even when confronted with that rushing terror, to notice that the magician was apparently so confident of his superior position and the power of his creature that he bore