“You’ll be making runs against the troops below Panjir,” he said. “Flying in at treetop level. Dropping rocks and-“
“And making ourselves targets for the seven batteries of ballistas and other sky-pointing missile-throwers,” Skan replied caustically. “Scarcely-moving targets, at that. There isn’t room between those cliff-walls for more than one gryphon to fly at a time, much less a decent formation. We’ll look like beads on a string. If the missiles don’t get us, the makaar will, coming down on us from the heights. You can tell the General that we’ll be declining his little invitation. Tell him the message is from the Black Gryphon.”
And with that, Skan put his head back down on his foreclaws, closed his eyes to mere slits, and pretended to go to sleep.
The aide’s mouth dropped completely open for a moment, then closed quickly. But to his credit, he did not try to bluster or argue; he simply turned on his heel and left, trudging back down the hill, leaving behind a trail of little puffs of dust. Skan watched him until he was well out of sight, then jumped to his feet.
“Now what?” one of the others called from the shelter of his lair.
“Now I go to Urtho before Shaiknam does,” Skan replied, and leapt skyward, wings laboring to gain altitude, heading straight for the Tower.
Where would Urtho be at this hour? Probably the Strategy Room. That wasn’t exactly convenient; he couldn’t go to something deep inside the Tower without passing a door and at least one guard. Skan was going to have to go through channels, rather than landing directly on Urtho’s balcony the way he would have preferred.
He backwinged down onto the pavement in front of the Tower, paced regally up to the guard just outside the door, and bowed his head in salute.
“Skandranon to see Urtho on a matter of extreme urgency,” he said politely and with strictest formality. “I would appreciate it if you would send him a message to that effect.”
He was rather proud of the fact that, despite his own agitation, his sibilants had no hissing, and he pronounced his r’s without a trill. The guard nodded, tapped on the door and whispered to someone just inside for a moment, and turned back to Skan.
“Taken care of, Skandranon,” he said. “If you’d care to wait, I don’t think it’ll take long.”
Skan nodded. “Thank you,” he replied. He longed to pace; his feet itched with the need to tear something up out of sheer nerves. But he kept as still and as serene as a statue of black granite-except for his tail, which twitched and lashed, no matter how hard he concentrated on keeping it quiet.
With every moment that passed, he expected to hear a messenger from Shaiknam running up behind him-messenger-birds still probably avoided the General and his underlings, so Shaiknam would have to use a much slower method of requesting his own audience with the Mage of Silence.
As time continued to crawl past, Skan wanted to grind his beak. He felt like a very large target in the middle of all the pale stone.
Finally, after far too long a wait, a faint tap on the door behind him caused the guard to open it and listen for a moment. He flung it wide, and gestured for Skan to enter. “Urtho will see you,” he said. “The Mage is in the Strategy Room.”
No point in the guard telling him the way, as they both knew. Skan was perfectly at home in the Tower. He simply nodded and walked in the open door. A second guard stationed inside gave him a brief nod of recognition as Skan passed. Urtho had planned most of his Tower with creatures like his gryphons in mind; the floors were of natural, rough-textured stone, so that claws and talons did not slip on them, the doors and hallways were all made tall and wide enough for things larger than a human to pass. There wasn’t a great deal to see, otherwise-just the hallway itself, plain and unadorned, with closed doors on either side of it. The room that Skan wanted was behind the third door on the right, and he hurried right to it.
The door opened for him, but by human agency, and not magical. Urtho stood behind the table-sized contour map used for all major planning sessions. Areas held by Ma’ar had been magically tinted red; everything else was blue. There was an alarming amount of red on that map.
“Urtho,” Skan began, as soon as he was in the door. “I-“
“You and the Sixth Wing gryphons are staging a revolt,” Urtho replied, with dangerous gentleness.
Skan’s ear-tufts flattened. “How did you know?” he blurted, backing up a pace or two. Behind him, a hertasi shut the door and took himself out of the room by a side passage, leaving the two of them alone.
“I am a mage,” Urtho reminded him. “While I don’t squander my energies, I do use them on occasion to keep an eye on something. I knew you lot wouldn’t care for having Shaiknam set over you, but I didn’t think you’d start a revolution.” He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed levelly at Skan. “That’s not a particularly clever thing to do. You can’t survive without me, you know.”
Ah, hells. Well, might as well drop it all at once.
“Yes, we can,” Skan replied, raising his head so that he looked down on Urtho, rather than dropping his eyes below the level of Urtho’s as all his training screamed at him to do. “I’m sorry, Urtho, but we don’t need you anymore. We know how to make ourselves fertile now. Zhaneel is the proof of that, if you doubt my unadorned word on it.”
He had never in all of his life seen Urtho taken aback before. Surprised, yes. Shocked, certainly. But completely dumbfounded-never.
The expression of complete blankness on Urtho’s face was so funny that Skan couldn’t help himself. He started laughing.
Urtho’s face flushed, and the blank expression he wore turned to one of annoyance and a little anger. “What are you laughing at, you overgrown chicken?” the mage spluttered. “What is so damned funny?”
Skan could only shake his head, still laughing. “Your face-“ was all he was able to manage, before he ran out of breath.
Urtho reddened a little more, but then, grudgingly, he smiled. “So, you think you have the upper hand, do you?” he said, challenge in his tone.
Skan got himself back under control, and quickly, even though laughter threatened to bubble up through his chest at any moment. “Yes and no,” he replied. “We can leave now. You no longer control us by means of our future, Urtho. That doesn’t mean we will leave, though, it just means that we won’t have to put up with idiots like Shaiknam and Garber who think we’re to be thrown away by the handful. Wait!” He held up a foreclaw as Urtho started to say something. “Listen to me first. This is what Shaiknam planned to do with the gryphons as soon as he got the Sixth out into the field again!”
He told Urtho what the aide had told him, then traced out the planned maneuvers on the map. “You see?” he said, as Urtho’s brow furrowed. “You see what that would do? Maybe we would provide a distraction for Ma’ar’s troops, but there are better ways of supplying distraction than sacrificing half the Wings!”
“I do see,” Urtho replied, nodding thoughtfully. “I do see.”
“We don’t want to make trouble, Urtho,” Skan continued earnestly, taking a cautious step nearer, “but we don’t want to be blackmailed into suicidal missions. Maybe that’s not how it seemed to you, but that was how it felt to us.” He raised his head a little higher. “You built our urges to reproduce as strongly as our will to eat and breathe, and used that to control us. We’d rather serve you out of loyalty than coercion.”
“I would rather have you out of loyalty,” Urtho murmured, blinking rapidly once or twice. He coughed, hiding his face for just a moment, then looked up again. “And just how did you obtain this knowledge?” he asked. “I’m sure it was you-I can’t think of another gryphon who would have tried, let alone succeeded.”
Skan gaped his beak wide in an insolent grin, hoping to charm Urtho into good humor. “That, Urtho, would be telling.”