Sixteen
For one brief moment when Skandranon defied him, Urtho had been in a white-hot rage. How dared this creature, a thing that he had created, presume to dictate the terms of this war? How dared this same creature usurp the knowledge it had no right to, and was not intelligent enough to use properly?
But that rage burned itself out as quickly as it came, for Urtho had lived too long to let his rage control his intellect. Intellect came to his rescue, with all of the answers to the questions of “how dared. . . .” Skan dared because he was not a “creature”; he was a living, thinking, rightfully independent being, as were all the rest of the gryphons. They were precisely what he had hoped and planned for and had never thought they would become in his lifetime. They had the right to control their own destinies. Perhaps he was responsible for their form, but their spirits were their own. He was now the one who “had no right” to dictate anything to them-and in a blinding instant of insight he realized that he was incredibly lucky that they didn’t harbor resentment against him for what he’d withheld from them. Instead, they were still loyal to him.
They would have been perfectly within their rights to fly off as they threatened, he thought, as Skan laughed at the expression on his face. It’s nothing short of a miracle that they didn’t. Dear gods, we have been lucky. . . .
He didn’t realize how lucky, until Skan told him just what Shaiknam had been planning. A quick survey of the topography of the area told him what it did not tell Skan; that Shaiknam had intended to launch an all-or-nothing glory-strike against the heavily-fortified valley. Such things succeeded brilliantly when they succeeded at all, but this particular battle-plan didn’t have the chances of a snowflake in a frying pan of working. It was just another one of Shaiknam’s insane attempts to pull off some maneuver that would have him hailed as a military genius and a hero.
The only trouble was that military geniuses and heroes had sound reasoning behind their plans. Shaiknam, unfortunately, had only wild ideas.
Urtho cursed the man silently as Skan pointed out all the ways that the gryphons would be cut down without being able to defend themselves. Shaiknam’s father was such a brilliant strategist and commander. How had the man avoided learning even the simplest of strategies from him?
Well, there was no hope for it; the only way to get rid of the man now would be to strip the Sixth of all nonhuman troops and mages on the excuse that all the other Commands were undermanned, and reassign the personnel elsewhere. Shaiknam could still be Commander of the Sixth, but he would only command foot-troops, all of them human. With no aerial support, and no mages, he would be forced into caution.
That should keep him out of trouble, and his inept assistant, Garber, too.
He growled a little when Skan refused to tell him who his co-conspirators had been, but it was a good bet that Lady Cinnabar was involved in this, right up to her aristocratic chin. And where you found Cinnabar, you found Tamsin, and probably Amberdrake. No doubt they got in when Cinnabar asked to “look at my records on the gryphons.” I thought she was looking for a cure for belly ache! The kestra’chern must have gotten a client to make him a set of “keys” for mage-locks; that would account for how they’d gotten into the book.
The wonder of it was that they had managed to penetrate past all the fireworks and folderol in order to find the real triggers for fertility.
“How many of you know the spell?” he asked, as reluctant admiration set in.
“All,” Skan said, without so much as blinking an eye. “And it’s not exactly a flashy spell, Urtho. It was simply good design. There was no point in holding the information back. Every gryphon outside this Tower knows the secret.”
He couldn’t help it; he had to shake his head with pure admiration. “And you’ve kept this whole thing from me all this time! Unbelievable.”
“We had reason to keep it among ourselves,” Skan replied. “Good reason. We didn’t know how you would feel or act, and we didn’t want you finding out before the time was right for me to tell you.”
“So you were the sacrificial goat, hmm?” Urtho eyed Skan dubiously. “I don’t know; a sacrifice is supposed to be savory, not scrawny.”
Skan drew himself up in an exaggerated pose. “A sacrifice is supposed to be the best of the best. I believe I fill that description.”
His eyes twinkled as he watched Urtho from beneath his heavy lids, and his beak gaped in a broad grin when Urtho laughed aloud.
“I submit to the inevitable, my friend,” Urtho said, still laughing, as he slapped Skan on the shoulder. “I suppose I must consider this as your test of adulthood, as the Kaled’a’in give their youngsters. You gryphons are certainly not my children any longer-not anyone’s children.”
Then he sobered. “I am glad that this has happened now, Skan. And I am glad that you are here. I need to pass along some grave news of my own, and this will probably be the best opportunity to do so.”
He called in the hertasi, who waited discreetly just on the other side of the door, and gave him swift instructions. “I wish you to summon General Shaiknam and take him to the Marble Office; once you have left him there, summon the commanders of the other forces to the Strategy Room.”
He turned back to Skan. “I am splitting the non-human manpower of the Sixth among all the other commanders-I have reason enough since all of them have been complaining that they are short-handed. That will leave Shaiknam in command of nothing but humans. Is there any commander that you think the gryphons of the Sixth would prefer to serve?”
For once, he had caught the Black Gryphon by surprise; Skan’s grin-gape turned into a jaw-dropped gape of surprise, and his eyes went blank for a moment. “Ah-ah-Judeth of the Fifth, I think.”
Urtho nodded, pleased with his choice. “Excellent. And she has had no real gryphon wings assigned to her forces until now, only those on loan from the Sixth or the Fourth. Consider it done.” Urtho regarded Skan measuringly. “Still, the gryphons should have their own collective voice, even as the mages do. There are things that you know about yourselves that no human could. There should be one gryphon assigned to speak for all gryphons, so that things will not come to the pass they have with Shaiknam before I come to hear about it.” He stabbed out a finger. “You. You, Skan. I hereby assign you to be the overall commander of all the gryphon wings and to speak for them directly to me.”
Skan’s surprise turned to stupefaction. His head came up as if someone had poked him in the rear. “Me?” he squeaked-yes, squeaked, he sounded like a mouse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Me? Why me? I am honored, Urtho, but-“
Urtho waved his objections aside. “You’ve obviously thought about becoming the leader of the gryphons, or why else would you have read all my history books about the great leaders of the past? The others clearly think that you should have that position, or why else would they have sent you here to confront me over Shaiknam?”
Is it unusually warm in here? Skan felt his nares flushing, and he hung his head. “They didn’t exactly pick me,” he admitted. “They couldn’t seem to do much besides panic and complain, so I . . . I took over. Nobody seemed to mind.”
“All the more reason to place you in charge, if you were the only one to take charge,” Urtho said implacably. “How do you think I wound up in charge of this so-called army?”
Skan ducked his head between his shoulder blades, his nares positively burning. “I’m not sure that’s a fit comparison-“
“Now, I have a few things to tell you,” Urtho continued. “I don’t know if you’ve been aware of it, but I’ve been sending groups of families and noncombatants into the west ever since we first thought we’d have to abandon the Tower.” He turned back to the map and stood over it, brooding. “I didn’t like having such a great concentration of folk here in the first place, and when I realized what chaos an evacuation would be, I liked it even less.”