“Well . . . not that I know of,” he said hesitantly. “But these aren’t the same wyrsa I know. They’ve been changed—maybe they are more tractable than the old kind. Maybe the poison was removed as a trade-off for some other powers, or it contributed to their uncontrollability. And a mage could have brought us down in their territory for amusement without needing to control them, just letting them do what they do.”
“You’re just full of good news today, aren’t you?” she growled, then repented. I shouldn’t be taking our bad luck out on him. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m just not exactly in a good frame of mind right now.”
“Neither am I,” he said softly, in a voice in which she could clearly hear his fear. “Neither am I.”
Tad kept a watch all day as Blade concentrated on fishing. Once or twice a single wyrsa showed itself, but the creatures made no move to cross the river to get at them.
Of course not. Night has always been their chosen hunting-time, and that should be especially true of wyrsa with this new coloration. Swift, silent, and incredibly fierce, he would not have wanted to face one of this new type, much less an entire pack.
I wonder how big the pack is, anyway? Six? Ten? More?
Were they the sport-offspring of a single female? Wyrsa were’only supposed to litter once every two years, and they didn’t whelp more than a couple at a time. If these are all from twin offspring of a single litter, back when the storms changed them—how many could the pair have produced? Four years to maturity, then two pups every two years. . . .
There could be as few as the seven that they had seen, and as many as thirty or forty. The true answer was probably somewhere in between.
He and Blade ate in silence, then she banked the fire down to almost nothing while he took the first watch. As soon as it was fully dark, he eased several rocks into place to disguise his outline, then pressed himself up against the stone of the floor as flat as he could. He hoped he could convince them that he wasn’t there, that nothing was watching them from the mouth of the cave. If he could lure one out into the open, out on the slippery rocks of the riverbank, he might be able to get off a very simple bit of magic. If he could stun one long enough to knock it into the river—well, here below the falls it would get sucked under to drown. Nothing but a fish could survive the swirling currents right at the foot of the falls. That would be one less wyrsa to contend with.
He didn’t hear Blade so much as sense her; after a moment’s hesitation, she touched his foot, then eased on up beside him.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she mouthed into his ear. He nodded. Stupid, maybe, but she had good cause for insomnia.
She pressed herself even farther down against the stone than he had; anything that spotted her from across the river would have to have better eyesight than an owl.
The rain is slacking off. That was both good and bad news; he had an idea that the wyrsa didn’t much care for rain, and that they were averse to climbing around on rain-slick rocks. Like him, they had talons, but he didn’t think that their feet were as flexible as his. Those talons could make walking on rock difficult.
On the other hand, as the rain thinned, that made visibility across the river better, especially if the lightning kept up without any rain falling.
Something moved on the bank across from his position. He froze, and he felt Blade hold her breath.
Lightning flickered, and the light fell on a sleek, black form, poised at the very edge of the bank, peering intently in their direction. And now he saw that the white glazing of the dead one’s eyes had been the real color; the wyrsa’s eyes were a dead, opaque corpse-white. The very look of them, as the creature peered across the river in their direction, made his skin crawl.
He readied his spell, hoarding his energies. No point in striking unless everything was perfect. . . .
He willed the creature to remain, to lean forward more. Lightning flickered again; it was still there, still craning its neck, peering.
Stay . . . stay. . . .
Now!
He unleashed the energy; saw the wyrsa start, its eyes widening—
But instead of dropping over, stunned, it glowed for a moment. Blade gasped, so Tad knew that she had seen it, too, as a feeling of faintness and dis-orientation that he had experienced once before came over him. He wheezed and blinked a few times, dazzled, refocusing on the wyrsa.
The wyrsa gaped its mouth, then, as if recharged, the creature made a tremendous leap into the underbrush that nothing wholly natural could have duplicated, and was gone.
And with it went the energy of the spell. If the wyrsa had deflected it, the energy would still be there, dissipating. It hadn’t. The spell hadn’t hit shields, and it hadn’t been reflected.
It had been inhaled, absorbed completely. And what was more—an additional fraction of Tad’s personal mage-energy had gotten pulled along behind it as if swept in a current.
“Oh. My. Gods,” he breathed, feeling utterly stunned. Now he knew what had hit them, out there over the forest. And now he knew why the wyrsa had begun following them in the first place.
The wyrsa were the magic-thieves, not some renegade mage, not some natural phenomena. They ate magic, or absorbed it, and it made them stronger.
Blade shook him urgently. “What happened?” she hissed in his ear. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
He shook off his paralysis to explain it to her; she knew enough about magic and how it worked that he didn’t have to explain things twice.
“Goddess.” She lay there, just as stunned for a moment as he was. And then, in typical fashion, she summed up their entire position in a two sentences. “They have our scent, they want our blood, and now they know that you produce magic on top of all that.” She stared at him, aghast, her eyes wide. “We’re going to have to kill them all, or we’ll never get away from here!”
Nine
Tad hissed at the cluster of wyrsa across the river. The wyrsa all bared their formidable teeth and snarled back. They made no move to vanish this time, and Tad got the distinct impression that they were taunting him, daring him to throw something magical at them.
Well, of course they were. They had no reason to believe he had anything that could reach across the river except magic, and they wanted him to throw that.
Throw us more food, stupid gryphon! Throw us the very thing that makes us stronger, and make it tasty!
He’d already checked a couple of things in their supplies. The stone he had made into a mage-light and the firestarter he had reenergized were both inert again; if he’d needed any confirmation of the fact that these were the creatures that had sucked all of the mage-energy out of the carry-basket and everything in it—well, he had it.