The Silver Gryphon

That meant cooperation, which meant more intelligence. Wolves might sniff around a trapped fellow, might even try to help him gnaw himself loose, but they would not have been able to remove parts of a deadfall trap except by purest accident, and then only after a great deal of trial and error effort. He had heard them last night. It had not taken them long at all to free the trapped one. And they had done so without too many missteps, if there were any at all. The snare-they didn't just chew the leg or head off the rabbit it caught and then eat the rest. The noose of the snare was opened. They killed the rabbit, pulled the snare open and removed it, then pulled up the snare and looked it over. That was evidence of more intelligence, and certainly the ability to manipulate objects. What that evidence meant to their survival, he couldn't yet tell. But he had his fears, and plenty of them. He could only wonder right now if Blade shared those fears. Maybe it was time to stop trying to shelter her and start discussing things. Maybe it had been time to do that a couple of days ago. Blade stopped in the shelter of a vine-covered bush. Is that what I think it is? She frowned with concentration, and motioned to Tad to remain where he was so she could hear without distraction. There was something in the distance, underneath the chatter of the four-legged canopy creatures, and the steady patter of debris from a tree where some of the birds were eating green fruit-a sound- Tad shifted his weight impatiently. "Shouldn't we-" he began. "Hush a moment," she interrupted, and closed her eyes to concentrate better. Was that really what she thought it was? She began to isolate it mentally from the rain of bits of leaf, twig, and half-eaten fruit. "I think I hear running water," she said at last. "Come on!" She abandoned all attempts at secrecy, trotting as quickly as she could through the tangle of underbrush, with Tad hot on her heels. If that was the long-sought river she heard, then their safety lay more surely in reaching it than in trying to hide themselves or their trail. Above them, a few canopy creatures barked or chattered a warning, but most of them seemed to regard her and Tad as harmless. Well, they would. Now we're running openly, not stalking. We can't be hunting, so we're not a danger to them directly. The sounds above kept on, and the fruit eaters didn't even pause in their gluttony. That was comforting; it meant there was nothing else around that aroused the tree dwellers' alarm. If there had been something trailing them closely, when they broke cover, it would have had to do the same to a certain extent, just to keep up with them. And if that had happened, the treetops should have erupted with alarm or once again gone silent, or both. There was sunlight pouring down through a huge gap in the trees, off in the distance; it shone green-gold through the leaves, white between the trunks of the trees. The closer they got, the clearer the sound of water running rapidly over rocks became. They literally burst through the luxuriant curtain of brush at the river's edge, teetering on the rocks lining the banks. She wanted to cheer, but confined herself to pounding on Tad's shoulder enthusiastically. The river at their feet was wide, but so far as she could tell, it was deep only in the middle. More to the point, across the river lay the cliff they had been looking for, with a wide beach made of rocks and mud lying between the rock cliff face and the river. Caves, waterfalls-even a crevice that we can fortify. Any of those will do very nicely just now! "Let's get across," Tad urged. "If they're following us, we'll be able to see them, and there's going to be water between them and us." Water between them and us. Right now, that was the best protection she could imagine. Tad was right; with an open space of water between their enemy and themselves, they would certainly be able to see the mysterious hunters coming. We can look for a cave as soon as we're across. For the first time in four days,, they should be able to find a safe and secure place to wait for rescue, a place too difficult to dig them out of, with walls of rock instead of flimsy canvas. And they might be able to actually see the creatures that were following them-assuming that the shadow-hunters were bold enough to go this far. They might give up. She wasn't going to count on it, but they might. This was certainly more trouble than most predators wanted to go through for a meal. Now she grinned, and it was heartfelt. "Let's go get wet," she said. "We both need a bath anyway!" Seven Blade peered through the curtain of rain, looking a few lengths ahead to see if there was anything like a cave in sight, then looking back down at her feet to pick out her footing among the slippery mud and river rocks. Here, out in the open, the rain came down in sheets, making footing doubly treacherous. More rain sluiced down the cliff face, washing across the rocks at her feet. This time, they hadn't gone to ground when the rains came; they didn't even look for a shelter. Instead, they continued to make their way along the cliff-side bank of the river. For one thing, the only shelter from the rain lay back on the other side of the river, and she didn't really want to take her chances back there. For another, every moment they spent in huddling away from the rain was a moment that they could not spend in looking for real cover, the protection of a place from which they could not be extracted by force. By now poor Tad was a wet, sodden mess, and after this, she was certainly going to have to figure out what they could spare to make him a new bandage for his wing. The bandages he wore were soaked and coming loose, and wouldn't be any good until after they had been rinsed clean and dried. Sacrifice some clothing, maybe, if we don't have enough bandages. I could shorten the legs of my trews for cloth, since they don't seem to be much protection against the bugs. That and some rope might make a decent sling. She was going to have to get him dried out before they slept; allowing a gryphon to go to sleep wet was a sure prescription for illness. We need a cave, or at worst, a cleft. This rain is going to go on until nightfall, and we won't be able to see anything then. The water level in the river didn't seem to be rising much, if any, which suggested that it was probably as high now as it ever got, except in the occasional flood. And I hope we don't happen to be in the midst of flood season! There was evidence aplenty for a flood, in the form of flotsam, mostly wood, washed up and wedged among the rocks. It would make admirable firewood, if they could ever find a place where they could build a fire! It would be just our luck to have pinned our hopes on finding this cliff only to discover that there is less shelter here than there was in the forest. If they didn't find a place to hole up before dark, they might have to spend the night exposed on this rocky shore, where they would have the grim choice of lighting a fire and attracting attention or shivering, cold and damp, wrapped up in wet blankets all night. The gods, or fate, were not to be so unkind, however. After a few more furlongs of picking their way across the rocks and sliding through the mud, the cliff receded somewhat to her left and the river opened up before her. A white, roaring wall loomed up out of the rain, as if someone had torn a hole in the clouds and let all the water out at once. After a moment of blinking and trying to get her dripping hair out of her eyes, she realized that she was not staring at a torrent in the midst of the downpour, she was looking at a waterfall, and just on their side of the waterfall, there was a series of darker holes in the cliff wall that must be caves. Tad spotted them at the same time, and shouted into her ear. "If any of these are deep enough, this is where we should stop! We may not be able to hear anything coming, but whatever tries to come at us from ahead won't be able to get past the falls! We'll only have to guard in one direction!" She winced at the bellowing, since she was right beside the excited gryphon, but saw at once that he was right. That overcame her misgiving at camping in a place where the sound of an enemy approaching would be covered by the roar of the water. And as if to emphasize just what a good spot this was, a stunned fish came floating to their very feet to lodge among the rocks, flapping feebly. It had obviously been knocked silly by going over the falls, and Tad, who was probably starving, was on it in a heartbeat. Two gulps, and it was gone, and Tad had a very satisfied look on his face. "See what else you can forage!" she shouted at him. "I'll check out these caves!" "Wait a moment!" he shouted back. Picking up a milky-white, smooth pebble from the rocks at his feet, Tad stared at it in concentration that she found very familiar. Then he handed it to her, gryph-grinning with open beak. The pebble glowed with mage-light. She accepted it with relief; at least he had enough magic back now that he could make a mage-light again! She didn't have to go far to find their new shelter; the very first cave she entered proved to be perfect. It went back a long way, slanting upward all the time. For a few lengths, the floor was covered with soft, dry sand. Then there was a pile of driftwood marking the high-water line that past floods had also left behind; that was where the sand ended and dirt and rock began. A thin stream of water ran down the center of the cave, coming from somewhere near the back, cutting a channel through the sand and rock alike. She made her way past it, holding the blue-glowing rock over her head to cast the best possible light ahead of her without dazzling her eyes. The cave narrowed, the farther she went back, then abruptly made a ninety-degree turn upward. This was where the stream of water originated. She put her head inside the hole and looked up. Besides getting a faceful of rain, she clearly saw the cloud-filled sky a great distance above. At one time, a real stream of water, perhaps a branchlet of the river that tumbled down the cliff further on, had cut a channel through here, forming the cave. Now, except perhaps during rain, that channel was dry. But it formed precisely what they needed; a natural chimney to carry the smoke away from their fire. Provided that nothing acted to funnel more water down that ancient outlet, this would be a perfect shelter. She could not have asked for anything better. Even the chimney was too small for anything threatening to climb down it, except perhaps snakes and the like. There were signs that other creatures had found this place just as congenial, a collection of small bones from fish and other creatures, and a cluster of bats toward the rear of the cave. She did not mind sharing this cave with bats; after her constant battles with insects, she was altogether happy to see them. They didn't seem disturbed to see her. "Blade?" Tad called from behind her, and she realized that although the sound of the waterfall did penetrate in here, it was much muted by the rock walls. "Coming!" she responded, turning her back on the chimney and climbing back down to the driftwood pile. She smelled smoke, and indeed, a plume of it, ghostlike in the blue light of the bespelled pebble, drifted toward her and the chimney outlet. A warmer light up ahead greeted her; Tad had already started a fire with the driftwood, and she joined him there. "The fish around here must not be terribly bright," he said cheerfully. "Quite a lot of them ended up on the rocks a few moments ago. I got you some." He pointed with his beak at a pair of sleek shapes at his feet. "After you ate your fill, I hope?" she admonished. "You need the food more than I do; I manage quite well on that travel-bread." His nares flushed, and she judged by that and the bulging state of his crop that he had been perfectly greedy. Not that she blamed him, especially not after going on short rations for so many days. "You might as well put this under something, so we can sleep," she said, handing him the pebble and shrugging painfully out of her pack. "If I'd ordered up a cave, I couldn't have gotten a better one than this. We can even make a really smoky fire back there-" she pointed to the rear of the cave, "-there's a natural chimney that'll send it up without smoking us out. The only thing we don't have is a nighttime signal. We need to talk about that." He ground his beak as he thought, his good wing half-spread in the firelight to dry. "I can't imagine them flying at night-" he began, then laughed. "Well, on the other hand, since it's me and you who are lost-" "Skandranon will have night flights out if he has to fly them himself," she finished for him, with a wry chuckle. Then her humor faded. She could not forget, even for a moment, that they were still being hunted. Until they knew by what, and for what reason, they should not assume they would be here to rescue when rescue came. Yes, they had good shelter now, and it would be very difficult to dig them out of it. But not impossible; not for-say-a renegade mage and his followers, human or created. Tad, however, was going to take the moment as it came; he shrugged out of his pack and nudged a fish over to her with one talon. "You eat," he said. "There's enough wood in here already to easily last the night. While you cook and eat that, I'll go back out and see what I can see." She hesitated a moment, then gave a mental shrug and bent to pick up the fish. I might as well eat and make myself comfortable. He's right about that. While the rain fell, it was unlikely that anything would try to find them. If the creatures trailing them were semi-intelligent, they would assume that the two castaways had followed their usual pattern, and had taken shelter before the rain started. The hunters would probably be looking for them on the other side of the river first, especially if the hunters had not traced them as far as the river when the rain began. Any trail would end short of the river itself, and the mud and rock of the riverbank would not hold any scent or footprint through the rain. The trail on the other side of the river would be completely obliterated, and if they could keep their fire out of sight, it was possible that they could keep their presence in this cave a secret for a day or more. By the time smoke got up the rock chimney and exited above them, it would be very difficult for anything scenting it to tell where it originated. After that, of course, it would become increasingly harder to stay hidden. Every time they left the cave, which they would have to do to catch fish, wash, and get firewood, they stood a chance of being seen. Watchers on the other side of the river could spot them without being seen themselves. But I'll worry about that after I eat, when I can think better, she decided. It was wonderful to be able to have enough space to properly open the packs and spread everything out. Once again though, she found herself attempting a task one-handed that was difficult enough using two; scaling and gutting a fish. She wound up slipping off her boot and using a foot as a clumsy "hand" on the tail to hold it down. She saved the head and the guts for later use as bait; they could not count on having the kind of luck that sent a harvest of fish down over the cliff to their feet every day. That was all right; they had fishing line and hooks with them, and if the fish guts didn't work, she could try a bug, a bread-ball, or a bit of dried meat. Once again, her shovel came into play as an impromptu grill; it probably would have been better if she'd had something to grease it with, but at the moment, she was too hungry for trifles like that. The fish burned a little and stuck to the shovel, but that didn't matter in the least-she could scrape the fish meat off and eat, and some blackened fish meat stuck to it wouldn't adversely affect the use of the shovel as a shovel. She was hungry enough, in fact, that she very nearly burned her fingers, picking flaky bits of meat off the hot carcass before it had properly cooled. She alternately swore softly and ate, making a happy pig of herself. Tad reappeared, dripping wet again, and regarded her thoughtfully. "Clay," he said. "Next time, wrap it up in clay and bake the whole thing. When you break the clay open, the skin comes off with it, but the rest of the fish is fine." "Where did you learn that one?" she asked, looking up at him in surprise. "Mother. She loves fish, and even though she likes it best fresh, she's been known to accept baked fish if it wasn't straight out of the sea." He gryph-grinned at her again, and cocked his head to one side. "You know how she is-unlike father, she'll wish for the ideal, but not complain when it isn't given! What do you want to do about the firelight? Move the fire back farther into the cave? The cave bends enough that I think that will make it harder to see from across the river. Or does it matter?" So, he had been thinking about their stalkers. "I'm not sure it matters; sooner or later they're going to see us, or see signs of where we are. I'd rather put some thought into defenses." "I've set up some simple line snares on the path, so watch out for them," he said. "Not much, there's not much I can do in the rain, but some. It should help, I would think. I can do better tomorrow." "So that's why you're wet!" She signed to him to sit beside the fire, as she devoured the cooked fish. It didn't taste like much, a bit bland, which in itself made it an improvement over the dried meat, which tasted like old boots. It was hot and satisfying and cooked, which made all the difference, and she ate every scrap, using her knife to scrape the burned bits off the shovel and eat them too. Then she settled back on her heels, sucking her slightly-burnt fingers to get the last of the juices, and gave him all of her attention. "Right, then. Let's settle the short-term first, then the long-term. First watch?" she asked. "Yours," he said promptly. "As full as I am, I'm going to doze off no matter what. I can't help it; it's the way I'm built. And I have marginally better night-vision than you do. I also have better hearing," he added, "but with that waterfall out there, that isn't going to matter. I can run our fishing line from one of the snares into here, and stack some stones over the light pebble to make a sort of alarm." Well, that seems pretty reasonable to me. "Good enough. If I see anything tonight, should I take a shot at it? Across the river is in the range of my sling, and with all these rocks around I can afford to miss now, and we won't have to go after my ammunition to get it back." That was another source of easing tensions. Now she was no longer limited to the pouches of lead shot for ammunition. The rocks might not fly as true, but she could lob as many of them around as she needed to. "My vote is that we not provoke anything tonight," he said instantly. "Let's not give them the answer to the question of where we went. If they can't find us tonight, we might get lucky and they'll go away." "Probably not, but it's worth giving ourselves the chance. Agreed. Do we trap the other side of the river?" That was another good question. It might well be worth it to try-or it might make them targets when they crossed the river to check the traps. The river wasn't all that deep even at its deepest; barely chin-high on Blade. Anything energetic enough could cross it easily. After all, they had, and neither of them was in the best of shape. A stealthy swimmer could cross it and never betray himself by sound, what with the waterfall out there pounding away. He shook his head. "No; we trap this side of the river, but not the other. We'd be too vulnerable on that side, and why bother? We really don't want to catch these things, do we?" He didn't look as if he did, and she agreed with him. After all, what could they do with one if they did catch it, alive or dead? All that would do would be to tell them what the hunters looked like, and there were easier ways to do that. "Not unless we have to start whittling down their numbers," she murmured, thinking that this cave was both a good and a bad place to be. They could defend it-but it would be hard for rescuers to spot, and it would be very easy to place them in a state of siege from which there was no escape. The narrowness of the chimney that made it impossible for anything to climb down also rendered it impossible for them to climb up. "Right. Then tomorrow, if it looks clear, we go get some green wood and leaves from across the way to make a smoke signal with. We get all the dry driftwood we can and stock it in here." He cocked his head to one side, and waited for her contribution. "Water we have, finally; I might just as well start fishing and as long as we're running a smoke-signal fire, it can do double duty and I can smoke what we don't eat." That way if we're trapped in here we'll have something to eat. "We ought to go back down the way we came in and decide what kind of traps we can lay." "At least one rockfall, right at the entrance, with a release one of us can trigger from in here," he said promptly, and yawned. "With a lot of work and cleverness we can even barricade the opening of the cave with wood and rocks; we're certainly clever enough, so all we need is the work. And that is about all of the thinking that I'm good for. I have got to get some sleep. I don't need a blanket; it's plenty warm enough in here next to the fire." He winked at her. "I can even lie down on this nice, soft sand so that I'm between the fire and the entrance, and screen it with my body. I shall sacrifice staying near the cold and water to do this duty." "Big of you. Help me spread out the bedding so it can dry," she responded dryly. "Then you can sleep all you like-at least until it's your turn on watch!" And may there be nothing to watch for-except a search party, and that soon, she thought, as he chuckled and moved to help her with the damp blankets. By now they'll have missed us back home. We didn't make the rendezvous, and the other patrol should have sent word back with their teleson. How long until we're missing instead of overdue? And will they look for us when they think we're only late? I wish I knew. I only know one thing. Father's going to go out of his mind when he hears of this. I'm glad I'm not the one to tell him! Amberdrake stared at Commander Judeth; for a moment her words made no sense. Then suddenly, they made all too much sense. "They're what?" All of Amberdrake's hard-won equanimity deserted him. He rose out of the chair in his office as if he'd sat on a hot coal. Indeed, that was very much the way he felt. "Calm down, Drake, the youngsters are only overdue by a day," Judeth told him. She looked outwardly calm, but he knew more than enough about her and the tiny telltale signals her body showed to know that she was seriously worried. And yet, that was simply not good enough. "The patrol they were relieving got to the rendezvous point expecting them to be there yesterday, and they weren't there." She's worried. She's only worried. And she still hasn't done anything. "And they haven't shown up yet." He held both the arms of his chair in a strangle grip, and stared at her with unveiled accusation in his eyes. "So why aren't you doing anything? You know those two are as by-the-book as any trainees you've ever had! They have never, ever violated orders. If they had a reason to be late, if they knew they were going to be delayed, they'd have sent a teleson message! If they haven't, it's because they can't, because something happened to them!" His voice was rising, and he knew it, and what was more, he didn't care that he was making a blatant display of his emotions. For once in his life he wanted someone to know how upset he was. Judeth made soothing motions, as if she thought he could somehow be propitiated by a few words. As if she thought he could be "reasoned out of his hysteria." She was certainly going to try. "We are doing something, Drake; the patrol has left the rendezvous and they are going on out to see if they can't find some sign of Blade and Tad. It's too early to get in a panic about this-" Too early to get in a panic? Who does she think she's talking to? He held himself back from exploding at her only by great effort of will. "You tell me that when it's your child that's missing!" he snapped at her. "Or have you gotten so wrapped up in being a commander that you've forgotten this isn't wartime? Instead of telling me not to panic, I suggest you tell me what else you're doing right now. And if you aren't doing anything right now, I am not interested in hearing why you can't! I'll pull in every resource I have to see that something does get done, and without any nonsense about not getting into a panic because one person thinks it's too early!" That was the closest he had ever come in his life to saying that he was actually going to use all the power and influence he held and had never used before, for any reason. And I will, I'll do it, if I have to blackmail everyone in this city. Even her. It was a threat, a real one, and he was not bluffing. But he felt he owed it to Judeth to warn her that lightning was going to fall on her before it came. If he used all his influence, it would be worse than lightning, and Judeth's position as commander might not survive the storm. Her eyes darkened dangerously at his words, but her voice remained calm and even, which was something of a testament to her own control. Judeth did not like threats, but she was a realist, and she must know that he was not bluffing. "Right at this moment, the original patrol is flying out about a day in the right direction to see if they can find anything. If they don't, they'll go north of the track, then south, to see if they somehow went off course. Meanwhile, we're working on it. We're not just sitting around, waiting to see what happens. We're trying to find some way of locating them from here, and-and-" she finally raised her own voice as he got ready to explode again. "-and we are putting together search parties. Those will leave in the morning, since we can't possibly get one together before then. There is no point in grabbing unprepared people and sending them out at random. Now, if you can think of anything I might have missed, I'd like to hear it." The truth was, he couldn't, but that didn't stop him from wanting some action right that very moment, something besides merely "readying a search party." "I can't think of anything, but I'm-this is difficult. It's hard to think," he admitted grudgingly. "Does Skan know yet?" "Aubri's telling him." Poor Aubri, her tone said, but Poor Skan, was what he was thinking. He was afraid of this. He didn't want Tad to go off on this assignment any more than I wanted Blade to. I know he thought about going to Judeth and asking them to be reassigned to something else, and didn't do it. And now he must be wondering if he is to blame for them being missing. "I'll tell Winterhart-" he began, his throat tightening at the thought. Gods, how do I tell her? This was my fault, if it all comes down to it; something I said or did made Blade want to be in the Silvers in the first place, all my interference made her want to be assigned somewhere far away from here-if I hadn't tried to meddle in her life so much, she would still be here-maybe even doing something else with her life. And Tad would have a different partner, one that wouldn't have urged him to ask for assignment out of the city. He desperately wanted someone else to take on the burden of telling her, so that he did not have to face her accusing eyes. Cowardly, yes, but - "No, I'll tell her," Judeth said firmly. "I already know where she is, and I'm Silverblade's commander; that's part of my job. You go to Skan; I'll send her to you there." There, as everyone in White Gryphon knew, was "Kechara's nursery" this time of the day. Skandranon spent at least an hour with her and the other children, human and otherwise, every afternoon. He loved to spend time with them, telling stories, playing games. Once again, Amberdrake got to his feet and headed for the door; this time Judeth didn't stop him. As soon as the White Gryphon Council Hall was finished, the spouses of every city official had demanded the addition of real offices to it-Winterhart included. "We're tired of you people bringing work home, and we're tired of having work follow you home," she had said, both in her capacity as "spokes-spouse" and in her capacity as a city official herself. "Home is where you go to get away from idiots who couldn't find the public latrine without a map and a guide! And every official gets an office, even if it's no bigger than a closet!" she had added. "I don't care if the post of k'Leshya Clan chief has never had a physical office before, the k'Leshya Clan chief has also never lived in anything other than a tent before, and if he can break tradition by living in a cave, he can break it a little more by having an office and regular hours, and he can bar the door when his office hours are over!" She had glared at Amberdrake, and her eyes had said, And that goes twice as much for you, my dear and over-obliging spouse! Since Lionwind's wife had been standing behind Winterhart, nodding her head at every word and with one hand on her knife, he and every other city official had readily agreed. The offices were all built into the cliff behind the Council Hall, small and private, and close to the other public buildings. The administrative building for the Silvers was not that far away from Amberdrake's office, and in that building was the nursery they had made for Kechara when she was still acting as the communication center for the Silvers. She shared it with the youngsters of anyone else in the Silvers or in city administration who needed to have someone tend their little ones while they worked. It was a good arrangement for everyone, and it gave Kechara a never-ending stream of playmates who were all her mental age, even if she was chronologically six or more times older. Even though Kechara's powers were severely limited, she could still "talk" to any gryphon within the city territory. That alone was useful to the Silvers, and a very good reason to keep her right where she always had been. As Amberdrake hurried toward the building, every muscle and nerve writhing with anxiety, he couldn't even begin to imagine how Judeth had thought that Aubri could break something like this gently to Skan. She must have been so upset by the news that her ability to reason had flown right out the door! Aubri hasn't the tact of a brick. When Skan- "DRAKE!" The bellow of a gryphon enraged could probably be heard all the way up to the farms, and the gryphon that burst out of the door of the Silvers' headquarters looked perfectly ready to chew up iron and spit out nails. Burst was indeed the correct term; the white-and-black gryphon erupted from the door flying, his head swiveling in all directions, presumably looking for his friend as he gained altitude. "Drake!" Skan bellowed again, from a height of about three lengths above him. "These idiots! They've lost-" "I know, I know," Amberdrake shouted back, waving his hands frantically. "That's why I'm-" Skan folded his wings and landed heavily, as if he were pouncing on something, every feather on end. "I want every mage in this city working on a way to find them!" he said wrathfully. "I don't care what they're doing! This is an emergency! I want everybody pulled in off of whatever they're doing, and I want search parties out there now! I want messengers sent to Shalaman! I want every man the Haighlei can spare out there looking, too! I want-" We have to work this together, or they're not going to listen to us. Amberdrake seized his friend's head in both hands, hooking his fingertips into the gryphon's nares. He pulled Skan's beak down so that the gryphon was looking directly into his eyes. "I know," he said forcefully. "Believe me, I feel the same! We have to call the Council to authorize this, Skan, but I don't think anybody on it is going to disagree with us, and if they do-" Skan growled wordlessly at the very idea. "If they do, we-we both know things they wish we didn't," he pointed out. "We do. And I'll use that." There it was; Skan agreed with him. It wasn't right, but it was better than arguing with shard-counters until it was too late to do anything. "But there's no point in scattering everybody like a covey of frightened quail," Drake persisted, trying to convince himself as much as Skandranon. "All right? Let's get things coordinated. Judeth told the original patrol to look for them; right now that's all that anyone can do out there. We have to organize, and get people out there, talk people into using Gates again if we have to. We have to get Council backing for all that before anything else can be done, and that isn't going to happen if we're both standing here and wasting precious time screaming like outraged parents!" "We are outraged parents!" The gryphon kicked clods of dirt in flurries of rage. "I don't want to have to follow procedure!" Amberdrake put his fists on his hips and leaned toward Skandranon. "We will get Council approval, by whatever means necessary." I hate it, but that's the case. If we want to have more than just "the usual effort" from the Silvers, we have to get Council authorization. And that's where the threats of blackmail come in. Skan growled again, but without as much force behind it. "Damn it, Drake, why do you have to be so right?" he snarled. "All right then, I'll go back in there and have Kechara call in the Council members so we can authorize all of this." Amberdrake wanted to add don't frighten her, but he held his tongue. Of all of them, Skan knew best how not to do anything that would make Kechara unhappy. He was her "Papa Skan," and she loved him with all of her heart-which was as large as her poor brain was small. He would no more do anything to frighten her than he would allow Blade and Tad to languish in the wilderness, unsought-for and unrescued. He headed back toward the Council Hall, certain that if Winterhart and Zhaneel were not already on the way there, after Kechara's call, they would be. Skan came stalking in shortly after Drake, and within moments after that, the rest of the Council members came hurrying in. Judeth was one of the first, looking very surprised and taken aback, and just a little annoyed; and although Skan leveled an icy glare at her, his tone was civil enough. "I've called this meeting," he said. "Since this is an emergency situation." He waited only until there were enough Council members present to constitute a quorum, and until everyone was seated before nodding to Judeth. "You're the commander of the Silvers, so I think it best that you explain the emergency to the rest of the Council," he said crisply. Judeth looked as if she wanted to say something scathing to him, but held her tongue, which was probably wise. Amberdrake had a good idea of what she was thinking, however. She was, first and foremost, a military commander, and under any other circumstances, the fact that two of the most junior members of the Silvers were missing-or overdue-should not have been considered an emergency the Council should be concerned with. Only an hysterical-but powerful-parent could have thought that it was. And Amberdrake would have cheerfully throttled her for suggesting any such thing, if she dared. Throttled her, then revived her so I could throttle her again. Part of him was appalled at this capacity for violence within himself; the rest of him nodded in gleeful agreement at the idea. Then I'd revive her so that Skan could have a turn. But she evidently knew better-or the threat of his influence made her think twice about suggesting any such thing. Judeth explained the situation, coolly and calmly, while the other members of the Council listened without making any comments. Skan kept glaring around the table as if daring any of them to say that this was not the sort of emergency for which the Council should be called. No one did, but Snowstar did have something to say that put the entire situation into a perspective that Amberdrake greatly appreciated. "Has anyone ever gone missing this way before?" he asked, without looking either at Skan or at Amberdrake. "I know that there have been a handful of accidents among the Silvers, but I don't ever recall any of our Silvers on Outpost Duty ever disappearing before. Judeth, you haven't even had any fatalities in the Silvers since we encountered the Haighlei, and all of those were on the trek to find the coast. If this is a new development, I think it is a very serious one." Aubri opened his beak, then looked at Judeth, startled. She was the one who replied. "Actually-you're right," she said, sounding just as surprised as Aubri looked. "The fatalities among young gryphons since we founded the city have all been among the hunters, not the Silvers, and the accidents causing injuries among the Silvers have all been just that-accidents, usually caused by weather, and not a single death from something like a drunkard or fight. To date we haven't had a single case of Outpost Patrols going missing. They've broken limbs, they've gotten sick, we've had to send help out to them, and one set of humans even got lost once-but they had a teleson and we knew they were all right, we just couldn't find them for a while. We've never had anyone just vanish before" Her eyes were the only part of her that showed how alarmed this new observation made her, but Amberdrake was savagely pleased at the way that her eyes went blank and steely. He knew that look. That was General Judeth, suddenly encountering a deadly enemy where she had been told there was open ground with no threats. "I kept thinking this was-sort of one of the hazards of duty-but that was under war conditions or while we were making our way here," Aubri muttered, so shamefaced that his nares flushed a brilliant red. "Snowstar, you're right! We've never lost a Silver since-since we allied with the Haighlei!" You two have been making the mistake of thinking that the Silvers were the extension of the old army-but they aren't and our situation is completely different than it was before the wars. And how could I have been so blind not to have seen your blindness? "Then I believe this does qualify as a full-scale emergency," Snowstar said firmly. "When two highly-trained individuals drop completely out of sight, for no reason and with no warning, it seems to me that the danger is not only to them alone, but possibly to the entire city. What if they were removed so that they could not alert us to some enemy who is moving against us? How can we know that if we don't mount a rescue, in strength and numbers?" Heads nodded all around the table, and Amberdrake exchanged stricken glances with Winterhart, who had come in just in time to hear that. He felt cold all over, and she had paled. He could have done without hearing that. He was perversely glad that Snowstar had thought of it, for it certainly swayed even the veterans on the Council to their cause, but he could have done without hearing it. Either Snowstar really believes that, or the self-proclaimed nondiplomat Snowstar just made a shrewd play in our support. Or both. A heavy and ominous silence filled the Council Hall, and no one seemed prepared to break it. Skan was as frozen as a statue, and beside him, Zhaneel simply looked to be in too much shock to be able to think. Winterhart stood beside her Council seat, unable to sit, clutching the back of it; her knuckles were as white as her namesake. Amberdrake himself felt unable to move, every limb leaden and inert. Judeth cleared her throat, making all of them jump. "Right," she said briskly, silence broken. "We have the original pair flying a search pattern; we're putting together more search teams. Does anyone have any further suggestions?" Skan opened his beak, but Snowstar beat him to it. "I'll organize the mages and start distance-scrying," he said immediately. "We're probably too far away, but those who can scry for them should at least try. We'll look for the traces of the magic on all the items they had with them; even if something made them crash, those traces will still be there. I'll also pick out mages for the search parties." Once again, Skan opened his beak-then glared around the table, to make certain that he wasn't interrupted this time. "We should send a message to Shalaman," he said belligerently. "His people know that forest better than we do. We should make him-I mean, ask him-to send out parties of his hunters." "That's good," Judeth approved, making a note of it. "I can put anyone who's been posted to that area on search parties, but if we can field Haighlei who are trained to hunt the forest in addition to our own people, that will be even better. Anything else?" Search parties, magic, the Haighlei Thoughts flitted through Drake's head, but he couldn't make any of them hold still long enough to be examined. Judeth looked around the table to meet shaking heads, and nodded. "Good. We've got a plan," she said firmly. "We should assume that whatever has happened to these Silvers could endanger the city, and make finding them a top priority. Let's get to it." She stood up and was halfway to the door before anyone else was even out of his chair. He didn't blame her. If the situation was reversed, he wouldn't want to be in the same room with four frantic parents either. And he wouldn't want to face two people who had just threatened to blackmail him for not taking the loss of their children seriously enough. Everyone else deserted the hall as quickly. Only Aubri paused at the door, looking back with uncertainty in his gaze. He opened his beak, then swallowed hard, shook his head, and followed the others. Skandranon wanted nothing more than to rush off to the rescue of his son. Failing that, he wanted to tear the gizzard out of those who were responsible for his disappearance. Right now, so far as his heart was concerned, the ones responsible were right here in White Gryphon. Judeth and Aubri. It was all their fault. If they hadn't assigned the children to this far-flung outpost, both his beloved son and his dear friend Amberdrake's daughter would still be here. "I knew that this was a mistake all along!" he seethed at Zhaneel as he paced the length and breadth of the Council Hall. "I knew they were too young to be sent off on Outpost Duty! No one that young has ever been sent off alone like that before! They should have been posted here, like everyone else was! Judeth's getting senile, and Aubri was already there to show her the way-and-" "Please!" Zhaneel suddenly exploded. "Stop!" He stared at her, his mouth still open, one foot raised. "Stop it, Skan," she said, in a more normal tone. "It is not their fault. It is not the fault of anyone. And if you would stop trying to find someone to blame, we would get something done." She looked up at him, with fear and anxiety in her eyes. "You are a mage; I am not. You go to work with Snowstar and the others, and I shall go to the messenger-mage and send a message in your name to Shalaman, asking for his help. At least I can do that much. And Skandranon-he is my son as well as yours, and I am able to act without rages and threats." With that, she turned away from him and left him still standing with his foot upraised and his beak open, staring after her in shock. Alone, for Amberdrake and Winterhart had already left. Stupid, stupid gryphon. She's right, you know. Blaming Aubri and Judeth won't get you anywhere, and if you take things out on them, you're only going to make them mad at you. The Black Gryphon would be remembered as an angry, overprotective, vengeful parent. And what good would that do? None, of course. What good would it do? All at once, his energy ran out of him. He sat down on the floor of the Council Hall, feeling-old. Old, tired, defeated, and utterly helpless, shaking with fear and in the grip of his own weakness. He squinted his eyes tightly closed, ground his beak, and shivered from anything but cold. Somewhere out there, his son was lost, possibly hurt, certainly in trouble. And there was nothing, nothing that he could do about it. This was one predicament that the Black Gryphon wasn't going to be able to swoop in and salvage. I couldn't swoop in on anything these days even if I could salvage it. I'm an anachronism; I've outlived my usefulness. It is happening all over again, except this time there can't be a rebirth of the Black Gryphon from the White Gryphon. The body wears out, the hips grow stiff and the muscles strain. I'm the one that's useless and senile, not Judeth and Aubri. They were doing the best they could; I was the one flapping my beak and making stupid threats. That is all that is left for a failed warrior to do. For a moment, he shook with the need to throw back his head and keen his grief and helplessness to the sky, in the faint hope that perhaps some god somewhere might hear him. His throat constricted terribly. With the weight of intolerable grief and pain on his shoulders, he slowly raised his head. As his eyes fell on the door through which Zhaneel had departed, his mind unfroze, gradually coming out of its shock. What am I? What am I thinking? I may be old now, but I am still a legend to these people. Heroes don't ever live as long as they want to, and most die young. I've lasted. That's all experience. I'm a mage, and more skilled than when I was younger-and if I'm not the fighter I used to be, I'm also a lot smarter than I used to be! And what I'm feeling - I know what it is. I know. It was what Urtho felt every time I left, every time one of his gryphons wound up missing. I loved him so dearly, and I breathe each breath honoring his memory - but he was a great man because he accepted his entire being, and dealt with it. I am not Urtho - but I am his son in spirit, and what I honor I can also emulate. There's plenty I can do, starting with seeing to it that Snowstar hasn't overlooked anything! He shook himself all over, as if he was shaking off some dark, cold shadow that was unpleasantly clinging to his back, and strode out of the Council Hall as fast as his legs would carry him. What I honor in Urtho's deeds, others have also honored in me. Urtho could embrace every facet of a situation and handle all of them with all of his intellect, whether it angered him personally or not. That was why he was a leader and not a panicked target. He could act when others would be overwhelmed by emotion. If I think of this disappearance in terms only of how I feel about it, then I will miss details that could be critical while I fill my vision with myself, and that could cost lives. Let the historians argue over whether I was enraged or determined or panicked on this day! I can still be effective to my last breath! It was not clear at first where the Adept had run off to, and by the time Skan tracked him down, Snowstar had managed to gather all of the most powerful mages together in his own dwelling and workshop. Skan was impressed in spite of himself at how quickly the Kaled'a'in mage had moved. It was notoriously difficult to organize mages, but Snowstar seemed to have accomplished the task in a very limited amount of time. There were seven mages at work including Snowstar. They had been divided into pairs, seated at individual tables so that they didn't interfere with each other, each pair of them scrying for something in particular. One pair looked for the teleson, one for the tent, one for the basket. Snowstar was working by himself, but the moment that Skan came near him, he looked up and beckoned. "I'm looking for Tadrith myself," he said without preamble, "I was waiting for you to help me; the blood-tie he has with you is going to make it possible to find him, if it's at all possible. You will both feel similar magically, as you know." "If?" Skan said, growing cold all over. Is he saying that he thinks Tad is-dead? "You mean you feel he is already dead-" Snowstar made a soothing gesture. "No, actually, I don't. Even if Tadrith was unconscious or worse, we'd still find him under normal circumstances. The problem is that I'm fairly certain that they're quite out of our range." The white-haired Kaled'a'in Adept shook his head. "But 'fairly' isn't 'completely,' and under the impetus of powerful emotions, people have been known to do extraordinary things before this. As you should know, better than any of us! I'm more than willing to try, if you are." Skan grunted in extreme irritation, but reined it in. "Stupid question, Snowstar. I'd try until I fell over." Snowstar grimaced. "I know it was a stupid question; forgive me. Fortunately, that won't matter to the spell or the stone." He gestured at a small table, and the half-dome of volcanic glass atop it. "Would you?" Skan took his place opposite the chair behind the table; he'd done scrying himself before, once or twice, but always with another mage and never with Snowstar. Each mage had his own chosen vehicle for scrying, but most used either a clear or black stone or a mirror. He put his foreclaws up on the table, surrounding his half of the stone with them. Snowstar placed his own hands on the table, touching fingertip to talon-tip with Skan. After that, it was a matter of Skan concentrating on his son and supplying mage-energy to Snowstar while Snowstar created and loosed the actual spell. Some mages had a visual component to this work, but Snowstar didn't. It took someone who was not only able to see mage-energy but one who was sensitive to its movement-like a gryphon-to sense what he was doing. Skan felt the energy gathering all around them and condensing into the form of the spell, like a warm wind encircling them and then cooling. He felt it strain and tug at the restraints Snowstar held on it. And he felt Snowstar finally let it go. Then-nothing. It leaped out-and dissipated. It wasn't gone, as if it had gone off to look for something. It was gone as if it had stretched itself out so thin that a mere breeze had made it fragment into a million uncoordinated bits. Snowstar jerked as if a string holding him upright had snapped, then sagged down, his hands clutching the stone. "Damn," he swore softly, as harsh an oath as Skan had ever heard him give voice to. "It's no good. It's just too far." Skan sagged himself, his throat locked up in grief, his chest so tight it was hard to take a breath. Tad A few moments later the others had all uttered the same words, in the same tones of anger and defeat- all except the pair trying to reach the teleson. They simply looked baffled and defeated, and they hadn't said anything. Finally Snowstar stopped waiting for them to speak up for themselves and went over to them. "Well?" he said, as Skan followed on his heels. Skan knew both of them; one was a young Kaled'a'in called Redoak, the other a mercenary mage from Urtho's following named Gielle. The latter was an uncannily lucky fellow; he had been a mere Journeyman at the beginning of the mage-storms following the Cataclysm, but when they were over, he was an Adept. He was more than a bit bewildered by the transition, but had handled it gracefully-far more gracefully than some would have. "I can't explain it, sir," he said, obviously working to suppress an automatic reaction to authority of snapping to attention and saluting. "When I couldn't reach Tadrith's device, I tried others, just to make certain that there wasn't something wrong with me. I've been able to call up every teleson we've ever created, including the one out there with the patrol looking for the missing Silvers. I got the one we left with the garrison at Khimbata, which is farther away than Tadrith is. I got all of them-except the one we sent out with Tadrith and Silverblade. It's-" he shook his head. "It's just gone, it's as if it was never there! It hasn't even been retuned or broken, that would leave a telltale. I've been working with tele-sons most of my life as a mage, and I've only seen something like this happen once before." "Was that during the Wars?" Snowstar asked instantly. Gielle nodded. "Yes, sir. And it was just a freak accident, something you'd have to have been an Adept to pull off, though. Some senile old fart who should never have been put in charge of anything was given an unfamiliar teleson to recharge and reversed the whole spell. Basically, he sucked all the magic out of it, made it just so much unmagical junk." Gielle shrugged. "The only reason he could do that was because he was an Adept. Senile, but still an Adept. We make those telesons foolproof for a good reason. Tadrith couldn't have done that, even by accident and a thousand tries a day, and even if someone actually smashed the teleson, I'd still be able to activate it and get a damaged echo-back. If it had been shattered by spell, the telltale would still mark the area magically. I don't know what to think about this." Snowstar pursed his lips, his forehead creasing as he frowned. "Neither do I. This is very peculiar" Skan looked from one mage to the other, and back again. He caught Redoak's eye; the Kaled'a'in just held up his hands in a gesture of puzzlement. "The signature of an Adept is fairly obvious," Redoak said slowly. "All Adepts have a distinctive style to even a moderately-trained eye. Urtho's was his ability to make enchantments undetectable-his mark was that there was no mark, but as far as I know, he could only veil spells he himself had crafted. The Haighlei would have seen something like this situation, I wager, by now. An Adept usually doesn't refrain from doing magic any time he can, especially not one of the old Neutrals. They were positively flamboyant about it. That was one of the quarrels that Urtho had with them." "I have an idea," Snowstar finally said. "Listen, all of you, I'll need all your help on this. We're going to do something very primitive, much more primitive than scrying." He looked around the room. "Redoak, you and Gielle and Joffer put all the small worktables together. Rides-alone, you know where my shaman implements are; go get them. Lora, Greenwing, come with me." He looked at Skan. "You go to the Silvers' headquarters and get me the biggest map of the area the children were headed into that you can find or bully out of them. They might give me an argument; you, they won't dare." "They'd lose a limb," Skan growled, and he went straight for the door. He did his best not to stagger; he hadn't used that much mage-energy in a long time, and it took more out of him than he had expected. All right, gryphon. Remember what you told yourself earlier. You have experience. You may fall on your beak from fatigue and tear something trying to fly in and save the day, but you have experience. Rely on experience when your resources are low, and rely on others when you can-not when you want to, vain gryphon. Work smarter. Think. Use what you have. And don't break yourself, stupid gryphon, because you are running out of spare parts! He saw to his surprise that it was already dark outside; he hadn't realized that he had spent so long with the mages, trying to find the children. No wonder he was tired and a bit weak! The Silvers' headquarters was lit up as if they were holding high festival inside, which made him feel a bit more placated. At least they were doing something, taking this seriously now. Too bad Snowstar had to convince them there was a threat to their own hides before they were willing to move. They should have just moved on it. Wasn't that the way we operated in the old days? He barged in the front door, readied a foreclaw and grabbed the first person wearing a Silver Gryphon badge that he saw, explaining what he wanted in a tone that implied he would macerate anyone who denied it to him. The young human did not even make a token protest as the talons caught in his tunic and the huge beak came dangerously near his face. "S-stay here, s-sir," he stammered, backing up as soon as Skan let go of him. "I'll f-find what you w-want and b-bring it right here!" Somehow, tonight Skan had the feeling that he was not "beloved where e're he went." That was fine. In his current black mood, he would much rather be feared than beloved. People have been thinking of me as the jolly old fraud, the uncle who gives all the children pony rides, he thought, grating his beak, his talons scoring the floor as he seethed. They forgot what I was, forgot the warrior who used to tear makaar apart with his bare talons. Well, tonight they were getting a reminder. The boy came back very quickly with the rolled-up map. Skan unrolled it just long enough to make certain that they weren't trying to fob something useless off on him to make him go away, then gruffly thanked the boy and launched himself out the door. Despite the darkness, he flew back with his prize. When he marched through Snowstar's door, he saw at once that the workroom had already been transformed. Everything not needed for the task at hand had been cleared away against the wall. Other projects had been piled atop one another with no thought for coherence. It was going to take days to put the workroom back into some semblance of order, but Skan doubted that Snowstar was going to be thinking about anything but Blade and Tad until they were found. At least we have one friend who took all this seriously without having to be persuaded. The several small tables were now one large one, waiting for the map he held in his beak. The moment he showed his face at the door, eager hands took-snatched!-the map away from him and spread it out on the table. Redoak lit a pungent incense, filling the room with smoke that just stopped short of being eye-watering. The mage that Snowstar had called Rides-alone, who came from one of the many odd tribes that Urtho had won to his cause, had a drum in his hands. Evidently he was going to be playing it during-whatever it was they were going to do. "Right." Snowstar stood over the table, the only one who was standing, and held a long chain terminating in a teardrop-shaped, rough-polished piece of some dark stone. "Redoak, you watch what the pendulum does, and mark what I told you out on the map. Rides-alone, give me a heartbeat rhythm. The rest of you, concentrate; I'll need your combined energies along with anything else I can pull up out of the local node. Skan, that goes for you, too. Come sit opposite me, but don't think of Tad or Blade, think of me. Got that?" He was not about to argue; this looked rather like one of those bizarre shamanistic rituals that Urtho used to try, now and again, when classical spell-casting failed. He simply did as he was told, watching as Snowstar carefully suspended the pendulum over the map at the location where the youngsters had last been heard from. Rides-alone began a steady drum pattern, hypnotic without inducing slumber; somehow it enhanced concentration. How that was managed, Skan could not begin to imagine. For a long time, nothing happened. The stone remained quite steady, and Skan was afraid that whatever Snowstar had planned wasn't working after all. But Snowstar remained impassive, and little by little, he began to move the pendulum along a route going north and east of the point of the youngsters' last camp. And abruptly, without any warning at all, the pendulum did move. It swung, violently and abruptly away from the spot Snowstar had been trying to move it toward. And in total defiance of gravity, it hung at an angle, as if it were being repelled by something there. Snowstar gave a grunt, although Skan could not tell if it was satisfaction or not, and Redoak made a mark on the map with a stick of charcoal. Snowstar moved his hand a trifle. The pendulum came back down, as if it had never exhibited its bizarre behavior. Snowstar moved it again, a little at a time, and once again came to a point where the pendulum repeated its action. The strange scene was repeated over and over, as Redoak kept marking places on the map and Snowstar moved the pendulum back. It took uncounted drumbeats, and sweat was pouring down the faces of every mage around the table, when Snowstar finally dropped the pendulum and signaled to Rides-alone to stop drumming. There was an irregular area marked out in charcoal dots on the map, an area that the pendulum avoided, and which the youngsters' flight would have bisected. Redoak connected the dots, outlining a weirdly-shaped blotch. "I would lay odds that they are in there, somewhere," Snowstar said wearily. "It's an area in which there is no magic; no magic and no magical energy. Whatever is given off in the normal course of things by animals and plants is immediately lost, somehow, and I suspect magic brought into that area is drained away as well. I can only guess that is what happened to their basket when they flew over it." "So the basket became heavier, and they couldn't fly with it?" Redoak hazarded, and whistled when Snowstar nodded. "That's not good. But how did you know what to use to find all this?" Snowstar shrugged modestly. "It was Gielle that gave me the idea to look for a negative, and I remembered shamanic dowsing; you can look for something that is there, like metal, or something that is not there, like water. Urtho taught it to me; we used to use it to make certain that we weren't planting our outposts atop unstable ground." He looked across the table at Skan, who was trying very hard to tell himself that it wasn't likely for all the magic infused into the basket to drain off at once. He did not want to think about what that would have meant for poor Tadrith if the basket regained its normal weight in a single moment while aflight. "Take that map with you, and tell Judeth what we've found," the Adept told Skan. "I'll work with the mages I'm sending out with the search teams. There's probably something about the area itself that we can shield against. I doubt that a mage caused this. It might just be a freak of nature, and the Haighlei would never have seen it, because they were looking for magic, not for its absence." Skan nodded, and Redoak brushed a quick-drying varnish on the map to set the charcoal. The fumes warred unpleasantly with the lingering scent of the incense, but the moment the map was dry, the younger mage rolled it up and handed it to the Black Gryphon. Skan did not wait around to see what the rest of the mages were going to do; he took the map and fled out the door for the second time that evening. This time he went straight to the planning room-which Judeth still referred to as the "War Room" out of habit. And it looked very much as if they were planning for a wartime situation. Judeth had a map spread out over the table, there were aides darting everywhere, Aubri was up on his hindquarters tracing out a line with one talon when Skan came in through the door. "Snowstar thinks he has a general area," Skan said, as silence descended and all heads but Judeth's swiveled around at his entrance. "That's what he wanted the map for. Here." He handed the map to the nearest aide, who spread it out on the table over the existing one at Judeth's nod. "What's that?" she asked, pointing at-the blobby outline on the map. "It's an area where there isn't magic," Skan replied. He repeated what Snowstar had told him, without the details about shamanic dowsing. "That would be why we can't raise the teleson. Snowstar thinks that anything that's magical gets all the mage-energy sucked out of it when it enters that area." "And if the spell making the basket into something Tad could tow lost its power-" Judeth sucked in her lower lip, as one of the aides coughed. "Well, no matter how they landed, they're stuck now. No teleson, no magic-they'd have to hole up and hope for rescue." Aubri studied the map for a moment. "The only teams we've sent out there were gryphon pairs, with one exception," he pointed out. "You and me, Judeth. We used a basket, and our flight path took us over that area. Nothing happened to us, so where did this come from?" "Maybe it's been growing," offered one of the aides. "Maybe the more it eats, the bigger it grows." "Well, that's certainly cheerful," Judeth said dryly, and patted the girl on the shoulder when she flushed a painful red. "No, you have a point, and we're going to have to find out what's causing this if you're right. If it's growing, sooner or later it's going to reach us. I did without working magic long enough and I'm not in the mood to do it again." "That's a lot of area to cover," Aubri pointed out. "They could be anywhere in there, depending on how far they got before they had to land." Land. Or crash. Skan's imagination was all too clever at providing him with an image of the basket plummeting down out of the sky "We can probably cover it with four teams including a base camp," Judeth said, at last. "But I think we're going to have to do a ground search, in a sweep pattern. Those trees are bigger than anything most of us here have ever seen before, and you could drop Urtho's Tower in there and not see most of it. Gryphons may not do us a lot of good." "They can look for signal smoke," Aubri objected. Judeth did not say anything, but Skan knew what she was thinking, since it was something that he was already trying not to think about. The youngsters might be too badly hurt to put up a signal fire. "Right, then the two already in the area can look for signal smoke," she said. "I'll fly in a mage here, to set up a match-Gate terminus, and I'll call for volunteers for four teams who are willing to trust their hides to a Gate-" "I shall go," said a deep voice from the doorway. Skan swiveled his head, as Ikala moved silently into the room. "With all respect, Commander, I must go. I know this forest; your people do not. Forget my rank and my breeding; my father would say that you should, in a case like this. These two are my friends and my sworn comrades, and it is my honor and duty to help them." "You are more than welcome, then. I'm going, you can count on it," Skan said instantly. "Drake will probably want to go, too. Judeth, that'll give you one mage and a field-Healer, along with a fighter." Judeth sighed, but made no objections, probably because she knew they would be futile. "All right, but these are going to be big teams. I don't want tiny little patrols running around in unknown territory. I want two mages, so you have one for each night watch on each team, and I want at least as many fighters. Ikala, you go call for volunteers among the hunters and the Silvers. Skan, go back to Snowstar and explain the situation and what we need." She glared at both of them. "Don't just stand there, go!" Skan went, but he was a fraction slower than Ikala and reached the door in second place. By the time he was outside, Ikala was nowhere in sight. But he was overjoyed that Ikala was still willing to volunteer, even with the need to trust to a Gate for transport. The young Haighlei was precisely what they needed; someone who knew the ordinary hazards of such a forest, and how to meet them. Snowstar had already anticipated Judeth's decision about a Gate. "As if any of us would be afraid to trust our own Gates!" he replied scornfully. "We've been perfectly willing to use them for the last five years, it's been the rest of you who were so overly cautious about them!" "Not me!" Skan protested, but Snowstar was already on to other things. "Gielle will fly out with a gryphon as soon as it's light; I'll have Redoak head one of the other three teams after you all get through the Gate," the Adept was saying. "I have more mages willing to volunteer than Judeth needs, but not all of them are suited to this kind of mission. Tell her I'll be choosing combat experience over sheer power; we can't take the chance that this dead zone is a freak of nature. No matter what she thinks, it might have a traceable cause, and that cause might be one of the mages who escaped the Wars." Skan nodded; he was certain that Judeth had already thought of that. "I'll go find Drake," he said. It was going to be a long night, and one he was certain none of them would be able to sleep through. They might as well start getting ready for deployment. At least that was something useful. Aging and hedonistic you may be, stupid gryphon, but you're also effective. Eight Amberdrake did not sleep that night. Despite the feeling that he was working at a fever pitch, he got precious little accomplished. Most of what he did was to go over the same scenarios, in his mind, on paper, in fevered conversation with whoever would listen-usually the long-suffering Gesten. But no matter how tired he became, the weariness was never enough to overcome him, not even for a moment. Insomnia was only one of the physical effects he suffered. He simply could not be still; he would sit or lie down, only to leap to his feet again as another urgent thought struck him. The muscles of his neck and back were so tense that no amount of soaking would relax him-not that he stayed long enough in a hot pool to do any good. He had not eaten since the news. His throat was too tight to swallow, his stomach a tight, cold knot, and as for his nerves-if he'd had a client as wrought up as he was, he would have recommended immediate tranquilization by a Healer. But if he had submitted himself to a Healer, he would be in no condition to accomplish anything thereafter. He could not do that. Amberdrake recalled Zhaneel's words of so long ago, as if they were an annoyance. Who heals the healer? Skan and Snowstar had not commandeered all of the mages in the city-there was always one whose sole duty was to oversee magical communications. Those communications were between both White Gryphon and the Silvers posted outside the city-in Shalaman's bodyguard, for instance-and with Sha-laman himself, via his priests. There could be no speaking with Shalaman directly, of course. There was no such thing in Haighlei society as a dirept link to anyone important. The messages would have to go through the priests, who were the only people permitted the use of magic, then to Shalaman's Chief Priest Leyuet, and only then to Shalaman. Amberdrake tracked down the mage in question and had him send his own personal plea for help to the Haighlei in addition to Skan's-but after that, he was at loose ends. There was only so much he could do. He was no mage, he could not possibly help Skan in trying to locate the children. He could pack, and did, for a trek across rough, primitive country, but that did not exactly take much time, even with Gesten coming along behind him and repacking it more efficiently. He certainly couldn't do anything to help the rescue parties of Silvers that Judeth and Aubri were organizing. Even if he could have, it might only have made things worse. He suspected that after his threats, overt and covert, Judeth would not appreciate seeing his face just now. Aubri would be more forgiving, but Judeth had lived long under the comfortable delusion that she no longer had to cope with the vagaries of "politics." As with most true military leaders, she had always hated politics, even while she used political games to further her own causes. She had thought that without a King, a court, or a single titular leader among them, she was at last free to do what she wanted with a policing branch.

She tried to keep the Silvers autonomous from the governing branch, and that was largely what she had accomplished. Now Amberdrake had made it very clear to her that there was no such thing as an environment that was free of politics, that under duress, even friends would muster any and all weapons at their disposal. And she had just learned in the harshest possible way that no one is ever free of the politics and machinations that arise when people live together as a group. No one likes to have their illusions shattered, least of all someone who holds so few. Judeth would be very difficult to live with for some time. He only hoped that her good sense would overcome her anger with him, and that she would see and understand his point of view. Hopefully Judeth would see Amberdrake as having used a long-withheld weapon at a strategic time, rather than seeing him as a friend who betrayed an unspoken trust to get what he wanted. If not-he had made an enemy, and there was nothing he could do about that now. Nor, if he'd had the chance to reverse time and go back to that moment of threat, would he have unsaid a single word. He had meant every bit of it, and Judeth had better get used to the idea that people-even the senior kestra'chern-would do anything to protect their children. That was one thing she had never had to deal with as a military commander before, because a military structure allowed replacement or reassignment of possible mutineers. Parental protectiveness was a factor that was going to be increasingly important as the children of the original settlers of White Gryphon entered the Silvers. Perhaps it was for the best that the precedent had been set in this way. And no matter what happens, knowing myself, I will have simultaneous feelings of justification as a concerned and desperate parent, as well as guilt over not having done better and had more forethought. So there was nothing more he could do, really, except to wait. Wait for morning, wait for word from Shalaman and from the mages, wait, wait, wait Just as it was when he had served in Urtho's ranks, waiting was the hardest job he had ever held. He had been in control of at least part of the life of this city for so long that, like Judeth, he had gotten accustomed to being able to fix problems as soon as they arose without anyone offering opposing force. Now, as the number of emergencies died down and new people came into authority, his control was gone. All of his old positions of influence were in the hands of others, and he was back to the old game of waiting. Finally he returned home, since it was the first place where anyone with news would look for him. As he paced the walkway outside the house, unable to enter the place that now seemed too confining and held far too many memories of his lost daughter, his mind circled endlessly without ever coming up with anything new. Only the circling; anger and fear, fear and anger. Anger at himself, at Judeth, at Blade-it wasn't productive, but it was inevitable, and anger kept his imagination at bay. It was all too easy to imagine Blade hurt, Blade helpless, Blade menaced by predatory animals or more nebulous enemies. And once again, he would be one of the last to know what others had long since uncovered. He was only Blade's father, as he had only been a kestra'chern. Yet hanging about in the hope that someone would take pity on him and tell him something was an exercise in futility. So he alternately paced and sat, staring out into the darkness, listening to the roar of the waves beneath him. In the light falling gently down onto the harbor from the city, the foam on the top of the waves glowed as if it was faintly luminescent. A wooden wind-chime swung in the evening breeze to his right, and a glass one sang softly to his left. How often had he sat here on a summer evening, listening to those chimes? Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survives. So our lives go. Winterhart joined him long after the moon had come out. He turned at her familiar footstep, to see her approaching from the direction of the Council Hall, the moonlight silvering her hair. In the soft light there was no sign of her true age; she could have been the trondi'irn of Urtho's forces, or the first ambassador to the Haighlei so many years ago. Only when she drew close were the signs of anxiety and tension apparent in her face, her eyes, the set of her mouth. "They're putting together the last of the supplies," she said, before he could ask. "Skan and the mages haven't come out of Snowstar's work area yet, and Shalaman hasn't replied. Don't worry, he will before the night is over; remember how long his court runs at night." He did remember; in the tropical heat of the climate around Khimbata, Shalaman's people all took long naps in the afternoon, and then continued their court ceremonies, entertainments, and duties until well after midnight. And he had no fear that Shalaman would refuse help; the Emperor could send off a hundred hunters or more from his forces, and they would never be missed. No, the only question was how soon the hunters could be somewhere that they could do some good. First the priests would have to approve the departure, then they would have to travel across many leagues of forest before they were anywhere near the place where the children had vanished. All that would take time, precious time Blindly, he held out his arms and Winterhart came into them. They held each other, seeking comfort in one another's warmth and presence. There was no point in talking; they would only echo one another, each saying what the other was thinking. They both knew that, and knew that talking would ease nothing, soothe nothing. So they simply sat down on the smooth, cool stone bench outside their home, and held each other, and waited beneath the stars. Neither of them were strangers to waiting. That did not make waiting any, easier-except that it removed the additional pain of loneliness. Judeth must have gotten over her own anger by dawn, for she showed no signs of it when a messenger summoned both Amberdrake and Winterhart to what the young Silver called a "planning session." The two of them had bathed and changed clothing, hoping that clean bodies would restore their minds a little. Amberdrake had shunned his usual finery in favor of something very like Winterhart's practical working garb, hoping that there might possibly be something he could do once the sun rose. When the summons came, both of them had been sitting over a breakfast neither of them had been able to touch, and it was a relief to rise and follow the youngster back to the Council hall. Skan and Zhaneel and, their other son Keenath were already there, showing just as much strain as Amberdrake felt, although only someone who knew gryphons well would have recognized the signs of strain in overpreened feathers, plumage lying flat against the body, posture that showed their muscles were as tense and knotted as Amberdrake's. He doubted that they had slept, but the sight of Keenath made a moment of intense anger flash through Amberdrake's heart. He still has a child. And if his other had not been so intent on leaving the city, mine might not have gone either! But that was irrational and entirely incorrect, and he knew it. He suppressed it immediately, and he and Winterhart maneuvered through the group crowded in here so that they could form a united block with the other set of parents. Judeth did not look as if she had slept either. Deep shadows touched the swollen pouches under her eyes, and she looked twice her real age. Aubri didn't even pretend to be calm; he chewed incessantly on one of his old, shed feathers, presumably to keep from shredding his current plumage. There were thirty or forty people in the group; Amberdrake noticed that at least six of them were mages and he, Winterhart, Skan, Keenath and Zhaneel were the only non-Silvers. Ikala was among the Silvers gathered here, and Amberdrake was irrationally pleased to see him, as if the tall young man represented more than just a local expert on the rain forest. The Council Hall was the only room large enough to hold all of them, and Judeth had completely taken it over, strewing maps and other documents all over the table. It looked as if she had been here for some time. "Snowstar and the mages have uncovered something damned peculiar," she said, when they had all gathered around the map-covered table. She tapped a darkened, irregularly shaped blob on the map in front of her. "This area here has no signs of magic. None, and they tell me that's practically impossible. The missing patrol was due to pass along this line-" She drew a swift mark with a piece of charcoal which crossed the southern end of the irregular-shaped area. "-and if there's something in there that's negating mage-energy, you can imagine for yourself what that would mean for both their carry-basket and their teleson." Amberdrake was all too able to imagine what that would do to a carry-basket; and from the way Winterhart suddenly clutched his arm, her fingers digging into the muscle, so was she. In his mind, he saw the two figures he had watched fly off into the distance suddenly stricken for a moment, then plummeting to their deaths on the unforgiving ground below. "That means we're going to have to come in somewhere near the edge and walk in," Judeth continued, without any hint that she had envisioned the same disaster that had played itself out behind Amberdrake' s eyes. "Our Gate probably won't work inside this area, and we'll have to suppose for now that nothing else magical in nature will work either. We'll have to operate by the old rules of working without magic, although yes, we will be taking mages, just in case magic does work after all. Though-if there's no local mage-power available, Snowstar tells me that the mages will be just like Journeymen and Apprentices, and limited to their own personal power. That's going to put a serious crimp in their activities, and any mages that go along had better start thinking in terms of budgeting themselves before they act." She leveled a sharp glance across the table, to the point where the mages of the Silvers had bunched together. "What about the gryphons?" someone wanted to know. "Can't they just fly overhead and scout the way they always do?" She closed her eyes for a moment, and sighed. "If I wanted a sign that our luck has turned truly wretched, I could not have conjured up one more certain. This is the rainy season for that part of the world-and the weather-mages tell me that storms will be unceasing over this particular area for the next several days to a week. Thunderstorms have already grounded the original pair that was out looking for our missing Silvers; they are on the ground and we know where they are. It might well be a side effect of the loss of magic over the area; we just don't know for certain. But what that means is that there won't be any flying going on. I'm not going to ban any gryphons from the search-parties, but they'll be strictly on foot unless the weather improves drastically." "I'm still going, and so are Zhaneel and Keeth," Skan spoke up firmly. Judeth nodded, as if she had expected as much. "In that case, since I'm going to divide the searchers into three parties, each gryphon can go with one. I've already sent out a gryphon with a Gate-mage; but he'll be coming straight back, and so will the two still out there while weather cooperates." Judeth cocked an eyebrow at Skan as if she expected him to object to this, but he didn't. Amberdrake could certainly understand why. A gryphon on the ground was severely handicapped; Skan, Zhaneel, and Keenath would be as much a hindrance as they were a help. The two who had been on patrol would be exhausted, and the one who had ferried the Gate-mage even more so. Judeth continued. "Now, here's the current plan. We'll Gate in here-that's the closest I want to get to this area with anything that depends upon magic." She stabbed down with her index finger. Here, the point where her finger indicated, was on the line that Blade and Tad had been expected to fly. "The Gate-mage and a small party will stay here, at a base camp, holding the area for the rest of you. We'll divide up; the party with Skan and Drake in it will go north, up to the top of the area, and then in. The one with Ikala leading it, including Keenath, will go straight in. The one with Winterhart and Zhaneel will go south, then in. That way we'll cover the maximum area in the shortest possible time." Judeth straightened, and looked straight at Skan again: "And in case you're wondering why I haven't put you two in on the expected line, it's because the two gryphons out there already flew that line and didn't see anything before weather forced them down. So either the missing patrol didn't fly that line, or it's going to take an expert in that kind of territory to find signs of them. That's Ikala, not you; he'll be leading a party of people all used to moving quickly, and after he scouts the line on the ground, he'll be covering the areas north and south of that line. I'm putting you two on the likeliest alternate track; Tad always had a tendency in training to stay on the northern side of a given flight line. My guess is, if they're anywhere off the line, it's in the north." "But that's just a guess," Skan stated. "They could be south." She nodded. "And the gods know I've guessed wrong before; that's why the third party. The parties are going to number eight; one gryphon, one Healer or trondi'irn, or whatever comes close-that's you, Drake-two mages, and five fighters, all experienced Silvers. Any smaller is dangerous, any larger is unwieldy. Don't bother to pack at all; you'll be taking standard Silver kits including medical supplies, and you aren't going to have time to change clothing. Besides, by the time you make a camp at night, you and your clothing should be sluiced clean." Her stare at Amberdrake said, as clearly as words, And if you don't like that, you don't have to go. He stared right back at her. Try and keep me from going and you'II have a fight. She waited for him to say something, staring into his gaze with challenge in her stance, but it was she who finally dropped her eyes. "This is an in-and-out mission, the faster the better. As of this moment, consider yourself facing a real enemy, a powerful one, if he can drain all the mage-energy out of a place. I don't know what's caused magic to leach out of that area, but I have to assume it's a hostile, and it isn't going to like having twenty-four people traipsing all over its territory. As soon as the mage gets to the Gate-point, we'll be bringing it up, and I don't want it up for longer than it takes to pitch all of you through it. Is that understood?" Once again, she stared at him as if her words were meant for him alone. Her tone of voice implied that, given the opportunity, she would "pitch" Amberdrake through the Gate. He simply nodded, as did everyone else. "Good. From now until you leave, you are all sleeping, eating, and everything else right here." She smiled thinly at their surprise. "That'll be quicker than trying to gather all of you up once the mage gets into place. I don't intend to waste a single minute on any dallying. I'll have sleeping arrangements brought in; the mage I sent out is being carried by Darzie, so I expect to hear that they've made their landing within the next full day." Amberdrake was impressed, as much by the identity of the gryphon as by the speed with which the duo expected to reach their destination. He wondered what Judeth had promised to get Darzie to fly a carry-basket at all, much less try to do so breaking a record and in bad weather. Darzie was not a Silver; he was one of a new class of gryphons who were primarily athletes. Whether as acrobats, fast couriers, or actual racers, these gryphons earned a very fine, even luxurious, living by serving the Haighlei appetite for speed and spectacle. Darzie was the best of the fast couriers and one of the fastest racers-he was a more consistent flyer than gryphons who actually clocked the occasional faster time. It was hard to imagine what hold Judeth could have over him to induce him to risk injury and strain in this way. But maybe he was being uncharitable; maybe Darzie had actually volunteered Not without blackmail. It didn't matter, so long as Judeth had gotten him, whether it was through bribery or blackmail, or a combination of both. Maybe she's following my example. The gods know she has enough power of her own to leverage just about anyone in this city into doing her bidding at least once. "Any questions?" Judeth asked, and looked around the room. "No? Right. Fall out, and for those of you who haven't slept, I'm calling Tamsin in to make you sleep." There was no doubt who she was targeting with the daggers of her gaze, and both Amberdrake and Skan flinched; but she wasn't finished. "That includes me; we won't be any good to anyone if we aren't rested when the call comes. Right, Drake?" Her question came as a surprise, and he was doubly surprised to sense the compassion and sympathy-and worry of her own-behind the words. It penetrated even his defensiveness. "Ah, right," he admitted sheepishly, relaxing just a trifle. So she does understand, and she's forgiven us He had not hoped for it so soon, but he welcomed it as a tiny bright spot of hope in the midst of too much grief. "Good. Glad you agree, because you're going to be one of the first to go to sleep." A commotion at the door proved to be bedding, food, and Tamsin all arriving simultaneously. "Now, stand down, all of you, and get yourselves taken care of. I'll be watching to see that you do." And she did; standing over them all like a slave-master, to see that every member of the three search parties ate, drank, and submitted to Tamsin's touch. As Judeth had warned, Amberdrake was one of the first, and after one look at Judeth's expression, he knew better than to protest. So he crammed down a few mouthfuls of food as dry and tasteless as paper, drank what was given him, and laid himself down on a standard, military-style sleeping roll. He closed his eyes as Tamsin leaned over him, and that was the last thing he knew until the rally-call awakened him. Rain. Why did it have to be rain? Even snakes would be better. Skandranon tried to keep his thoughts on his purely physical discomfort, but try as he might, he couldn't. His skin crawled, and the rain had nothing to do with it. If Skan's feathers hadn't been plastered flat to his body, they'd have been standing up in instinctive alarm. He did not like this place, and his dislike was not connected in any way whatsoever with the miserable weather. It could have been that this bizarre, claustrophobic forest had swallowed Blade and Tad without a trace, but that wasn't the reason his soggy hackles were trying to rise either. The other mage of the party felt the same, and if there had been any choice in the matter, he'd have gone back to the base camp because it just plain felt wrong here. The two of them, after some discussion last night before the human took the first sleep shift, had decided that the problem was that lack of mage-energy in this place. Presumably an Apprentice-level mage or Journeyman would not be affected in this way; they were not used to sensing and using energies outside themselves, unless those energies were fed to them by a mage of greater ability. But a Master (as Skan and the human Silver, Filix, were) was as accustomed to the all-pervasive currents of mage-energy as a gryphon was to the currents of the air. Skan could not remember a time in his adult life that he had not been aware of those currents. Even when the mage-storms had caused such disruptions in magic, the energy had never vanished, it just hadn't worked or felt quite the same. But having no mage-energy about-it felt wrong, very wrong. It had him disoriented and off-balance, constantly looking for something that simply wasn't there. It feels as if I've suddenly lost a sense; something subtle, like smell. Nevertheless, a quick trial had proved to his satisfaction that magic still worked here, and furthermore, those magical items that they had brought in with them were still empowered. Further checks proved that, at the moment at least, there was no ongoing drain of mage-energy. The power that built up in any area naturally was slowly rising back up. So whatever was wrong in this forest, whatever had caused this anomaly, it had not completely negated magic, just removed it. Whether that drainage had been gradual or all at once was anyone's guess. And there must be something coming along to drain mage-energy again as it built up, or there would be some areas that had at least a little power available. As for what that could be, he had no idea. He did not care to think about what must have happened if the basket had also had all of its empowering mage-energy drained-all at once. Skandranon mentally worked on a few new phrases to use when he finally complained about it all to someone whom he could corral into listening sympathetically. He had a reputation for-colorful-language to maintain after all. He would much rather concentrate on that, than how miserable his soggy feathers felt, how cold he was, how sore his muscles were after two days of walking. That was something he simply hadn't considered, and it was galling to realize that Drake was in better physical shape than he was! Drake had been climbing the stairs and ladders of White Gryphon for almost twenty years; he had only been flying. He could not think of more than a handful of times that he had actually climbed up rather than down, and none of those times had been in the last three years. At least Keeth had been working out on the obstacle course lately, and Winterhart had made certain that all muscles were exercised. Poor Zhaneel must be as miserable as he. But she has the best trondi'irn in the city to tend her. Keeth is a trondi'irn. I only have Drake, who does his best, but still he's preoccupied. Rain dripped into his nares and he sneezed to clear them, shaking his head fiercely. He and Drake were at the rear of the party; with his keener sense of hearing than the humans possessed, it seemed a good idea to have him at the back where he might be able to detect something following them. Now he wished he had thought to ask Judeth for a couple of kyree scouts for each party; they would have been much more effective than any of the humans. Rain poured down out of the sky, as it had since the fog lifted that morning. This was a truly lovely climate; fog from before dawn to just after, followed by rain until well past darkness, followed by damp chill until the fog came again in the morning. Judeth had been absolutely right in grounding them, and he would have grounded himself once he saw the weather; there was no way for a gryphon to fly safely in this muck, even if he could get his wings dry long enough to take off. Darzie had managed to bring his mage in safely only because he was insanely self-confident and lucky enough for four gryphons, and because the weather changed abruptly to something more like a "normal" rainy season outside of the "no-magic" area. That, and Darzie is young enough to think he's immortal, and good enough to fly as if he were. Like another stupid, stupid gryphon I used to know. In spite of the fact that the rainy season was normal back at the base-camp, "normal" still meant a raging thunderstorm every afternoon. Darzie had flown and landed in one of those thunderstorms, blithely asserting that it was all a matter of timing and watching where the bolts hit. His passenger had been white-lipped, but remarkably reticent about discussing the flight. Drake had found out what had tempted Darzie into making the trip; a challenge. Judeth had asked the young gryphon if he knew of anyone who might be persuaded, and had hinted broadly that she didn't think he could do it. That had been enough for Darzie, who had insisted that he and only he could manage the trip. And he had, in record-breaking time, and without damaging himself or his passenger. For sheer speed, audacity, and insane courage, that flight had surpassed even some of the Black Gryphon's legendary accomplishments. Some, but not all. Darzie will just have to take his own time to become a legend, and if he is wise, he will do it in his own way, and not try to emulate me. I think that my life must have used up the luck of twenty gryphons. Skan, the base-camp crew, and the other twenty-three rescuers had piled through the Gate in a record-setting time of their own. Although no people had been "pitched" through, all the supplies had been; hurled in a mass by a small army of Judeth's support crew. Not even during a resupply had Skan ever seen a Gate go up and down again so quickly. Darzie flew home to receive his justly-earned accolades and the admiration of every unattached female in the city; the results of that would likely be more exhausting for him than the great deed itself. The Gate-mage and his helpers and guards remained to set up a base camp; the rest of them had shouldered packs and moved out under the beginnings of a rainstorm. No one had told them, however, that they were going to have to climb down a cliff to get into the forest where the children were lost. The three gryphons had shaken themselves dry and flown themselves down, but the humans had been forced to get to the bottom the hard way. That experience, in a worsening thunderstorm, had been exciting enough to age even the most hardened veteran in the lot. Absolutely everything they touched was slippery, either with mud, water, or substances they were probably better off not knowing about. Once at the bottom, the three parties had formed up and gone their separate ways-and Skan had been amazed at how quickly the forest had swallowed the other two search parties. In an amazingly short period of time, he couldn't even hear the faintest sound of the others; only the steady drumming of the rain, and the whistles, chirps, and calls of creatures up in the tops of the trees. Each day had been much like the one before it; only the navigator knew for certain that they were going in the right direction and not in circles. The only time that Skan was ever dry was just before he slept; the moment he poked his beak out of the tent he shared with Drake and the other mage, he was wet. Either fog condensed on his feathers and soaked into them, or he got soaked directly by the usual downpour. Just at the moment, the downpour had him wet to the skin. And he was depressed, though he would have been depressed without the rain. How can we ever hope to find any sign of them? he asked himself, staring up at the endless sea of dripping leaves, and around at the dizzying procession of tree trunks on all sides, tangled with vines or shrouded with brush. There wasn't a sign of a game trail, and as for game itself-well, he'd had to feed himself by surprising some of the climbing creatures in the mornings, while he could still fly. They could be within shouting distance of us, and we would never know it! This forest was not only claustrophobic, it was uncannily enveloping. One of the fighters swore that he could actually see the plants growing, and Skan could find it in his heart to believe him. How long would it take until vines and bushes covered anything left after a crash? A few days? A week? It had been a week since the children went missing, maybe more than a week; he lost track of time in here. And they could have been down for three or four days before that. Gloomy thoughts; as gloomy as their surroundings. And yet he could not give up; as long as there was any chance, however minuscule, that they would find the children, he would search on. No matter what, he had to know what had happened to them. The uncertainty of not knowing was the worst part. Drake looked like Skan felt; the kestra'chern was a grim-faced, taciturn, sodden, muddy mess most of the time. He spoke only when spoken to; tended to the minor injuries of the party without being asked, but offered nothing other than physical aid, which was utterly unlike him. He hiked with the rest of them, or dealt with camp chores, but it was obvious that his mind was not on what he was doing. It was out there, somewhere, and Skan wondered if Drake was trying to use his limited empathic ability as a different kind of north-needle, searching for the pole star of pain and distress hidden among the trunks and vines. With the blood tie between himself and his daughter, he should be especially sensitive to her. If she were alive, he might be able to find her where conventional methods were failing. More power to him; he's never tried using it that way, but that doesn't mean it won't work. Skan only wished he had a similar ability he could exercise. As it was, he was mostly a beast of burden, and otherwise not much help. He couldn't track, he couldn't use much magic without depleting himself, and as for anything else-well, his other talents all involved flying. And he could only fly for a short time in the mornings. Regin, the leader in their party, held up a hand, halting them, as he had done several times already that day. There didn't seem to be any reason for this behavior, and Skan was getting tired of it. Why stop and stand in the rain for no cause? The more ground they covered, the better chance they had of finding something. He nudged past Filix, and splashed his way up to the weather-beaten Silver Judeth had placed in charge. "Regin, just what, exactly, are we waiting for?" he asked, none too politely. Fortunately, the man ignored the sarcastic tone of his voice, and answered the question by pointing upward. Skan looked, just in time to see their scout Bern sliding down the trunk of a tree ahead of them with a speed that made Skan wince. "Bern's been looking for breaks in the trees ahead," Regin said, as Bern made a hand signal and strode off into the trees. "We figure, if the basket came down it had to make a hole; that hole'll still be there. He gets up into a tall tree and looks for holes all around, especially if he can see they're fresh. You might not believe it with all these clouds around, but if there's a break in the trees more light gets in, and you can see it from high enough in the canopy. That's what we're waiting on." Bern reappeared a moment later, and rejoined the party, shaking his head. Skan didn't have to know the Silver's signals to read that one; no holes. He and Regin had a quick conference with the navigator, and the scout headed back off into the forest on a new bearing. The rest of the party followed in Bern's wake. So far, there had been no sign of anything following or watching them, much less any attacks. Skan was beginning to think that Judeth's insistence on assuming there was a hostile entity in here was overreaction on her part. There hadn't been any signs that anything lived in here but wild animals; surely whatever had drained off all the mage-energy here must be a freak phenomenon. Maybe that was what had caught the two children Skan dropped back to his former place beside Amberdrake, but with a feeling of a little more hope, brought on by the knowledge that at least they weren't totally without a guide or a plan. Drake still seemed sunk into himself, but he revived a bit when Skan returned and explained what the lead members were up to. "I've heard worse ideas," he said thoughtfully, wiping strands of sodden hair out of his eyes, and blinking away the rain. "It's not a gryphon eye view, but it's better than nothing." Once again, the leader signaled a stop. Skan peered out and up through the curtains of rain, but he couldn't see anything. Wherever the scout was this time, not even Skan's excellent eyes could pick him out. "I have no idea how Bern is managing to climb in this weather, much less how he's doing it so quickly." Skan moved up a few feet and ducked around a tangle of vines, but the view was no better from the new vantage. "He must be as limber as one of those little furry climbers that Shalaman keeps at his Palace as pets. For all we know, this sort of place is where those come from." Drake shrugged dismissively, as if the subject held no interest for him. "I-" "Hoy!" Skan looked up again, startled, and just caught sight of the tiny figure above, waving frantically. He seemed to be balanced on a thick tree limb, and clung to the trunk with only one hand. The other hand waved wildly, and then pointed. "Hoy!" the call came again. "Fresh break, that way!" Fresh break? The same thought occurred to all of them, but the Silvers were quicker to react than Skan or Drake. They broke into a trot, shoving their way through the vegetation, leaving the other two to belatedly stumble along in their wake. Skan's heart raced, and not from the exertion. He longed to gallop on ahead, and probably would have, except that it was all he could do to keep up with the Silvers. And much to his embarrassment, just as he developed a sudden stitch in his side, Bern, the scout who had been up in the tree, burst through the underbrush behind them, overtook them, and plunged on to the head of the column. Show-off Another shout echoed back through the trees, muffled by the falling rain. The words weren't distinguishable, but the tone said all Skan needed to know. There was excitement, but no grief, no shock. They've found something. Something and not someone-or worse, bodies From some reserve he didn't know he had, he dredged up more strength and speed, and turned his trot into a series of leaps that carried him through the underbrush until he broke through into the clearing beneath the break in the trees. He stumbled across the remains of a crude palisade of brush and onto clear ground. A camp! That was his first elated thought; if the children had been able to build a camp, they could not have been too badly hurt. Then he looked at the kind of camp it was, and felt suddenly faint. This was no orderly camp; this was something patched together from the remains of wreckage and whatever could be scavenged. Regin looked up from his examination of the soggy remains of the basket as Skan halted inside the periphery of the clearing. "They crashed here, all right." He pointed upward at the ragged gap in the canopy. "They're gone now, but they did hit here, hard enough to smash two sides of the basket. They both survived it, though I can't guess how. Maybe there was enough in the way of branches on the way down to slow their fall. The medical kit's gone, there's signs they both used it." They were here. They were hurt. Now they're gone. But why? "Why aren't they still here?" he asked, speaking his bewilderment aloud. "Now that is a good question." Regin poked through a confusion of articles that looked as if they had just been tossed there and left. "Standard advice is to stay with your wrecked craft if you have an accident. I'd guess they started to do that, were here for maybe two days, then something made them leave. It looks to me as if they left in a hurry, and yet I don't see any signs of a fight." "They could have been frightened away," Amberdrake ventured. "Or-well, this isn't a very good camp-" "It's a disaster of a camp, that's what it is," Regin corrected bluntly. "But if all I had was wreckage, and I was badly hurt, I probably wouldn't have been able to do much better. It's shelter, though, and that isn't quite enough. I wish I knew how much of their supplies got ruined, and how much they took with them." He straightened,, and looked around, frowning. "There's no sign of a struggle, but no sign of game around here either. They might have run out of food, and it would be hard to hunt if they were hurt. There's no steady water source-" Amberdrake coughed politely. "We're under a steady water-source," he pointed out. Regin just shrugged. "We're taught not to count on rain. So-no game, no water, and an indefensible camp. Gryphons eat a lot; if their supplies were all trashed, they'd be good for about two days before they were garbage, unfit to eat. After that, they've got to find game, for Tadrith alone. My guess is, they stayed here just long enough to get back some strength, and headed back in the direction of home. They're probably putting up signals now." He grimaced. "I just hope their trail isn't too cold to follow-but on the other hand, if they headed directly west, we should stay pretty much on their trail. That's where I'd go, back to the river. It's a lot easier to fish if you're hurt than to hunt." Skan groaned. "You mean we could have just followed the river and we probably would have found them?" Regin grinned sourly. "That's exactly what I mean. But look on the bright side; now we know they're alive and they're probably all right." Skan nodded, as Regin signaled to Bern to start hunting for a trail. But as Bern searched for signs, Skan couldn't help noticing a few things. For one thing, the piles of discarded material had a curiously ordered-disordered look about them, as if they had been tossed everywhere, then gathered up and crudely examined, then sorted. For another, there were no messages, notes, or anything of the sort to give a direction to any rescuers. Granted, the children might not have known whether anyone would find the camp, but shouldn't they have left something? And last of all, there was no magic, none at all, left in any of the discarded equipment. So the surmise had been correct, something had drained all of the magic out of their gear, and from the signs of the crash, it had happened all at once. And yet none of the search-party gear had been affected-yet. So what had done this in the first place? What had sorted through the remains of the camp? And what had made the children flee into the unknown and trackless forest without even leaving a sign for searchers to follow? Was the answer to the third question the same as the answer to the other two? Tad entered the cave, sloshing through ankle-deep water at the entrance, carefully avoiding Blade's three fishing lines. Blade held up some of her catch, neatly strung, and he nodded appreciatively. "Water's higher," he told her. "In places it covers the trail here." That was to be expected, considering how much is falling out of the sky. "Well," Blade said with resignation. "At least we have a steady water supply- and we don't have to leave the cave to fish anymore." It had not stopped raining for more than a few marks in the middle of the night ever since they had arrived here. She'd wondered what the rainy season would be like; well, now she knew. The stream of water running down the middle of the cave had remained at about the same size, only its pace had quickened. The river had risen, and now it was perfectly possible for them to throw lines into the river itself without going past the mouth of the cave, with a reasonable expectation of catching something. That was just as well, since they were now under siege, although they still had not seen their hunters clearly. The flitting shadows espied in the undergrowth had made it very clear that there was no getting back across the river without confronting them. Tad nodded, spreading his good wing to dry it in front of the fire. He had gone out long enough to drag in every bit of driftwood he could find, and there was now a sizable store of it in the cave. He'd also hauled in things that would make a thick, black smoke, and they had a second, extremely nasty fire going now. It stood just to one side of the stream at the rear of the cave, putting a heavy smoke up the natural "chimney." Whether or not there was anyone likely to see it was a good question; this was not the kind of weather anything but a desperate or suicidal gryphon would fly in. On the other hand-how desperate would Skandranon or Tad's twin be by now? Desperate enough to try? Blade both hoped so and hoped that they would have more sense; their pursuers were getting bolder, and she hadn't particularly wanted Tad to go out this afternoon. The stalkers were still nothing more than menacing shadows, but she had seen them skulking through the underbrush on the other side of the river even by day, yesterday and this morning. "I think they might try something tonight," Tad said, far too casually. "I know I was being watched all the time, and I just had that feeling, as if there was something out there that was frustrated and losing patience." "I got the same feeling," Blade confessed. She hadn't enjoyed taking her shields down and making a tentative try at assessing what lay beyond the river, but it had felt necessary. In part, she had been hoping to sense a rescue party, but the cold and very alien wave of frustrated anger that met her tentative probe had made her shut herself up behind her shields and sit there shivering for a moment. "I-tried using that Empathic sense, and I got the same impression you did. They would like very much to get a chance at us." She hoped that Tad wouldn't make too big a fuss about that confession; he'd been at her often enough to use everything she had. Now she'd finally given in to his urgings, she was not in the mood for an "I told you that was a good idea." She wasn't certain that it was a good idea; what if those things out there had been able to sense her just as she sensed them? Then again, what would they learn? That she was hurt, and scared spitless of them? They already knew that. Fortunately for him, Tad just nodded. "It's good to know that it's not just my own worry talking to me," he said, and sighed. "Now I don't feel so badly about setting all those traps." "What-" she began. At that moment, one of her fishing lines went tight, and she turned her attention to it long enough to haul in her catch. But after rebaiting the hook and setting the line again, she returned to the subject. "What other traps do you think would work?" she asked. "On our side of the river, that is. Where could we set more?" Thus far, they hadn't had any luck with deadfalls like the one that had marked one of the shadows before. It was as if, having seen that particular sort of trap, the hunters now knew how to avoid it. Large snares hadn't worked either, but she hadn't really expected them to, since there was no way to conceal them. But perhaps now, with water over the trail, trip-wires could be hidden under the water. "I tended to that during my 'walk' earlier. There's only one good place, really," he told her. "The river's gotten so deep and fast that there's only one place where I think they might try to cross-that's downstream, past where we crossed it when we first got here. I didn't set a trap right there, though-what I did was rig something that's harmless but looks just like the rockfall I rigged later on." He gryph-grinned at his own cleverness, and she could hardly blame him. "So they'll see the harmless decoy, and then walk right into the rockfall?" He nodded, looking very proud of himself. "It's a good big one, too. If they actually try coming after us, at least one of them is going to be seriously hurt or killed, unless they've got lightning reflexes and more luck than any one creature deserves to have." "Just as long as you don't hurt someone coming to rescue us!" she warned. Yesterday she might have argued with him about the merits of setting something meant to kill rather than discourage-but that was before she had opened herself to the creatures across the river. She still might not know what they looked like, but now she knew what they were. Killers, plainly and simply, with a kind of cold intelligence about them that made her wish for one good bow, two good arms, and three dozen arrows. She would debate the merits of permitting such creatures the free run of their own territory some other time; and if they gave up and left her alone, she would be perfectly happy to leave them alone. But if they came after her or Tad, she would strike as efficiently and with the same deadly force as they would. There was still the question of whether or not these creatures were the "hunting pack" of someone or something else; she did not have the ability to read thoughts, even if these creatures had anything like a thought. But she hadn't sensed anything else out there with them; all of the creatures had been of the same type, with a definite feeling of pack about them. Which could simply mean that their master was off, lounging about at his ease somewhere, watching all of this in a scrying-mirror. That would certainly fit the profile of a sadistic Adept; she couldn't picture Ma'ar, for instance, subjecting himself to mud and pouring rain. If that was so, if there was an Adept behind all this, and she ever got her hands on him "That wasn't the only trap I built," Tad continued proudly, oblivious to her dark thoughts. "I have trip-tangles under the water that will throw them into the stream, I balanced boulders to roll at a touch and trap feet and legs, and I put up some more snares. Between all that and the rock barricade we have across the front of the cave, I think we can feel a little safer." "Just as long as we can continue fishing from in here," she corrected. "And as long as you can stand to live on fish." "All I have to do is think about eating any more of that dried meat, and fish takes on a whole new spectrum of delight," he countered. "I'm learning to tell the difference between one fish and another, raw. Some are sweeter, one has more fat-" And they all taste the same to me. "Fine, I believe you!" she interrupted hastily. "Listen, I wonder if we could rig some kind of a net or something to haul in driftwood as it comes down over the falls. There's a lot of stuff getting by us that we could really use." There was nothing that Tad liked better than trying to invent a new way to do something, and the idea of a driftwood-net kept him happily occupied for some time. And more importantly, it kept him restfully occupied; no matter how cheerful and energetic he seemed-or tried to appear-he was tired, and so was she. The ever-present roar of the falls would cover the sounds of anything approaching them, and most especially would cover the sounds of anything bold enough to try swimming across the river at this point. They both knew that, and she suspected that he was staying half-awake even through her watch, as she was staying through his. Not especially bright of either of them, but neither of them were able to help themselves. Their imaginations supplied the creatures out there with every kind of supernatural attribute, especially in the dark of the night. It was easier to dismiss such fears by daylight, except that she kept reminding herself that just because their hunters hadn't done something yet, that didn't mean they weren't capable of a particular action. It was hard to strike a balance between seeing threats that didn't exist and not being wary enough, especially when you didn't know everything the enemy could do. "Not long until dark," Tad observed, after a long discussion of nets and draglines and other ways of catching runaway driftwood. He pointed his beak toward the river. She nodded; although it was difficult to keep track of time without the sun being visible, the light did seem to be fading. Another one of her lines went taut; this fish was a fighter, which probably meant that it was one of the kinds Tad liked best. Any fish seemed pretty tasteless to her, wrapped in wet clay to bake and without any herbs to season it with. She'd thought about using some of the peppery leaves just to give her food some spice, then thought better of the idea. Although they had not had any deleterious effect rubbed on the skin, there was no telling if they were poisonous if eaten. You could rub your skin all day with shadow-berries and not get anything worse than a purple stain, but eat a few and you would find yourself retching up your toenails She fought the fish to exhaustion and reeled it in, hand over hand, taking care not to tangle the line. That was enough for tonight; she pulled in the other lines, and by the time she was done, there was no doubt; it was darker out on the river. She took the fish back behind the rock barrier to the fire, where Tad still basked. Each day they added a few more rocks, but they were rapidly approaching the point where they wouldn't be able to use river clay as mortar anymore. It just wasn't strong enough. There was another advantage to this cave; no bugs. Enough smoke hung in the air from their signal-fire to discourage insects of all sorts. Her bites had finally begun to heal and didn't bother her too much anymore. In fact, if it hadn't been for those watchers out there, she would be feeling pretty pleased with the state of things. They had fire, excellent shelter, and plenty to eat, and sooner or later someone from White Gryphon or even Khimbata would see or smell the signal-fire, and they could go home. And in the meantime, while they were not comfortable, they were secure. She took one of the big, sluggish bottom feeders from her string, gutted it, wrapped it in wet clay, put it in the firepit and raked coals and ashes over it. The rest she handed to Tad as they were. No longer as famished as he was when they first got here, he ate them with gusto. And if he lacked fine table manners, she was not going to complain about the company. I can think of worse people to be stranded with. "How's the wing?" she asked, as she did at least once a day. "It doesn't hurt as much as it did yesterday, but I still don't want to unwrap it," he replied. "Whenever I move in an unusual way, it hurts." In Tad-language, that meant "it hurts enough that my knees buckle and I almost pass out." She knew; she'd seen it happen. Tad was so stoic. He tried very hard to be cheerful, and it was likely for her benefit alone. By moving very carefully, she had managed to keep the same thing from happening to her, but that meant a lot of restriction on her movement. If only she had two good hands-or he had two good wings! If either of them could manage to get to the top of the cliff, she was sure they could think of a way to bring the other up afterward. Up there, they wouldn't have to worry about pursuit anymore; if the hunters couldn't climb a tree, they sure as stars couldn't climb a cliff! Might as well wish for three or four experienced Silvers with long-range bows, she thought grimly. I have the feeling that there is something about all of this that I'm missing completely, something that should be obvious, but isn't. I just wish I had a clue to what it is. "Do you really think they're going to try something tonight?" she asked, more to fill the silence than because she thought he'd changed his mind. For an answer, he nodded toward the cave entrance. "Rain's slackening early. The current isn't bad in that one wide, shallow spot. Not that hard to wade across, if you've got claws to hang onto the rock with. And we already know they do have claws." She wondered if she ought to try opening herself up to them a second time, then decided against it. They could be waiting for her to do exactly that. Silence fell between them again, and she just didn't feel right about breaking it with small talk. She checked her fish instead, and found the clay rock hard; that was a good indication that the fish inside was done, so she went ahead, raked it out of the coals, and broke it open. The skin and scales came away with the clay, leaving the steaming white flesh ready to eat without all the labor of skinning or scaling. She made fairly short work of it. As usual, it tasted like-not much of anything. Visceral memories of hot, fresh bread smothered in sweet butter, spicy meat and bean soup, and that incredible garlic and onion-laced fish stew that Jewel made taunted her until she drove them from her mind. After that, they let the fire die down to coals and banked them with ashes to reduce the amount of light in the cave. If the hunters were going to try something tonight, there was no point in giving them the advantage of being able to see their targets clearly silhouetted. She moved toward the barricade by edging along the side of the cave to keep herself in the shadows as much as possible. Tad did the same on the other side. The rain had indeed slackened off early for once; instead of illuminating a solid sheet of water in front of her nose, the intermittent flashes of lightning showed the other side of the river, with the churning, rolling water between. There was no sign of anything on the other side of the river, and that wasn't good. Up until now, there had always been at least one lurking shadow in the bushes over there; now there was nothing. That was just one more indication that Tad's instincts and her reading of the hunters' impatience were both correct. They were going to try something tonight. She glanced over at Tad; when lightning flickered, she could see his head and neck clearly, although he was so still he could have passed for a carving. He kept his eyelids lowered, so that not even a flicker of reflection would betray his presence to anything watching. His natural coloration blended beautifully with the stone behind him, and the lines of his feathers passed for rock-striations. It was amazing just how well camouflaged he was. His ear-tufts lay flat along his head, but she knew better than to assume that meant he wasn't listening; the ear-tufts were largely decorative tufts of feathers that had nothing to do with his hearing. No, he was listening, all right. She wondered how much he could hear over the roar of the waterfall beside them. But when the noise of his trap coming down thundered across the river, it was not at all subtle; in fact, it was loud enough that even the rock of the cave mouth vibrated for a moment. She jumped, her nerves stretched so tight that she went off-balance for a moment, and had to twist to catch herself with her good hand. She regained her balance quickly and moved to go outside. He shot out a claw, catching her good wrist and holding her where she was. "Wait until morning," he advised, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear it over the roaring water. "That killed something. And they aren't going to be able to move the body." "How much rock did you pile up?" she asked incredulously. How had he been able to pile up anything with only a pair of talons instead of hands, and with one bad wing? "Enough," he replied, then chuckled with pardonable pride. "I didn't want to boast until I knew it had worked-but I used a little magic to undermine part of the cliff-face that was ready to go. I honestly didn't know how much was going to come down, I only knew it would be more than I could manage by stacking rocks." "From the sound of it, a lot came down," she answered in awe. What a brilliant application of a very tiny amount of magic! "Did you feel it through the rock?" He nodded. "There could be a problem, though," he added. "I might have given them a bridge, or half a bridge, across the river. There was that chance that the rock would fall that way." But she shrugged philosophically. If he had, he had; it might well be worth it to find out just what, precisely, had been stalking them all this time. "And the cliff could have come down by itself, doing the same thing," she answered. "There's no point in getting upset until we know. I doubt that we're going to see any further trouble out of them for tonight, anyway." She was quite right; the rest of the night was as quiet as anyone could have wished, and with the first light, they both went out to see what, if anything, Tad's trap had caught. When they got to the rock-fall, they both saw that it had indeed come sliding down into the river, providing a bridge about halfway across, though some of it had already washed farther downstream. But as they neared it, and saw that the trap had caught a victim, Blade was just as puzzled by what was trapped there as she had been by the shadows. There had been some effort made to free the creature; that much showed in the signs of digging and the obvious places where rubble and even large stones had been moved off the carcass. But it was not a carcass of any animal she recognized. If a mage had taken a greyhound, crossed it with a serpent, and magnified it up to the size of a horse, he would have had something like this creature. A deep black in color, with shiny scaled skin just like a snake or a lizard, and a long neck, it had teeth sharper and more daggerlike than a dog's. Its head and those of its limbs not crushed by the fallen rock were also doglike. They couldn't tell what color its eyes were; the exposed slit only showed an opaque white. She stared at it, trying to think if there was anything in all of the stories she'd heard that matched it. But Tad had no such trouble putting a name to it. "Wyrsa," Tad muttered. "But the color's all wrong" She turned her head to see that he was staring down at the thing, and he seemed certain of his identification. "What's a wyrsa?" she asked sharply. He nudged the head with one cautious talon. "One of the old Adepts, before Ma'ar, made things like this to mimic kyree and called them wyrsa. He meant them for a more formidable guard dog or hunting pack. But they couldn't be controlled, and got loose from him - oh, a long time ago. Long before Ma'ar and the War. Aubri told me about hunting them; said that they ran wild in packs in some places." His eyes narrowed as he concentrated. "But the ones he talked about were smaller than this. They were white, and they had poison fangs and poison talons." She bent down, carefully, and examined the mouth and the one exposed foot for poison sacs, checking to see if either talons or teeth were hollow. She finally got a couple of rocks and carefully broke off a long canine tooth and a talon, to examine them more closely. Finally she stood up with a grunt. "I don't know what else is different on these beasts, but they aren't carrying anything poisonous," she told him, as he watched her actions dubiously. "Neither the teeth nor the claws are hollow, they have no channel to carry venom, and no venom sacs at the root to produce poison in the first place. Venom has to come from somewhere, Tad, and it has to get into the victim somehow, so unless this creature has poisonous saliva" "Aubri distinctly said that they were just like a poisonous snake," Tad insisted. "But the color is different on these things, and the size. Something must have changed them." They exchanged a look. "A mage?" she asked. "Or the storms?" She might know venom, but he knew magic. "The mage-storms, if anything at all," Tad said flatly. "If a mage had changed wyrsa deliberately, he wouldn't have taken out the venom, he'd have made it worse. I'll bet it was the mage-storms." "I wouldn't bet against it." Blade knelt again to examine the head in detail; it was as long as her forearm, and most of it was jaw. "Tad, these things don't need venom to hurt you," she pointed out. "Look at those canines! They're as long as my finger, and the rest of the teeth are in proportion. What else do you know about wyrsa?" He swallowed audibly. "Aubri said that the bigger the pack was, the smarter they acted, as if part of their intelligence was shared with every other one in the pack. He also said that they were unbelievably tenacious; if they got your scent, they'd track you for days-and if you killed or hurt one, they would track you forever. You'd never get rid of them until they killed you, or you killed them all." "How comforting," she said dryly, standing up again. "And we've hurt one and killed one. I wish we'd known this before." Tad just shuffled his feet, looking sheepish. "They might not connect us with the rockfall," he offered tentatively. "Well, it's done and can't be undone." She caught something, a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head. And froze. As if, now that she and Tad knew what the things were and the wyrsa saw no reason to hide, a group of six stood on the bank across from them. Snarling silently. Tad let out his breath in a hiss of surprise and dismay. Then, before she could even blink or draw a breath, they were gone. She hadn't even seen them move, but the only thing across from them now was a stand of bushes, the branches still quivering as the only sign that something had passed through them. "I think we can safely assume that they do connect us with the rockfall," she replied, a chill climbing up her spine. "And I think we had better get back to the cave before they decide to try to cross the river again." "Don't run," Tad cautioned, turning slowly and deliberately, and watching where he placed his feet. "Aubri said that would make them chase you, even if they hadn't been chasing you before." She tried to hide how frightened she was, but the idea of six or more of those creatures coming at her in the dark was terrifying. "What charming and delightful creations," she replied sarcastically. "Anything else you'd like to tell me?" He shook his head, spraying her with rain. "That's all I remember right now." She concentrated on being very careful where she walked, for the rain was getting heavier and the rocks slicker. It would do no one any good if she slipped on these rocks and broke something else. Well, no one but the wyrsa. "Has anyone ever been able to control these things?" she asked. "Just out of curiosity." The navigable part of the track narrowed. He gestured to her to precede him, which she did. If the wyrsa decided to cross the river, he did make a better rear guard than she did as soon as he got turned around. "Not that I've ever heard," he said from behind her. "I suppose that a really good mage could hold a coercion-spell on a few and make them attack a target he chose, but that would be about the limit of 'controlling' them. He wouldn't be able to stop them once they started, and he wouldn't be able to make them turn aside if they went after something he didn't choose. I certainly wouldn't count on controlling them." "So at least we probably don't have to worry about some mage setting this pack on our trail after bringing us down?" she persisted, and stole a glance over her shoulder at him. His feathers were plastered flat to his head, making his eyes look enormous. "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. I wonder what Father would do in a situation like this? But Skan would not likely have ever found himself in a situation like this one. Nor would his solution necessarily have been a good one since it likely would have involved a great deal of semi-suicidal straight-on combat and high-energy physical action, which he was not in the least in any shape to perform. Skandranon was more known for his physicality than his raw inventiveness, when it came right down to facts. Oh, Tad, not you, too-now you are even comparing yourself to your father. The real question is not what my father would do, the real question is, what am I going to do in this situation! He raised himself up as high on his hindquarters as he could get, and gave a battle-scream, presenting the wyrsa with an open beak and a good view of his foreclaws. They stopped snarling and eyed him warily; with a little more respect, he thought. He hoped. "I wish you wouldn't do that." Blade emerged from the back of the cave where she'd been napping, hair tousled and expression sour. "It's a bad way to wake up, thinking that your partner is about to engage in mortal combat." "They don't seem to like the look of my claws," he replied, trying to sound apologetic without actually apologizing. "I was hoping I could intimidate them a little more." He studied the knot of wyrsa, which never seemed to be still for more than an eyeblink. They were constantly moving, leaping, bending, twining in, around, over and under each other. He'd never seen creatures with so much energy and so much determination to use it. It was almost as if they physically couldn't stay still for more than a heartbeat. They had come out of the underbrush about the time that the fog lifted and the rains began; if the rain bothered them now, it certainly wasn't possible to tell. Then again, why should it bother them? That it did had been an assumption on his part, not a reflection of what was really going on in those narrow snake-like heads. They had neither fur nor feathers to get wet and matted down. The only effect that rain had on their scales was to make them shiny. "On first blush, I'd say they don't look very intimidated," Blade pointed out. But her brows knitted as she watched the wyrsa move, and her eyes narrowed in concentration. "On the other hand-that's a very effective defensive strategy, isn't it?" Tad gazed at the stalkers' glistening hides, the way it moved and flashed. The patterns they moved in knotted and reknotted, like a decorative interlace. "Is it? But it bunches them up all in one place; shouldn't that make it easier to hit one?" He watched them carefully, then suddenly shook himself as he realized that the creatures' constant movement was making him go into a trance! He glanced over at Blade. She lifted an eyebrow and nodded. "Not bad if you can put your attacker to sleep, hmm?" she asked, then smiled slyly, which put Tad instantly on the alert. He'd seen that smile before, and he knew what it meant. Trouble, usually for someone else. "Well, let's see if we can take advantage of their bit of cleverness, shall we? Stay there and look impressive, why don't you? I need something to keep them distracted." She retreated into the cave. The wyrsa continued their hypnotic weaving as Tad watched them, this time prepared to keep from falling under their spell, glancing away at every mental count of ten. "Duck," came the calm order from behind him. He dropped to the floor, and a heavy lead shot zinged over him, through the space where his head had been. Across the stream, one of the wyrsa squalled and bit the one nearest it. The second retaliated, and Tad had the impression that it looked both surprised and offended at the "unprovoked" attack. The weaving knot was becoming unraveled as the two offended parties snapped and hissed at one another. Another lead shot followed quickly, and a third wyrsa hissed and joined what was becoming a melee. That seemed to be more provocation than the others could resist, and the knot became a tumbling tangle of quarreling wyrsa, with nothing graceful, coordinated, or hypnotic about it. Now most of the knot was involved in the fight, except for a loner who extricated itself from the snarling, hissing pack. This creature backed up slowly, eying the others with what was clearly surprise, and Blade's third shot thudded right into its head. It dropped in its tracks, stunned, while the rest of the group continued to squabble, squall, and bite. Blade stepped back into the front of the cave and watched the wyrsa with satisfaction. "I wondered just how cohesive that pack was. I also wonder how long it's going to take them to associate a distance-weapon with us; I doubt that they've ever seen or experienced one before." At just that moment, another one of the creatures emerged from the bushes, and uttered a cry that was part hiss, part deep-throated growl. The reaction to this was remarkable and immediate; the others stopped fighting, instantly, and dropped to the ground, groveling in submission. The new wyrsa ignored them, going instead to the one that Blade had brought down, sniffing at it, then nipping its hindquarters to bring it groggily to its feet. "I'd say the pack-leader just arrived," Tad said. The new wyrsa swung its head around as he spoke, and glared at him from across the river. The dead-white eyes skewered him, holding him in place entirely against his will, while the wyrsa's lip lifted in a silent snarl. The eyes glowed faintly, and his thoughts slowed to a sluggish crawl. Tad felt exactly like a bird caught within striking distance of a snake; unable to move even to save his own life. It was a horrible feeling of cold dread, one that made his extremities feel icy. At just that moment, Blade stepped between them, and leveled a malevolent glare of her own at the pack-leader. In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult, and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish. Tad blinked as his mind came back to life again when the wyrsa took its eyes off him. He'd had no idea Blade's education had been that liberal! The wyrsa might not have understood the words, but the tone was unmistakable. It reared back as if it were going to accept the implied challenge by leaping across the river-or leaping into it and swimming across-and Blade let another stone fly from her sling. This one cracked the pack-leader across the muzzle, breaking a tooth with a wet snap. The creature made that strange noise of hiss and yelp that Tad had heard the night one got caught in his deadfall. It whirled and turned on the others, driving them away in front of it with a ragged squeal, and a heartbeat later, the river-bank was empty. Blade tucked her sling back into her pocket, and rubbed her bad shoulder thoughtfully. "I don't know if that was a good idea, or a bad one. We aren't going to be able to turn them against each other again. But at least they know now that we have something that can hit them from a distance besides magic." "And you certainly made an impression on the leader," Tad observed, cocking his head to one side. She smiled faintly. "Just making it clear which of us is the meanest bitch in the valley," she replied lightly. "Or hadn't you noticed the leader was female?" "Uh, actually, no. I hadn't." He felt his nares flush with chagrin at being so caught in the creature's spell that he had completely missed something so obvious. "She's really not my type." Her grin widened. "Makes me wonder if the reason she's keeping the pack here has less to do with the fact that we killed one of her pups, than it does with her infatuation with you. Or rather, with your magnificent physique." Her eyes twinkled wickedly. Whether or not she realizes it, she's definitely recovering. But I wonder if I ought to break something else, just for the sake of a little peace? He coughed. "I think not," he replied, flushing further with embarrassment. "Oh, no?" But Blade let it drop; this was hardly the time and place to skewer him with further wit, although when they got out of this, he had the feeling that she would not have forgotten this incident or her own implications. "You know," she continued, "if we had even a chance of picking her off, the pack might lose its cohesiveness. At the very least, they'd be spending as much time squabbling over the leadership position as stalking us." He scratched the side of his head thoughtfully. She had a good point. "We have to be able to see them to pick one particular wyrsa," he pointed out. "And traps and rockfalls are likely to get the least experienced, not the most. But it does account for why they're being so persistent and tenacious." "Uh-huh. We got one of her babies, probably." Blade sank down on the stone floor of the cave, and watched the underbrush across the river. He turned his attention in that direction himself, and was rewarded by the slight movement of a bit of brush. Since there wasn't a breeze at the moment, he concentrated on that spot, and was able to make out a flash of dark, shiny hide before the creature moved again. "Interesting." Blade chewed on a nail, and regarded the brush with narrowed eyes. "I don't think we're going to see them out in the open again. They learn quickly." That quickly? That was impressive; but he called to mind what Aubri had told him about the pack's collective intelligence. If there were many more than just the knot that he'd seen, it would mean that as a group, the pack might be as smart as a makaar, and that was pretty smart. Regardless of what Father claims. The bushes moved again, and he caught another glimpse of slick black hide. A cross of greyhound and snake I can't imagine anything more bizarre. But then, Blade would tell me that my imagination isn't very good. 1 wonder what kind of vision they get out of those strange eyes? Can they see in the dark? Could that white film be a screen they pull across their eyes to protect them from daylight? Can they actually "see" magic? Or scent it? "I wonder what we look like to them," he said, musing aloud. Blade shot him a sharp glance. "I suppose I looked fairly harmless until I whipped out my sling," she replied. "But I suspect that you look like a movable feast. After all, you are burdened with a magical nature, and it might be rather obvious to them." "You mean-they might be more interested in me than you as prey?" he choked. She nodded. "Probably as someone they'd want to keep alive a while, so they could continue to feed on your magic as it rebuilt. They're probably bright enough for that." He hadn't thought