The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  He didn’t need to try more than a dozen, however; as he took the bead away and fingered up the next, the straps suddenly parted company, unfolding neatly down onto the stand, and leaving the book ready for perusal.

  Cinnabar exclaimed with satisfaction, and flipped the cover open. “Ah, Urtho,” she said with a chuckle. “Just as methodical as always. Indexed as neatly as a scribe’s copy, and here’s what we want on page five hundred and two…”

  She and Tamsin leafed through the pages rapidly, and soon copied the relevant formula down. They planned to make two copies, just in case they were discovered; they would turn over one, but not the second, unless Urtho somehow knew that they’d made it.

  Suddenly, Skan’s head snapped up, alarm in his eyes, his crest-feathers erect and quivering.

  “What is it?” Amberdrake whispered, afraid to make a sound. Was there a guard coming?

  “There’s—another gryphon up here!” Skan muttered, his head weaving back and forth a little, his eyes slightly glazed with concentration. “It’s in the next room, but there’s something wrong, something odd…”

  Before Amberdrake could stop him, the Black Gryphon had snatched the lock-pick beads out of his hand. He turned and trotted down the hall to a doorway barely visible at the end of it.

  Tamsin and Cinnabar became so engrossed in their copying that they didn’t even notice Skan’s abrupt departure. It was left to Amberdrake to chase after him and snatch the beads out of his talons as he shoved them in a bundle against the door-lock.

  “What are you trying to do?” he hissed, as the gryphon turned to look at him with reproach. “Do you want us to be discovered?”

  “I…” Skan shook his head. “I just felt as if there was—something I should do about that other gryphon. It felt important. It felt as if I needed to get in there quickly.”

  Amberdrake did not make the scathing retort he wanted to. “And what if that was the point?” he asked, instead. “What if there is some kind of trap in there and this feeling of yours is the bait? We both know how tricky Urtho is! That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do!”

  “He wouldn’t be mad—at least not for long,” Skan replied weakly. “I could talk him down.”

  “Until he figured out that we had taken his precious fertility formula!” Amberdrake retorted. “Now will you be sensible? Did you actually unlock that door?”

  “I thought I heard a click,” the Black Gryphon told him, with uncharacteristic meekness. “But I don’t know, I could have heard the beads clicking together.”

  These were meant to unlock books, not doors—maybe nothing happened. “Look, Skan, whatever it is behind that door, it can wait until you have a chance to ask Urtho yourself. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you. You were supposed to be here, after all, and you can say you sensed another gryphon—then you can ask him what was going on. He’ll probably tell you.”

  “Just like he’s told me the fertility formula?” the gryphon replied scornfully, sounding much more like his usual self. He walked beside Amberdrake with his usual unnerving lack of sound. “Oh please…”

  “We’re done!” Tamsin grinned. “We copied legitimate information to cover the notes on the fertility formula, if we meet Urtho on the way out and he asks. Let’s get out of here. I’d rather not try and bluff him.”

  “Right.” Amberdrake said. “Come on, Skan. You can solve mysteries later.”

  He stuffed the “picks” into a deep pocket, one full of other miscellaneous junk of the kind a kestra’chern often collected: bits of trim, loose beads, a heavy neck-chain, the odd token or two. He hoped that among all that junk the beads would appear insignificant. And hopefully Urtho, if they met him, would not check him over for magic.

  He hurried down the hall to join the others, assuming Skan followed. The mage-lights extinguished in his wake, leaving darkness and silence behind him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Skan pushed the unlocked door open the tiniest bit. Stupid gryphon. Stupid, stupid gryphon. Going to get yourself into trouble again. This time with your own side! Skan shoved the door open a little more, carefully, listening, watching for moving shadows as he opened the portal, taking a huge breath of air and testing it for scents other than dust. His bump of curiosity was eating him alive. His weaker bump of caution was screaming at him to turn around and join the others on the staircase. As always, his bump of curiosity won.

  Metal doors, and I wonder why? Never mind, Urtho’s not going to like this, stupid gryphon. He puts locks on things for a reason.

  Yes, but what could that reason be? Why would paternal, kindly Urtho hide something that called to him like a gryphon—only not quite? What if it was something important, and out-of-keeping with Urtho’s kind-hearted image? What if Urtho was as bad as Ma’ar beneath that absent-minded and gentle exterior? After all, hadn’t the Mage of Silence been withholding the fertility secret all this time? What if he was hiding something sinister?

  Stupid and paranoid, gryphon. Maybe you addled your brains when you struck the too-hard earth. It’s been known to happen.

  Still. Just because you were paranoid, that did not mean your fears had no foundation. What if Urtho had no intention of giving the gryphons their fertility and their autonomy because he already had their replacement waiting in the wings, so to speak?

  Some kind of super-gryphon, but one that wouldn’t do such an inconvenient thing as begin to think for itself and hold its own opinions. A prettier sort of makaar?

  Stupid, stupid gryphon. And if you find out that’s really the case, what then? Take the chance that Urtho won’t know and stay to tell the others, or fly away before he can catch you? If so, to where?

  The door moved, slowly, a talon-width at a time. Then, suddenly, it swung open very quickly indeed, all at once, as if he had triggered something.

  For a moment, he looked into darkness, overwhelmed by a wash of gryphon “presence,” so strong that surely, surely it must be from many gryphons.

  Then the lights came up, albeit dim ones that left the far walls in shadow-shrouded obscurity, and he found himself staring at—

  Gryphon-ghosts!

  That was his first thought; they hung in midair, floated, and he could see right through them. They were the source of most of the light in the room. Wasn’t that the way ghosts were supposed to look? Surely they must be the source of the “presence” that had hit him so strongly!

  But then he saw that they didn’t move at all, they didn’t even breathe; they stared into nothingness, with a peculiar lack of expression. Not dead… but lifeless, he thought. As if they never lived in the first place.

  And as he continued to stare, it occurred to him that it wasn’t only their surface that he saw, it was their insides too! Every detail of their anatomy, in fact. If he concentrated on stomach when he stared at one, there would be the stomach, eerily see-through, suspended inside the transparent gryphon.

  Fascinated now, if a trifle revolted, he stepped inside, and the door closed softly behind him.

  They hung at about knee-height to a human above the floor, so that one could, if he chose, crawl under them to view the detail from below. Each one differed from the one next to it, some in trivial ways, some very drastically. Here was a rufous broadwing, like Aubri; there a dark gray gos-type, with the goshawk’s mad red eyes, blazingly life-like even in the lifeless face. There was the compact-bodied suntail that was best at flying cover…

  They’re all types. I’m looking at types of gryphons! All of them, every kind I’ve ever seen! We aren’t just one race, we’re many races! Why did I never see that before? Is that why Urtho keeps the fertility secret to himself? Is he trying to keep the types pure?

  Dazed with the revelation, he wandered past another three of the transparent models, to find himself beak-to-beak with—

  Zhaneel!

  Only it wasn’t Zhaneel at all, it was a creature with no personality. But there was her general build, her coloration and configuration.

 
He looked back along the line of gryphons, following them up to where he stood, and the Zhaneel-type. Back and forth he looked, a thought slowly forming in his mind. There was something about this line of gryphons, something that had struck an unconscious chord. What was it? Of course. The types closest to the door represented more numerous populations than the ones nearest him, and as far as he knew of the Zhaneel-type there was only Zhaneel…

  Because she is the first?

  That was it! This was a visual record of Urtho’s entire breeding program! Zhaneel wasn’t a freak, she wasn’t malformed, she was the very first of an entirely new gryphon type!

  Now all those questions Urtho asked her, about her parents, her siblings, her training, they begin to make sense! Surely her parents knew that she was a new type—and if they had lived, they would have seen to it that she got special training for her special skills! But with them gone, she was left to flounder, and Urtho cannot remember everything…

  As Urtho himself had reminded Skan. He could not remember everything, and evidently he had forgotten that one, solitary gryphon of a new falcon type—

  Amberdrake called her—a gryfalcon!

  —who survived, was alone and needed an eye kept on her. Skan had been angry with the mage, and now he was furious. How could he have done that to her? Surely he knew what lay ahead of her when she didn’t look anything like the others! Surely he knew how the gryphons felt about runts, sports, the “misborn.”

  But there was the war. How could he remember? He could only trust to his trainers to be clever and see that she was not some misborn freak, but something entirely new. It is as much their fault as his, if not more. His anger faded, he sighed, and rounded the image of the gryfalcon.

  And he looked upon his own feet, his own chest, his face. His own beak, eyes, and crest, lifeless, mutely staring through the living Skandranon.

  The shock was a little less, this time. He was quicker to see that it was no more him than the other was Zhaneel. Still, the shock was of an entirely different sort; he was perfectly well able to think of the other gryphons as the end result of a breeding program, and even think of Zhaneel that way—but it was profoundly harder to think of himself in those terms.

  It was, in fact, uncomfortable enough that he had to remind himself to resume breathing.

  But as he studied the model, he took some comfort in noting that his proportions were rather better than its were. Especially in some specific areas.

  And I’m definitely handsomer. Better-feathered. Smoother-muscled. Longer—

  :FEAR-ALARM-ANGER!:

  The emotion hit him like a catapult-boulder, and before he could even get his mental “feet” underneath him, something physical hit him from behind. It hurtled out of a place he had subconsciously noted was a doorframe, but had dismissed because there were no lights on the other side.

  The strike sent his feet slipping out from under him, causing him to fall sideways through the image of himself. He tumbled into a wall, and his dancer’s grace was not helping him in the least at the moment. Whatever wanted his hide was only about half his size, and it smelled like gryphon—

  —only not quite like gryphon. It was muskier, earthier…

  But this was no time to start contemplating scents! Whatever this was, it jumped him again and kicked his beak sideways into the wall. Only reflexes kept him from being blinded by the next slash—and then the assault began again.

  This thing—is like a wildcat! Too small to take me, and too crazy to know better. It just might hurt me bad. I don’t like being hurt bad!

  And if this is something of Urtho’s—oh damn and blast, I have to stop it without hurting it!

  A scratch across his cere carried up over his eyes and sent blood down into them. He was momentarily blinded, but blinked the haze away and rolled. He gathered his hindlegs under him, ignored the pain of the bites and claw-marks for a moment, then tucked both of his feet under its belly and heaved.

  It tumbled into the other wall, without any sign of control, as if parts of it got tangled up with the rest of it. But it was game, that much was for certain; as soon as it stopped rolling, it sprang to its feet again and faced him, claws up and hissing.

  It was a gryphon.

  It was what Zhaneel had misnamed herself, something that the gryphons referred to as a “misborn.” It was actually about a quarter of Skan’s size, not half. Its head was small in proportion to its size, and very narrow, more like a true raptor’s head than a gryphon or gryfalcon’s broader cranium. The wings were far too long for its body, and they dragged the floor so badly that the ends of the primaries had been rubbed off by the constant friction.

  In coloration, it was a dusty gray and buff. It was that which made Skan realize why it looked slightly familiar.

  It was a misborn—of Zhaneel’s type.

  It was at that moment that it finally penetrated that the creature wasn’t hissing—it was trying, and failing, to produce a true gryphonic scream of challenge.

  He blinked again, clearing the blood from his eyes with the flight membranes. The powerful telepathic “presence” of gryphon, a presence so strong he had thought that it must come from several of his kind, was all emanating from this single small creature that valiantly tried to howl defiance at him.

  The mental hammering of alarm-fear-rage had come, and was still coming, from it.

  Skan had reared instinctively into a fighting stance while his mind was putting all this together. The misborn looked up at him—four times larger than it was.

  Its eyes widened for a moment, and it cringed.

  But in the next second, it had gone back into a defensive posture. The intensity of its mental radiations increased, and Skan dropped back a little. It wasn’t consciously attacking him with those thoughts, but they were strong. Very strong.

  The moment he dropped back, it glanced to the side and scrambled away, into the new room. Lights came on in there as it entered, leaping up onto a table with incredible speed considering how clumsy it was. It scattered books and instruments in all directions with its too-long wings, and reared up again from the advantage of this greater height.

  “Bad! Bad!” the thing hissed. “Go away!”

  Skan forced himself to relax, and got down out of his fighting posture. The bites and claw-marks stung, but his injuries weren’t that bad, no worse than he got when playing with a rowdy bunch of fledglings. This poor little thing was obviously scared witless.

  “What—ah—who are you?” he asked carefully. It did have enough language to tell him to go away; surely it would understand him.

  “Go away!” it hissed again, feinting with a claw. “Go away! Where is he? Did you hurt him?”

  It reared up again into a ridiculous parody of full battle display, and it was clear that its anger was overwhelming its fear. But why was it so frightened and angry? And who was ‘he’? “I hurt you!” it tried to shriek. “I hurt you! I will!”

  Skan was completely bewildered, and he could only hope that there was some kind of sense behind all this. If the creature was completely mad, he would have to render it unconscious or trap it before he could make his own escape, and he really didn’t want to hurt it.

  Urtho be damned; it would be like hurting a cat defending its litter. This creature doesn’t know what I am and that I don’t intend any harm—and unless I can get that through to it, I don’t think it’s going to stop attacking me.

  “Hurt who?” he asked. “I haven’t hurt anyone; I haven’t even seen anyone here! Hurt who? Urtho? Who are you?”

  He put his ear-tufts and hackles flat, and gryph-grinned, trying to look as friendly as possible. Evidently it worked, for the little creature stared at him for a moment, then suddenly sat down on the shredded desk-blotter. It came out of its battle-posture, instantly deflating, and wiped its foreclaws free of Skandranon’s blood. “Not bad?” it asked plaintively, its anger gone completely. “Not hurt Father? Where is Father?”

  Father? What on earth can this creat
ure mean? Surely no other gryphons have ever been up here; no one could keep a secret like this for long! No, of course there haven’t been any gryphons here, otherwise this little thing would recognize me for one.

  He looked around at the room for clues who “Father” was, but there weren’t any; just the table with odd bits of equipment and a few books and papers, an old cabinet that looked mostly empty, and a sink. In fact, it looked more like a Healer’s examination room than anything.

  “No,” he said persuasively. “I’m not bad. I haven’t hurt anyone. I just opened up a door and came inside.” He edged a little closer to the creature as it relaxed. “Who is Father? Who are you?”

  “Father is Father,” the creature replied, as if stating the obvious for a very slow child. “Father calls me Kechara.”

  Skan moved right over to the table and sat beside it, which put him just about beak-to-beak with the little one. “Tell me about your father, Kechara,” he said softly. “Everything you can. All right? There are a lot of people where I come from, and I need you to tell me what Father looks like so I know which person he is.”

  Kechara (which meant “beloved” or “darling” in Kaled’a’in) was a female, as near as he could tell. It might have been more appropriate to say that Kechara was a neuter, for she had none of the outward sexual characteristics of a female gryphon. That peculiar muskiness of hers was not a sexual musk, just an odd and very primitive scent.

  “Father comes here, Father goes,” Kechara told him. “Father bring me treats. Father brings toys, plays with me. He not here for a while, and I play.”

  “What does Father look like, Kechara?” Skan asked.

  The little creature wrinkled up its brow with intense thought. “Two legs, not four,” it said hesitantly. “No wings, no feathers. No beak. Has—long stuff, not grown, not feathers, over legs and body. Skin, smooth skin, here—” it pawed its face. “—long crest-hair here—” it ran its paws down where the scalp would be on a human. “And Father makes pretty cries, when he comes, so I know he here. Cries like songbirds, and he dances with me.”