The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  He would not be able to maintain it for more than a moment after the rest of the forces learned of Farle’s death. It was either shame Shaiknam, with all the attendant problems that would cause, or give the Sixth back to the man who’d never completed a task in his life.

  There was no doubt in Skan’s mind which it would be. Shaiknam was too well-born, too well-connected. The Sixth would go back to him.

  That seemed to be the conclusion everyone else had come to as well. With Shaiknam in charge, the gryphons of the Sixth just became deployable decoys again. Right now the big question seemed to be, what, if anything, could they do about it?

  Skan moved from group to group, just listening, saying nothing. He heard much the same from each group: this is dreadful, and we’re all going to get killed by this madman, but we can’t do anything about it. There was a great deal of anxiety—panic, in fact—but no one was emerging with any ideas, or even as a leader willing and able to represent them all.

  Which leaves—me. Well, this was the moment, if ever, to act on the theories of leadership he had been researching all this time. Can you be a leader, featherhead? He looked around once more at the gathering of his kind; gryphons had started to pick at their feathers like hysterical messenger-birds, they were so upset.

  I guess there isn’t a choice. It’s me, or no one.

  He jumped up onto the highest sunbathing-rock, and let loose with a battle-screech that stunned everyone else to silence.

  “Excuse me,” he said into the quiet, as startled eyes met his, and upturned beaks gaped at him. “But this seems to be a problem that we already have the solution to. Urtho doesn’t control us anymore, remember? We are just as autonomous as the mages, if we want to be. We can all fly off into the wilderness and leave the whole war behind any time we want.”

  A moment more of silence, and then the assembled gryphons met his words with a roar of objections. He nodded and listened without trying to stem the noise or counter their initial words; most of the objections boiled down to the simple fact of the gryphons’ loyalty to their creator. No one wanted to abandon Urtho or his cause. They just wanted to be rid of Shaiknam.

  When the last objection had been cried out onto the air, and the assemblage quieted down again, he spoke.

  “I agree with you,” he said, marveling that not a single gryphon in the lot had made any objection to his assumption of leadership. “We owe loyalty—everything—to Urtho. We shouldn’t even consider abandoning him. But we do not have to tell him that. The mages all felt exactly the same way, but they were perfectly willing to use the fact that they could all pack up and leave as a bargaining-chit. We should do the same thing. If the situation was less dangerous for us than it is, I would never suggest this course of action, but I think we all know what life for the Sixth was like under Shaiknam, and we can’t allow a fool to throw our lives away.”

  Heads nodded vigorously all around him—and crest-feathers slowly smoothed down, ear-tufts rising with interest. “You’ve got to be the one, Black Boy,” Aubri called out from somewhere in the rear. “You’ve got to be the one to speak for us. You’re the best choice for the job.”

  Another chorus, this time of assent, greeted Aubri’s statement. Skan’s nares flushed, with mingled embarrassment and pride.

  “I’ll tell you what, then,” he told them all, wondering if what he was doing was suicidally stupid, or would be their salvation. “I was trying to come up with a plan to get the confrontation over with quickly, before Shaiknam has a chance to entrench himself. Now, we all know that where Shaiknam goes, Garber follows, and I’m pretty certain he is going to be the one to try to bring us to heel initially. This is the tactic that just might work best…”

  * * *

  Two messages came by bird from Garber, both of which he ignored. One of the gryphons who had a particularly good relationship with the birds smugly took the second one off for a moment when it arrived. When the gryphon was finished, the bird flew off—and shortly thereafter, messenger-birds rose in a cloud from the area around Shaiknam’s tent, and scattered to the far corners of the camp.

  That left Shaiknam and Garber with no choice but to use a human messenger. The gryphons of the Sixth took to their lairs to hide while the rest made themselves scarce, and Skan was the only gryphon in sight. He reclined at his ease up on the sunbathing-rock, as an aide-decamp in the colors of the Sixth came trudging up the path to the lairs, looking for the gryphons Garber had summoned so imperiously.

  The gryphons in question hid in the shadows just out of sight, although they had a clear view of Skan and the aide. They were not going to show so much as a feather until Skan gave them the word.

  The young man glanced curiously around the area—which looked, for all intents and purposes, to be completely deserted. Skan wondered what was going on in his mind. The gryphons were not with their Trondi’irn, who obviously had not been told of this impromptu conspiracy. They were not on the practise-grounds, nor on Zhaneel’s now-sanctioned obstacle-course. They were not with the Command. They could only be at their lairs, unless they had all taken leave out of the area, and leave had not been approved.

  Yet the lawn in front of the lairs was completely deserted. No sign of gryphons, nor where they had gone to. There was no one in the dust-bathing pits, nor at the water-baths. No one lounged in the shady “porch” of his or her lair. No one reclined on a sunbathing-rock.

  Except Skan.

  The Black Gryphon watched the man’s expressions as he tried to reconcile his orders with what he’d found. Skan was not precisely assigned to the Sixth, but he had been flying cover for Zhaneel. Skan would have to do.

  The aide-de-camp took another look around, then squared his shoulders, and marched straight up to the Black Gryphon. Skan raised his head to watch him approach, but said and did nothing else.

  “General Shaiknam has sent two messenger-birds here to rally the gryphons of the Sixth,” the young man said crisply. “Why was there no answer?”

  Skan simply looked at him—exactly the same way that he would have regarded a nice plump deer.

  But the youngster was made of sterner stuff than most, and obviously was not going to be rattled simply by the stare of an unfriendly carnivore with a beak large and sharp enough to make short work of his torso. He continued on, bravely: “General Shaiknam orders that the gryphons of the Sixth report immediately to the landing-field for deployment.”

  “Why?” Skan rumbled.

  The young man blinked, as if he had not expected Skan to say anything, much less demand information. He was so startled that he actually gave it.

  “You’ll be making runs against the troops below Panjir,” he said. “Flying in at treetop level. Dropping rocks and—”

  “And making ourselves targets for the seven batteries of ballistas and other sky-pointing missile-throwers,” Skan replied caustically. “Scarcely-moving targets, at that. There isn’t room between those cliff-walls for more than one gryphon to fly at a time, much less a decent formation. We’ll look like beads on a string. If the missiles don’t get us, the makaar will, coming down on us from the heights. You can tell the General that we’ll be declining his little invitation. Tell him the message is from the Black Gryphon.”

  And with that, Skan put his head back down on his foreclaws, closed his eyes to mere slits, and pretended to go to sleep.

  The aide’s mouth dropped completely open for a moment, then closed quickly. But to his credit, he did not try to bluster or argue; he simply turned crisply on his heel and left, trudging back down the hill, leaving behind a trail of little puffs of dust. Skan watched him until he was well out of sight, then jumped to his feet.

  “Now what?” one of the others called from the shelter of his lair.

  “Now I go to Urtho before Shaiknam does,” Skan replied, and leapt skywards, wings laboring to gain altitude, heading straight for the Tower.

  Where would Urtho be at this hour? Probably the Strategy Room. That wasn’t exactly convenient
; he couldn’t get to something deep inside the tower without passing a door and at least one guard. Skan was going to have to go through channels, rather than landing directly on Urtho’s balcony the way he would have preferred.

  He backwinged down onto the pavement in front of the Tower, paced regally up to the guard just outside the door, and bowed his head in salute.

  “Skandranon to see Urtho on a matter of extreme urgency,” he said, politely, and with strictest formality. “I would appreciate it if you would send him a message to that effect.”

  He was rather proud of the fact that, despite his own agitation, his sibilants had no hissing, and he pronounced his r’s without a trill. The guard nodded, tapped on the door and whispered to someone just inside for a moment, and turned back to Skan.

  “Taken care of, Skandranon,” he said. “If you’d care to wait, I don’t think it’ll take long.”

  Skan nodded. “Thank you,” he replied. He longed to pace; his feet itched with the need to tear something up out of sheer nerve. But he kept as still and as serene as a statue of black granite—except for his tail, which twitched and lashed, no matter how hard he concentrated on keeping it quiet.

  With every moment that passed, he expected to hear a messenger from Shaiknam running up behind him—messenger-birds still probably avoided the General and his underlings, so Shaiknam would have to use a much slower method of requesting his own audience with the Mage of Silence.

  As time continued to crawl past, Skan wanted to grind his beak. He felt like a very large target in the middle of all the pale stone.

  Finally, after far too long a wait, a faint tap on the door behind him caused the guard to open it and listen for a moment. He flung it wide, and gestured for Skan to enter. “Urtho will see you,” he said. “The mage is in the Strategy Room.”

  No point in the guard telling him the way, as they both knew. Skan was perfectly at home in the Tower. He simply nodded, and walked in the open door.

  A second guard stationed inside gave him a brief nod of recognition as Skan passed. Urtho had planned most of his tower with creatures like his gryphons in mind: the floors were of natural, rough-textured stone, so that claws and talons did not slip on them, the doors and hallways were all made tall and wide enough for things larger than a human to pass. There wasn’t a great deal to see, otherwise—just the hallway itself, plain and unadorned, with closed doors on either side of it. The room that Skan wanted was behind the third door on the right, and he hurried right to it.

  The door opened for him, but by human agency, and not magical. Urtho stood behind the table-sized contour-map used for all major planning sessions. Areas held by Ma’ar had been magically tinted painted red; everything else was blue.

  There was an alarming amount of red on that map.

  “Urtho,” Skan began, as soon as he was in the door. “I—”

  “You and the Sixth Wing gryphons are staging a revolt,” Urtho replied, with dangerous gentleness.

  Skan’s ear-tufts flattened. “How did you know?” he blurted, backing up a pace or two. Behind him, a hertasi shut the door and took himself out of the room by a side passage, leaving the two of them alone.

  “I am a mage,” Urtho reminded him. “While I don’t squander my energies, I do use them on occasion to keep an eye on something. I knew you lot wouldn’t care for having Shaiknam set over you, but I didn’t think you’d start a revolution.” He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed levelly at Skan. “That’s not a particularly clever thing to do. You can’t survive without me, you know.”

  Ah, hells. Well, might as well drop it all at once.

  “Yes, we can,” Skan replied, raising his head so that he looked down on Urtho, rather than dropping his eyes below the level of Urtho’s as all his training screamed at him to do. “I’m sorry, Urtho, but we don’t need you anymore. We know how to make ourselves fertile now. Zhaneel is the proof of that, if you doubt my unadorned word on it.”

  He had never in all of his life seen Urtho taken aback before. Surprised, yes. Shocked, certainly. But completely dumbfounded—never.

  The expression of complete blankness on Urtho’s face was so funny that Skan couldn’t help himself. He started laughing.

  Urtho’s face flushed, and the blank expression he wore turned to one of annoyance and a little anger. “What are you laughing at, you overgrown chicken?” the mage spluttered. “What is so damned funny?”

  Skan could only shake his head, still laughing. “Your face was all he was able to manage, before he ran out of breath.

  Urtho reddened a little more, but then, grudgingly, he smiled. “So, you think you have the upper hand, do you?” he said, challenge in his tone.

  Skan got himself back under control, and quickly, even though laughter threatened to bubble up through his chest at any moment. “Yes and no,” he replied. “We can leave, now. You no longer control us by means of our future, Urtho. That doesn’t mean we will leave, though, it just means that we won’t have to put up with idiots like Shaiknam and Garber who think we’re to be thrown away by the handful. Wait!” He held up a foreclaw as Urtho started to say something. “Listen to me, first. This is what Shaiknam planned to do with the gryphons as soon as he got the Sixth out into the field again!”

  He told Urtho what the aide had told him, then traced out the planned maneuvers on the map. “You see?” he said, as Urtho’s brow furrowed. “You see what that would do? Maybe we would provide a distraction for Ma’ar’s troops, but there are better ways of supplying distraction than sacrificing half the wings!”

  “I do see,” Urtho replied, nodding thoughtfully. “I do see.”

  “We don’t want to make trouble, Urtho,” Skan continued earnestly, taking a cautious step nearer. “But we don’t want to be blackmailed into suicidal missions. Maybe that’s not how it seemed to you, but that was how it felt to us.” He raised his head a little higher. “You built our urges to reproduce as strongly as our will to eat and breathe, and used that to control us. We’d rather serve you out of loyalty than coercion.”

  “I would rather have you out of loyalty,” Urtho murmured, blinking once or twice rapidly. He coughed, hiding his face for just a moment, then looked up again. “And just how did you obtain this knowledge?” he asked. “I’m sure it was you—I can’t think of another gryphon who would have tried, let alone succeeded.”

  Skan gaped his beak wide in an insolent grin, hoping to charm Urtho into good humor. “That, Urtho, would be telling.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  For one brief moment when Skandranon defied him, Urtho had been in a white-hot rage. How dared this creature, a thing that he had created, presume to dictate the terms of this war? How dared this same creature usurp the knowledge it had no right to, and was not intelligent enough to use properly?

  But that rage burned itself out as quickly as it came, for Urtho had lived too long to let his rage control his intellect. Intellect came to his rescue, with all of the answers to the questions of “how dared…” Skan dared because he was not a “creature,” he was a living, thinking, rightfully independent being, as were all the rest of the gryphons. They were precisely what he had hoped and planned for, and had never thought they would become in his lifetime. They had the right to control their own destinies. Perhaps he was responsible for their form, but their spirits were their own. He was now the one who “had no right” to dictate anything to them—and he realized, in a blinding instant of insight, that he was incredibly lucky that they didn’t harbor resentment against him for what he’d withheld from them. Instead, they were still loyal to him.

  They would have been perfectly within their rights to fly off as they threatened, he thought, as Skan laughed at the expression on his face. It’s nothing short of a miracle that they didn’t. Dear gods, we have been lucky…

  He didn’t realize how lucky, until Skan told him just what Shaiknam had been planning. A quick survey of the topography of the area told him what it did not tell Skan: that Shaiknam had i
ntended to launch an all-or-nothing glory-strike against the heavily fortified valley. Such things succeeded brilliantly when they succeeded at all, but this particular battle-plan didn’t have the chances of a snowflake in a frying pan of working. It was just another one of Shaiknam’s insane attempts to pull off some maneuver that would make him hailed as a military genius and a hero.

  The only trouble was that military geniuses and heroes had sound reasoning behind their plans. Shaiknam, unfortunately, had only wild ideas.

  Urtho cursed the man silently, as Skan pointed out all the ways that the gryphons would be cut down without being able to defend themselves. Shaiknam’s father was such a brilliant strategist and commander—how had the man avoided learning even the simplest of strategies from him?

  Well, there was no hope for it; the only way to get rid of the man now would be to strip the Sixth of all non-human troops and mages on the excuse that all the other commands were undermanned, and reassign the personnel elsewhere. Shaiknam could still be Commander of the Sixth, but he would only command foot-troops, all of them human. With no aerial support, and no mages, he would be forced into caution.

  That should keep him out of trouble, and his little dog Garber, too.

  He growled a little when Skan refused to tell him who his coconspirators had been, but it was a good bet that Lady Cinnabar was involved in this, right up to her aristocratic chin. And where you found Cinnabar, you found Tamsin, and probably Amberdrake. No doubt they got in when Cinnabar asked to “look at my records on the gryphons.” I thought she was looking for a cure for belly-ache! The kestra’chern must have gotten a client to make him a set of “keys” for mage-locks; that would account for how they’d gotten into the book.

  The wonder of it was that they had managed to penetrate past all the fireworks and folderol in order to find the real triggers for fertility.