The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  Winterhart stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, gently massaging muscles that must have been terribly tense. Outside, seabirds cried, greeting the dawn and the winds that would carry them out to their fishing grounds.

  Amberdrake reached up and covered one of his mate’s hands with his own. “I have two problems with this assignment, really, and neither of them is rational. The first is that it is you, my daughter, who is going off for six months to a place that is unsettlingly far away. And you’ll be all alone there, except for a single gryphon. If it were someone else, I would see him or her off with a cheerful heart, and go about my business.”

  “But it isn’t,” she stated.

  “No.” He sighed, and patted Winterhart’s hand. “Your mother is handling this better than I.”

  “I have perfect confidence in Aubri and Judeth,” Winterhart said serenely. “They wouldn’t send anyone that far away who wasn’t prepared for any contingency.” Her tone turned just a little sharp as she looked down at him. “If you won’t trust Blade, dearheart, at least trust them.”

  “Intellectually, I do,” Amberdrake protested. “It’s just—it’s just that it’s hard to convince the emotions.”

  He turned back to Blade, who was even more embarrassed at her parent’s decision to bare his soul to her. She struggled not to show it. And underneath the embarrassment was exasperation.

  Can’t he learn that I am grown now, and don’t need him to come haul me out of difficulties! Can’t he just let me go?

  “The other problem I have is very old, older than you, by far,” he told her earnestly. “And it has absolutely nothing to do with your abilities; it’s something I would still feel even if you were a warrior out of legend with magical weapons at your side. It doesn’t matter to my heart that this is peace time, that you are simply going off to man a wilderness outpost. The point to my reaction is that you are going out. When—” momentary pain ghosted over his expressive features. “—when people used to go out, back in the days of the wars, they didn’t always come back.” She opened her mouth to protest; he forestalled her.

  “I know this is peacetime, I know you are not going forth to combat an enemy, I know that there is no enemy but storms and accident. But I still have the emotional reaction to seeing people going out on a quasi-military mission, and that fact that it is my daughter that is doing so only makes the reaction worse.” He smiled thinly. “You cannot reason with an old emotional problem, I am afraid.”

  She looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, and made little patterns with her forefinger, tracing the grain of the wood. What on earth did he expect her to say? What could she say? That was years and years ago, before I was even born. Can’t he have gotten over it by now! He’s supposed to be the great magician of the emotions, so why can’t he keep his own trained to heel! What could possibly go wrong with this assignment! We’ll have a teleson with us, we’ll be reporting in, and if there is a life-threatening emergency and they can’t get help to us quickly, they’ll take the risk and Gate us back!

  But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and it wouldn’t help anything to say it. “I can understand. At least, I think I can. I’ll try,” she finished lamely.

  True, it is nothing but wilderness between here and there—but when we get “there,” we’ll be in a fortified outpost built to withstand storm, siege, or earthquake. And, granted, no one has even tried to explore all the rain forest in between, but we’ll be flying, not walking! What could possibly knock us out of the sky that our people or the Haighlei wouldn’t have encountered a long, long time ago!

  It was—barely—possible that some mage-made creatures of Ma’ar’s survived from the Cataclysm. It was less likely that any of them could have made it this far south. And even if they did, there had never been that many of them that could threaten a gryphon. The last makaar died ages ago, and there never was anything else that could take a flying gryphon down. We’ll be flying too high for any projectile to hurt us, and even if we weren’t, there’ll be the mass of the carry-basket and all our supplies between us and a marksman.

  “Father, I promise you, we’ll be fine,” she only said, choking down a last dry mouthful of bread. “Makaar are extinct, and nothing less could even ruffle Tadrith’s feathers. You’ve seen him; he’s one of the biggest, strongest gryphons in the Silvers!”

  But Amberdrake shook his head. “Blade, it’s not that I don’t trust or believe in you, but there is far more in this world than you or Tadrith have ever seen. There were more mages involved in the Mage Wars than just Urtho and Ma’ar; plenty of them created some very dangerous creatures, too, and not all of them were as short-lived as makaar. I will admit that we are a long distance from the war zones, but we got this far, so who’s to say that other things couldn’t?”

  He’s not going to listen to me, she realized. He’s determined to be afraid for me, no matter what I say. There was more likelihood of moving the population of the city up to the rim of the canyon than there was of getting Amberdrake to change his mind when it was made up.

  “What’s more, as you very well know, the mage-storms that followed the Cataclysm altered many, many otherwise harmless creatures, and conjured up more.” His jaw firmed stubbornly. “You ask Snowstar if you don’t believe me; some of the territory we passed through was unbelievable, and that was only after a year or so of mage-storms battering at it! We were very, very lucky that most of the things we encountered were minimally intelligent.”

  “Sports and change-children die out in less than a generation,” she retorted, letting her impatience get the better of her. “That’s simple fact, Father. There’re just too many things wrong with most, magic-made creatures for them to live very long, if they’ve been created by accident.”

  He raised an elegant eyebrow at her, and the expression on his face told her she’d been caught in a mistake.

  “Urtho was not infallible,” he said quietly. “He had many accidents in the course of creating some of his new creatures. One of those accidents was responsible for the creation of intelligence in kyree, and another for intelligence in hertasi. And neither race has ‘died out within a generation.’”

  She had already spotted the flaw in his argument. “An accident may have been responsible for the intelligence of the creature, but not the creature itself,” she countered. “Creature creation takes great thought, planning, and skill. An accident is simply not going to be able to duplicate that!”

  He looked as if he were going to say something, but subsided instead.

  “Besides,” Blade continued, taking her advantage while she still had it, “people have been going to this outpost for years, and no one has seen anything—either there or on the way. Don’t you think by now if there was going to be any trouble, someone would have encountered it?”

  Amberdrake dropped his eyes in defeat and shook his head. “There you have me,” he admitted. “Except for one thing. We don’t know what lies beyond that outpost and its immediate area. The Haighlei have never been there, and neither have we. For all we know, there’s an army of refugees from the wars about to swarm over you, or a renegade wizard about to take a force of his own across the land—”

  “And that,” Blade said with finality, “is precisely why we will be there in the first place. It is our duty to be vigilant.”

  He couldn’t refute that, and he didn’t try.

  * * *

  Blade extracted herself from her parents with the promise that she and Tad would not take off until they arrived. With one pack slung over her back and the other suspended from her shoulder, she hurried up the six levels of staircase that led in turn to the narrow path which would take her to the top of the cliff. She was so used to running up and down the ladderlike staircases and the switchback path that she wasn’t even breathing heavily when she reached the top. She had spent almost all of her life here, after all, and verticality was a fact of life at White Gryphon.

  Below, on the westward-facing clif
f the city was built from, she had been in cool shadow; she ascended as the invisible sun rose, and both she and the sun broke free of the clinging vestiges of night at the same time. Golden fingers of light met and caressed her as she took the last few steps on the path. It would be a perfect morning; there were no clouds marring the horizon to presage storms to the east. Red skies were lovely—but red skies required clouds … If I am going to be traveling, I prefer a morning like this one; not a cloud in the sky and the air dry, cool, and quiet.

  At the top of the cliff a great expanse of meadow and farmland composed of gently rolling hills stretched out before her. It was completely indefensible, of course; like Ka’venusho, Urtho’s stronghold, there was no decent “high ground” to defend. This was why the city itself had been built into the cliff, with the only access being a single, narrow path. You couldn’t even rain boulders down on White Gryphon from above, for the path had been cut into the cliff so cleverly that it channeled objects falling down from the edge away from the city entirely.

  Judeth’s idea, but it took some very clever stonecrafters, to put her idea into solid form.

  At the edge were large constructions of wooden frames and pulleys that could lower huge amounts of material down to the first level of the city; that was how food was brought down from the farms up here. Those could be dismantled or destroyed in mere moments by a very few people. Nothing that was up here would be left to be used by an enemy if there ever was an attack.

  The farmers used to live in White Gryphon and travel up each day to tend their flocks and fields; now they didn’t bother with the trip. There was a second village up here on the rim, a village of farmhouses and barns, a few warehouses and workshops, and the pens where herds were brought during the few days of each year that the weather was too bad to keep the herds in the fields. If severe winter storms came from the sea instead of the landward side, the herds could be driven into the shelter of the forest, and those who were not sent to watch over them could take shelter within the rock walls of White Gryphon.

  The stockade and supply warehouse of the Silvers was up here as well. Space was too precious in the city for any to be wasted on bulk stores except in an emergency. And as for the stockade, most punishment involved physical labor in the fields with the proceeds going to pay back those who had been wronged. Since most crime in the city involved theft or minor damage, that was usually acceptable to the victims. There had been those—a few—who were more dangerous. Those were either imprisoned up here, under bindings, or—dealt with, out of the sight of the city. After Hadanelith, no one was ever exiled again. The possibility that another dangerous criminal might survive exile was too great to risk.

  Just outside the stockade was a landing platform. Sitting squarely in the middle of it was what appeared to be a large basket, about the size of a six-person expedition-tent. There was a complicated webbing of ropes attached to it, and standing nearby was Tadrith, with a hertasi helping him into a heavy leather harness. As usual, he was carrying on a running dialogue with his helper, trying to get his harness adjusted perfectly. She knew better than to interrupt; her life would depend on that harness and whether or not he was comfortable in it.

  This was the carry-basket that would take her and all their supplies to the Outpost. It looked far, far too heavy for Tadrith to fly with, and it was. Even the strongest of gryphons would not have been able to lift her alone in it unaided.

  But magic was working reliably enough these days, and there would be a mage somewhere around who had made certain that the basket and anything that might be in it would “weigh” nothing, with a reserve for changes in momentum and speed. He would essentially have made the basket into a variant of one of the Kaled’a’in floating-barges. Tadrith would not be “lifting” the basket, only guiding it.

  The spell was a complicated one that Blade couldn’t even begin to understand. Anything inside the basket—like herself—would still have its apparent weight. If that wasn’t the case, everything not tied down would be in danger of drifting off on a stiff breeze. But to Tad, although the basket had no up-and-down weight, it would still have a certain amount of side-to-side mass and momentum. He would not be lifting it, but he would have to exert some strength in pulling it, just as teams of dyheli and horses pulled the floating barges.

  Blade hurried up to check the supplies lashed down inside the basket. As Aubri had promised, the supply sergeant had taken care of everything she and Tad would need except for their own personal gear. Most of the supplies they had requisitioned—the ones for after they reached the outpost—had already been sent on via Gate. So only what they would need for the trip, what there had not been time to send by the Gate, and what she had brought with her would actually travel with them.

  That’s certainly going to relieve Tad.

  It had also relieved Tad when she told him that she was nothing like her father when it came to wardrobe. She could manage very simply, actually; but Aubri had once described Amberdrake’s floating-barge and if gryphons could have blanched, Tad would have, at the thought of having to help move all that mass of clothing, gear, and furniture.

  She tossed her two bags into the basket, and waited quietly beside the platform for the last of the adjustments to be made. The hertasi in charge was Gesten’s daughter Chana; as thorough and meticulous as her father, she would not leave Tadrith’s side until they were both satisfied with the fit of every strap. Blade knew that every buckle would be checked and rechecked, every rivet and every ring subjected to the most exacting scrutiny. Chana would leave nothing to chance, and there was no possible compromise with safety in her view.

  Finally, she stepped back. “It’ll do,” she said, in her hissing hertasi voice. “Try to bring the rig back in one piece.”

  Blade suppressed a laugh, for the remark was so like Gesten that it could have been he who was standing there. Like her father, Chana would never admit to concern for the trainees she served, only to concern that the equipment return intact. But of course, it went without saying that if the equipment came back to the warehouse in pristine condition, the trainee would certainly have arrived at the landing platform in like shape.

  Tad waved her over, as Chana began hooking up his harness to the basket itself. “We’re waiting for the parents, I presume?” he said casually.

  She sighed. “Much as I would like to simply slip away, if we leave without allowing them their fanfare, they may not let us come back.”

  “Or we may not want to,” he groaned, and flexed his claws restlessly. “Because when we did, they’d make our lives sheer misery with guilt.”

  She laughed, and patted him on the shoulder. “Parents always know how to pull your strings,” she advised him. “After all, they attached those strings in the first place.”

  “Do I hear someone borrowing my words?” The newcomer to the conversation was as elegant as Amberdrake in dress and demeanor, though far less flamboyant. Blade knew him too well to blush.

  “Of course, Uncle Snowstar,” she retorted. “You weren’t using them, so why shouldn’t I?”

  He chuckled at her impertinence; next to Skandranon, she was the only person likely to take that tone with him. It was not wise to risk the anger of an Adept-level mage as powerful as Snowstar, as others, even his own underlings, had found out to their sorrow.

  “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with the basket-spells, Tadrith,” he said, turning to the young gryphon. “They are as tight as any I’ve ever set.”

  Blade had assumed her “adoptive uncle” had come to see them off, along with her parents; she was astonished to hear him say that he himself had placed the magics on their carry-basket that would make it possible to fly with it. “You set them, uncle?” she said, making no secret of her surprise. “Isn’t that—well—?”

  “Rather beneath me?” He laughed. “First of all, it is always a good idea for a mage to keep in practice on anything he might be asked to do, and secondly, if something were to fail, magically, on your bas
ket—” He shrugged suggestively. “Suffice it to say, it was easier and safer to do the work myself, than have to explain to your parents why I let some ‘inferior mage’ do it.”

  Blade nodded ruefully. “Only too true,” she told him. She would have said more, but at that moment she caught the sound of familiar voices from below the edge of the cliff.

  At nearly the same moment, Tad pointed warningly with his beak at a trio of rapidly approaching gryphons, who could only be his parents and sibling.

  “All we need now are Judeth and Aubri to make this show complete,” Blade groaned, resigning herself to a long and complicated farewell that would shave precious time off the amount of daylight they could have used for traveling.

  “Is that a complaint or a request?”

  Commander Judeth stalked out of the door to the Silvers’ clifftop headquarters, but she was smiling rather than frowning. She was not Kaled’a’in; her hair, before it turned to snowy white, had been a dark blonde, and her eyes a clear gray-green. Nevertheless she had been one of Urtho’s generals who understood the value of her nonhuman troops and deployed them with care and consideration, and no one had been unhappy to find her among the k’Leshya when the last Gate came down. She had proved her worth over and over, both during their retreat from lands racked by mage-storms and at White Gryphon. With her partner Aubri, she had organized the first beginnings of the Silvers, and the Silvers in their turn bore the stamp of her personality. She alone of all of them wore anything like a uniform; a black tunic and trews modeled from the tattered originals of her old dress uniforms. The gryphon-badge stood out proudly against such an elegant background.

  She stopped just short of the platform and looked sardonically from Tad to Blade and back again. “Can I take it from that remark that you think I might be a hindrance to a timely departure?” she continued.

  Blade flushed, and the old woman allowed a hint of a smile to steal across her lips.