The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  What could he say? “It happens,” he managed, as graciously as possible—not very, but he doubted that she blamed him at the moment for not speaking with an Ambassador’s tact and dissimulation. “Let’s go check that deadfall.”

  When they got close to where the trap had been, it was quite clear that it was going to be empty, for the remains of the vegetation they had used to conceal it were scattered all over the area. The trap itself was quite empty—though there was a trace of blood on the bark of one of the logs.

  “We marked him,” Blade said, squatting down beside it to examine it further. “How badly—well, probably not too badly. Maybe a scrape, or a minor cut. Possibly a broken bone. But we did hurt him a little.”

  She stood up and looked toward the tree where the decoys were hidden. “We’d better go see how they reacted.”

  When they reached the base of the tree, they finally saw something of what their trackers could do, and some clues as to their nature.

  Persistent. And… possibly angry. But not foolishly persistent.

  There were scratches, deep ones, in the bark of the tree, about twice as high up on the trunk as Blade was tall. So the decoys had worked, at least for a while, and the hunters had been unable to resist trying to get at the quarry when it was openly in sight.

  Or else they were so angry when one of their number got caught in the deadfall that, they tried to get to us no matter how difficult it was going to be.

  Now they knew this much: the hunters could leap respectable distances, but they couldn’t climb the tree trunk, which at least meant that they were not great cats. The ground at the foot of the tree was torn by claws, either as the hunters tore at the ground in frustration, or when they tried to leap up to drag their prey down out of the tree.

  On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of damage to the tree trunk itself; the hunters had made several attempts, but it didn’t look as if they had tried mindlessly, over and over, until they were exhausted.

  That meant that they were intelligent enough to know when their task was impossible.

  Or intelligent enough to recognize that the decoys were just that. In that case, they might well have reasoned that we would have to come back to get the packs before we left, no matter where we hid ourselves overnight.

  And if it had been anger that motivated their attack, their anger did not overcome them for long.

  Blade looked around, shivering, as if some of the same thoughts had occurred to her. “Let’s, get the packs and get out of here,” she urged. “Fast. They haven’t shown themselves by day before, but that doesn’t mean they won’t now. We might have given them a reason to.”

  He swarmed up the tree far more quickly than he had thought possible a few moments before, and this time he didn’t notice his sore muscles. There was no need to concern himself with ropes on the way up, which made things simpler. He untied the packs when he got there, and dropped them and the rope that held them in place down to the ground, leaving the decoys stuck in the forks of the branches. If the shadow-lurkers were still deceived by the decoys, they might linger, giving him and Blade that much more of a head start.

  He went down the tree twice as fast as he had gone up. Every nerve in his body jumped whenever an unexpected sound occurred, and the quicker they left, the happier he would be. There was just a moment more of delay during which they stowed the rope and donned the packs, and then they were on their way without even a pause for a meal.

  He wasn’t hungry, and he suspected that Blade wasn’t either. His insides were all knotted up with tension, and he kept hearing old gryphon proverbs in the back of his mind, about well-fed gryphons and the inability to fly out of danger.

  Not that I can fly out of danger now—but it’s better to run or fight on an empty stomach than a full one!

  It was barely dawn by the light, and the morning fog had not yet lifted. The entire world was painted in dim grays and blues, vague gray shapes and columns appearing and vanishing in white mist. In a way, that was all to the good, for rather than using the trees as cover, they counted on the fog itself for primary concealment. They were able to make much better time that way, and since they were taking their bearings from the north-needle rather than the sun, it didn’t matter that everything was obscured and enshrouded.

  The fog itself had an odd, bitter aftertaste to it, nothing at all like the sea mists Tad was used to. The air felt heavier and thicker, although that was probably his imagination. The fog condensed on his feathers, and he kept shaking himself so that it didn’t soak in. Poor Blade had no such ability; her hair was damp, and she would probably be shivering if they weren’t trotting along fast enough to stay warm from exertion.

  He found himself trying to think what kind of creature the hunters could be. Those stories about Ma’ar and all the creatures he made—what sort of things did he do? Father said that most of what he did was to make copies of the creatures that Urtho developed…

  The makaar had been analogs of gryphons; had there been analogs of hertasi and kyreel The tervardi and dyheli were natural creatures, surely Ma’ar had not bothered to make analogous creatures to them; why would he? But then again, why not? Ma’ar had never hesitated to do or try anything he considered might give him an edge.

  He made cold-drakes and basilisks, but those weren’t analogs of anything Urtho made, so there goes Father’s theory. There were smaller creatures, but I can’t remember anything that might correspond in size to the hunters. Did he do flightless makaar! But why would he, when a makaar on the ground would be more helpless than I am! The shadow-hunters can’t be analogs of hertasi, because I’m certain that what we’ve been seeing is four-footed, not two-footed.

  Had anyone else involved in the Mage Wars made a four-footed hunter the size of a horse?

  I just can’t remember anyone ever going into a lot of detail about the mage-made creatures. Maybe Snowstar would know, but he’s rather effectively out of reach at the moment.

  He kept his ears trained on the trail behind them, and his eyes on Blade’s back. She was a ghost in the fog, and it was up to him to keep track of her and not lose her. Her pale beige clothing blended in beautifully with the fog—but so would his own gray plumage. For once, it would probably be harder for the hunters to see them than vice versa.

  Whatever is behind us is clever, very clever. They weren’t deceived by my false trails, and they either gave up on the decoys or recognized them as false, and if they gave up temporarily, there’s no guarantee that they won’t realize what’s going on when they come back. They didn’t find us, but they might not have bothered to look. Or they might have needed to hunt and feed, and they couldn’t take the extra time to figure out where we were. Why should they! They knew we’d come out in the morning, and all they have to do is wait for us to come out and get on our way and they could trail us again. They could even be hoping we will stay put in that campsite, since it has been proven to protect us once.

  He wanted rock walls around him; a secure place that these shadow-hunters couldn’t dig into. He wanted a steady food source that the shadows couldn’t frighten away. Once they had both, they could figure out ways to signal the help that must be coming.

  And he wanted to see them. He wanted to know exactly what was hunting them. Traps might give him more of a chance to see one, provided that any injured or dead hunters remained in the trap. And there was no guarantee of that, either.

  They freed the injured one from the deadfall. That was what I heard last night; they were freeing him.

  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!”

  CHAPTER 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 h
im. “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.