“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 telesons 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, Green wing, 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 spellcasting 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.”
The Mage Wars Page 94