The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  She wondered if she ought to try opening herself up to them a second time, then decided against it. They could be waiting for her to do exactly that.

  Silence fell between them again, and she just didn’t feel right about breaking it with small talk. She checked her fish instead, and found the clay rock hard; that was a good indication that the fish inside was done, so she went ahead, raked it out of the coals, and broke it open. The skin and scales came away with the clay, leaving the steaming white flesh ready to eat without all the labor of skinning or scaling. She made fairly short work of it. As usual, it tasted like—not much of anything. Visceral memories of hot, fresh bread smothered in sweet butter, spicy meat and bean soup, and that incredible garlic and onion-laced fish stew that Jewel made taunted her until she drove them from her mind.

  After that, they let the fire die down to coals and banked them with ashes to reduce the amount of light in the cave. If the hunters were going to try something tonight, there was no point in giving them the advantage of being able to see their targets clearly silhouetted.

  She moved toward the barricade by edging along the side of the cave to keep herself in the shadows as much as possible. Tad did the same on the other side. The rain had indeed slackened off early for once; instead of illuminating a solid sheet of water in front of her nose, the intermittent flashes of lightning showed the other side of the river, with the churning, rolling water between.

  There was no sign of anything on the other side of the river, and that wasn’t good. Up until now, there had always been at least one lurking shadow in the bushes over there; now there was nothing. That was just one more indication that Tad’s instincts and her reading of the hunters’ impatience were both correct. They were going to try something tonight.

  She glanced over at Tad; when lightning flickered, she could see his head and neck clearly, although he was so still he could have passed for a carving. He kept his eyelids lowered, so that not even a flicker of reflection would betray his presence to anything watching. His natural coloration blended beautifully with the stone behind him, and the lines of his feathers passed for rock-striations. It was amazing just how well camouflaged he was.

  His ear-tufts lay flat along his head, but she knew better than to assume that meant he wasn’t listening; the ear-tufts were largely decorative tufts of feathers that had nothing to do with his hearing. No, he was listening, all right. She wondered how much he could hear over the roar of the waterfall beside them.

  But when the noise of his trap coming down thundered across the river, it was not at all subtle; in fact, it was loud enough that even the rock of the cave mouth vibrated for a moment. She jumped, her nerves stretched so tight that she went off-balance for a moment, and had to twist to catch herself with her good hand. She regained her balance quickly and moved to go outside. He shot out a claw, catching her good wrist and holding her where she was.

  “Wait until morning,” he advised, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear it over the roaring water. “That killed something. And they aren’t going to be able to move the body.”

  “How much rock did you pile up?” she asked incredulously. How had he been able to pile up anything with only a pair of talons instead of hands, and with one bad wing?

  “Enough,” he replied, then chuckled with pardonable pride. “I didn’t want to boast until I knew it had worked—but I used a little magic to undermine part of the cliff-face that was ready to go. I honestly didn’t know how much was going to come down, I only knew it would be more than I could manage by stacking rocks.”

  “From the sound of it, a lot came down,” she answered in awe. What a brilliant application of a very tiny amount of magic! “Did you feel it through the rock?”

  He nodded. “There could be a problem, though,” he added. “I might have given them a bridge, or half a bridge, across the river. There was that chance that the rock would fall that way.”

  But she shrugged philosophically. If he had, he had; it might well be worth it to find out just what, precisely, had been stalking them all this time.

  “And the cliff could have come down by itself, doing the same thing,” she answered. “There’s no point in getting upset until we know. I doubt that we’re going to see any further trouble out of them for tonight, anyway.”

  * * *

  She was quite right; the rest of the night was as quiet as anyone could have wished, and with the first light they both went out to see what, if anything, Tad’s trap had caught.

  When they got to the rock-fall, they both saw that it had indeed come sliding down into the river, providing a bridge about halfway across, though some of it had already washed farther downstream. But as they neared it, and saw that the trap had caught a victim, Blade was just as puzzled by what was trapped there as she had been by the shadows.

  There had been some effort made to free the creature; that much showed in the signs of digging and the obvious places where rubble and even large stones had been moved off the carcass. But it was not a carcass of any animal she recognized.

  If a mage had taken a greyhound, crossed it with a serpent, and magnified it up to the size of a horse, he would have had something like this creature. A deep black in color, with shiny scaled skin just like a snake or a lizard, and a long neck, it had teeth sharper and more dagger-like than a dog’s. Its head and those of its limbs not crushed by the fallen rock were also dog-like. They couldn’t tell what color its eyes were; the exposed slit only showed an opaque white. She stared at it, trying to think if there was anything in all of the stories she’d heard that matched it.

  But Tad had no such trouble putting a name to it.

  “Wyrsa,” Tad muttered, “But the color’s all wrong…”

  She turned her head to see that he was staring down at the thing, and he seemed certain of his identification. “What’s a wyrsa?” she asked sharply.

  He nudged the head with one cautious talon. “One of the old Adepts, before Ma’ar, made things like this to mimic kyree and called them wyrsa. He meant them for a more formidable guard dog or hunting pack. But they couldn’t be controlled, and got loose from him—oh, a long time ago. Long before Ma’ar and the War. Aubri told me about hunting them; said that they ran wild in packs in some places.” His eyes narrowed as he concentrated. “But the ones he talked about were smaller than this. They were white, and they had poison fangs and poison talons.”

  She bent down, carefully, and examined the mouth and the one exposed foot for poison sacs, checking to see if either talons or teeth were hollow. She finally got a couple of rocks and carefully broke off a long canine tooth and a talon, to examine them more closely. Finally she stood up with a grunt.

  “I don’t know what else is different on these beasts, but they aren’t carrying anything poisonous,” she told him, as he watched her actions dubiously. “Neither the teeth nor the claws are hollow, they have no channel to carry venom, and no venom sacs at the root to produce poison in the first place. Venom has to come from somewhere, Tad, and it has to get into the victim somehow, so unless this creature has poisonous saliva…”

  “Aubri distinctly said that they were just like a poisonous snake,” Tad insisted. “But the color is different on these things, and the size. Something must have changed them.”

  They exchanged a look. “A mage?” she asked. “Or the storms?” She might know venom, but he knew magic.

  “The mage-storms, if anything at all,” Tad said flatly. “If a mage had changed wyrsa deliberately, he wouldn’t have taken out the venom, he’d have made it worse. I’ll bet it was the mage-storms.”

  “I wouldn’t bet against it.” Blade knelt again to examine the head in detail; it was as long as her forearm, and most of it was jaw. “Tad, these things don’t need venom to hurt you,” she pointed out. “Look at those canines! They’re as long as my finger, and the rest of the teeth are in proportion. What else do you know about wyrsa?”

  He swallowed audibly. “Aubri said that the bigger the pack
was, the smarter they acted, as if part of their intelligence was shared with every other one in the pack. He also said that they were unbelievably tenacious; if they got your scent, they’d track you for days—and if you killed or hurt one, they would track you forever. You’d never get rid of them until they killed you, or you killed them all.”

  “How comforting,” she said dryly, standing up again. “And we’ve hurt one and killed one. I wish we’d known this before.”

  Tad just shuffled his feet, looking sheepish. “They might not connect us with the rockfall,” he offered tentatively.

  “Well, it’s done and can’t be undone.” She caught something, a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head.

  And froze. As if, now that she and Tad knew what the things were and the wyrsa saw no reason to hide, a group of six stood on the bank across from them. Snarling silently. Tad let out his breath in a hiss of surprise and dismay.

  Then, before she could even blink or draw, a breath, they were gone. She hadn’t even seen them move, but the only thing across from them now was a stand of bushes, the branches still quivering as the only sign that something had passed through them.

  “I think we can safely assume that they do connect us with the rockfall,” she replied, a chill climbing up her spine. “And I think we had better get back to the cave before they decide to try to cross the river again.”

  “Don’t run,” Tad cautioned, turning slowly and deliberately, and watching where he placed his feet. “Aubri said that would make them chase you, even if they hadn’t been chasing you before.”

  She tried to hide how frightened she was, but the idea of six or more of those creatures coming at her in the dark was terrifying. “What charming and delightful creations,” she replied sarcastically. “Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  He shook his head, spraying her with rain. “That’s all I remember right now.”

  She concentrated on being very careful where she walked, for the rain was getting heavier and the rocks slicker. It would do no one any good if she slipped on these rocks and broke something else.

  Well, no one but the wyrsa.

  “Has anyone ever been able to control these things?” she asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

  The navigable part of the track narrowed. He gestured to her to precede him, which she did. If the wyrsa decided to cross the river, he did make a better rear guard than she did as soon as he got turned around. “Not that I’ve ever heard,” he said from behind her. “I suppose that a really good mage could hold a coercion-spell on a few and make them attack a target he chose, but that would be about the limit of ‘controlling’ them. He wouldn’t be able to stop them once they started, and he wouldn’t be able to make them turn aside if they went after something he didn’t choose. I certainly wouldn’t count on controlling them.”

  “So at least we probably don’t have to worry about some mage setting this pack on our trail after bringing us down?” she persisted, and stole a glance, over her shoulder at him. His feathers were plastered flat to his head, making his eyes look enormous.

  “Well… not that I know of,” he said hesitantly. “But these aren’t the same wyrsa I know. They’ve been changed—maybe they are more tractable than the old kind. Maybe the poison was removed as a trade-off for some other powers, or it contributed to their uncontrollability. And a mage could have brought us down in their territory for amusement without needing to control them, just letting them do what they do.”

  “You’re just full of good news today, aren’t you?” she growled, then repented. I shouldn’t be taking our bad luck out on him. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m just not exactly in a good frame of mind right now.”

  “Neither am I,” he said softly, in a voice in which she could clearly hear his fear. “Neither am I.”

  * * *

  Tad kept a watch all day as Blade concentrated on fishing. Once or twice a single, wyrsa showed itself, but the creatures made no move to cross the river to get at them.

  Of course not. Night has always been their chosen hunting-time, and that should be especially true of wyrsa with this new coloration. Swift, silent, and incredibly fierce, he would not have wanted to face one of this new type, much less an entire pack.

  I wonder how big the pack is, anyway! Six! Ten! More!

  Were they the sport-offspring of a single female? Wyrsa were only supposed to litter once every two years, and they didn’t whelp more than a couple at a time. If these are all from twin offspring of a single litter, back when the storms changed them—how many could the pair have produced! Four years to maturity, then two pups every two years…

  There could be as few as the seven that they had seen, and as many as thirty or forty. The true answer was probably somewhere in between.

  He and Blade ate in silence, then she banked the fire down to almost nothing while he took the first watch. As soon as it was fully dark, he eased several rocks into place to disguise his outline, then pressed himself up against the stone of the floor as flat as he could. He hoped he could convince them that he wasn’t there, that nothing was watching them from the mouth of the cave. If he could lure one out into the open, out on the slippery rocks of the riverbank, he might be able to get off a very simple bit of magic. If he could stun one long enough to knock it into the river—well, here below the falls it would get sucked under to drown. Nothing but a fish could survive the swirling currents right at the foot of the falls. That would be one less wyrsa to contend with.

  He didn’t hear Blade so much as sense her; after a moment’s hesitation, she touched his foot, then eased on up beside him.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she mouthed into his ear. He nodded. Stupid, maybe, but she had good cause for insomnia.

  She pressed herself even farther down against the stone than he had; anything that spotted her from across the river would have to have better eyesight than an owl.

  The rain is slacking off. That was both good and bad news; he had an idea that the wyrsa didn’t much care for rain, and that they were averse to climbing around on rain-slick rocks. Like him, they had talons, but he didn’t think that their feet were as flexible as his. Those talons could make walking on rock difficult.

  On the other hand, as the rain thinned, that made visibility across the river better, especially if the lightning kept up without any rain falling.

  Something moved on the bank across from his position. He froze, and he felt Blade hold her breath.

  Lightning flickered, and the light fell on a sleek, black form, poised at the very edge of the bank, peering intently in their direction. And now he saw that the white glazing of the dead one’s eyes had been the real color; the wyrsa’s eyes were a dead, opaque corpse-white. The very look of them, as the creature peered across the river in their direction, made his skin crawl.

  He readied his spell, hoarding his energies. No point in striking unless everything was perfect…

  He willed the creature to remain, to lean forward more. Lightning flickered again; it was still there, still craning its neck, peering.

  Stay… stay…

  Now!

  He unleashed the energy; saw the wyrsa start, its eyes widening—

  But instead of dropping over, stunned, it glowed for a moment. Blade gasped, so Tad knew that she had seen it, too, as a feeling of faintness and disorientation that he had experienced once before came over him. He wheezed and blinked a few times, dazzled, refocusing on the wyrsa.

  The wyrsa gaped its mouth, then, as if recharged, the creature made a tremendous leap into the underbrush that nothing wholly natural could have duplicated, and was gone.

  And with it went the energy of the spell. If the wyrsa had deflected it, the energy would still be there, dissipating. It hadn’t. The spell hadn’t hit shields, and it hadn’t been reflected.

  It had been inhaled, absorbed completely. And what was more—an additional fraction of Tad’s personal mage-energy had gotten pulled along behind it as if swept in
a current.

  “Oh. My. Gods,” he breathed, feeling utterly stunned. Now he knew what had hit them, out there over the forest. And now he knew why the wyrsa had begun following them in the first place.

  The wyrsa were the magic-thieves, not some renegade magic, not some natural phenomena. They ate magic, or absorbed it, and it made them stronger.

  Blade shook him urgently. “What happened?” she hissed in his ear. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

  He shook off his paralysis to explain it to her; she knew enough about magic and how it worked that he didn’t have to explain things twice.

  “Goddess.” She lay there, just as stunned for a moment as he was. And then, in typical fashion, she summed up their entire position in a two sentences. “They have, our scent, they want our blood, and now they know that you produce magic on top of all that.” She stared at him, aghast, her eyes wide. “We’re going to have to kill them all, or we’ll never get away from here!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tad hissed at the cluster of wyrsa across the river. The wyrsa all bared their formidable teeth and snarled back. They made no move to vanish this time, and Tad got the distinct impression that they were taunting him, daring him to throw something magical at them.

  Well, of course they were. They had no reason to believe he had anything that could reach across the river except magic, and they wanted him to throw that.

  Throw us more food, stupid gryphon! Throw us the very thing that makes us stronger, and make it tasty!

  He’d already checked a couple of things in their supplies. The stone he had made into a mage-light and the firestarter he had reenergized were both inert again; if he’d needed any confirmation of the fact that these were the creatures that had sucked all of the mage-energy out of the carry-basket and everything in it—well, he had it.

  I wonder what Father would do in a situation like this! But Skan would not likely have ever found himself in a situation like this one. Nor would his solution necessarily have been a good one… since it likely would have involved a great deal of semi-suicidal straight-on combat and high-energy physical action, which he was not in the least in any shape to perform. Skandranon was more known for his physicality than his raw inventiveness, when it came right down to facts.