Grand Theft Griffin

by Michael Angel

  At the very least, it gave me a basis from which I could explain DNA testing. Since DNA carried a being’s unique genetic code, I was able to sum up its properties with the biology class jingle: It’s the slimy goo that makes you you! And because DNA existed in every cell of the body, it certainly could be found in the griffin feather left at the crime scene.

  Of course, Ollie had contaminated the outside of the feather when he’d handed it to me. But I figured that a quick swab inside the hollow part of the quill would yield cells that no biologist on earth had yet seen.

  “There’s a saying in my field,” I explained. “You can’t walk through a room without leaving a trace of yourself on something. Here, you might have skin cells, hair, and feathers. With humans, you can also look at the prints left behind by the pads at the tips of the fingers. Finding a specific type of fingerprint was how I got the break that solved my first big case.”

  “A griffin hath no finger ‘pads’,” Shaw pointed out.

  “Then we’d have to look at paw prints. But the only computer programs that could match up the print of the paw work with existing databases. There’s nothing like that here.”

  “Doth a ‘database’ exist for my kind’s ‘code’?”

  “No, but there are programs which can ‘sift’ through the patterns of the genetic code until we find a match. Whichever griffin matches that of the feather will be our guilty party.”

  “You shall be plucking a great number of feathers,” Galen observed.

  “Not feathers,” I corrected as I held up the toothbrush-shaped utensil. “This is what’s called a ‘buccal’ brush. You swab it on the inside of a subject’s cheek and put it into a little plastic bag to prevent it from being contaminated.”

  “That would make it less of a chore, indeed.”

  “I sold the idea to King Fitzwilliam by suggesting that I approach the Council of Elders as a representative of his kingdom: one who is conducting a study to ensure that only the healthiest griffins serve with the Andeluvian Air Cavalry.”

  “Ah. That would explain his awarding you ‘envoy’ status. Among other things it would impress the urgency of your mission.”

  Shaw nodded vigorously as he added, “And ‘tis lucky indeed that the griffins serving with the Air Cavalry shall return home for the Rite of the Autumn Winds. Many warriors are nigh obsessed with joining the Cavalry. You shan’t have much of a problem getting volunteers for your samples, especially if it tells which doth possess superior health.”

  “I’m not sure that I’ll be able to tell much,” I hedged. “Griffin genes are going to confuse the hell out of any lab. But if there are any questions of parentage in the aerie, I should be able to answer them.”

  For the first time today, my friends’ reactions caught me off guard. My last statement was met with a knowing chuckle from the wizard, while the griffin let out something close to an avian guffaw. I stood there, confused, until Shaw placed a furry paw on my shoulder.

  “A griffin hath no question as to what their parentage might be,” he reassured me. “Your thought is kind, but ‘ere you offer, be aware that it shall bring forth laughter.”

  “What? I mean, why would it–”

  “I suspect that you need to see how griffins mate,” Galen said, with a smile. “And from that you shall see how they handle the resulting issues of lineage.”

  I frowned, puzzled. “It sounds like I should.”

  “And if you are to see anything, it is time that you depart. Daylight is burning, as the griffins say. Even now, it will be well towards evening by the time you get there.”

  Shaw turned to his side again and crouched down a little for me. I slipped on my backpack with Galen’s help and then swung up into the griffin’s saddle. There was a creak of leather as my weight settled into place.

  Galen beamed at me. “Fare thee well, Dayna. I charge you, Shaw: do not let her out of your sight if you can help it. Strange forces are at work here, and I mistrust them.”

  “Your mistrust and mine,” Shaw responded seriously. “Much have I pondered upon this very thing, and I shall protect her life with mine.”

  “And I’m hoping that you won’t have to put yourself in that spot,” I chimed in. “Farewell, Galen. I’ll be keeping these gifts of yours close.”

  The centaur bowed and took a few steps back. Shaw raised his head and unfurled his wings. With a trio of mighty beats, we leapt into the air as if someone had fired us out of a circus cannon. In a moment, the balcony fell away. The snap of fabric by my ear gave me a start, as I realized how close we’d passed to the red-and-black pennon atop the palace’s highest tower.

  Galen had given me a ride before. The experience had been singularly underwhelming, since I was preoccupied with holding on and seeing anything over his broad shoulder was nearly impossible. I’d also ridden Shaw in a pinch. His lumbering pace on the ground translated into a gentle, rocking ride.

  This was different - exciting and terrifying in equal measure.

  The ground fell away, turning into a tangle of city streets populated by ant-like people and dotted with spires and flapping banners. That was actually somewhat familiar, since I’d been up once or twice in a small plane.

  But an airplane muted the experience, making it more distant. The comforting confines of the cabin window, the buzz or whoosh of the engine, made one passive, like a viewer watching television.

  Right in the here and now, the screen was gone. Wind blasted me in the face, making me squint if I looked directly ahead. My hair tossed back and forth, whipping my cheeks when we banked. Every aspect of this flight was real and raw, cold and exhilarating!

  The only sounds – aside from my startled ‘eek!’ as we took off – were the beats of Shaw’s wings in my ears. Well, that and my heavy breathing, once I realized that there was no seat belt or anything to keep me from falling off Shaw’s back. I swallowed hard and grabbed on for dear life to a bulge on the saddle’s front, roughly where the pommel would be.

  “Art thou feeling well?” Shaw inquired, in a voice that was as unconcerned as if he’d been on the ground, munching on a raw leg of lamb.

  “I’m fine, really,” I said. “This is all just very…new to me.”

  A soft chuckle. “Many new to the Air Cavalry come nigh to sobbing in fear upon their first flight. Bravery resides in thy soul.”

  I pried one of my hands from the pommel-bump and patted Shaw on his shoulder in thanks. Right then, we passed through the gossamer surface of a low cloud. I suppressed a shiver as a deliciously cool wetness pressed against my skin. It was over in a few seconds and we broke out into the sun again.

  Time passed as Shaw continued his steady flight, heading in a general southerly direction. The gray stone buildings of the city around Fitzwilliam’s palace gave way to smaller, more isolated farm houses surrounded by well-tended farmland and orchards. Eventually, the farmland turned into forest, spitted through with a single silvery-gray paved road.

  “Does that road run all the way to the Griffin Lands?” I asked.

  “Nay, that road doth run to its end at a port. One that belongs to the little country of Kescar. Our journey shall part ways with it, as it runs south where we turn west.”

  The name ‘Kescar’ sounded familiar. Then it came back to me. That land’s ambassador had been killed in the same murder plot that took Good King Benedict’s life. And I’d seen two more of their people recently in Fitzwilliam’s throne room. I recalled that Captain Vazura had said the border regions nigh to the sea were poor places where the people couldn’t afford horses for their travels. I mentioned as much to Shaw.

  Shaw nodded as he retracted one wing slightly to bank us to the west.

  “‘Tis true enough, one supposes. Knowest I little of Kescar, save that it is a humble place. They are known for their ample-sized fishing fleet and not much else.” I detected the hint of a sniff as he added, “They lack the mark of a true warrior culture.”

  Up ahead, the land lost its gentle roll and
began to rear up into tumbled foothills and rugged, stony highlands. Off to the left, the forest sloped down towards a wide sandy beach. I smelled salt in the air and caught a glimpse of blue. Shaw let out a squawk and jabbed a paw up at about ten o’clock high.

  “Have my senses gone tricksy? Do you see it as well, Dayna?”

  I squinted in the direction he indicated. My poor human eyes were nowhere near as good as an aging griffin’s, but finally, I spotted something. I saw a mass of black specks, no larger than poppy seeds at this distance, silhouetted high above against the white of a towering cumulus cloud.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Wyverns. Dragon creatures like to my own size, or larger. But they do not swarm as such, not unless they have fallen upon prey.”

  “Prey?” My stomach gave a gentle tug, as if to remind me how quickly it could tie itself into a knot. “What could they prey upon out here?”

  Shaw didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed upon the rapidly growing specks. Each black spot resolved itself into a long, skinny object like a snake with scaly bat wings glued to its back. I counted more than fifty of the creatures before I gave up. But I did notice that the swarm was ignoring us and heading for a spot far below, on the beach.

  “Ah, mine eyes see it now!” Shaw said, and his voice took on an excited tone. I felt his fur prick up around my legs, and his wing beats began to quicken. “Up and to the right! Three lances of griffin warriors approach!”

  Again, it took me a moment to find what Shaw was looking at. Then the scene snapped into focus. Higher up and behind the swarm were a dozen griffins, divided into three quartets of flyers. Each ‘lance’, as Shaw put it, flew in a diamond-shaped formation. The griffins moved at a terrific speed, closing in just as the wyverns had begun landing at the edge of the beach.

  “They’re stalking the wyverns!” I said incredulously.

  “Nay, not stalking. Getting into position to attack!”

  “At four-to-one odds, or worse?”

  “Of course! The fewer warriors in the battle, the greater the share of honor!”

  And with that pronouncement, the griffin lances half-folded one of their wings. In unison, they banked and dove towards the swarm like a squadron of fighter planes from the Second World War. A distant scream resonated in my ears as the warriors went into their attack. That scream was echoed from Shaw’s beak.

  I followed suit with a scream of my own as Shaw folded his wings and plummeted towards the earth below like a fur-and-feather covered stone.

  Chapter Twelve

  Shaw angled his wings, turning his plummet into a full corkscrew dive. The landscape below us turned from a comforting quilt of forest into a big green and brown smear. Blood rushed to my head, making my skin flush. My stomach decided enough was enough and tried to leap up into my throat to strangle me and end it all.

  The dive was one part horror, two parts terror, like being on an out-of-control roller-coaster. One that was suspended hundreds of feet in the air. Oh, and without seat belts.

  “Shaw!” I screamed. “Grimshaw!”

  The rush of the wind against my face robbed my lungs of any real sort of air. Anything else I had to say came out in a breathless rush: “ShawdammitwillyoucutitoutwearegoingtoDIE!”

  Of course, this didn’t slow him down at all.

  I figured that the only mode of communication I had was body language.

  So I did what any good friend would do to another, in just such a situation.

  I kicked him as hard as I could in the side.

  Lucky for me, I’d purchased some decent-quality hiking boots to go along with my ridiculous traffic-cone colored backpack. They weren’t steel-toed, but the tips were a bit harder than on the shoes I normally wore to the office. That said, I don’t think Shaw would have noticed had I not slipped back in the saddle during the griffin’s Dive of Death. When I kicked out, I actually managed to hit the edge of his armored chest plate. It got his attention, much like a human tapping another human’s shoulder. He stopped the upchuck-inducing corkscrew and brought us back to halfway level flight.

  His voice came out in an impatient growl. “What dost thou want?”

  It took me a moment to answer. My brain was reeling and I was doing my best not to puke my guts up all over Shaw’s proud eagle head. Also, the air just ahead of us was filled with horrific screams of pain and slaughter.

  The three griffin lances sliced back and forth among the section of the wyvern swarm that had not yet landed. Their behavior reminded me of a nature film I’d seen where a group of sharks carved their way through a ‘bait ball’ of sardines that had clustered into a tight school for safety. The speed of the attack and my still blurry vision made it difficult to see specifics, but a couple of images pressed themselves into my eyeballs.

  Each lance exploded through the densely packed wyverns. One griffin emerged with a thick green neck or tail wedged in his black, jackhammer-stout beak. A snap, and pieces fell away on either side.

  “Shaw,” I gasped, “you…you can’t take us right into a battle like that!”

  My griffin friend let out a gruff-sounding squawk and then did a double-take.

  “Thou art correct! I have nearly deprived you of your chance for glory! I shall land, and thou shalt engage the enemy with blood and fire as much as I!”

  Well, that hadn’t exactly been my goal. But Shaw had said the magic words: I shall land.

  He came in low and fast. The forest abruptly ended and we shot out over the sandy expanse of the beach. It wasn’t a mass of grainy dunes like I had expected. A cat’s cradle of ravines cut their way down sandy berms nearly all the way to the water’s edge.

  I spotted the wyvern swarm’s ‘prey’ where it lay beached at the high-water mark. A two-masted fishing boat lay upon the sand, its sails completely shredded and nets still dangling from its stern. As Shaw flared his wings and prepared to land atop one of the berms, I got one final glimpse over the boat’s side.

  The deck lay awash in blood, wreckage, and a half-dozen or so badly mangled human corpses. Whoever these people were, they hadn’t gone down without a fight. An empty crossbow rested in the arms of one headless body. Fired bolts stuck out of the flanks of at least three felled wyverns that lay nearby.

  Shaw kicked up a vortex of sand and dust as he landed. If not for the weight of my backpack, I’d have leapt off. As it was, I slid off as quickly as I could. It took some mental restraint, but I managed to avoid throwing myself on the ground and kissing it.

  “The enemy was after this Kescar fishing boat,” Shaw said excitedly. “So thou shouldst find foes in abundance here! Good hunting, Dayna!”

  And with that, he took off into the air in a flurry of wing beats. He was right about the abundant foes, anyway. Wyverns continued to circle in a flock, hissing and spitting at the griffins and even at each other as they came in to land.

  Up close, these creatures looked different than Sirrahon, or the lesser dragons that I’d fought beside Galen in the Fayleene Woods. Wyverns didn’t have the relatively stocky build of the former, nor the racing-stripe colors of the latter. Instead, they were sinuous, slightly longer than the average griffin but with about half the bulk. In fact, they closely resembled the Chinese depictions of dragons, and they came in two color schemes: emerald green and jet black. Leathery scales made up wings that extended from the rear of their forelimbs, similar to some species of bat.

  Regardless of what Shaw had done for me in dropping me off, I was going to do my best to stay out of this fight unless absolutely necessary. As far as I could tell there wasn’t anyone left alive to rescue, and the griffins looked like they were more than holding their own. So the first thing I did was to slip off my backpack, since it stood out like an orange beacon amidst the browns, blues, and greens of the surrounding landscape.

  Next up, I half-ran, half-scrabbled away from the pack to put a few yards between me and it. The steep-sided berm that Shaw had deposited me on wasn’t all that big, but at least i
t had a few scrubby bushes growing atop it. I pushed my way into the largest one, crouched down, and prayed that it wasn’t the Andeluvian equivalent of poison oak. Finally, I unzipped my jacket and pulled out two more items. One was the chain that held the trio of medallions Galen had given me – especially the one which could teleport me home if things really got out of control.

  The second was my gun. A quick check, and I flipped off the safety. I grimly reflected upon the idea that I was still going to have to work around Lieutenant Ollivar if I wanted to keep it. The backup plan was that I could buy my own weapon and then try to qualify on a civilian range, but I wouldn’t be able to bring it to work, on assignment, or keep it on my person anywhere as easily. Hardly the best option.

  A predatory eagle’s shriek yanked me back to the present. Several of the griffins had landed near the remains of the boat. It turned out that they were just as deadly on the ground as in the air. Talons slashed and beaks tore into the enemy; in a couple of cases, an enemy was slammed to the ground with a quickly unfurled wing. But the battle wasn’t completely one-sided. Almost every member of the three lances bled from at least one wound. Two had been hobbled by bites to a fore or hind leg.

  Suddenly, a single griffin went down under a coiling, writhing mass of the enemy. Terrible wet, shredding noises emanated from the pile as the wyverns tore their victim apart. Their long jaws were mounted at the ends of snakelike necks and were crammed with needle-shaped teeth. Though limited in motion by their wings, I noticed that the reptiles’ front feet were surprisingly dexterous, allowing humanlike gripping and tearing motions.

  The coil of wyverns flew apart as the largest of the griffins, one of the few that hadn’t been wounded yet, smashed bodily through the mass of the enemy. Hisses of outrage filled the air, then turned into yowls of pain as the griffin slashed through one wyvern, then another.

  As one, the swarm’s focus turned towards this lone griffin. A baker’s dozen of wyverns dropped from the air and closed in. They hadn’t taken more than a few wing beats before two more griffins swooped in to guard the first one’s flanks. One had a slightly lighter gold coat; the other had a killing glint in his eye and sported an Andeluvian steel breastplate.