Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Skan laid her ear-tufts back with dismay. "You aren't serious, surely."

  Amberdrake laughed and slapped the gryphon's shoulder. "You wouldn't do anything to make Zhaneel nervous, would you?"

  "Of course not," he said firmly and wondered in the next moment if there was any chance....

  Amberdrake only chuckled. "I've spent enough time with you, featherhead. There are some things I need to take care of, and I'm certain that you have plenty to do yourself. So if you don't mind, I'll get on with my cleaning, and you get back to your mate."

  Skan's crest rose with pleasure at that last word. Mate. He had a mate. And that mate was Zhaneel; swift, strong, and altogether lovely....

  He tugged affectionately on a mouthful of Amberdrake's hair, and then shoved the kestra'chern back in the direction of his own tent. "Back to your housekeeping, then. If you prefer it to my company. You really ought to know that a clean and neat dwelling place—"

  "—is the sign of a disturbed mind, yes, I know." Amberdrake combed the hair Skan had mouthed back with his fingers, grinned, and took himself back into his tent before Skan could retort with anything else.

  Such respites were doomed to be short in wartime.

  The flight back to the gryphons' lairs was a short one, and normally completely uneventful. But as Skan took to the air and got above the tops of the tents, he saw evidence of a great deal of disturbance in that direction. Gryphons flew in to the lairs from all over the camp, their irregular wing-beats betraying agitation. Even at a distance he saw ruffled feathers and flattened ear-tufts, crests raised in alarm and clenched foreclaws. Yet there was no other sign of agitation in the camp, so either the gryphons were privy to something the rest of Urtho's forces hadn't found out yet or the information was pertinent only to gryphons.

  It wouldn't be the first time we found out about something no one else knew, he thought with a sinking heart.

  Immediately, he lengthened and strengthened his wingstrokes, to gain more speed. Whatever had occurred, it was imperative that he learn what was going on!

  The lairs had been built into an artificial hill, terraced in three rings, so that each lair had clear space in front of it. There was a small field full of sunning rocks between the lairs and the rest of the camp. That was where everyone had gathered. He landed next to a cluster of half a dozen gryphons from the Sixth that included Aubri. All of them listened intently to what the broadwing had to say, necks stretched out, and heads cocked a little to one side. Their sides heaved as they panted heavily, one of them hissed to himself; their neck-feathers stood straight out from their necks like a fighting-cock's ruff, and two of them rocked back and forth as their feet flexed. All of this was quite unconscious, and a sign of great agitation.

  Aubri stopped in mid-sentence as Skan back-winged down on the top of a rock beside them, and waved Skan over with an outstretched fore-claw. "I've got bad news, Skan," he called out, as Skan leapt down off the rock and hurried over to join the group. "It's not all over camp yet, but it will be soon. General Farle's dead."

  "What?" Skan could not have been more surprised if Aubri had told him that the Tower had just burned down. Farle? Dead? How did you kill a General without wiping out the entire Command? Chief officers were never anywhere near the front lines!

  Granted, Farle had a reputation for wanting to be near the action, but the General wasn't stupid, and he was certainly the best-protected man in the Sixth! How had anyone gotten to him? Was it accident? Could it have been treachery?

  "I was telling the others—we think that some kind of suicide group got through and took him out, him and most of the other chief officers of the Sixth," Aubri said. "We don't even know how or who did it. There was just an explosion in the command tent, and when the smoke and dust cleared, there wasn't much there but a smoking hole. The mages are trying to figure out just what happened, but the main thing for us is that we've lost him."

  Skan swore. There was only one man of Farle's rank that was not already in a command position: Shaiknam, the General that Farle had replaced. The official story was that Shaiknam was on leave while Farle got more command experience, although the real reason Shaiknam had been taken out of the post was his incompetence.

  But Urtho could not help being his optimistic self, nor could he stop giving unworthy people so many second chances that they might as well not even have gotten reprimanded. Urtho would remember all the great things that Shaiknam's father had done, probably assume that Shaiknam had learned his lesson and would give him back the command he had taken away, rather than promoting someone else.

  After all, it would look very bad for General Shaiknam if Urtho did promote someone of a lower rank to command the Sixth, when Shaiknam was sitting there on his thumbs, doing nothing. Until now, Urtho had been able to maintain that polite fiction that he was "seasoning" Farle, and that General Shaiknam was taking a well-earned leave of absence to rest.

  He would not be able to maintain it for more than a moment after the rest of the forces learned of Farle's death. It was either shame Shaiknam, with all the attendant problems that would cause, or give the Sixth back to the man who'd never completed a task in his life.

  There was no doubt in Skan's mind which it would be. Shaiknam was too well-born, too well-connected. The Sixth would go back to him.

  That seemed to be the conclusion everyone else had come to as well. With Shaiknam in charge, the gryphons of the Sixth just became deployable decoys again. Right now, the big question seemed to be what, if anything, they could do about it.

  Skan moved from group to group, just listening, saying nothing. He heard much the same from each group; this is dreadful, and we're all going to get killed by this madman, but we can't do anything about it. There was a great deal of anxiety—panic, in fact—but no one was emerging with any ideas, or even as a leader willing and able to represent them all.

  Which leaves—me. Well, this was the moment, if ever, to act on the theories of leadership he had been researching all this time. Can you be a leader, featherhead? He looked around once more at the gathering of his kind; gryphons had started to pick at their feathers like hysterical messenger-birds, they were so upset.

  I guess there isn't a choice. It's me, or no one.

  He jumped up onto the highest sunbathing rock, and let loose with a battle-screech that stunned everyone else to silence.

  "Excuse me," he said into the quiet, as startled eyes met his, and upturned beaks gaped at him. "But this seems to be a problem that we already have the solution to. Urtho doesn't control us anymore, remember? We are just as autonomous as the mages, if we want to be. We can all fly off into the wilderness and leave the whole war behind any time we want."

  A moment more of silence, and then the assembled gryphons met his words with a roar of objections. He nodded and listened without trying to stem the noise or counter their initial words; most of the objections boiled down to the simple fact of the gryphons' loyalty to their creator. No one wanted to abandon Urtho or his cause. They just wanted to be rid of Shaiknam.

  When the last objection had been cried out onto the air, and the assemblage quieted down again, he spoke.

  "I agree with you," he said, marveling that not a single gryphon in the lot had made any objection to his assumption of leadership. "We owe loyalty—everything—to Urtho. We shouldn't even consider abandoning him. But we do not have to tell him that. The mages all felt exactly the same way, but they were perfectly willing to use the fact that they could all pack up and leave as a bargaining-chit. We should do the same thing. If the situation was less dangerous for us than it is, I would never suggest this course of action, but I think we all know what life for the Sixth was like under Shaiknam, and we can't allow a fool to throw our lives away."

  Heads nodded vigorously all around him as crest-feathers slowly smoothed down, ear-tufts rising with interest. "You've got to be the one, Black Boy," Aubri called out from somewhere in the rear. "You've got to be the one to speak for us. You're the best choi
ce for the job."

  Another chorus, this time of assent, greeted Aubri's statement. Skan's nares flushed with mingled embarrassment and pride.

  "I'll tell you what, then," he told them all, wondering if what he was doing was suicidally stupid, or would be their salvation. "I was trying to come up with a plan to get the confrontation over with quickly, before Shaiknam has a chance to entrench himself. Now, we all know that where Shaiknam goes, Garber follows, and I'm pretty certain he is going to be the one to try to bring us to heel initially. This is the tactic that just might work best...."

  Two messages came by bird from Garber, both of which he ignored. One of the gryphons who had a particularly good relationship with the birds smugly took the second one off for a moment when it arrived. When the gryphon was finished, the bird flew off. Shortly thereafter, messenger-birds rose in a cloud from the area around Shaiknam's tent, and scattered to the far corners of the camp.

  That left Shaiknam and Garber with no choice but to use a human messenger. The gryphons of the Sixth took to their lairs to hide while the rest made themselves scarce, and Skan was the only gryphon in sight. He reclined at his ease up on the sunbathing rock, as an aide-de-camp in the colors of the Sixth came trudging up the path to the lairs, looking for the gryphons Garber had summoned so imperiously.

  The gryphons in question hid in the shadows just out of sight, although they had a clear view of Skan and the aide. They were not going to show so much as a feather until Skan gave them the word.

  The young man glanced curiously around the area—which looked, for all intents and purposes, to be completely deserted. Skan wondered what was going on in his mind. The gryphons were not with their Trondi'irn, who obviously had not been told of this impromptu conspiracy. They were not on the practice grounds, nor on Zhaneel's now-sanctioned obstacle course. They were not with the Command. They could only be at their lairs, unless they had all taken leave out of the area, and leave had not been approved.

  Yet the lawn in front of the lairs was completely deserted. No sign of gryphons, nor where they had gone to. There was no one in the dustbathing pits, nor at the water-baths. No one lounged in the shady "porch" of his or her lair. No one reclined on a sunbathing rock.

  Except Skan.

  The Black Gryphon watched the man's expression as he tried to reconcile his orders with what he'd found. Skan was not precisely assigned to the Sixth, but he had been flying cover for Zhaneel. Skan would have to do.

  The aide-de-camp took another look around, then squared his shoulder, and marched straight up to the Black Gryphon. Skan raised his head to watch him approach, but said and did nothing else.

  "General Shaiknam has sent two messenger-birds here to rally the gryphons of the Sixth," the young man said crisply. "Why was there no answer?"

  Skan simply looked at him—exactly the same way that he would have regarded a nice plump deer.

  But the youngster was made of sterner stuff than most, and obviously was not going to be rattled simply by the stare of an unfriendly carnivore with a beak large and sharp enough to make short work of his torso. He continued bravely. "General Shaiknam orders that the gryphons of the Sixth report immediately to the landing field for deployment."

  "Why?" Skan rumbled.

  The young man blinked, as if he had not expected Skan to say anything, much less demand information. He was so startled that he actually gave it.

  "You'll be making runs against the troops below Panjir," he said. "Flying in at treetop level. Dropping rocks and—"

  "And making ourselves targets for the seven batteries of ballistas and other sky-pointing missile-throwers," Skan replied caustically. "Scarcely-moving targets, at that. There isn't room between those cliff-walls for more than one gryphon to fly at a time, much less a decent formation. We'll look like beads on a string. If the missiles don't get us, the makaar will, coming down on us from the heights. You can tell the General that we'll be declining his little invitation. Tell him the message is from the Black Gryphon."

  And with that, Skan put his head back down on his foreclaws, closed his eyes to mere slits, and pretended to go to sleep.

  The aide's mouth dropped completely open for a moment, then closed quickly. But to his credit, he did not try to bluster or argue; he simply turned on his heel and left, trudging back down the hill, leaving behind a trail of little puffs of dust. Skan watched him until he was well out of sight, then jumped to his feet.

  "Now what?" one of the others called from the shelter of his lair.

  "Now I go to Urtho before Shaiknam does," Skan replied, and leapt skyward, wings laboring to gain altitude, heading straight for the Tower.

  Where would Urtho be at this hour? Probably the Strategy Room. That wasn't exactly convenient; he couldn't go to something deep inside the Tower without passing a door and at least one guard. Skan was going to have to go through channels, rather than landing directly on Urtho's balcony the way he would have preferred.

  He backwinged down onto the pavement in front of the Tower, paced regally up to the guard just outside the door, and bowed his head in salute.

  "Skandranon to see Urtho on a matter of extreme urgency," he said politely and with strictest formality. "I would appreciate it if you would send him a message to that effect."

  He was rather proud of the fact that, despite his own agitation, his sibilants had no hissing, and he pronounced his r's without a trill. The guard nodded, tapped on the door and whispered to someone just inside for a moment, and turned back to Skan.

  "Taken care of, Skandranon," he said. "If you'd care to wait, I don't think it'll take long."

  Skan nodded. "Thank you," he replied. He longed to pace; his feet itched with the need to tear something up out of sheer nerves. But he kept as still and as serene as a statue of black granite—except for his tail, which twitched and lashed, no matter how hard he concentrated on keeping it quiet.

  With every moment that passed, he expected to hear a messenger from Shaiknam running up behind him—messenger-birds still probably avoided the General and his underlings, so Shaiknam would have to use a much slower method of requesting his own audience with the Mage of Silence.

  As time continued to crawl past, Skan wanted to grind his beak. He felt like a very large target in the middle of all the pale stone.

  Finally, after far too long a wait, a faint tap on the door behind him caused the guard to open it and listen for a moment. He flung it wide, and gestured for Skan to enter. "Urtho will see you," he said. "The Mage is in the Strategy Room."

  No point in the guard telling him the way, as they both knew. Skan was perfectly at home in the Tower. He simply nodded and walked in the open door. A second guard stationed inside gave him a brief nod of recognition as Skan passed. Urtho had planned most of his Tower with creatures like his gryphons in mind; the floors were of natural, rough-textured stone, so that claws and talons did not slip on them, the doors and hallways were all made tall and wide enough for things larger than a human to pass. There wasn't a great deal to see, otherwise—just the hallway itself, plain and unadorned, with closed doors on either side of it. The room that Skan wanted was behind the third door on the right, and he hurried right to it.

  The door opened for him, but by human agency, and not magical. Urtho stood behind the table-sized contour map used for all major planning sessions. Areas held by Ma'ar had been magically tinted red; everything else was blue. There was an alarming amount of red on that map.

  "Urtho," Skan began, as soon as he was in the door. "I—"

  "You and the Sixth Wing gryphons are staging a revolt," Urtho replied, with dangerous gentleness.

  Skan's ear-tufts flattened. "How did you know?" he blurted, backing up a pace or two. Behind him, a hertasi shut the door and took himself out of the room by a side passage, leaving the two of them alone.

  "I am a mage," Urtho reminded him. "While I don't squander my energies, I do use them on occasion to keep an eye on something. I knew you lot wouldn't care for having Shaiknam
set over you, but I didn't think you'd start a revolution." He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed levelly at Skan. "That's not a particularly clever thing to do. You can't survive without me, you know."

  Ah, hells. Well, might as well drop it all at once.

  "Yes, we can," Skan replied, raising his head so that he looked down on Urtho, rather than dropping his eyes below the level of Urtho's as all his training screamed at him to do. "I'm sorry, Urtho, but we don't need you anymore. We know how to make ourselves fertile now. Zhaneel is the proof of that, if you doubt my unadorned word on it."

  He had never in all of his life seen Urtho taken aback before. Surprised, yes. Shocked, certainly. But completely dumbfounded—never.

  The expression of complete blankness on Urtho's face was so funny that Skan couldn't help himself. He started laughing.

  Urtho's face flushed, and the blank expression he wore turned to one of annoyance and a little anger. "What are you laughing at, you overgrown chicken?" the mage spluttered. "What is so damned funny?"

  Skan could only shake his head, still laughing. "Your face—" was all he was able to manage, before he ran out of breath.

  Urtho reddened a little more, but then, grudgingly, he smiled. "So, you think you have the upper hand, do you?" he said, challenge in his tone.

  Skan got himself back under control, and quickly, even though laughter threatened to bubble up through his chest at any moment. "Yes and no," he replied. "We can leave now. You no longer control us by means of our future, Urtho. That doesn't mean we will leave, though, it just means that we won't have to put up with idiots like Shaiknam and Garber who think we're to be thrown away by the handful. Wait!" He held up a foreclaw as Urtho started to say something. "Listen to me first. This is what Shaiknam planned to do with the gryphons as soon as he got the Sixth out into the field again!"