Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  “Then I believe this does qualify as a full-scale emergency,” Snowstar said firmly. “When two highly-trained individuals drop completely out of sight, for no reason and with no warning, it seems to me that the danger is not only to them alone, but possibly to the entire city. What if they were removed so that they could not alert us to some enemy who is moving against us? How can we know that if we don’t mount a rescue, in strength and numbers?”

  Heads nodded all around the table, and Amberdrake exchanged stricken glances with Winterhart, who had come in just in time to hear that. He felt cold all over, and she had paled. He could have done without hearing that. He was perversely glad that Snowstar had thought of it, for it certainly swayed even the veterans on the Council to their cause, but he could have done without hearing it.

  Either Snowstar really believes that, or the self-proclaimed nondiplomat Snowstar just made a shrewd play in our support. Or both.

  A heavy and ominous silence filled the Council Hall, and no one seemed prepared to break it. Skan was as frozen as a statue, and beside him, Zhaneel simply looked to be in too much shock to be able to think. Winterhart stood beside her Council seat, unable to sit, clutching the back of it; her knuckles were as white as her namesake. Amberdrake himself felt unable to move, every limb leaden and inert.

  Judeth cleared her throat, making all of them jump. “Right,” she said briskly, silence broken. “We have the original pair flying a search pattern; we’re putting together more search teams. Does anyone have any further suggestions?”

  Skan opened his beak, but Snowstar beat him to it. “I’ll organize the mages and start distance-scrying,” he said immediately. “We’re probably too far away, but those who can scry for them should at least try. We’ll look for the traces of the magic on all the items they had with them; even if something made them crash, those traces will still be there. I’ll also pick out mages for the search parties.”

  Once again, Skan opened his beak—then glared around the table, to make certain that he wasn’t interrupted this time. “We should send a message to Shalaman,” he said belligerently. “His people know that forest better than we do. We should make him—I mean, ask him—to send out parties of his hunters.”

  “That’s good,” Judeth approved, making a note of it. “I can put anyone who’s been posted to that area on search parties, but if we can field Haighlei who are trained to hunt the forest in addition to our own people, that will be even better. Anything else?”

  Search parties, magic, the Haighlei. . . . Thoughts flitted through Drake’s head, but he couldn’t make any of them hold still long enough to be examined. Judeth looked around the table to meet shaking heads, and nodded.

  “Good. We’ve got a plan,” she said firmly. “We should assume that whatever has happened to these Silvers could endanger the city, and make finding them a top priority. Let’s get to it.”

  She stood up and was halfway to the door before anyone else was even out of his chair. He didn’t blame her. If the situation was reversed, he wouldn’t want to be in the same room with four frantic parents either.

  And he wouldn’t want to face two people who had just threatened to blackmail him for not taking the loss of their children seriously enough.

  Everyone else deserted the hall as quickly. Only Aubri paused at the door, looking back with uncertainty in his gaze. He opened his beak, then swallowed hard, shook his head, and followed the others.

  Skandranon wanted nothing more than to rush off to the rescue of his son. Failing that, he wanted to tear the gizzard out of those who were responsible for his disappearance. Right now, so far as his heart was concerned, the ones responsible were right here in White Gryphon.

  Judeth and Aubri. It was all their fault. If they hadn’t assigned the children to this far-flung outpost, both his beloved son and his dear friend Amberdrake’s daughter would still be here.

  “I knew that this was a mistake all along!” he seethed at Zhaneel as he paced the length and breadth of the Council Hall. “I knew they were too young to be sent off on Outpost Duty! No one that young has ever been sent off alone like that before! They should have been posted here, like everyone else was! Judeth’s getting senile, and Aubri was already there to show her the way—and—”

  “Please!” Zhaneel suddenly exploded. “Stop!”

  He stared at her, his mouth still open, one foot raised.

  “Stop it, Skan,” she said, in a more normal tone. “It is not their fault. It is not the fault of anyone. And if you would stop trying to find someone to blame, we would get something done.” She looked up at him, with fear and anxiety in her eyes. “You are a mage; I am not. You go to work with Snowstar and the others, and I shall go to the messenger-mage and send a message in your name to Shalaman, asking for his help. At least I can do that much. And Skandranon—he is my son as well as yours, and I am able to act without rages and threats.”

  With that, she turned away from him and left him still standing with his foot upraised and his beak open, staring after her in shock.

  Alone, for Amberdrake and Winterhart had already left.

  Stupid, stupid gryphon. She’s right, you know. Blaming Aubri and Judeth won’t get you anywhere, and if you take things out on them, you’re only going to make them mad at you. The Black Gryphon would be remembered as an angry, overprotective, vengeful parent. And what good would that do? None, of course.

  What good would it do?

  All at once, his energy ran out of him. He sat down on the floor of the Council Hall, feeling—old.

  Old, tired, defeated, and utterly helpless, shaking with fear and in the grip of his own weakness. He squinted his eyes tightly closed, ground his beak, and shivered from anything but cold.

  Somewhere out there, his son was lost, possibly hurt, certainly in trouble. And there was nothing, nothing that he could do about it. This was one predicament that the Black Gryphon wasn’t going to be able to swoop in and salvage.

  I couldn‘t swoop in on anything these days even if I could salvage it. I’m an anachronism; I’ve outlived my usefulness. It is happening all over again, except this time there can’t be a rebirth of the Black Gryphon from the White Gryphon. The body wears out, the hips grow stiff and the muscles strain. I’m the one that’s useless and senile, not Judeth and Aubri. They were doing the best they could; I was the one flapping my beak and making stupid threats. That is all that is left for a failed warrior to do.

  For a moment, he shook with the need to throw back his head and keen his grief and helplessness to the sky, in the faint hope that perhaps some god somewhere might hear him. His throat constricted terribly. With the weight of intolerable grief and pain on his shoulders, he slowly raised his head.

  As his eyes fell on the door through which Zhaneel had departed, his mind unfroze, gradually coming out of its shock.

  What am I? What am I thinking?

  I may be old now, but I am still a legend to these people. Heroes don’t ever live as long as they want to, and most die young. I’ve lasted. That’s all experience. I’m a mage, and more skilled than when I was younger—and if I’m not the fighter I used to be, I’m also a lot smarter than I used to be! And what I’m feeling — I know what it is. I know. It was what Urtho felt every time I left, every time one of his gryphons wound up missing. I loved him so dearly, and I breathe each breath honoring his memory — but he was a great man because he accepted his entire being, and dealt with it. I am not Urtho — but I am his son in spirit, and what I honor I can also emulate. There‘s plenty I can do, starting with seeing to it that Snowstar hasn’t overlooked anything!

  He shook himself all over, as if he was shaking off some dark, cold shadow that was unpleasantly clinging to his back, and strode out of the Council Hall as fast as his legs would carry him.

  What I honor in Urtho‘s deeds, others have also honored in me. Urtho could embrace every facet of a situation and handle all of them with all of his intellect, whether it angered him personally or not. That was w
hy he was a leader and not a panicked target. He could act when others would be overwhelmed by emotion. If I think of this disappearance in terms only of how I feel about it, then I will miss details that could be critical while I fill my vision with myself, and that could cost lives. Let the historians argue over whether I was enraged or determined or panicked on this day! I can still be effective to my last breath!

  It was not clear at first where the Adept had run off to, and by the time Skan tracked him down, Snowstar had managed to gather all of the most powerful mages together in his own dwelling and workshop. Skan was impressed in spite of himself at how quickly the Kaled’a’in mage had moved. It was notoriously difficult to organize mages, but Snowstar seemed to have accomplished the task in a very limited amount of time.

  There were seven mages at work including Snowstar. They had been divided into pairs, seated at individual tables so that they didn’t interfere with each other, each pair of them scrying for something in particular. One pair looked for the teleson, one for the tent, one for the basket. Snowstar was working by himself, but the moment that Skan came near him, he looked up and beckoned.

  “I’m looking for Tadrith myself,” he said without preamble, “I was waiting for you to help me; the blood-tie he has with you is going to make it possible to find him, if it’s at all possible. You will both feel similar magically, as you know.”

  “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 tele-sons 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, Greenwing, 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 be
ak 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.