The black gryphon

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Take your freedom, Skan,” Amberdrake whispered. “Steal the spell, and teach it to everyone you trust.”

  Skandranon backwinged in place, then pulled himself up to his full, magnificent height.

  The brisk wind from the Black Gryphon’s wings sent Vikteren’s hair into his face and kicked up a bit of dust that made Amberdrake squint for a moment.

  “Stealing a spell from Urtho, though . . .” Vikteren’s eyes lit up with a manic glee. “You know, that’d be nearly impossible? Not working the spell itself, that would be pretty simple, fertility spells nearly always are. No, it’s the stealing part that would be hard. Getting into Urtho’s Tower, getting past all the protections . . .”

  From the look on Vikteren’s face, he relished that very challenge and impossibility.

  “It would not be impossible for me,” Skan replied, his crest-feathers rising arrogantly.

  But Amberdrake shook his head. “Be realistic, Skan. You’ve always flown directly to Urtho’s balcony when you went to see him. You have no idea what safeguards are in that Tower, many of them built only for human hands. It would be impossible for you. But not for us.”

  “Us?” Skan asked, eyeing them both. Vikteren nodded gleefully, seconding Amberdrake.

  “Exactly,” the kestra’chern said with immense satisfaction, feeling as if the weight of a hundred gryphons was lifted off him. “Us.”

  In the end, the “us” also included Tamsin and Cinnabar. After a brief discussion, the means of bypassing all those special protections turned out I to be absurdly easy.

  Cinnabar crafted a message to be sent to Urtho just before Urtho was to meet with the leader of the mages’ delegation. She claimed that there were some problems she and Tamsin were encountering with gryphon anatomy-not even a lie!-and that she and he needed to consult the records on the gryphons’ development so that they could tell what Urtho used for a “model.”

  She did not specify who she would have with her, only that she needed some “help.”

  “Urtho keeps records on everything he’s ever done,” she said, as they waited in her tent for the reply. She sat as calmly and quietly as if they were all her guests for an evening of quiet social chat and not gathered to perform what could, by some standards, be considered a major theft. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she leaned into Tarnsin’s shoulder, wearing an enigmatic little smile. Her pale green robes were as smooth and cool as tinted porcelain; beside her lover, she looked like an expensive doll propped next to a peasant-child’s rag-toy. “I know he has extensive records on how he put your race together, and what he modeled you on. I specified ‘internal problems,’ which could be anything in the gut, and that’s difficult stuff to muck about with when you don’t know what you’re doing. It isn’t enough to be a Healer familiar with raptors in order to be successful with gryphons, even though that is how I became a default Healer to your people, Skan. You aren’t all, or even mostly, raptoral. I’m counting on his being preoccupied with this mages’ meeting; he should simply give us access to the Tower rather than taking the time to explain things to us in person.”

  “A pity about the timing on that,” Skan observed dispassionately. “Vikteren did want to be here, and he has some-ah-unusual talents for a mage. He could have been very useful. Still, he will surely keep Urtho’s attention at the meeting.” The Black Gryphon lay along one side of the tent on Cinnabar’s expensive carpet of crimson and gold, where the furniture had been cleared away for him. Until he moved or spoke, he looked like an expensive piece of sculpture, brought in to match the carpet. Or, perhaps, like a very expensive and odd couch.

  Amberdrake chuckled. “Well, he’ll be here in spirit, anyway,” he said, patting his pocket where the bespelled lock-breaker Vikteren had loaned him resided. “It’s just as well, given that we’ve been huddled together like conspirators for the whole afternoon. This way, if anyone has seen us all together, they can assume we won’t do anything without him, and won’t be watching us.”

  Tamsin laughed and reached across Cinnabar for a cup of hot tea. “You’ve heard too many adventure tales, kestra’chern,” he mocked. “Who would be watching us? And why? Even if Urtho catches us, the worst he’ll do is dress us down. It’s not as if we were trying to take over his Power Stone or something. We are not even particularly important Personages in this camp.”

  Skan raised his hackles at that. “Speak for yourself, Tamsin!” he responded sharply. Tamsin only laughed, and Cinnabar smiled a little wider.

  Before a verbal sparring match could begin, one of Cinnabar’s hertasi scratched at the tent flap, then let herself in, handing the Lady a sealed envelope. Cinnabar opened it, read the contents, and nodded with satisfaction.

  “As I thought,” she said, to no one in particular. “Urtho is so caught up with the mages that he didn’t even ask me what the complaint is. He’s leaving orders to pass us into the Tower. We have relatively free access to the gryphon records; he warned me that some things have some magical protections on them, and that if I want to see them, I’ll have to ask him.”

  “Which, of course, we will not,” Amberdrake said. “Since we have other means of getting at them.”

  “So, you see, we didn’t need all that skulking and going in through windows that you three wanted to do,” Cinnabar replied, with just a hint of reproach in her voice.

  “Lady, don’t include me in that!” Amberdrake protested. “It was Tamsin, Skan, and Vikteren that wanted to go breaking into the Tower! I knew better!”

  “Of course you did,” Tamsin muttered under his breath, as they all rose to go. “And you never collected ropes and equipment for securing prisoners. I don’t even want to know why you conveniently had all that stuff on hand!”

  Amberdrake raised an eyebrow and pretended not to hear him, and simply rose with all of the dignity that years of practice could grant.

  They all walked very calmly into the Tower, a massive and yet curiously graceful structure of smooth, sculpted stone. They gave a friendly nod to the guard on duty, and received one in return; very clearly he was expecting them. They didn’t even need to make up some excuse for Amberdrake and Skan being with them. The guard didn’t bother to ask why they were there.

  There were no fences; the Tower didn’t need them. It probably didn’t need a human guard, either, but such things made mere mortals feel a little more comfortable around a mage like Urtho. The entrance was recessed into the Tower wall, and the door opened for them at the guard’s touch. They passed out of the darkness and into a lighted antechamber, bare of all furnishings, with a mosaic of stone inlaid on the floor. Three doors led out of it; Cinnabar had been here before and she led the way.

  Ah, bless the mages, Amberdrake thought yet again. II it hadn’t been for them-

  Then again, perhaps Lady Cinnabar would have found another excuse. She was a woman of remarkable resources, the Lady was.

  The area where Urtho kept his records on the gryphons was several floors up, but all of them were fit enough that they didn’t much mind the climb. The circular staircase was wide enough for Skan and, other than the fact that it was lit by mage-lights, seemed completely ordinary. It was constructed entirely of the native stone of the area, planed smooth, and fitted together so closely that the joins looked hardly wider than the blade of a knife.

  However, as they reached the floor they wanted, a gently-curved door opened itself as they approached. All the other doors they had passed remained securely closed, with no visible means of opening them. They passed through that open door into an area of halls and cubicles, all lined floor-to-ceiling with books.

  It certainly looked as if they’d found the right place. Amberdrake wondered how Urtho kept the air moving and fresh in a place like this; there was no more than a hint of dust in the air, no mold, and no moisture. If he stood very still, there was a gentle, steady current of air running past him, but where it came from and where it went he simply couldn’t tell.

  This place, too, glowed with mag
e-lights; a wise precaution with so many flammable books around.

  Interesting that Cinnabar herself said we ought to simply take the secret without confronting Urtho. She knows him better than any of us. I wish I knew why she’d come to that conclusion, but she must have some reason to think he would have refused to give away his hold over the gryphons.

  As a kestra’chern, Amberdrake’s curiosity had been aroused by that. He could think of many possible motivations, but he would have liked to know which of them was the most likely.

  So while Tamsin and Cinnabar perused the index to the record room to find the books on the gryphons’ reproductive system, he browsed through the notations written on the spines of the books in search of clues.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t find any. The notations were all strictly impersonal, mostly dates or specific keywords to the contents. Eggs, raptor, failure rate, said one. Breeding records, Kaled’a’in bondbirds.

  So he had a hand in that as well? Or did he just study what my people did?

  Next to it, Breeding records, Kaled’a’in horses. Amberdrake had to chuckle at that. Just one book? Then Urtho had no real idea of what the Kaled’a’in were up to with their horse herds. Unless, of course, this was a very limited study of what they did with the warhorse breed.

  That might be his only interest, but even so, Amberdrake doubted that the Kaled’a’in horsemasters had parted with their inmost secrets even for the mighty Urtho, Mage of Silence and their titular liege lord. Kaled’a’in Healers and Mages together worked on both the warhorses and the bondbirds-and while the results with the raptors might be more obvious, the ones with the horses were far more spectacular, though never to the naked eye.

  The raptors had been given increased intelligence and curiosity, the ability to speak mind-to-mind with humans, and the ability to flock-bond to each other and to the humans who raised them. To compensate for the increased mass of brain tissue, and to make them more effective as fighting partners, they were larger than their wild counterparts.

  But the horses had been changed in far more subtle ways. Bone density had been increased, hoof strength increased, in some cases extra muscles had been created that simply didn’t exist in a “normal” horse. The digestion had been changed; the war-horses could forage where few other horses could feed, taking nourishment from such unlikely sources as thistle and dead or dried plants, like a goat or a wild sheep. As with the raptors, the intelligence had been increased, but one thing had been utterly changed.

  The warhorses were no longer herd beasts. They were pack animals. Their behavior was no longer that of a horse, but like a dog. Properly trained, there was nothing they would not do for their riders-and unlike a horse, the rider could count on his mount to continue a command after the rider was out of sight. “Guard,” for instance. Or “Go home.”

  Very few people knew this, or the amount of work it took to change a behavior set rather than a simple physical characteristic. Did Urtho?

  He was reaching for the book when Cinnabar called him. Regretfully, he pulled his hand back. Another mystery that would remain unsolved, at least for now.

  “We’ve found the book we want,” Tamsin said, as he followed Cinnabar’s voice into yet another book-lined cubicle. “Very nicely annotated in the index, with the fact that it contains the fertility formula. He refers to it as that, by the way, rather than an actual ‘spell,’ so Cinnabar and I are assuming that only a small part of it actually requires magic.”

  “That’s good news for the gryphons, then,” Skan said with interest, padding in from the opposite direction to Amberdrake. “If it only requires a little magic, most should be able to do it for themselves.”

  “As we expected, however, the book is mage-locked,” Cinnabar interrupted, gesturing to a large leather-bound volume securely fastened with leather and metal straps. There were no visible locks, but then, there wouldn’t be, not with a volume that was mage-locked.

  But, thanks to Vikteren, that was not going to be a problem.

  The “lock picks” didn’t look like anything of the sort; rather, they looked like a set of inscribed beads of various sorts. “Urtho only uses about a dozen different spells to hold his ordinary magic books,” Vikteren had said. “There aren’t more than a hundred common spells of that sort in existence. Of course, there’s always a chance he used something entirely new, but why? Most people don’t know more than two or three mage-lock spells, even at the Master level. The chances that he’d use something esoteric for a relatively common book that he’s going to want to consult easily are pretty remote.”

  Amberdrake had looked over the string of beads curiously. “So how many counterspells are there here?” he’d asked.

  “Seventy-six,” Vikteren had replied with a grin. “My Master is a Lock-master among his other talents. I paid attention. You never know when you may need to get into something.”

  “Or out of it,” Amberdrake had remarked sardonically. But he’d taken the “picks.”

  Now it was just a matter of trying the beads against the place where all the straps met, one at a time. Vikteren had strung them in order-from the most common to the least, and that was how Amberdrake would use them. All it would take would be patience.

  He didn’t need to try more than a dozen, however; as he took the bead away and fingered up the next, the straps suddenly parted company, unfolding neatly down onto the stand, and leaving the book ready for perusal.

  Cinnabar exclaimed with satisfaction, and flipped the cover open. “Ah, Urtho,” she said with a chuckle. “Just as methodical as always. Indexed as neatly as a scribe’s copy, and here’s what we want on page five hundred and two.”

  She and Tamsin leafed rapidly through the pages and soon located the relevant formula. They planned to make two copies, just in case they were discovered; they would turn over one, but not the second, unless Urtho somehow knew that they’d made it.

  Suddenly, Skan’s head snapped up, alarm in his eyes, his crest-feathers erect and quivering.

  “What is it?” Amberdrake whispered, afraid to make a sound. Was there a guard coming?

  “There’s-another gryphon up here!” Skan muttered, his head weaving back and forth a little, his eyes slightly glazed with concentration. “It’s in the next room, but there’s something wrong, something odd-“

  Before Amberdrake could stop him, the Black Gryphon had snatched the lock-pick beads out of his hand. He turned and trotted down the hall to a doorway barely visible at the end of it.

  Tamsin and Cinnabar became so engrossed in their copying that they didn’t even notice Skan’s abrupt departure. It was left to Amberdrake to chase after him and snatch the beads out of his talons as he shoved them in a bundle against the door lock.

  “What are you trying to do?” he hissed, as the gryphon turned to look at him with reproach. “Do you want us to be discovered?”

  “I-“ Skan shook his head. “I just felt as if there was-something I should do about that other gryphon. It felt important. It felt as if I needed to get in there quickly.”

  Amberdrake did not make the scathing retort he wanted to, “And what if that was the point?” he asked, instead. “What if there is some kind of trap in there and this feeling of yours is the bait? We both know how tricky Urtho is! That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do!”

  “He wouldn’t be mad, at least not for long,” Skan replied weakly. “I could talk him down.”

  “Until he figured out that we had taken his precious fertility formula!” Amberdrake retorted. “Now will you be sensible? Did you actually unlock that door?”

  “I thought I heard a click,” the Black Gryphon told him, with uncharacteristic meekness. “But I don’t know, I could have heard the beads clicking together.”

  These were meant to unlock books, not doors-maybe nothing happened. “Look, Skan, whatever it is behind that door, it can wait until you have a chance to ask Urtho yourself. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you. You were supposed to be here, after al
l, and you can say you sensed another gryphon-then you can ask him what was going on. He’ll probably tell you.”

  “Just like he’s told me the fertility formula?” the gryphon replied scornfully, sounding much more like his usual serf. He walked beside Amberdrake with his usual unnerving lack of sound. “Oh, please-“

  “We’re done!” Tamsin grinned. “We copied legitimate information to cover the notes on the fertility formula, if we meet Urtho on the way out and he asks. Let’s get out of here. I’d rather not try and bluff him.”

  “Right.” Amberdrake said. “Come on, Skan. You can solve mysteries later.”

  He stuffed the “picks” into a deep pocket, one full of other miscellaneous junk of the kind a kestra’chern often collected; bits of trim, loose beads, a heavy neck chain, the odd token or two. He hoped that among all that junk the beads would appear insignificant. And hopefully, Urtho, if they met him, would not check him over for magic.

  He hurried down the hall to join the others, assuming Skan followed. The mage-lights extinguished in his wake, leaving darkness and silence behind him.

  Nine

  Skan pushed the unlocked door open the tiniest bit. Stupid gryphon. Stupid, stupid gryphon. Going to get yourself into trouble again. This time with your own side! Skan shoved the door open a little more, carefully, listening, watching for moving shadows as he opened the portal, taking a huge breath of air and testing it for scents other than dust. His bump of curiosity was eating him alive. His weaker bump of caution was screaming at him to turn around and join the others on the staircase. As always, his bump of curiosity won.

  Metal doors, and I wonder why? Never mind, Urtho’s not going to like this, stupid gryphon. He puts locks on things for a reason.

  Yes, but what could that reason be? Why would paternal, kindly Urtho hide something that called to him like a gryphon-only not quite? What if it was something important, something out of keeping with Urtho’s kindhearted image? What if Urtho was as bad as Ma’ar beneath that absentminded and gentle exterior? After all, hadn’t the Mage of Silence been withholding the fertility secret all this time? What if he was hiding something sinister?