Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon.txt
Page 8
that.
She gulped down her cooling tea to cover her embarrassment and guilty
conscience, as Amberdrake toyed with a piece of bread, reducing it to a pile
of crumbs.
He’s trying to pretend that he isn’t worried; trying to put on a brave face
when I know he’s feeling anything but brave. Why? Why is he so worried? If
he’s transparent enough for me to see through, he must be all of a knot
inside.
Finally Amberdrake looked up at her, slowly chewing on his lower lip. “I
know I probably seem as if I am overreacting to this situation, ke’chara,” he
said quietly. “I shouldn’t be so worked up over the simple fact that you and
your partner are going off on a normal, peaceful assignment. I realize that I
am being quite foolish about this, and I can’t even pretend that I have some
mysterious presentiment of doom. It’s all due to old—well, I suppose you’d
have to call them habits, habits of feeling, perhaps.”
Winterhart stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, gently
massaging muscles that must have been terribly tense. Outside, seabirds
cried, greeting the dawn and the winds that would carry them out to their
fishing grounds.
Amberdrake reached up and covered one of his mate’s hands with his own.
“I have two problems with this assignment, really, and neither of them is
rational. The first is that it is you, my daughter, who is going off for six months
to a place that is unsettlingly far away. And you’ll be all alone there, except for
a single gryphon. If it were someone else, I would see him or her off with a
cheerful heart, and go about my business.”
“But it isn’t,” she stated.
“No.” He sighed, and patted Winterhart’s hand. “Your mother is handling
this better than I.”
“I have perfect confidence in Aubri and Judeth,” Winterhart said serenely.
“They wouldn’t send anyone that far away who wasn’t prepared for any
contingency.” Her tone turned just a little sharp as she looked down at him. “If
you won’t trust Blade, dearheart, at least trust them.”
“Intellectually, I do” Amberdrake protested. “It’s just—it’s just that it’s hard
to convince the emotions.”
He turned back to Blade, who was even more embarrassed at her parent’s
decision to bare his soul to her. She struggled not to show it. And underneath
the embarrassment was exasperation.
Can’t he learn that I am grown now, and don’t need him to come haul me
out of difficulties? Can’t he just let me go ?
“The other problem I have is very old, older than you, by far,” he told her
earnestly. “And it has absolutely nothing to do with your abilities; it’s
something I would still feel even if you were a warrior out of legend with
magical weapons at your side. It doesn’t matter to my heart that this is peace
time, that you are simply going off to man a wilderness outpost. The point to
my reaction is that you are going out. When—” momentary pain ghosted over
his expressive features. “—when people used to go out, back in the days of
the wars, they didn’t always come back.” She opened her mouth to protest; he
forestalled her.
“I know this is peacetime, I know you are not going forth to combat an
enemy, I know that there is no enemy but storms and accident. But I still have
the emotional reaction to seeing people going out on a quasi-military mission,
and that fact that it is my daughter that is doing so only makes the reaction
worse.” He smiled thinly. “You cannot reason with an old emotional problem, I
am afraid.”
She looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, and made little
patterns with her forefinger, tracing the grain of the wood. What on earth did
he expect her to say? What could she say? That was years and years ago,
before I was even born. Can’t he have gotten over it by now? He’s supposed
to be the great magician of the emotions, so why can’t he keep his own
trained to heel? What could possibly go wrong with this assignment? We’ll
have a teleson with us, we ‘II be reporting in, and if there is a life-threatening
emergency and they can’t get help to us quickly, they ‘II take the risk and
Gate us back!
But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and it wouldn’t help anything to say
it. “I can understand. At least, I think I can. I’ll try,” she finished lamely.
True, it is nothing but wilderness between here and there—but when we
get “there,” we’ll be in a fortified outpost built to withstand storm, siege, or
earthquake. And, granted, no one has even tried to explore all the rainforest in
between, but we’ll be flying, not walking! What could possibly knock us out of
the sky that our people or the Haighlei wouldn‘t have encountered a long, long
time ago ?
It was—barely—possible that some mage-made creatures of Ma’ar’s
survived from the Cataclysm. It was less likely that any of them could have
made it this far south. And even if they did, there had never been that many of
them that could threaten a gryphon. The last makaar died ages ago, and there
never was anything else that could take a flying gryphon down. We’ll be flying
too high for any projectile to hurt us, and even if we weren‘t, there‘II be the
mass of the carry-basket and all our supplies between us and a marksman.
“Father, I promise you, we’ll be fine,” she only said, choking down a last dry
mouthful of bread. “Makaar are extinct, and nothing less could even ruffle
Tadrith’s feathers. You’ve seen him; he’s one of the biggest, strongest
gryphons in the Silvers!”
But Amberdrake shook his head. “Blade, it’s not that I don’t trust or believe
in you, but there is far more in this world than you or Tadrith have ever seen.
There were more mages involved in the Mage Wars than just Urtho and
Ma’ar; plenty of them created some very dangerous creatures, too, and not all
of them were as short-lived as makaar. I will admit that we are a long distance
from the war zones, but we got this far, so who’s to say that other things
couldn’t?”
He’s not going to listen to me, she realized. He’s determined to be afraid for
me, no matter what I say. There was more likelihood of moving the population
of the city up to the rim of the canyon than there was of getting Amberdrake to
change his mind when it was made up.
“What’s more, as you very well know, the mage-storms that followed the
Cataclysm altered many, many otherwise harmless creatures, and conjured
up more.” His jaw firmed stubbornly. “You ask Snowstar if you don’t believe
me; some of the territory we passed through was unbelievable, and that was
only after a year or so of mage-storms battering at it! We were very, very
lucky that most of the things we encountered were minimally intelligent.”
“Sports and change-children die out in less than a generation,” she
retorted, letting her impatience get the better of her. “That’s simple fact,
Father. There’re just too many things wrong with most magic-made creatures
for them to live very long, if they’ve
been created by accident.”
He raised an elegant eyebrow at her, and the expression on his face told
her she’d been caught in a mistake.
“Urtho was not infallible,” he said quietly. “He had many accidents in the
course of creating some of his new creatures. One of those accidents was
responsible for the creation of intelligence in kyree, and another for
intelligence in hertasi. And neither race has died out within a generation.’ ‘
She had already spotted the flaw in his argument. “An accident may have
been responsible for the intelligence of the creature, but not the creature
itself,” she countered. “Creature creation takes great thought, planning, and
skill. An accident is simply not going to be able to duplicate that!”
He looked as if he were going to say something, but subsided instead.
“Besides,” Blade continued, taking her advantage while she still had it,
“people have been going to this outpost for years, and no one has seen
anything— either there or on the way. Don’t you think by now if there was
going to be any trouble, someone would have encountered it?”
Amberdrake dropped his eyes in defeat and shook his head. “There you
have me,” he admitted. “Except for one thing. We don’t know what lies beyond
that outpost and its immediate area. The Haighlei have never been there, and
neither have we. For all we know, there’s an army of refugees from the wars
about to swarm over you, or a renegade wizard about to take a force of his
own across the land—”
“And that,” Blade said with finality, “is precisely why we will be there in the
first place. It is our duty to be vigilant.”
He couldn’t refute that, and he didn’t try.
Blade extracted herself from her parents with the promise that she and Tad
would not take off until they arrived. With one pack slung over her back and
the other suspended from her shoulder, she hurried up the six levels of
staircase that led in turn to the narrow path which would take her to the top of
the cliff. She was so used to running up and down the ladder-like staircases
and the switchback path that she wasn’t even breathing heavily when she
reached the top. She had spent almost all of her life here, after all, and ver-
ticality was a fact of life at White Gryphon.
Below, on the westward-facing cliff the city was built from, she had been in
cool shadow; she ascended as the invisible sun rose, and both she and the
sun broke free of the clinging vestiges of night at the same time. Golden
fingers of light met and caressed her as she took the last few steps on the
path. It would be a perfect morning; there were no clouds marring the horizon
to presage storms to the east. Red skies were lovely—but red skies required
clouds. If I am going to be traveling, I prefer a morning like this one; not a
cloud in the sky and the air dry, cool, and quiet.
At the top of the cliff a great expanse of meadow and farmland composed
of gently rolling hills stretched out before her. It was completely indefensible,
of course; like Ka’venusho, Urtho’s stronghold, there was no decent “high
ground” to defend. This was why the city itself had been built into the cliff, with
the only access being a single, narrow path. You couldn’t even rain boulders
down on White Gryphon from above, for the path had been cut into the cliff so
cleverly that it channeled objects falling down from the edge away from the
city entirely.
Judeth’s idea, but it took some very clever stonecrafters to put her idea into
solid form.
At the edge were large constructions of wooden frames and pulleys that
could lower huge amounts of material down to the first level of the city; that
was how food was brought down from the farms up here. Those could be
dismantled or destroyed in mere moments by a very few people. Nothing that
was up here would be left to be used by an enemy if there ever was an attack.
The farmers used to live in White Gryphon and travel up each day to tend
their flocks and fields; now they didn’t bother with the trip. There was a
second village up here on the rim, a village of farmhouses and barns, a few
warehouses and workshops, and the pens where herds were brought during
the few days of each year that the weather was too bad to keep the herds in
the fields. If severe winter storms came from the sea instead of the landward
side, the herds could be driven into the shelter of the forest, and those who
were not sent to watch over them could take shelter within the rock walls of
White Gryphon.
The stockade and supply warehouse of the Silvers was up here as well.
Space was too precious in the city for any to be wasted on bulk stores except
in an emergency. And as for the stockade, most punishment involved physical
labor in the fields with the proceeds going to pay back those who had been
wronged. Since most crime in the city involved theft or minor damage, that
was usually acceptable to the victims. There had been those—a few—who
were more dangerous. Those were either imprisoned up here, under bindings,
or—dealt with, out of the sight of the city. After Hadanelith, no one was ever
exiled again. The possibility that another dangerous criminal might survive
exile was too great to risk.
Just outside the stockade was a landing platform. Sitting squarely in the
middle of it was what appeared to be a large basket, about the size of a six-
person expedition-tent. There was a complicated webbing of ropes attached
to it, and standing nearby was Tadrith, with a hertasi helping him into a heavy
leather harness. As usual, he was carrying on a running dialogue with his
helper, trying to get his harness adjusted perfectly. She knew better than to
interrupt; her life would depend on that harness and whether or not he was
comfortable in it.
This was the carry-basket that would take her and all their supplies to the
Outpost. It looked far, far too heavy for Tadrith to fly with, and it was. Even the
strongest of gryphons would not have been able to lift her alone in it unaided.
But magic was working reliably enough these days, and there would be a
mage somewhere around who had made certain that the basket and anything
that might be in it would “weigh” nothing, with a reserve for changes in
momentum and speed. He would essentially have made the basket into a
variant of one of the Kaled’a’in floating-barges. Tadrith would not be “lifting”
the basket, only guiding it.
The spell was a complicated one that Blade couldn’t even begin to
understand. Anything inside the basket—like herself—would still have its
apparent weight. If that wasn’t the case, everything not tied down would be in
danger of drifting off on a stiff breeze. But to Tad, although the basket had no
up-and-down weight, it would still have a certain amount of side-to-side mass
and momentum. He would not be lifting it, but he would have to exert some
strength in pulling it, just as teams of dyheli and horses pulled the floating
barges.
Blade hurried up to check the supplies lashed down inside the basket. As
Aubri had promised, the sup
ply sergeant had taken care of everything she
and Tad would need except for their own personal gear. Most of the supplies
they had requisitioned—the ones for after they reached the outpost—had
already been sent on via Gate. So only what they would need for the trip,
what there had not been time to send by the Gate, and what she had brought
with her would actually travel with them.
That’s certainly going to relieve Tad.
It had also relieved Tad when she told him that she was nothing like her
father when it came to wardrobe. She could manage very simply, actually; but
Aubri had once described Amberdrake’s floating-barge and if gryphons could
have blanched, Tad would have, at the thought of having to help move all that
mass of clothing, gear, and furniture.
She tossed her two bags into the basket, and waited quietly beside the
platform for the last of the adjustments to be made. The hertasi in charge was
Gesten’s daughter Ghana; as thorough and meticulous as her father, she
would not leave Tadrith’s side until they were both satisfied with the fit of
every strap. Blade knew that every buckle would be checked and rechecked,
every rivet and every ring subjected to the most exacting scrutiny. Ghana
would leave nothing to chance, and there was no possible compromise with
safety in her view.
Finally, she stepped back. “It’ll do,” she said, in her hissing hertasi voice.
“Try to bring the rig back in one piece.”
Blade suppressed a laugh, for the remark was so like Gesten that it could
have been he who was standing there. Like her father, Ghana would never
admit to concern for the trainees she served, only to concern that the
equipment return intact. But of course, it went without saying that if the
equipment came back to the warehouse in pristine condition, the trainee
would certainly have arrived at the landing platform in like shape.
Tad waved her over, as Ghana began hooking up his harness to the basket
itself. “We’re waiting for the parents, I presume?” he said casually.
She sighed. “Much as I would like to simply slip away, if we leave without
allowing them their fanfare, they may not let us come back.”
“Or we may not want to,” he groaned, and flexed his claws restlessly.
“Because when we did, they’d make our lives sheer misery with guilt.”