Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon.txt

by The Silver Gryphon [lit]

  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 beak 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.

  Despite the darkness, he flew back with his prize. When he marched

  through Snowstar’s door, he saw at once that the workroom had already been

  transformed. Everything not needed for the task at hand had been cleared

  away against the wall. Other projects had been piled atop one another with no

  thought for coherence. It was going to take days to put the workroom back

  into some semblance of order, but Skan doubted that Snowstar was going to

  be thinking about anything but Blade and Tad until they were found.

  At least we have one friend who took all this seriously without having to be

  persuaded.

  The several small tables were now one large one, waiting for the map he

  held in his beak. The moment he showed his face at the door, eager hands

  took—snatched!—the map away from him and spread it out on the table.

  Redoak lit a pungent incense, filling the room with smoke that just stopped

  short of being eye-watering. The mage that Snowstar had called Rides-alone,

  who came from one of the many odd tribes that Urtho had won to his cause,

  had a drum in his hands. Evidently he was going to be playing it during—

  whatever it was they were going to do.

  “Right.” Snowstar stood over the table, the only one who was standing, and

  held a long chain terminating in a teardrop-shaped, rough-polished piece of

  some dark stone. “Redoak, you watch what the pendulum does, and mark

  what I told you out on the map. Rides-alone, give me a heartbeat rhythm. The

  rest of you, concentrate; I’ll need your combined energies along with anything

  else I can pull up out of the local node. Skan, that goes for you, too. Come sit

  opposite me, but don’t think of Tad or Blade, think of me. Got that?”

  He was not about to argue; this looked rather like one of those bizarre

  shamanistic rituals that Urtho used to try, now and again, when classical spell-

  casting failed. He simply did as he was told, watching as Snowstar carefullyr />
  suspended the pendulum over the map at the location where the youngsters

  had last been heard from. Rides-alone began a steady drum pattern, hypnotic

  without inducing slumber; somehow it enhanced concentration. How that was

  managed, Skan could not begin to imagine.

  For a long time, nothing happened. The stone remained quite steady, and

  Skan was afraid that whatever Snowstar had planned wasn’t working after all.

  But Snowstar remained impassive, and little by little, he began to move the

  pendulum along a route going north and east of the point of the youngsters’

  last camp.

  And abruptly, without any warning at all, the pendulum did move.

  It swung, violently and abruptly away from the spot Snowstar had been

  trying to move it toward. And in total defiance of gravity, it hung at an angle,

  as if it were being repelled by something there.

  Snowstar gave a grunt, although Skan could not tell if it was satisfaction or

  not, and Redoak made a mark on the map with a stick of charcoal. Snowstar

  moved his hand a trifle.

  The pendulum came back down, as if it had never exhibited its bizarre

  behavior.

  Snowstar moved it again, a little at a time, and once again came to a point

  where the pendulum repeated its action. The strange scene was repeated

  over and over, as Redoak kept marking places on the map and Snowstar

  moved the pendulum back.

  It took uncounted drumbeats, and sweat was pouring down the faces of

  every mage around the table, when Snowstar finally dropped the pendulum

  and signaled to Rides-alone to stop drumming. There was an irregular area

  marked out in charcoal dots on the map, an area that the pendulum avoided,

  and which the youngsters’ flight would have bisected. Redoak connected the

  dots, outlining a weirdly-shaped blotch.

  “I would lay odds that they are in there, somewhere,” Snowstar said

  wearily. “It’s an area in which there is no magic; no magic and no magical

  energy. Whatever is given off in the normal course of things by animals and

  plants is immediately lost, somehow, and I suspect magic brought into that

  area is drained away as well. I can only guess that is what happened to their

  basket when they flew over it.”

  “So the basket became heavier, and they couldn’t fly with it?” Redoak

  hazarded, and whistled when Snowstar nodded. “That’s not good. But how did

  you know what to use to find all this?”

  Snowstar shrugged modestly. “It was Gielle that gave me the idea to look

  for a negative, and I remembered shamanic dowsing; you can look for

  something that is there, like metal, or something that is not there, like water.

  Urtho taught it to me; we used to use it to make certain that we weren’t

  planting our outposts atop unstable ground.” He looked across the table at

  Skan, who was trying very hard to tell himself that it wasn’t likely for all the

  magic infused into the basket to drain off at once. He did not want to think

  about what that would have meant for poor Tadrith if the basket regained its

  normal weight in a single moment while aflight.

  “Take that map with you, and tell Judeth what we’ve found,” the Adept told

  Skan. “I’ll work with the mages I’m sending out with the search teams. There’s

  probably something about the area itself that we can shield against. I doubt

  that a mage caused this. It might just be a freak of nature, and the Haighlei

  would never have seen it, because they were looking for magic, not for its

  absence.”

  Skan nodded, and Redoak brushed a quick-drying varnish on the map to

  set the charcoal. The fumes warred unpleasantly with the lingering scent of

  the incense, but the moment the map was dry, the younger mage rolled it up

  and handed it to the Black Gryphon. Skan did not wait around to see what the

  rest of the mages were going to do; he took the map and fled out the door for

  the second time that evening.

  This time he went straight to the planning room—which Judeth still referred

  to as the “War Room” out of habit. And it looked very much as if they were

  planning for a wartime situation. Judeth had a map spread out over the table,

  there were aides darting everywhere, Aubri was up on his hindquarters tracing

  out a line with one talon when Skan came in through the door.

  “Snowstar thinks he has a general area,” Skan said, as silence descended

  and all heads but Judeth’s swiveled around at his entrance. “That’s what he

  wanted the map for. Here.”

  He handed the map to the nearest aide, who spread it out on the table over

  the existing one at Judeth’s nod.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at-the blobby outline on the map.

  “It’s an area where there isn’t magic,” Skan replied. He repeated what

  Snowstar had told him, without the details about shamanic dowsing. “That

  would be why we can’t raise the teleson. Snowstar thinks that anything that’s

  magical gets all the mage-energy sucked out of it when it enters that area.”

  “And if the spell making the basket into something Tad could tow lost its

  power—” Judeth sucked in her lower lip, as one of the aides coughed. “Well,

  no matter how they landed, they’re stuck now. No teleson, no magic—they’d

  have to hole up and hope for rescue.”

  Aubri studied the map for a moment. “The only teams we’ve sent out there

  were gryphon pairs, with one exception,” he pointed out. “You and me,

  Judeth. We used a basket, and our flight path took us over that area. Nothing

  happened to us, so where did this come from?”

  “Maybe it’s been growing,” offered one of the aides. “Maybe the more it

  eats, the bigger it grows.”

  “Well, that’s certainly cheerful,” Judeth said dryly, and patted the girl on the

  shoulder when she flushed a painful red. “No, you have a point, and we’re

  going to have to find out what’s causing this if you’re right. If it’s growing,

  sooner or later it’s going to reach us. I did without working magic long enough

  and I’m not in the mood to do it again.”

  “That’s a lot of area to cover,” Aubri pointed out. “They could be anywhere

  in there, depending on how far they got before they had to land.”

  Land. Or crash. Skan’s imagination was all too clever at providing him with

  an image of the basket plummeting down out of the sky. . . .

  “We can probably cover it with four teams including a base camp,” Judeth

  said, at last. “But I think we’re going to have to do a ground search, in a

  sweep pattern. Those trees are bigger than anything most of us here have

  ever seen before, and you could drop Urtho’s Tower in there and not see

  most of it. Gryphons may not do us a lot of good.”

  “They can look for signal smoke,” Aubri objected.

  Judeth did not say anything, but Skan knew what she was thinking, since it

  was something that he was already trying not to think about. The youngsters

  might be too badly hurt to put up a signal fire.

  “Right, then the two already in the area can look for signal smoke,” she

  said. “I’ll fly in a mage here, to set up a match-Gate terminus, and I’ll call for

  volunteers
for four teams who are willing to trust their hides to a Gate—”

  “I shall go,” said a deep voice from the doorway.

  Skan swiveled his head, as Ikala moved silently into the room. “With all

  respect, Commander, I must go. I know this forest; your people do not. Forget

  my rank and my breeding; my father would say that you should, in a case like

  this. These two are my friends and my sworn comrades, and it is my honor

  and duty to help them.”

  “You are more than welcome, then. I’m going, you can count on it,” Skan

  said instantly. “Drake will probably want to go, too. Judeth, that’ll give you one

  mage and a field-Healer, along with a fighter.”

  Judeth sighed, but made no objections, probably because she knew they

  would be futile. “All right, but these are going to be big teams. I don’t want tiny

  little patrols running around in unknown territory. I want two mages, so you

  have one for each night watch on each team, and I want at least as many

  fighters. Ikala, you go call for volunteers among the hunters and the Silvers.

  Skan, go back to Snowstar and explain the situation and what we need.” She

  glared at both of them. “Don’t just stand there, go!”

  Skan went, but he was a fraction slower than Ikala and reached the door in

  second place. By the time he was outside, Ikala was nowhere in sight.

  But he was overjoyed that Ikala was still willing to volunteer, even with the

  need to trust to a Gate for transport. The young Haighlei was precisely what

  they needed; someone who knew the ordinary hazards of such a forest, and

  how to meet them.

  Snowstar had already anticipated Judeth’s decision about a Gate. “As if

  any of us would be afraid to trust our own Gates!” he replied scornfully.

  “We’ve been perfectly willing to use them for the last five years, it’s been the

  rest of you who were so overly cautious about them!”

  “Not me!” Skan protested, but Snowstar was already on to other things.

  “Gielle will fly out with a gryphon as soon as it’s light; I’ll have Redoak head

  one of the other three teams after you all get through the Gate,” the Adept

  was saying. “I have more mages willing to volunteer than Judeth needs, but

  not all of them are suited to this kind of mission. Tell her I’ll be choosing

  combat experience over sheer power; we can’t take the chance that this dead