they hadn’t been chasing you before.”
She tried to hide how frightened she was, but the idea of six or more of
those creatures coming at her in the dark was terrifying. “What charming and
delightful creations,” she replied sarcastically. “Anything else you’d like to tell
me?”
He shook his head, spraying her with rain. “That’s all I remember right
now.”
She concentrated on being very careful where she walked, for the rain was
getting heavier and the rocks slicker. It would do no one any good if she
slipped on these rocks and broke something else.
Well, no one but the wyrsa.
“Has anyone ever been able to control these things?” she asked. “Just out
of curiosity.”
The navigable part of the track narrowed. He gestured to her to precede
him, which she did. If the wyrsa decided to cross the river, he did make a
better rear guard than she did as soon as he got turned around. “Not that I’ve
ever heard,” he said from behind her. “I suppose that a really good mage
could hold a coercion-spell on a few and make them attack a target he chose,
but that would be about the limit of ‘controlling’ them. He wouldn’t be able to
stop them once they started, and he wouldn’t be able to make them turn aside
if they went after something he didn’t choose. I certainly wouldn’t count on
controlling them.”
“So at least we probably don’t have to worry about some mage setting this
pack on our trail after bringing us down?” she persisted, and stole a glance
over her shoulder at him. His feathers were plastered flat to his head, making
his eyes look enormous.
“Well . . . not that I know of,” he said hesitantly. “But these aren’t the same
wyrsa I know. They’ve been changed—maybe they are more tractable than
the old kind. Maybe the poison was removed as a trade-off for some other
powers, or it contributed to their uncontrollability. And a mage could have
brought us down in their territory for amusement without needing to control
them, just letting them do what they do.”
“You’re just full of good news today, aren’t you?” she growled, then
repented. I shouldn’t be taking our bad luck out on him. “Never mind. I’m
sorry. I’m just not exactly in a good frame of mind right now.”
“Neither am I,” he said softly, in a voice in which she could clearly hear his
fear. “Neither am I.”
Tad kept a watch all day as Blade concentrated on fishing. Once or twice a
single wyrsa showed itself, but the creatures made no move to cross the river
to get at them.
Of course not. Night has always been their chosen hunting-time, and that
should be especially true of wyrsa with this new coloration. Swift, silent, and
incredibly fierce, he would not have wanted to face one of this new type, much
less an entire pack.
I wonder how big the pack is, anyway? Six? Ten? More?
Were they the sport-offspring of a single female? Wyrsa were’only
supposed to litter once every two years, and they didn’t whelp more than a
couple at a time. If these are all from twin offspring of a single litter, back
when the storms changed them—how many could the pair have produced?
Four years to maturity, then two pups every two years. . . .
There could be as few as the seven that they had seen, and as many as
thirty or forty. The true answer was probably somewhere in between.
He and Blade ate in silence, then she banked the fire down to almost
nothing while he took the first watch. As soon as it was fully dark, he eased
several rocks into place to disguise his outline, then pressed himself up
against the stone of the floor as flat as he could. He hoped he could convince
them that he wasn’t there, that nothing was watching them from the mouth of
the cave. If he could lure one out into the open, out on the slippery rocks of
the riverbank, he might be able to get off a very simple bit of magic. If he
could stun one long enough to knock it into the river—well, here below the
falls it would get sucked under to drown. Nothing but a fish could survive the
swirling currents right at the foot of the falls. That would be one less wyrsa to
contend with.
He didn’t hear Blade so much as sense her; after a moment’s hesitation,
she touched his foot, then eased on up beside him.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she mouthed into his ear. He nodded. Stupid, maybe, but
she had good cause for insomnia.
She pressed herself even farther down against the stone than he had;
anything that spotted her from across the river would have to have better
eyesight than an owl.
The rain is slacking off. That was both good and bad news; he had an idea
that the wyrsa didn’t much care for rain, and that they were averse to climbing
around on rain-slick rocks. Like him, they had talons, but he didn’t think that
their feet were as flexible as his. Those talons could make walking on rock
difficult.
On the other hand, as the rain thinned, that made visibility across the river
better, especially if the lightning kept up without any rain falling.
Something moved on the bank across from his position. He froze, and he
felt Blade hold her breath.
Lightning flickered, and the light fell on a sleek, black form, poised at the
very edge of the bank, peering intently in their direction. And now he saw that
the white glazing of the dead one’s eyes had been the real color; the wyrsa’s
eyes were a dead, opaque corpse-white. The very look of them, as the
creature peered across the river in their direction, made his skin crawl.
He readied his spell, hoarding his energies. No point in striking unless
everything was perfect. . . .
He willed the creature to remain, to lean forward more. Lightning flickered
again; it was still there, still craning its neck, peering.
Stay . . . stay. . . .
Now!
He unleashed the energy; saw the wyrsa start, its eyes widening—
But instead of dropping over, stunned, it glowed for a moment. Blade
gasped, so Tad knew that she had seen it, too, as a feeling of faintness and
dis-orientation that he had experienced once before came over him. He
wheezed and blinked a few times, dazzled, refocusing on the wyrsa.
The wyrsa gaped its mouth, then, as if recharged, the creature made a
tremendous leap into the underbrush that nothing wholly natural could have
duplicated, and was gone.
And with it went the energy of the spell. If the wyrsa had deflected it, the
energy would still be there, dissipating. It hadn’t. The spell hadn’t hit shields,
and it hadn’t been reflected.
It had been inhaled, absorbed completely. And what was more—an
additional fraction of Tad’s personal mage-energy had gotten pulled along
behind it as if swept in a current.
“Oh. My. Gods,” he breathed, feeling utterly stunned. Now he knew what
had hit them, out there over the forest. And now he knew why the wyrsa had
begun following them in the first place.
The wyrsa were the magic-thieves, not some renegade mage, not some
natural phenomena. T
hey ate magic, or absorbed it, and it made them
stronger.
Blade shook him urgently. “What happened?” she hissed in his ear. “What’s
the matter? What’s going on?”
He shook off his paralysis to explain it to her; she knew enough about
magic and how it worked that he didn’t have to explain things twice.
“Goddess.” She lay there, just as stunned for a moment as he was. And
then, in typical fashion, she summed up their entire position in a two
sentences. “They have our scent, they want our blood, and now they know
that you produce magic on top of all that.” She stared at him, aghast, her eyes
wide. “We’re going to have to kill them all, or we’ll never get away from here!”
Nine
Tad hissed at the cluster of wyrsa across the river. The wyrsa all bared
their formidable teeth and snarled back. They made no move to vanish this
time, and Tad got the distinct impression that they were taunting him, daring
him to throw something magical at them.
Well, of course they were. They had no reason to believe he had anything
that could reach across the river except magic, and they wanted him to throw
that.
Throw us more food, stupid gryphon! Throw us the very thing that makes
us stronger, and make it tasty!
He’d already checked a couple of things in their supplies. The stone he had
made into a mage-light and the firestarter he had reenergized were both inert
again; if he’d needed any confirmation of the fact that these were the
creatures that had sucked all of the mage-energy out of the carry-basket and
everything in it—well, he had it.
I wonder what Father would do in a situation like this? But Skan would not
likely have ever found himself in a situation like this one. Nor would his
solution necessarily have been a good one . . . since it likely would have
involved a great deal of semi-suicidal straight-on combat and high-energy
physical action, which he was not in the least in any shape to perform.
Skandranon was more known for his physicality than his raw inventiveness,
when it came right down to facts.
Oh, Tad, not you, too—now you are even comparing yourself to your
father. The real question is not what my father would do, the real question is,
what am I going to do in this situation!
He raised himself up as high on his hindquarters as he could get, and gave
a battle-scream, presenting the wyrsa with an open beak and a good view of
his foreclaws. They stopped snarling and eyed him warily; with a little more
respect, he thought. He hoped.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” Blade emerged from the back of the cave
where she’d been napping, hair tousled and expression sour. “It’s a bad way
to wake up, thinking that your partner is about to engage in mortal combat.”
“They don’t seem to like the look of my claws,” he replied, trying to sound
apologetic without actually apologizing. “I was hoping I could intimidate them
a little more.”
He studied the knot of wyrsa, which never seemed to be still for more than
an eyeblink. They were constantly moving, leaping, bending, twining in,
around, over and under each other. He’d never seen creatures with so much
energy and so much determination to use it. It was almost as if they physically
couldn’t stay still for more than a heartbeat.
They had come out of the underbrush about the time that the fog lifted and
the rains began; if the rain bothered them now, it certainly wasn’t possible to
tell.
Then again, why should it bother them? That it did had been an assumption
on his part, not a reflection of what was really going on in those narrow snake-
like heads. They had neither fur nor feathers to get wet and matted down. The
only effect that rain had on their scales was to make them shiny.
“On first blush, I’d say they don’t look very intimidated,” Blade pointed out.
But her brows knitted as she watched the wyrsa move, and her eyes
narrowed in concentration. “On the other hand—that’s a very effective
defensive strategy, isn’t it?”
Tad gazed at the stalkers’ glistening hides, the way it moved and flashed.
The patterns they moved in knotted and reknotted, like a decorative interlace.
“Is it? But it bunches them up all in one place; shouldn’t that make it easier to
hit one?” He watched them carefully, then suddenly shook himself as he
realized that the creatures’ constant movement was making him go into a
trance! He glanced over at Blade. She lifted an eyebrow and nodded.
“Not bad if you can put your attacker to sleep, hmm?” she asked, then
smiled slyly, which put Tad instantly on the alert. He’d seen that smile before,
and he knew what it meant. Trouble, usually for someone else. “Well, let’s see
if we can take advantage of their bit of cleverness, shall we? Stay there and
look impressive, why don’t you? I need something to keep them distracted.”
She retreated into the cave. The wyrsa continued their hypnotic weaving as
Tad watched them, this time prepared to keep from falling under their spell,
glancing away at every mental count of ten.
“Duck,” came the calm order from behind him.
He dropped to the floor, and a heavy lead shot zinged over him, through
the space where his head had been. Across the stream, one of the wyrsa
squalled and bit the one nearest it. The second retaliated, and Tad had the
impression that it looked both surprised and offended at the “unprovoked”
attack. The weaving knot was becoming unraveled as the two offended
parties snapped and hissed at one another.
Another lead shot followed quickly, and a third wyrsa hissed and joined
what was becoming a melee. That seemed to be more provocation than the
others could resist, and the knot became a tumbling tangle of quarreling
wyrsa, with nothing graceful, coordinated, or hypnotic about it. Now most of
the knot was involved in the fight, except for a loner who extricated itself from
the snarling, hissing pack. This creature backed up slowly, eying the others
with what was clearly surprise, and Blade’s third shot thudded right into its
head. It dropped in its tracks, stunned, while the rest of the group continued to
squabble, squall, and bite.
Blade stepped back into the front of the cave and watched the wyrsa with
satisfaction. “I wondered just how cohesive that pack was. I also wonder how
long it’s going to take them to associate a distance-weapon with us; I doubt
that they’ve ever seen or experienced one before.”
At just that moment, another one of the creatures emerged from the
bushes, and uttered a cry that was part hiss, part deep-throated growl. The
reaction to this was remarkable and immediate; the others stopped fighting,
instantly, and dropped to the ground, groveling in submission. The new wyrsa
ignored them, going instead to the one that Blade had brought down, sniffing
at it, then nipping its hindquarters to bring it groggily to its feet.
“I’d say the pack-leader just arrived,” Tad said.
The new wyrsa swung its head around as he spoke, and glared at him from
across the river.
The dead-white eyes skewered him, holding him in place
entirely against his will, while the wyrsa’s lip lifted in a silent snarl. The eyes
glowed faintly, and his thoughts slowed to a sluggish crawl.
Tad felt exactly like a bird caught within striking distance of a snake; unable
to move even to save his own life. It was a horrible feeling of cold dread, one
that made his extremities feel icy. At just that moment, Blade stepped
between them, and leveled a malevolent glare of her own at the pack-leader.
In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do
several highly improbable, athletically difficult, and possibly biologically
impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and
a dead fish.
Tad blinked as his mind came back to life again when the wyrsa took its
eyes off him. He’d had no idea Blade’s education had been that liberal!
The wyrsa might not have understood the words, but the tone was
unmistakable. It reared back as if it were going to accept the implied
challenge by leaping across the river—or leaping into it and swimming
across—and Blade let another stone fly from her sling.
This one cracked the pack-leader across the muzzle, breaking a tooth with
a wet snap. The creature made that strange noise of hiss and yelp that Tad
had heard the night one got caught in his deadfall. It whirled and turned on the
others, driving them away in front of it with a ragged squeal, and a heartbeat
later, the river-bank was empty.
Blade tucked her sling back into her pocket, and rubbed her bad shoulder
thoughtfully. “I don’t know if that was a good idea, or a bad one. We aren’t
going to be able to turn them against each other again. But at least they know
now that we have something that can hit them from a distance besides
magic.”
“And you certainly made an impression on the leader,” Tad observed,
cocking his head to one side.
She smiled faintly. “Just making it clear which of us is the meanest bitch in
the valley,” she replied lightly. “Or hadn’t you noticed the leader was female?”
“Uh, actually, no. I hadn’t.” He felt his nares flush with chagrin at being so
caught in the creature’s spell that he had completely missed something so
obvious. “She’s really not my type.”
Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon.txt Page 33