The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  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 riverbank 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.”

  Her grin widened. “Makes me wonder if the reason she’s keeping the pack here has less to do with the fact that we killed one of her pups, than it does with her infatuation with you. Or rather, with your magnificent… physique.” Her eyes twinkled wickedly.

  Whether or not she realizes it, she’s definitely recovering. But I wonder if I ought to break something else, just for the sake of a little peace!

  He coughed. “I think not,” he replied, flushing further with embarrassment.

  “Oh, no?” But Blade let it drop; this was hardly the time and place to skewer him with further wit, although when they got out of this, he had the feeling that she would not have forgotten this incident or her own implications. “You know,” she continued, “if we had even a chance of picking her off, the pack might lose its cohesiveness. At the very least, they’d be spending as much time squabbling over the leadership position as stalking us.”

  He scratched the side of his head thoughtfully. She had a good point. “We have to be able to see them to pick one particular wyrsa,” he pointed out. “And traps and rockfalls are likely to get
the least experienced, not the most. But it does account for why they’re being so persistent and tenacious.”

  “Uh-huh. We got one of her babies, probably.” Blade sank down on the stone floor of the cave, and watched the underbrush across the river. He turned his attention in that direction himself, and was rewarded by the slight movement of a bit of brush. Since there wasn’t a breeze at the moment, he concentrated on that spot, and was able to make out a flash of dark, shiny hide before the creature moved again.

  “Interesting.” Blade chewed on a nail, and regarded the brush with narrowed eyes. “I don’t think we’re going to see them out in the open again. They learn quickly.”

  That quickly! That was impressive; but he called to mind what Aubri had told him about the pack’s collective intelligence. If there were many more than just the knot that he’d seen, it would mean that as a group, the pack might be as smart as a makaar, and that was pretty smart.

  Regardless of what Father claims.

  The bushes moved again, and he caught another glimpse of slick black hide. A cross of greyhound and snake… I can’t imagine anything more bizarre. But then, Blade would tell me that my imagination isn’t very good. I wonder what kind of vision they get out of those strange eyes! Can they see in the dark! Could that white film be a screen they pull across their eyes to protect them from daylight! Can they actually “see” magic! Or scent it!

  “I wonder what we look like to them,” he said, musing aloud. Blade shot him a sharp glance.

  “I suppose I looked fairly harmless until I whipped out my sling,” she replied. “But I suspect that you look like a movable feast. After all, you are burdened with a magical nature, and it might be rather obvious to them.”

  “You mean—they might be more interested in me than you as prey?” he choked. She nodded.

  “Probably as someone they’d want to keep alive a while, so they could continue to feed on your magic as it rebuilt. They’re probably bright enough for that.”

  He hadn’t thought about that.

  It did not make him feel any better.

  * * *

  Amberdrake stood beside the leader of their party and wrung more water out of a braid of hair. He waited for the fellow to say something enlightening. Fog wreathed around them both, and shrouded everything more than a few paces away in impenetrable whiteness.

  “I wish I knew what was going on here,” Regin muttered, staring at the pair of soggy decoys wedged up in the fork of a tree. “There’s no trail from the camp, which looks as if the Silvers were trying to conceal, their backtrail. But there isn’t a sign of anything hunting them, either. And now—we find this.” The ground beneath the tree was torn up, as was the bark of the lower trunk, but there was no blood. There was a deadfall rigged of wood that had been tripped, but there was no sign that anything had been caught in it. They might have passed the site by, thinking that it was just a place where some large forest creature had been marking his territory.

  Except that there was a human-shaped decoy and a gryphon-shaped decoy wedged high in a tree.

  That isn’t very enlightening.

  “They might have run into some sort of large predator,” Drake pointed out. “Just because we didn’t see any sign of a hunter, that doesn’t mean they weren’t being trailed. That would account for why they tried not to leave a trail. Maybe that’s even the reason why they left their camp in the first place.”

  This was the first sign of the children that any of them had come across in their trek toward the river. Amberdrake took it as a good omen; it certainly showed that the duo had gotten this far, so their own party was certainly on the right track. And it showed that they were in good enough health to rig something like this.

  “Maybe. But why decoys?” Regin paced carefully around the trunk of the tree, examining it on all sides. “Most forest predators hunt with their noses, and even in this rain, the trail from here to wherever they did spend the night would be fresh enough to follow. I wonder what we can learn from this.”

  “I don’t know; I’m not a hunter,” Amberdrake admitted, and let it go at that.

  Skan didn’t, however. “Whatever tore this place up is an animal—or at least, it doesn’t use weapons or tools,” he pointed out. “It might just be that the—that Blade and Tad wandered into its territory, and they built the decoys to keep it occupied while they went on their way.”

  “Maybe.” Regin shook his head. “Whatever it was, I don’t recognize the marks, but that doesn’t surprise me. I haven’t recognized much in this benighted forest since we got into it. And I’m beginning to wonder how anything survives here without gills.”

  With that, he shrugged, heading off into the forest in the direction of the river. Amberdrake followed him, but Skan lingered a moment before hurrying to catch up lest he get left behind and lost in the fog.

  “I don’t like it,” he muttered fretfully as he reached Drake’s side. “I just don’t like it. It didn’t look right back there, but I can’t put my finger on why.”

  “I don’t know enough about hunting animals to be of any help,” Drake replied bluntly. He kept telling himself that the children were—must be—still fine. That no matter how impressive the signs these unknown creatures had left were, the children had obviously escaped their jaws. “All I know is that whatever made those marks must be the size of a horse, and if I were being chased by something that size, I probably wouldn’t be on the ground at night. Maybe they put the decoys up one tree and then climbed over to another to spend the night.”

  Unless, of course, they’re too hurt to climb trees. But in that case, how did the decoys get up in one?

  “Illusion!” Skan said suddenly, his head coming up with a jerk. “That’s it! There’s no illusion and no traces of one on those decoys. Tad’s not a powerful mage, but he’s good enough to cast an illusion, and if I were building a decoy I’d want to make it look as much like me as possible! So why didn’t he put an illusion on it?”

  “Because he couldn’t,” Drake said flatly. “If mage-energy got sucked out of the basket and everything else, it could have gotten sucked out of him, and it might not have built up enough yet for him to do anything.”

  “Oh.” Skan was taken a bit aback, but finally nodded his acceptance of Drake’s explanation. Amberdrake was just as glad, because he could think of another.

  Tad can’t work a simple magic like an illusion because he’s hurt too badly.

  On the other hand, those decoys were soggy enough to have been here for a couple of days, so that meant that the children made fairly good progress for two people trying to hide their backtrail, So that in turn meant that they couldn’t have been hurt too badly. Didn’t it?

  He also didn’t want to think about how having mage-energy drained from him might affect Tad in other, more subtle ways. Would it be like a slowly-draining wound? Would it affect his ability to work magic at all? What if he simply was no longer a mage anymore? Gryphons were inherently magical for good reasons, and Urtho would not have designed them so otherwise. Although the Mage of Silence had made many mistakes, the gryphons were considered his masterpieces. Magic collected in their bodies with every breath and with every stroke of the wings. It stabilized their life systems, cleaned their organs, helped them fly. Amberdrake had never heard of what would happen if a gryphon were deprived of mage-energy completely for an extended amount of time; would it be like fatigue poisoning, or gout, or something even more insidious, like a mental imbalance?

  The rescue party was moving along in a tightly-bunched group to keep from getting separated in the mist. We’re on the right track at least; the children certainly came this way, Amberdrake reminded himself. They’re moving right along, thinking, planning. If they’re in trouble, the best place for them is the river. There’s food there that’s easy to catch, and maybe caves in the cliffs. They’re doing all the right things, especially if they’re having to deal with large predators.

  Maybe this was why the rescuers hadn’t found
much in the way of large game. They’d tried to send on their findings by teleson, so that the other two parties out searching knew to turn back to the river. The mage Filix thought he’d gotten everything through clearly, but without local mage-energy to draw on, he couldn’t be certain that all the details had made it over. Still, whether the children went north or south when they encountered the river, someone should run into them now. Their own party was going to try to the north, mostly because they did know for certain that Ikala’s would be coming up from below them, also heading north.

  This damned fog. It makes me more nervous than the rain! If—when—we all get out of this, I am never leaving the city again, I swear it. Not unless it’s to visit another city. So far as I’m concerned, you can take the “wilderness experience” and bury it in a hole. He’d never forgotten the hardships of the trek to White Gryphon, and he had been all too well aware of what this mission would involve. He thought he’d been prepared for it. Except for one thing; I’d forgotten that now I’m not as limber as I used to be for this sort of thing. Judeth and Aubri certainly didn’t volunteer to traipse through the woods, and now I see why. They probably think I’m a fool, forcing myself to go along on this rescue, trying to do a young man’s job. Maybe letting me go was Judeth’s way of getting revenge upon me for threatening her!

  But Blade wasn’t Judeth’s daughter, nor was Tad Aubri’s son.

  No, I’d rather be out here. At least I know that I’m doing something this way. Zhaneel and Winterhart must feel the same, or they wouldn’t have insisted on coming either.

  But the fog was doing more than just getting on his nerves; he kept thinking that he was seeing shadows flitting alongside them, out there. He kept feeling eyes on him, and getting glimpses of skulking shapes out of the corner of his eye. It was all nonsense, of course, and just his nerves getting the better of him, but—