“What was she schooled in?” Ironwood asked his brother.
“Rolling Mountain. Sea Wind.”
“Those are good, I suppose. Very…traditional.”
Shaw, to my surprise, seemed to bristle at that.
Blackthorn looked gloomy as he added, “I did what I could to protect her.”
“You are not meant to mind a family’s chicks on the battlefield!” Hollyhock stated firmly. I spotted a glint of silver at her breast, and realized that she wore a silver chain with a tiny pendant. It rode up under her outermost layer of feathers, making it hard to see. “The stain of failure lies upon the pride of Korlson.”
Ironwood waved off the objection. “Rather, I would have the wyvern bear the stain of her death. But since you are so eager to speak, report on your own lance.”
Hollyhock’s expression turned grim as she answered.
Chapter Fifteen
“My lance has three injured,” Hollyhock stated. “One of them seriously.”
She made a motion, and one of her subordinates limped forward. In truth, this griffin’s wounds did look like he should be headed for surgery. His right hind leg had been badly gashed, and his body bore at least three wounds that still dripped blood. One of his wings lay flat against his back, crumpled midway by a serious bite.
“I am Gorse, of the Reyka Pride,” the griffin said, his voice strained by pain. “I am broken yet unbowed, Lance Captain.”
“Well met, pride-mate,” Ironwood said encouragingly. “Do you feel that you will bleed to death?”
“I have enough juice within me yet, sir.”
“Can you move on the ground, if not the air?”
“Well enough.”
“Then I charge you with journeying to Kescar Port. Travel east along this shore until you arrive. Inform them of the events here before you return to the aerie.”
“I shall, Lance Captain.”
To my astonishment, Gorse limped down towards the waves. He moved so that the westering sun fell on his bloodied back and began a wobbly walk towards the eastern horizon.
“Wait, aren’t you going to send someone with him?” I demanded. “Gorse looked pretty badly wounded to me! What if he passes out on the way to Kescar?”
“I understand thy concern,” Shaw assured me. “But he shall not. Honor will not allow him to do so. And the Kescari have healers among them. Our treaty is such that we protect and avenge their people in exchange for services like healing and mending.”
“It’s not my place to say, I know that. But in my world, honor will and does yield to serious blood loss.”
“Then I need remind you that we are not in thy world. For in this one, honor counts for all. Is that not so?”
Blackthorn and Ironwood traded an uneasy look. Hollyhock cleared her throat before she spoke. “We all know how much honor means to you, father.”
At that, Shaw fixed his three children in a leonine glare.
“Then before all eyes under the Eternal Sky, why doth thy brothers dishonor our pride?”
That shocked me to the core. I knew in my bones that the last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of a family dispute – especially one where any member could tear me to pieces in three seconds, tops. But the words came out before I could help myself.
“Shaw, what do you mean?” I cried. “I was here too. I didn’t see anything dishonorable with the way this battle was conducted.”
“That is because thou knowest little of our ways,” he said, in a surprisingly gentle manner. “Honor comes from the ultimate test in combat: between one’s abilities and thy opponent’s. Gaining victory by this ‘Way of the Serpent’? It is underhanded. It is sly. It is–”
Ironwood broke in. “It is effective. I developed this art. I teach it.”
“Do not remind me of thy perfidy! Griffins fight with beak, with talon, with wing! Doth we rely upon the part of our bodies most like a wyvern now?”
It didn’t take a ‘click’ in my head or anything, but at least I finally figured out the problem. The ‘Way of the Serpent’ that Shaw objected to made use of the griffins’ surprisingly flexible tails. I noticed that five of the remaining eleven griffins wore steel tips at the end of their tails. The five included all three of Shaw’s offspring.
“Be reasonable,” Hollyhock pleaded. “I know the objections of the Elders. They would not listen, but Ironwood speaks the truth. Splitting the focus of the enemy forces them to choose between following our talons or our tails. It is a key advantage we cannot throw away. We only lost one warrior today. In the olden days we could have lost an entire lance.”
“The victory wouldst be ours, nonetheless!”
“How can you be so blind, father? Would you have more of us die for your ‘honor’?”
“Were it up to me?” Shaw roared. “We would all die before we gave up our honor!”
Hollyhock stared back defiantly. The remaining griffins looked away uncomfortably or tended to their wounds with extra care for a few moments.
“It is good that we know each other’s thoughts,” Ironwood sighed. “It is time that we return home.”
My eyes lingered on the fallen griffin’s mangled remains. “Are you going to do anything with Cloudburst’s body?”
With a shake of her head, Hollyhock answered. “She is not there anymore. Her body returns to the Eternal Sky on its own, as it should.”
I looked to Shaw. Without further comment, he presented his flank towards me. I’d gotten over most of my fright, though I still had a distinctly queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. But given Shaw’s still-agitated state, I guessed that silence would be best for now. I climbed into the saddle and did my best to ignore the claw mark that zig-zagged down the center of the saddle where I had to rest my crotch.
Shaw’s preoccupation with his children’s misdeeds ended up working in my favor. He took to the air smoothly, kept his wing beats measured, and flew low and level towards the southwest. The beach fell away, as did the smells of blood and fear. They were replaced by the clean scents of pine and griffin musk as the lances linked up around us, putting Shaw and me in the heart of their new formation.
The land grew more and more rugged. The sun slid down to the west, but before it could shine into our eyes, steep mountain peaks off to the right reared up and blocked the worst of the glare. To the left, the sandy beach disappeared and the sea chewed at the forest’s edge, slowly eating its way into the mass of deep green.
We flew above a large, finger-shaped wedge of land that narrowed in the distance to a mist-shrouded hump of rock. To either side, the sea crashed and boomed against a shoreline made of sharp gray stone. The briny smell of the ocean became stronger than the pine and musk scents.
A dish-shaped plateau appeared below. Stuck into its very center was a tall wooden post, painted an eye-frying shade of scarlet. The post itself had been carved into the shape of a double-headed griffin.
“Look there,” Shaw said, in something closer to his normal jovial rumble. “That is thy border marker. A path shows yon way through the tumbled valleys ahead.”
Sure enough, a windblown little road marked at intervals with smaller red posts wound its way through the tangled woods. I followed it as far as I could with my eyes towards the horizon. The mists parted, allowing the sun to reach the hump of rock I’d seen in the distance.
The light turned the stony mass into a sparkling dazzle, the shapeless hump transforming into a massive wave of marble, forever frozen at the very moment it crested. Ivory whites and slate grays were shot through with veins of icy blue rock and glittering streams of silver – some made of mica, others of actual water as it condensed from the mists and dripped to the forest below. All the air between the lances and the steep backside of the wave echoed with the calls of griffins as they plied the air on giant feathered wings.
My voice failed me. It took me a few moments to try again.
“Is that…” I asked, in a near-whisper.
“Thine eyes see true,”
Shaw said, his voice as quiet as mine. “There lies the griffin aerie. My home.”
Chapter Sixteen
We banked to the right so as to approach the aerie from the northwest. Several times I tried to work up my voice to speak again, but my brain kept jamming up with the amazing sights that I’d never dreamed of.
The backside of the giant marble mountain made a steep, rounded slope all the way around to the western side. The marble itself was carved up into twelve horizontal levels, each scraped or carved from the stony face of the slope. A wide gravel path and a space of about twenty near-vertical feet separated each level. Each level was in turn divided up into rectangular spaces bordered by crude stone walls similar to the kind I’d seen in Scotland to separate herds of sheep.
At first glance, the levels and their rectangular slabs of space reminded me of terraced fields of rice. In fact, the multiple levels of gray and silver-white stone made me think of one of the big cities from the Lord of the Rings movies. Try as I might, I couldn’t pry the name out of whatever memory I’d stashed it in.
Then, as I watched three griffins land in a trio of adjoining spaces my brain finally did its clicking thing. I realized that these were communal roosts of a sort, rather similar to the ones used by the owls of Parliament. But where the owls used a single wooden structure, the griffins mimicked cliff-nesting birds like kittiwakes or puffins. Each stone-bracketed section was an individual ‘home’ or ‘nest’, much like studio apartments in the older parts of downtown Los Angeles.
Of course, these ‘apartments’ didn’t have much in the way of furniture, to say nothing of a roof. But to the avian griffins, what was a roof but a nuisance blocking easy access to the sky? The three who had landed seemed happy enough. Each settled into an oval twig-and-branch nest set in a corner of their abodes and began preening their fur and feathers with their beaks.
The slope flattened out below the lowest level of griffin dwellings and turned into a series of small beaches made up more of boulders and twisted driftwood than sand. The pounding of the waves grew louder as Grimshaw descended. We approached a stony spit jutting out at the point furthest west. Spray drenched the rocks as we came in for a landing. A pair of gray-furred griffins waited patiently nearby. They wore Andeluvian-style chest plates and elaborate metal helmets studded with blue or red gems.
“Looks like someone sent the palace guard to greet us,” I remarked, as I slid off of Shaw’s back.
“Nay, Dayna, not guards,” Shaw said. “Thou espies two of the Elders. There is little enough a griffin must fear, let alone one of the Nine.”
“So there are nine on the Council.”
“The Elders are eight in number,” Shaw clarified. “The High Elder, who ranks the others, is the Ninth.”
Ironwood and Hollyhock went forward and spoke with the two Elders. I couldn’t make out the words over the beating of the surf, but I did catch a nod of assent. That was followed by the comical sight of the two older griffins craning their necks around Shaw’s kids to get a curious glimpse of me.
“Blackthorn,” Hollyhock called. “Take our wounded to the healers. Bring the rest of the lance to await us at the second parapet.”
The massive griffin cawed in response and took off with a single massive beat of his wings. The remaining warriors of the lance followed suit, though the wounded lifted off more unsteadily. Without further ceremony, the two Elders turned away from us and walked back towards the sheer face of the mountain. Hollyhock and Ironwood did so as well. I threw Shaw a puzzled glance. He shrugged, then indicated that we should follow.
I leaned back for a moment to look up as we approached the sheer rock wall. Overhead hung a silvery-gray lip of stone, forever frozen in space. I lowered my gaze and focused on a jagged vertical fissure ahead of us. From a distance, it appeared to be a mere crack, a lightning-bolt shaped flaw in the mountain. Up close it yawed open to reveal a passage wide enough to admit a single pair of griffins walking side by side. The boom of the waves picked up a pulse-pounding echo as we passed the threshold. The cool wetness of the air inside draped itself over my skin like a damp terrycloth robe.
The entryway snaked back and forth as we bore deeper into the fastness of the Elders. Multiple side passages loomed out of the shadows and then fell behind as we progressed. Most of the side-tunnels were silent, though from a couple I clearly heard the sound of waves breaking on gravel.
I realized that the interior of the griffins’ mountain was a vast shatter zone of cracks, passages, and natural caverns. All along our way, I didn’t spy any of the fixtures I’d gotten used to seeing in Fitzwilliam’s palace. No torch holders (or torches, for that matter). No doors, stone lips to the entryways, or even decorative paint. Save for smoothing out the floors, the griffins had left the natural rock untouched.
“Where are we going?” I asked Shaw, my voice a whisper in the dim light.
“The Lair of the Elders,” Shaw intoned solemnly, as if that answered everything. “Bide a moment. We draw near.”
The passageway grew lighter. Suddenly, we stepped into a space so wide and bright that it felt as if I’d fallen into it. Blinking, I looked around owlishly, taking in the sights.
The ‘Lair of the Elders’ was something straight out of a barbarian or caveman epic. A vast egg-shaped cavern wrapped around us in smooth flanks of ochre and gray-banded stone. Needle-sharp stalagmites and matching stalactites as long as I was tall and as thick as my legs projected from floor or ceiling in spots, glinting evilly. Irregularly shaped passages or cracks punctuated the walls.
Overhead was the largest opening of all: a wide crack that spanned most of the cavern’s length and illuminated the space below like the Mother of All Skylights. The cavern itself was large enough for several dozen griffins to make themselves comfortable, and about half that many could have spread their wings to take off. That is, save for the grid of heavy chains that hung forty feet above. The chains were suspended from a wicked-looking set of iron spikes that had been hammered into the walls.
The chain links had turned a dark shade of red rust from the salt air. Something about the way the grid hung in spots made me squint harder at it. Nightmare shapes were wrapped or tangled in the iron net, suspended in the shadows, and my brain couldn’t quite register whether I was looking at a grotesque set of sculptures or leather-wrapped mannequins.
My group came to a halt facing the center of the huge room. The two helmet-wearing griffins climbed atop a pair of swirl-patterned boulders and turned to face us. We waited a moment, then new sets of fierce leonine eyes gleamed one-by-one from the dark spaces of the room. Winged feline shapes made their way to a stony perch, staring down in judgement.
Several wore helmets and breastplates, the metal glinting in the dim light. Others were bare, though their fur and feathers were as steely gray as armor plate. The one who clambered to the highest outcrop of rock was the youngest looking, at least at first glance. This particular griffin had a baby-powder white coat with the black rosette markings of a snow leopard.
A series of low caws echoed through the cavern from the assembled griffins. As best I could figure, this meant ‘approach’. Ironwood stepped up to speak.
“Hail to thee, drakes and reeves of the Elder Roost,” he said, his voice ringing in the cavernous space. “We bring the one who is known to all as–”
“Enough!” A high-pitched voice, teetering on the edge of shrillness, cut Shaw’s son off in mid-sentence. “Wouldst thou lecture thy elders, pup? Let Shaw’s rider step forth ‘ere I grow peeved. Let me see her with mine own eyes.”
“As you decree.” Ironwood dipped his head in acquiescence. Looking over his shoulder he made an all-too recognizably human gesture with his lion’s paw to come and join him. “Dayna Chrissie of the Land of the Angels, I bid thee: Come forth and receive the wisdom of High Elder Belladonna of the Reykajar Aerie.”
I swallowed hard and stepped forward. Fitzwilliam’s court could be intimidating, but there was still a human element that I
could easily grasp. Dealing with Xandra and the owls was more difficult, but the problem in that case was mere language and stonewalling. Here, in the Lair of the Elders, there was a barbaric atmosphere to the place, the clink of talon on stone, metal on rock, the feeling that any single member of the Council could have me served up for a light snack.
Take it easy, I told myself firmly. This ‘Belladonna’ won’t be so bad. Remember Thea?
I cast my mind back. When I’d first laid eyes on the Albess of the Owls, she’d looked so stern that I’d envisioned her contemplating how a chunk of my earlobe would taste. Instead, her first few words had put me at ease, revealing her true, warm nature.
Belladonna leapt from the highest outcropping and landed before me with a flutter of her wings. The High Elder had sleek white fur an Angora cat would have envied, dappled with perfectly groomed black spots and rosettes. But her snowy wings sported dozens of feathers that stuck out at odd angles. Her head was fringed with so many out-of-place feathers that she looked less like a proud eagle and more like a bedraggled secretary bird.
Belladonna wore a beaded headdress that had been strapped or braided to her skull, complete with silver circlets that dangled on either side like hoop earrings. One of her piercing black eyes focused unerringly on me. The other wandered off to the side, tracking a reflected spot of light cast by one of the silvery circles. Her beak, tipped with yellow and shading towards bloodshot red up by her eyes, gave a series of spasmodic twitches.
Half of the good feelings I managed to conjure up melted away.
Okay, I thought, backpedaling a little, Maybe she only looks crazy.
“So,” the High Elder hissed. “The speck of corruption in mine eye is revealed at last. Speak of the treachery thou dost plan to befoul our home with, lest I send you to join the ranks of the Skinned Ones!”
Well, that did it.
The remaining ‘good feelings’ I had built up for myself vanished without a trace.
Grand Theft Griffin Page 8
