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 carefully 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 t
here 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 zone is a freak of nature. No matter what she thinks, it might have a traceable cause, and that cause might be one of the mages who escaped the Wars.”
Skan nodded; he was certain that Judeth had already thought of that.
“I’ll go find Drake,” he said. It was going to be a long night, and one he was certain none of them would be able to sleep through. They might as well start getting ready for deployment.
At least that was something useful.
Aging and hedonistic you may be, stupid gryphon, but you’re also effective.
Eight
Amberdrake did not sleep that night. Despite the feeling that he was working at a fever pitch, he got precious little accomplished. Most of what he did was to go over the same scenarios, in his mind, on paper, in fevered conversation with whoever would listen—usually the long-suffering Gesten. But no matter how tired he became, the weariness was never enough to overcome him, not even for a moment.
Insomnia was only one of the physical effects he suffered. He simply could not be still; he would sit or lie down, only to leap to his feet again as another urgent thought struck him. The muscles of his neck and back were so tense that no amount of soaking would relax him—not that he stayed long enough in a hot pool to do any good. He had not eaten since the news. His throat was too tight to swallow, his stomach a tight, cold knot, and as for his nerves—if he’d had a client as wrought up as he was, he would have recommended immediate tranquilization by a Healer. But if he had submitted himself to a Healer, he would be in no condition to accomplish anything thereafter. He could not do that.
Amberdrake recalled Zhaneel’s words of so long ago, as if they were an annoyance.
Who heals the healer?
Skan and Snowstar had not commandeered all of the mages in the city—there was always one whose sole duty was to oversee magical communications. Those communications were between both White Gryphon and the Silvers posted outside the city—in Shalaman’s bodyguard, for instance—and with Sha-laman himself, via his priests. There could be no speaking with Shalaman directly, of course. There was no such thing in Haighlei society as a dirept link to anyone important. The messages would have to go through the priests, who were the only people permitted the use of magic, then to Shalaman’s Chief Priest Leyuet, and only then to Shalaman. Amberdrake tracked down the mage in question and had him send his own personal plea for help to the Haighlei in addition to Skan’s—but after that, he was at loose ends.
There was only so much he could do. He was no mage, he could not possibly help Skan in trying to locate the children. He could pack, and did, for a trek across rough, primitive country, but that did not exactly take much time, even with Gesten coming along behind him and repacking it more efficiently. He certainly couldn’t do anything to help the rescue parties of Silvers that Judeth and Aubri were organizing.
Even if he could have, it might only have made things worse. He suspected that after his threats, overt and covert, Judeth would not appreciate seeing his face just now. Aubri would be more forgiving, but Judeth had lived long under the comfortable delusion that she no longer had to cope with the vagaries of “politics.” As with most true military leaders, she had always hated politics, even while she used political games to further her own causes. She had thought that without a King, a court, or a single titular leader among them, she was at last free to do what she wanted with a policing branch. She tried to keep the Silvers autonomous from the governing branch, and that was largely what she had accomplished.
Now Amberdrake had made it very clear to her that there was no such thing as an environment that was free of politics, that under duress, even friends would muster any and all weapons at their disposal. And she had just learned in the harshest possible way that no one is ever free of the politics and machinations that arise when people live together as a group.
No one likes to have their illusions shattered, least of all someone who holds so few.
Judeth would be very difficult to live with for some time. He only hoped that her good sense would overcome her anger with him, and that she would see and understand his point of view. Hopefully Judeth would see Amberdrake as having used a long-withheld weapon at a strategic time, rather than seeing him as a friend who betrayed an unspoken trust to get what he wanted. If not—he had made an enemy, and there was nothing he could do about that now. Nor, if he’d had the chance to reverse time and go back to that moment of threat, would he have unsaid a single word. He had meant every bit of it, and Judeth had better get used to the idea that people—even the senior kestra’chern—would do anything to protect their children. That was one thing she had never had to deal with as a military commander before, because a military structure allowed replacement or reassignment of possible mutineers. Parental protectiveness was a factor that was going to be increasingly important as the children of the original settlers of White Gryphon entered the Silvers. Perhaps it was for the best that the precedent had been set in this way.
And no matter what happens, knowing myself, I will have simultaneous feelings of justification as a concerned and desperate parent, as well as guilt over not having done better and had more forethought.
So there was nothing more he could do, really, except to wait. Wait for morning, wait for word from Shalaman and from
the mages, wait, wait, wait. . . .
Just as it was when he had served in Urtho’s ranks, waiting was the hardest job he had ever held. He had been in control of at least part of the life of this city for so long that, like Judeth, he had gotten accustomed to being able to fix problems as soon as they arose without anyone offering opposing force. Now, as the number of emergencies died down and new people came into authority, his control was gone. All of his old positions of influence were in the hands of others, and he was back to the old game of waiting.
Finally he returned home, since it was the first place where anyone with news would look for him. As he paced the walkway outside the house, unable to enter the place that now seemed too confining and held far too many memories of his lost daughter, his mind circled endlessly without ever coming up with anything new. Only the circling; anger and fear, fear and anger. Anger at himself, at Judeth, at Blade—it wasn’t productive, but it was inevitable, and anger kept his imagination at bay. It was all too easy to imagine Blade hurt, Blade helpless, Blade menaced by predatory animals or more nebulous enemies.
And once again, he would be one of the last to know what others had long since uncovered. He was only Blade’s father, as he had only been a kestra’chern. Yet hanging about in the hope that someone would take pity on him and tell him something was an exercise in futility. So he alternately paced and sat, staring out into the darkness, listening to the roar of the waves beneath him. In the light falling gently down onto the harbor from the city, the foam on the top of the waves glowed as if it was faintly luminescent. A wooden wind-chime swung in the evening breeze to his right, and a glass one sang softly to his left. How often had he sat here on a summer evening, listening to those chimes?
Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survives. So our lives go.
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