More power to him; he’s never tried using it that way, but that doesn‘t mean
it won’t work. Skan only wished he had a similar ability he could exercise. As it
was, he was mostly a beast of burden, and otherwise not much help. He
couldn’t track, he couldn’t use much magic without depleting himself, and as
for anything else—well, his other talents all involved flying. And he could only
fly for a short time in the mornings.
Regin, the leader in their party, held up a hand, halting them, as he had
done several times already that day. There didn’t seem to be any reason for
this behavior, and Skan was getting tired of it. Why stop and stand in the rain
for no cause? The more ground they covered, the better chance they had of
finding something. He nudged past Filix, and splashed his way up to the
weather-beaten Silver Judeth had placed in charge.
“Regin, just what, exactly, are we waiting for?” he asked, none too politely.
Fortunately, the man ignored the sarcastic tone of his voice, and answered
the question by pointing upward. Skan looked, just in time to see their scout
Bern sliding down the trunk of a tree ahead of them with a speed that made
Skan wince. “Bern’s been looking for breaks in the trees ahead,” Regin said,
as Bern made a hand signal and strode off into the trees. “We figure, if the
basket came down it had to make a hole; that hole’ll still be there. He gets up
into a tall tree and looks for holes all around, especially if he can see they’re
fresh. You might not believe it with all these clouds around, but if there’s a
break in the trees more light gets in, and you can see it from high enough in
the canopy. That’s what we’re waiting on.”
Bern reappeared a moment later, and rejoined the party, shaking his head.
Skan didn’t have to know the Silver’s signals to read that one; no holes. He
and Regin had a quick conference with the navigator, and the scout headed
back off into the forest on a new bearing. The rest of the party followed in
Bern’s wake.
So far, there had been no sign of anything following or watching them,
much less any attacks. Skan was beginning to think that Judeth’s insistence
on assuming there was a hostile entity in here was overreaction on her part.
There hadn’t been any signs that anything lived in here but wild animals;
surely whatever had drained off all the mage-energy here must be a freak
phenomenon. Maybe that was what had caught the two children. . . .
Skan dropped back to his former place beside Amberdrake, but with a
feeling of a little more hope, brought on by the knowledge that at least they
weren’t totally without a guide or a plan.
Drake still seemed sunk into himself, but he revived a bit when Skan
returned and explained what the lead members were up to. “I’ve heard worse
ideas,” he said thoughtfully, wiping strands of sodden hair out of his eyes, and
blinking away the rain. “It’s not a gryphon eye view, but it’s better than
nothing.”
Once again, the leader signaled a stop. Skan peered out and up through
the curtains of rain, but he couldn’t see anything. Wherever the scout was this
time, not even Skan’s excellent eyes could pick him out. “I have no idea how
Bern is managing to climb in this weather, much less how he’s doing it so
quickly.” Skan moved up a few feet and ducked around a tangle of vines, but
the view was no better from the new vantage. “He must be as limber as one of
those little furry climbers that Shalaman keeps at his Palace as pets. For all
we know, this sort of place is where those come from.”
Drake shrugged dismissively, as if the subject held no interest for him. “I—”
“Hoy!”
Skan looked up again, startled, and just caught sight of the tiny figure
above, waving frantically. He seemed to be balanced on a thick tree limb, and
clung to the trunk with only one hand. The other hand waved wildly, and then
pointed.
“Hoy!” the call came again. “Fresh break, that way!”
Fresh break? The same thought occurred to all of them, but the Silvers
were quicker to react than Skan or Drake. They broke into a trot, shoving their
way through the vegetation, leaving the other two to belatedly stumble along
in their wake.
Skan’s heart raced, and not from the exertion. He longed to gallop on
ahead, and probably would have, except that it was all he could do to keep up
with the Silvers. And much to his embarrassment, just as he developed a
sudden stitch in his side, Bern, the scout who had been up in the tree, burst
through the underbrush behind them, overtook them, and plunged on to the
head of the column. Show-off. . . .
Another shout echoed back through the trees, muffled by the falling rain.
The words weren’t distinguishable, but the tone said all Skan needed to know.
There was excitement, but no grief, no shock. They’ve found something.
Something and not someone—or worse, bodies. . . .
From some reserve he didn’t know he had, he dredged up more strength
and speed, and turned his trot into a series of leaps that carried him through
the underbrush until he broke through into the clearing beneath the break in
the trees. He stumbled across the remains of a crude palisade of brush and
onto clear ground.
A camp! That was his first elated thought; if the children had been able to
build a camp, they could not have been too badly hurt. Then he looked at the
kind of camp it was, and felt suddenly faint. This was no orderly camp; this
was something patched together from the remains of wreckage and whatever
could be scavenged. Regin looked up from his examination of the soggy
remains of the basket as Skan halted inside the periphery of the clearing.
“They crashed here, all right.” He pointed upward at the ragged gap in the
canopy. “They’re gone now, but they did hit here, hard enough to smash two
sides of the basket. They both survived it, though I can’t guess how. Maybe
there was enough in the way of branches on the way down to slow their fall.
The medical kit’s gone, there’s signs they both used it.”
They were here. They were hurt. Now they’re gone. But why? “Why aren’t
they still here?” he asked, speaking his bewilderment aloud.
“Now that is a good question.” Regin poked through a confusion of articles
that looked as if they had just been tossed there and left. “Standard advice is
to stay with your wrecked craft if you have an accident. I’d guess they started
to do that, were here for maybe two days, then something made them leave. It
looks to me as if they left in a hurry, and yet I don’t see any signs of a fight.”
“They could have been frightened away,”
Amberdrake ventured. “Or—well, this isn’t a very good camp—”
“It’s a disaster of a camp, that’s what it is,” Regin corrected bluntly. “But if
all I had was wreckage, and I was badly hurt, I probably wouldn’t have been
able to do much better. It’s shelter, though, and that isn’t quite enough. I wish
I knew how much of their supplies got ruined, and how much they took with
them.” He straightened,,
and looked around, frowning. “There’s no sign of a
struggle, but no sign of game around here either. They might have run out of
food, and it would be hard to hunt if they were hurt. There’s no steady water
source—”
Amberdrake coughed politely. “We’re under a steady water-source,” he
pointed out.
Regin just shrugged. “We’re taught not to count on rain. So—no game, no
water, and an indefensible camp. Gryphons eat a lot; if their supplies were all
trashed, they’d be good for about two days before they were garbage, unfit to
eat. After that, they’ve got to find game, for Tadrith alone. My guess is, they
stayed here just long enough to get back some strength, and headed back in
the direction of home. They’re probably putting up signals now.” He grimaced.
“I just hope their trail isn’t too cold to follow—but on the other hand, if they
headed directly west, we should stay pretty much on their trail. That’s where
I’d go, back to the river. It’s a lot easier to fish if you’re hurt than to hunt.”
Skan groaned. “You mean we could have just followed the river and we
probably would have found them?”
Regin grinned sourly. “That’s exactly what I mean. But look on the bright
side; now we know they’re alive and they’re probably all right.”
Skan nodded, as Regin signaled to Bern to start hunting for a trail. But as
Bern searched for signs, Skan couldn’t help noticing a few things.
For one thing, the piles of discarded material had a curiously ordered-
disordered look about them, as if they had been tossed everywhere, then
gathered up and crudely examined, then sorted.
For another, there were no messages, notes, or anything of the sort to give
a direction to any rescuers. Granted, the children might not have known
whether anyone would find the camp, but shouldn’t they have left something?
And last of all, there was no magic, none at all, left in any of the discarded
equipment. So the surmise had been correct, something had drained all of the
magic out of their gear, and from the signs of the crash, it had happened all at
once. And yet none of the search-party gear had been affected—yet.
So what had done this in the first place? What had sorted through the
remains of the camp?
And what had made the children flee into the unknown and trackless forest
without even leaving a sign for searchers to follow?
Was the answer to the third question the same as the answer to the other
two?
Tad entered the cave, sloshing through ankle-deep water at the entrance,
carefully avoiding Blade’s three fishing lines. Blade held up some of her catch,
neatly strung, and he nodded appreciatively.
“Water’s higher,” he told her. “In places it covers the trail here.”
That was to be expected, considering how much is falling out of the sky.
“Well,” Blade said with resignation. “At least we have a steady water supply—
and we don’t have to leave the cave to fish anymore.” It had not stopped
raining for more than a few marks in the middle of the night ever since they
had arrived here. She’d wondered what the rainy season would be like; well,
now she knew. The stream of water running down the middle of the cave had
remained at about the same size, only its pace had quickened. The river had
risen, and now it was perfectly possible for them to throw lines into the river
itself without going past the mouth of the cave, with a reasonable expectation
of catching something.
That was just as well, since they were now under siege, although they still
had not seen their hunters clearly. The flitting shadows espied in the
undergrowth had made it very clear that there was no getting back across the
river without confronting them.
Tad nodded, spreading his good wing to dry it in front of the fire. He had
gone out long enough to drag in every bit of driftwood he could find, and there
was now a sizable store of it in the cave. He’d also hauled in things that would
make a thick, black smoke, and they had a second, extremely nasty fire going
now. It stood just to one side of the stream at the rear of the cave, putting a
heavy smoke up the natural “chimney.” Whether or not there was anyone
likely to see it was a good question; this was not the kind of weather anything
but a desperate or suicidal gryphon would fly in.
On the other hand—how desperate would Skandranon or Tad’s twin be by
now? Desperate enough to try?
Blade both hoped so and hoped that they would have more sense; their
pursuers were getting bolder, and she hadn’t particularly wanted Tad to go out
this afternoon. The stalkers were still nothing more than menacing shadows,
but she had seen them skulking through the underbrush on the other side of
the river even by day, yesterday and this morning.
“I think they might try something tonight,” Tad said, far too casually. “I know
I was being watched all the time, and I just had that feeling, as if there was
something out there that was frustrated and losing patience.”
“I got the same feeling,” Blade confessed. She hadn’t enjoyed taking her
shields down and making a tentative try at assessing what lay beyond the
river, but it had felt necessary. In part, she had been hoping to sense a rescue
party, but the cold and very alien wave of frustrated anger that met her
tentative probe had made her shut herself up behind her shields and sit there
shivering for a moment. “I—tried using that Empathic sense, and I got the
same impression you did. They would like very much to get a chance at us.”
She hoped that Tad wouldn’t make too big a fuss about that confession;
he’d been at her often enough to use everything she had. Now she’d finally
given in to his urgings, she was not in the mood for an “I told you that was a
good idea.” She wasn’t certain that it was a good idea; what if those things out
there had been able to sense her just as she sensed them?
Then again, what would they learn? That she was hurt, and scared spitless
of them? They already knew that.
Fortunately for him, Tad just nodded. “It’s good to know that it’s not just my
own worry talking to me,” he said, and sighed. “Now I don’t feel so badly
about setting all those traps.”
“What—” she began. At that moment, one of her fishing lines went tight,
and she turned her attention to it long enough to haul in her catch. But after
rebaiting the hook and setting the line again, she returned to the subject.
“What other traps do you think would work?” she asked. “On our side of the
river, that is. Where could we set more?”
Thus far, they hadn’t had any luck with deadfalls like the one that had
marked one of the shadows before. It was as if, having seen that particular
sort of trap, the hunters now knew how to avoid it. Large snares hadn’t
worked either, but she hadn’t really expected them to, since there was no way
to conceal them. But perhaps now, with water over the trail, trip-wires could
be hidden under the water.
“I tended to that during my ‘walk’ earlier. There’s only one good place,
/>
really,” he told her. “The river’s gotten so deep and fast that there’s only one
place where I think they might try to cross—that’s downstream, past where we
crossed it when we first got here. I didn’t set a trap right there, though—what I
did was rig something that’s harmless but looks just like the rockfall I rigged
later on.” He gryph-grinned at his own cleverness, and she could hardly blame
him.
“So they’ll see the harmless decoy, and then walk right into the rockfall?”
He nodded, looking very proud of himself. “It’s a good big one, too. If they
actually try coming after us, at least one of them is going to be seriously hurt
or killed, unless they’ve got lightning reflexes and more luck than any one
creature deserves to have.”
“Just as long as you don’t hurt someone coming to rescue us!” she warned.
Yesterday she might have argued with him about the merits of setting
something meant to kill rather than discourage—but that was before she had
opened herself to the creatures across the river. She still might not know what
they looked like, but now she knew what they were. Killers, plainly and simply,
with a kind of cold intelligence about them that made her wish for one good
bow, two good arms, and three dozen arrows. She would debate the merits of
permitting such creatures the free run of their own territory some other time;
and if they gave up and left her alone, she would be perfectly happy to leave
them alone. But if they came after her or Tad, she would strike as efficiently
and with the same deadly force as they would.
There was still the question of whether or not these creatures were the
“hunting pack” of someone or something else; she did not have the ability to
read thoughts, even if these creatures had anything like a thought. But she
hadn’t sensed anything else out there with them; all of the creatures had been
of the same type, with a definite feeling of pack about them.
Which could simply mean that their master was off, lounging about at his
ease somewhere, watching all of this in a scrying-mirror. That would certainly
fit the profile of a sadistic Adept; she couldn’t picture Ma’ar, for instance,
subjecting himself to mud and pouring rain.
If that was so, if there was an Adept behind all this, and she ever got her
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