Fifteen

Peace, at last.

Amberdrake dropped the tent flap behind his last client for the evening; he turned with a whisper of silk to look back into the brightly-lit public chamber, and sighed with relief. Gesten raised his blunt snout from the towel chest, where he had been working, and looked straight at him and then away, as if the hertasi were going to say something, then thought better of it.

Not a comment or a complaint, or he wouldn’t have hesitated, so it must be a request.

“Spit it out, Gesten,” Amberdrake said patiently. “You want something. Whatever it is, you’ve more than earned it a dozen times over. What is it?”

“I’m tired, and I’d like to quit early and get some sleep,” Gesten admitted, “but I don’t want to leave you with all this mess to take care of alone, if you’re tired, too. I thought you felt pretty good until I heard you sigh just now.”

Amberdrake shook his head, and pulled his hair back behind his neck. “That sigh was because it is damned nice to be doing the job I’m trained for, and not playing second-rate Healer,” he told the hertasi. “It was a sigh of contentment.”

Amberdrake turned aside and went over to the portable folding table beside the couch, a table that currently held a selection of lotions and unguents, scented and not. He picked up the first, a half-empty bottle of camil-lotion, and put them in their proper order. He made very sure that the lid of each was properly tightened down before he put it away. Right now, there was no way of telling when he’d ever find replacements, and each drop was too precious to waste in evaporation or spillage. Cosmetics and lotions no longer appeared on the list of any herbalist’s priorities. He knew how to make his own, of course, but when would he ever have the time or the materials?

Of course he might not ever need to find replacements. Ma’ar might very well make the question of where or how he would find them moot at any point.

Better not to think of that. Better just to enjoy the respite and try not to think of how brief it might be.

“No, Gesten, I’m not tired. Oddly enough, I think that exhausting myself on a regular basis up on the Hill only made me learn how to make better use of my resources,” he continued. “Either that, or I’m fitter now than I was before. It’s just such a pleasure to get back to being nothing more than a simple kestra’chern. . . .” A pregnant silence alerted him, and he turned to see that Gesten was grinning a toothy hertasi grin. He made a face. “And you can wipe that smug smile off your snout, my little friend. No puns, and no clever sallies. Just go get some rest. I had to clean up after myself long before you came along, and I think I can remember how.”

If anything, Gesten’s smile widened a bit more, but there was no doubt that the hertasi was as tired as he claimed. Probably more so; the past few days had not been easy ones for him, either. If anything, he had gotten less rest than Amberdrake. His scales had dulled, and he carried his tail as if the weight of it was a burden to him. That didn’t stop him from exercising his tongue, however.

He bowed, spreading his foreclaws wide. “Yes, O greatest of the kestra’chern, O master of massage, O summit of the sensuous, O acme of the erogenous, O prelate of-“

“That’ll do,” Amberdrake interrupted. “One of these days, Gesten, you’re going to get me annoyed.”

“And when that happens, the moon will turn purple and there’ll be fish flying and birds under the sea,” Gesten jeered. “You almost never get angry, Drake, not even with people who deserve it. Demonsblood! The last time I saw you get angry was with that uppity Healer, the one that came all the way down from the Hill to tell you off, and then you cooled off by the time you got back to the tent! You ought to get angry a lot more often; you’re too polite. You’ve got too much control for your own good. Dams break, you know.”

But Amberdrake shook his head, and continued to put the jars and bottles back into their special places, each one in order. The sendel-wood lined case had cushioned slots for each, so that no matter how roughly the case was handled, the contents would never break or spill. And, after all the times of trouble in the recent past, doing a simple task was relaxing. So was simply talking to his dear hertasi rather than trading snap opinions of how to deflect this emergency or that crisis. “It’s not that I’m polite, it’s that I know too much about human nature-and I know how it can be twisted and deformed until people turn into monsters. That makes it difficult to stay angry with anyone for very long, since I generally know what their feelings and motivations are. Now that I’ve talked with Urtho about our enemy, I even know why Ma’ar is the way he is. I can manage to stay angry with Ma’ar; I just wish that knowing the reasons for his behavior would make some difference in stopping him.”

“But you never stay angry with anyone else,” Gesten argued. “And people think you’re weak because of that. They think that they can walk all over you. And they think that because you don’t fight back, you must really think that they are in the right.”

He had to raise a surprised eyebrow at that. “Do they really?” he replied. “Interesting. Well, Gesten, that’s all to the good, don’t you think? If they believe that I’m a weakling, they’ll underestimate me. If they think I’m harboring some kind of secret guilt or shame, they’ll believe that I’m handicapped in dealing with them. I’ll be able to defeat their purposes or get around them with a minimum of effort, and they’ll have spent their strategy-time gloating that they’ve already won.”

Gesten snorted scornfully. “Maybe you think so-but what about all the folk like that damned Healer? The ones who look down their noses at you, think they’re better’n you, and say rotten things behind your back? How’re you going to stop a whispering campaign against you? How’re you going to deal with people who slander you?”

Amberdrake shrugged. “I’ll do what I always do. Find out who they are and what they’re saying. Once I know who the dagger is likely to come from, I have options. I can duck, I can find something to use as a shield, or I can tell the right people to deal with my detractors from a position of authority without my getting personally involved.”

Gesten growled, and it was clear that he was annoyed at Amberdrake’s calm reasoning. “Mostly, you duck. And they go on thinking you’re weak. Worse, they figure you’ve just proved that they’re right, because you won’t come after them!”

He thought about that carefully for a moment, then lifted the now-filled chest and returned it to its proper place against the tent wall. “That’s true,” he said at last. “But as long as what they say and do does me no real harm, why should I care? As long as I know who they are, so that I can guard against real harm in the future, there’s no point in dealing with them on any level. And it makes them happy.”

Gesten’s mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. “I don’t believe I just heard that,” he said, aghast. “That poison they spread-it’s like stinky, sticky mud, it sticks to everything it touches and makes it filthy, contaminates everyone who hears it! Worse, it makes other people want to spread the same poison! Why would you want to make them happy?”

Amberdrake turned back to his little friend, and sat with a sad smile on his face. “Because they are bitter, unhappy people, and very little else makes them happy. They say what they do out of envy, for any number of reasons. It may be because I lead a more luxurious life than they, or at least they believe I do. It may be because there are many people who do call me friend, and those are all folk of great personal worth; a few of them are people that occupy high position and deservedly so. Perhaps it is because they cannot do what I can, and for some reason, this galls them. But they have so little else that gives them pleasure, I see no reason to deprive them of the few drops of enjoyment they can extract from heaping scorn and derision on me.”

Gesten shook his head. “Drake, you’re crazy. But I already knew that. I’m getting some sleep; this is all too much for me. Good night.”

“Good night, Gesten,” Amberdrake said softly, rising again and beginning to pick up scattered pieces of clothing.

I wonder if I should have told him the whole truth? he thought, as he stacked pillows neatly in the corner. Maybe he was right, maybe I should get angry, but I don’t have the energy to waste on anger anymore. There are more important things to use that energy for than to squander it on petty fools.

If there hadn’t been a war, would he still feel the same way? No way of knowing. Maybe. He thought for a moment about the “enemies” he had among Urtho’s ranks-most of them on the Hill, Healers who felt that he was debasing their noble calling; some few among the officers, people he had refused to “serve” for any amount of money.

The motives of the latter were easy to guess; those that Amberdrake sent away were not likely to advertise the fact, but the rejection infuriated them. For most of them, it was one of the few times anyone had ever dared to tell them “no.” But the motives of the Healers were nearly as transparent. The fact that he used much the same training and identical Gifts to bring something as trivial as “mere” pleasure to others sent them into a rage. The fact that he was well paid for doing so made them even angrier.

He could see their point; they had spent many years honing their craft, and they felt that it should never be used for trivial purposes. But how was giving pleasure trivial? Why must everything in life be deadly and deathly serious? Yes, they were in the middle of a war camp, but he had discovered this gave most folk an even greater need for a moment of pleasure, a moment of forgetfulness. Look at Skan; even in the midst of war and death, he found reasons for laughter and love.

Maybe that was why those enemies often included the Black Gryphon on the list of those to be scorned.

Oh, these are people who would never coat a bitter pill, for fear that the patient would not know that it was good for him. Never mind that honey-coating something makes it easier-and more likely-to be swallowed. And if this had been a time of peace, they would probably be agitating at Urtho’s gates to have Amberdrake thrown out of the city without a rag to his name.

And they would be angry and unhappy because if this were a time of peace-I would be a very rich kestra’chern. That is not boasting, I do not think.

And in that time of peace, Urtho would listen to their poison, and nod, and send for Amberdrake. And Amberdrake would come, and the two would have a pleasant meal, and all would remain precisely as it had been before-except that Amberdrake would then know exactly who was saying what.

Which is exactly what happens now. Except that it’s Tamsin and Skan, Gesten and Cinnabar, who tell me these things rather than Urtho. We kestra’chern are officially serving, even as they, and it is obvious that we have a place here as far as Urtho is concerned. Besides, if they tried to rid the camp of us and of the perchi, there would be a riot among the line fighters.

But would he hate his enemies, if he had the time and the energy to do so?

I don’t think so, he decided. But I would be very hurt by what they said. I am now, though I try not to dwell on it. I may not hate people, but I do hate the things that they do. Whispering campaigns, hiding behind anonymity-those I hate. As Gesten said, they are poison, a poison that works by touch. It makes everyone it touches sick, and it takes effort and energy to become well again.

For all of his brave words to Gesten, he felt that way now, hurt and unhappy, and it took effort to shrug off the feelings.

He immersed himself in the simpler tasks of his work, things he had not done since Gesten had come to serve him, to help push the hurt into the background. Putting towels away, draining and emptying the steam-cabinet, rearranging the furniture . . . these things all became a meditative exercise, expending the energy of anger and hurt into something useful. As he brought order into his tent, he could bring order into his mind.

Although Skan claims that a neat and orderly living space is the sign of a dangerously sick mind, he thought with amusement, as he folded coverings and stacked them on one end of the couch. It’s a good thing that gryphons don’t have much in the way of personal possessions, because I’ve seen his lair.

“Amberdrake?” It was a thin whisper behind him, female, and it was followed by what sounded like a strangled sob.

He dropped the last blanket and turned quickly, wondering if his mind was playing tricks on him. But-no, he had not imagined it; Winterhart stood in the doorway, tent flap drawn aside in one hand, clearly in tears.

He quickly reached out, grasped her hand in both of his, and drew her inside. The tent flap fell from her nerveless fingers and he took a moment to tie it shut, ensuring their privacy. “What happened?” he asked, as she took a few stumbling steps, then crumpled onto the couch, clutching a pillow to her chest with fresh tears pouring down her face. “What’s the matter? Don’t worry about being interrupted, my last client just left, and I have all night for you if you need it.”

“I may,” she said, rubbing the back of her hand fiercely across her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall apart on you like this-it’s just-I saw you standing there and you looked so confident, so strong-and I feel so-so-horrible.”

He sat down beside her, and took her into his arms, handing her a clean towel to dry her tears and blow her nose with. It might not be a handkerchief, but it was at hand.

“Tell me from the beginning,” he said, as she took several deep breaths, each of which ended in a strangled sob. “What happened?”

“It-it’s Conn,” she said, muffled in the towel. “You knew we haven’t been-for a couple of weeks now. Mostly it was because I was exhausted, but sometimes-Amberdrake, I just didn’t want to. There’s nothing there for him anymore, even if there ever was. I just wished he’d go away. So tonight, when his group came back in and he started on me-well, that’s when I told him that I wanted him to leave-and not just for right then, but permanently.”

“And?” Amberdrake prompted gently.

“He said-“ she burst into tears again. “He started yelling at me, telling me how worthless I am. He said I was a cold, heartless bitch, that I didn’t have the capacity to love anyone but myself. He said I was selfish and spoiled, and all I cared about was myself. He said I was the worst lover he’d ever had, that it was like making love to a board, and that I’d never find another man as tolerant as he was. He said I was probably a Trondi’irn because no human would have me as a Healer, and if it weren’t for the fact that there’s no one checking on the Trondi’irn’s competence, I wouldn’t even have that job. He said I was clumsy, incompetent, and if there weren’t a war on, I’d be a total failure-“ She was weeping uncontrollably now, and if Amberdrake hadn’t been listening carefully, he wouldn’t have been able to understand more than half of what she said.

“And you’re afraid that it’s all true, right?” he said gently, as soon as she gave him the chance.

She nodded, quite unable to speak, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, her nose a brilliant pink. She looked horrible. He wanted to hold her in his arms and protect her from the rest of the world.

And then he wanted to take the nearest crossbow and go hunting for Conn Levas.

And I told Gesten I couldn’t be angry with anyone anymore. . . .

But none of that would solve anything. She did not need to be coddled or protected; she needed to regain confidence in herself, so that she could stand on her own feet without having to hide behind anyone else.

“You think that what he said is true, only because you are very self-critical, and there is just enough truth in what he said to make you believe all of it,” he said firmly. “We both know what kind of a manipulator he is. He plays people the way a musician plays his instruments-and he can do that because he simply doesn’t care what happens to them so long as he gets the tune he wants.” He pulled away a little, and looked her straight in the eyes. “Think about him for a moment. Right now, the one thing he is afraid of is that someone will think you left him because he isn’t ‘man enough to keep you.’ He said what he did to make you feel too afraid to leave him. Let’s take the things he said one at a time. What is the first thing that you can think of?”

“Th-that I’m a c-cold bitch?” she said, in a small voice.

“By which he means that you are both uncaring and an unsatisfactory lover?” he replied. “Well, so far as he is concerned, that’s correct. You told me yourself that you didn’t care in the least for him, emotionally, when you made your arrangement with him. You used him to protect your real identity. Reanna would never have had anything to do with someone like him, which made him perfect as part of your disguise. Right?”

“Reanna would never have taken any lover, much less a lowborn one,” she replied, her cheeks flaming. “I-I-“

He shook his head gently. “You made an unemotional bargain, and you expected it to remain that way. It didn’t. In part, because he was good enough at winkling, out your real feelings and using them against you. Which by definition means that you are not without emotion. Yes?”

She nodded, still blushing, her eyes averted.

“He also claimed that you are incompetent and clumsy, and you are professional enough to fear that he is correct in that assessment as well.” He thought for a moment. “The worst that I ever heard about you-and trust me, kechara, a kestra’chern hears a great deal-was that you parroted rotten orders without questioning them, and treated your charges as if they were so many animals. No one ever questioned your competence, only your-ah-manner. And now that you treat your gryphons as the people they are, you have the highest marks from everyone. Cinnabar included.”

“I do?” She looked at him again, shocked.

“I don’t know Conn Levas very well on a personal level, nor do I wish to,” Amberdrake continued. “I had him as a client once, and I managed to avoid a second session; I have seen far too many people with his attitudes, and I don’t feel I need to see any more. Furthermore, every other kestra’chern that he has gone to feels the same about him as I do. The center of Conn’s world is Conn; he is interested only in someone else insofar as they can do something for him. In his world, there are users and the used; once you took yourself out of the ranks of the latter, you must have become one of the former, and thus, you went from being his possession to his rival. So that is why he flung the other insults at you, about being selfish and spoiled. To his eyes, the universe is a mirror-he sees himself reflected everywhere, both his good and bad traits. People who are good to him must be like him-and people who are bad to him must also be like him.” She nodded, and rubbed her eyes with the corner of the towel.

“As for the rest of his accusations . . .” he paused a moment, and assessed his own feelings. Should I? What happens if I do? And what would happen if I don’t? “. . . would you care to have a professional assessment?”

She pulled away, eyes wide with surprise. But not with fear or revulsion, the two things he had been worried that he would see in her expression.

“You can’t-I mean, do you mean-“ she stammered.

He smiled, and nodded. “The assessment would be professional,” he told her, very quietly. “But the motives are purely selfish. I find you exceedingly attractive, Winterhart. I do not want to complicate our friendship, nor do I want to jeopardize it, but I wish that we were more than just friends.”

She blinked for several moments, as her cheeks flushed and paled and flushed again. For a moment, he thought that she was going to refuse, and he wished that he had never said a word. Then, to his own delight and surprise, she suddenly flung herself at him. But not like a drowning woman grasping after safety, but like an eagle coming home to her aerie after a long and weary flight, and there was no doubt left at all, of her feelings-or of his.

The afternoon respite was rare enough for Skan-and that Amberdrake had time to spare was a gift from the hand of the gods. Time for the two of them to sit in the warm sun together-and as an excuse to keep others away, Amberdrake tasked himself with repairing feathers Skan had broken in the last engagement with the enemy.

“The word on the lines is-stalemate,” said Skan, as Amberdrake imped in one of his old feathers on the shaft of a broken primary. “Again. Not a quiet stalemate though, at least not for us.”

The warm sun felt so good on his back and neck . . . he stretched his head out and half-closed his eyes, flattening his ear-tufts and crest-feathers with pleasure.

“That seems to be the case up and down the lines,” Amberdrake replied, his brows furrowed with concentration, as he carefully inserted the pin that would hold the new shaft to the old.

Skan turned his head a little, and watched him with interest, and not a little envy. He would have loved to have the hands to do things like this for himself. Even Zhaneel couldn’t imp in her own feathers, for all that she had those wonderful, clever “hands.” She could do plenty of other things he relied on a human for, though.

She no longer had the disadvantage of shortened foreclaws that had handicapped her in aerial combat. A human in the Sixth who had once been a trainer of fighting cocks had made her a set of removable, razor-sharp fighting “claws,” that fit over the backs of her hands. She could still manipulate objects while wearing them, for they worked best when she held her own foreclaws fisted. Now she was as formidable as the strongest of the broad-wings and wouldn’t need to rely on her shears to take down makaar! These new claws were made of steel, sharp as file and stone could make them, and much longer than natural claws.

She had been so effective in claw-to-claw combat with the makaar while wearing these contraptions that the man had been pulled out of the ranks and set to making modified “claws” and “spurs” that other gryphons could wear. The makaar dropped with gratifying frequency, and gryphons wearing the new contraptions found themselves able to take out two and even three makaar more per sortie.

The trouble was, of course, that as soon as someone in the enemy ranks figured out what the gryphons’ new advantage was, it would be copied for the makaar. It was only a matter of time.

As long as every makaar that gets close enough to see the new claws winds up dead, we can keep our secret weapon secret a little longer, Skan told himself. And every makaar dead is one more that won’t rise to fight us and will have to be replaced.

“I understand that the word in the camp is much more interesting than that,” Skan continued casually, looking back at his friend through slitted eyes.

Amberdrake fitted the trimmed feather onto the spike of the pin, and slowly eased it into place. Skan had expected him to hem and haw, but the kestra’chern surprised him by glancing up and smiling. “If you mean what’s going on between Winterhart and me, you’re right,” he said, with a nod. “The situation between us is not a stalemate anymore.” He looked back down and finished the work of gluing the feather to the steel pin and the place where both shafts met. “Hold still. Don’t move. If you can sit there patiently until this sets, it’s going to be perfect.”

“Not a stalemate?” Skan asked, suppressing the urge to flip his wings, which would ruin Amberdrake’s careful work. “Is that all you can say?”

Amberdrake peeled the last of the glue from his fingers, and tossed aside the rag he had used to clean up before he answered. “What else do you want me to say?” he asked. “She’s the Sixth Wing East Trondi’irn, I’m theoretically the chief kestra’chern. She can’t and won’t abandon her duties, and neither will I. Mine take up a great deal of the evening and night, and hers take up a great deal of the daytime. Aside from that-we are managing. Conn Levas is back out in the field. He has made no moves to cause her trouble other than gossip and backbiting which we can both ignore. He chooses to believe that she is proving what a fool she truly is by taking up with a manipulating kestra’chern, and if that makes him happy and causes him to leave her alone, then he can spread all the gossip he wants so far as we are concerned. We have an ear among the mages in the person of Vikteren, so we know everything he says.”

“Huh.” Skan cast Amberdrake a look of dissatisfaction, but the kestra’chern ignored it. “Tamsin and Cinnabar had a lot more to say about it than that.”

“Tamsin is a romantic, and Cinnabar was raised on ballads,” Amberdrake retorted, his neck and ears flushing a little. “Winterhart and I are satisfied with the arrangement we have. We are fulfilling our duties exactly as we did before. That is all anyone needs to know.”

Skan raised his head carefully and flattened his ear-tufts. “Heyla, excuse me!” he said in surprise at Amberdrake’s controlled vehemence. “Didn’t mean to pry. When you’re in love, you know, you like to hear that the whole world’s in love, too!”

Amberdrake finally looked into his eyes, and patted his shoulder. “Sorry, old bird,” he said apologetically. “There’ve been too many people who want to make up some kind of romantic nonsense about the two of us being lifebonded, and just as many who want to turn me into the evil perchi who seduced the virtuous Winterhart away from the equally virtuous Conn Levas. I’m a little tired of both stories.”

Skan nodded, but for all of Amberdrake’s denials, there was very little doubt in his mind that Amberdrake and Winterhart were a lifebonded pair. Tamsin and Cinnabar said so, and they also said that those who were lifebonded tended to be able to recognize the state in others.

“It won’t be easy for either of them,” Tamsin had added pensively. “Lifebonding is hardly as romantic as the ballads make it out to be. Both of you have got to be strong in order to keep one from devouring the other alive. And you’d better hope that both of you are ready for the kind of closeness that lifebonding brings, especially between two people who are Empaths. You can’t fight or argue-you feel your partner’s pain as much as your own. You become, not two people precisely, but a kind of two-headed, two-personalitied entity, Tamsin-and-Cinnabar, and you’d better hope that one of you doesn’t suddenly come to like something that the other detests because you wind up sharing just about everything!”

“But when it finally works,” Cinnabar had added, with an affectionate caress for Tamsin, “it is a good thing, a partnership where strengths are shared and weaknesses minimized. I think that the good points all outweigh the bad, but I have reason to.”

Neither of them had bothered to point out the obvious-that Tamsin was as low-born as Cinnabar was high, and if there had not been a war on, there would have been considerable opposition to their pairing even from Cinnabar’s conspicuously liberal and broad-minded family. In fact, there had been terrible tragedies over such pairings in the past, which was why there were as many tragic ballads about lifebondings as there were romantic ones. Even Skan knew that much.

Well, if Amberdrake chose not to admit to such a tie with Winterhart, that was his business and not Skan’s. And if he preferred to make the relationship seem as casual as possible, well, that was only good sense.

“Can’t help what people say, and you know that Conn is the origin of most of the spiteful talk,” Skan observed. “And as for the people who are spreading it, well, you know who they are, too. If it wasn’t Winterhart, they’d make something up about you, and that’s a fact. I just want to know one thing. Are you happy! Both of you?”

Amberdrake nodded, soberly. “I think that we are as happy as any two people can be, in this whole situation. We aren’t unhappy, if that makes any difference.” He sighed and smoothed down the vanes of the feather, blending the old one into the new. “This is a war; she deals with the physical hurts, I try to deal with the emotional ones. Every day brings more grief; I help her through hers, and she helps me through mine. Maybe-“

He didn’t finish the sentence, but Skan knew the rest of it. It was the litany of everyone in Urtho’s forces, from the lowest to the highest. “Maybe someday, when the war is over-“

The war had gone on so long that there was an entire generation of gryphons now fighting who had never known anything but the war. That probably went for humans, too. The war had turned the society that older folks sometimes talked about completely upside down, and even Skan could not remember most of what his elders talked about with such longing. The repercussions of that were still going on.

“Is it set?” Skan asked finally, when the silence between them had lingered for some time. Amberdrake seemed to jar himself awake from some pensive dream, and checked the joint with a careful finger.

“I think so,” he replied. “Give yourself a good shake. If it holds through that, it’s set.”

Skan did so, gratefully. There was nothing like being told to hold still that made a gryphon wild for a good shake! Amberdrake laughed and backed out of the way as the gryphon roused all of his feathers and then shook himself so vigorously that bits of down and dust went everywhere.

The newly-imped feather held, feeling and acting entirely as strong as any of the undamaged ones. He grinned in satisfaction and saluted Amberdrake with a jaunty wave.

“Excellent as always, my friend,” he said cheerfully. “You should give up your wicked ways and become a full-time feather-artist.”

“Very few gryphons are as enthusiastic in the performance of their duties as you are,” Amber-drake countered. “I don’t think I’ve had to imp in more than a dozen feathers in the last two years, and most of those were yours. I’d starve for lack of work.”

“You could always tend hawks as well as gryphons,” Skan suggested.

“You could always pull a travel-wagon,” Amber-drake replied. “Thank you, no. I enjoy my duties. I would not enjoy tending psychotic goshawks, neurotic peregrines, murderous hawkeagles, and demented gyrfalcons. Have you ever heard the story about how you tell what a falconer flies?”

“No,” Skan replied, with ear-tufts up. Hawks and falcons fascinated him, because they were so outwardly like and inwardly unlike a gryphon. “How do you?”

“The man who flies a falcon has puncture wounds all over his fist from nervous talons. The man who flies a goshawk has an arm that is white to the elbow, because he never dares go without his gauntlet. And the man who flies a hawkeagle is the one with the eye patch.” Amberdrake’s mouth quirked slightly, and Skan chuckled.

“I presume that must be a very old Kaled’a’in proverb,” Skan told him, with the sigh that was supposed to tell Amberdrake he had quoted far too many Kaled’a’in proverbs. “But-nervous talons? What does that mean?”

“Tense birds have tense toes, and peregrines are notoriously nervous,” Amberdrake said, his mouth quirking a little more, this time with a distinctly wicked glint in his eye. “Remember that the next time your little gryfalcon is startled when she’s got some portion of you in her ‘hands.’ “

Skan laid her ear-tufts back with dismay. “You aren’t serious, surely.”

Amberdrake laughed and slapped the gryphon’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t do anything to make Zhaneel nervous, would you?”

“Of course not,” he said firmly and wondered in the next moment if there was any chance. . . .

Amberdrake only chuckled. “I’ve spent enough time with you, featherhead. There are some things I need to take care of, and I’m certain that you have plenty to do yourself. So if you don’t mind, I’ll get on with my cleaning, and you get back to your mate.”

Skan’s crest rose with pleasure at that last word. Mate. He had a mate. And that mate was Zhaneel; swift, strong, and altogether lovely. . . .

He tugged affectionately on a mouthful of Amberdrake’s hair, and then shoved the kestra’chern back in the direction of his own tent. “Back to your housekeeping, then. If you prefer it to my company. You really ought to know that a clean and neat dwelling place-“

“-is the sign of a disturbed mind, yes, I know.” Amberdrake combed the hair Skan had mouthed back with his ringers, grinned, and took himself back into his tent before Skan could retort with anything else.

Such respites were doomed to be short in wartime.

The flight back to the gryphons’ lairs was a short one, and normally completely uneventful. But as Skan took to the air and got above the tops of the tents, he saw evidence of a great deal of disturbance in that direction. Gryphons flew in to the lairs from all over the camp, their irregular wing-beats betraying agitation. Even at a distance he saw ruffled feathers and flattened ear-tufts, crests raised in alarm and clenched foreclaws. Yet there was no other sign of agitation in the camp, so either the gryphons were privy to something the rest of Urtho’s forces hadn’t found out yet or the information was pertinent only to gryphons.

It wouldn’t be the first time we found out about something no one else knew, he thought with a sinking heart.

Immediately, he lengthened and strengthened his wingstrokes, to gain more speed. Whatever had occurred, it was imperative that he learn what was going on!

The lairs had been built into an artificial hill, terraced in three rings, so that each lair had clear space in front of it. There was a small field full of sunning rocks between the lairs and the rest of the camp. That was where everyone had gathered. He landed next to a cluster of half a dozen gryphons from the Sixth that included Aubri. All of them listened intently to what the broadwing had to say, necks stretched out, and heads cocked a little to one side. Their sides heaved as they panted heavily, one of them hissed to himself; their neck-feathers stood straight out from their necks like a fighting-cock’s ruff, and two of them rocked back and forth as their feet flexed. All of this was quite unconscious, and a sign of great agitation.

Aubri stopped in mid-sentence as Skan back-winged down on the top of a rock beside them, and waved Skan over with an outstretched fore-claw. “I’ve got bad news, Skan,” he called out, as Skan leapt down off the rock and hurried over to join the group. “It’s not all over camp yet, but it will be soon. General Farle’s dead.”

“What?” Skan could not have been more surprised if Aubri had told him that the Tower had just burned down. Farle? Dead? How did you kill a General without wiping out the entire Command? Chief officers were never anywhere near the front lines!

Granted, Farle had a reputation for wanting to be near the action, but the General wasn’t stupid, and he was certainly the best-protected man in the Sixth! How had anyone gotten to him? Was it accident? Could it have been treachery?

“I was telling the others-we think that some kind of suicide group got through and took him out, him and most of the other chief officers of the Sixth,” Aubri said. “We don’t even know how or who did it. There was just an explosion in the command tent, and when the smoke and dust cleared, there wasn’t much there but a smoking hole. The mages are trying to figure out just what happened, but the main thing for us is that we’ve lost him.”

Skan swore. There was only one man of Farle’s rank that was not already in a command position: Shaiknam, the General that Farle had replaced. The official story was that Shaiknam was on leave while Farle got more command experience, although the real reason Shaiknam had been taken out of the post was his incompetence.

But Urtho could not help being his optimistic self, nor could he stop giving unworthy people so many second chances that they might as well not even have gotten reprimanded. Urtho would remember all the great things that Shaiknam’s father had done, probably assume that Shaiknam had learned his lesson and would give him back the command he had taken away, rather than promoting someone else.

After all, it would look very bad for General Shaiknam if Urtho did promote someone of a lower rank to command the Sixth, when Shaiknam was sitting there on his thumbs, doing nothing. Until now, Urtho had been able to maintain that polite fiction that he was “seasoning” Farle, and that General Shaiknam was taking a well-earned leave of absence to rest.

He would not be able to maintain it for more than a moment after the rest of the forces learned of Farle’s death. It was either shame Shaiknam, with all the attendant problems that would cause, or give the Sixth back to the man who’d never completed a task in his life.

There was no doubt in Skan’s mind which it would be. Shaiknam was too well-born, too well-connected. The Sixth would go back to him.

That seemed to be the conclusion everyone else had come to as well. With Shaiknam in charge, the gryphons of the Sixth just became deployable decoys again. Right now, the big question seemed to be what, if anything, they could do about it.

Skan moved from group to group, just listening, saying nothing. He heard much the same from each group; this is dreadful, and we’re all going to get killed by this madman, but we can’t do anything about it. There was a great deal of anxiety-panic, in fact-but no one was emerging with any ideas, or even as a leader willing and able to represent them all.

Which leaves-me. Well, this was the moment, if ever, to act on the theories of leadership he had been researching all this time. Can you be a leader, featherhead? He looked around once more at the gathering of his kind; gryphons had started to pick at their feathers like hysterical messenger-birds, they were so upset.

I guess there isn’t a choice. It’s me, or no one.

He jumped up onto the highest sunbathing rock, and let loose with a battle-screech that stunned everyone else to silence.

“Excuse me,” he said into the quiet, as startled eyes met his, and upturned beaks gaped at him. “But this seems to be a problem that we already have the solution to. Urtho doesn’t control us anymore, remember? We are just as autonomous as the mages, if we want to be. We can all fly off into the wilderness and leave the whole war behind any time we want.”

A moment more of silence, and then the assembled gryphons met his words with a roar of objections. He nodded and listened without trying to stem the noise or counter their initial words; most of the objections boiled down to the simple fact of the gryphons’ loyalty to their creator. No one wanted to abandon Urtho or his cause. They just wanted to be rid of Shaiknam.

When the last objection had been cried out onto the air, and the assemblage quieted down again, he spoke.

“I agree with you,” he said, marveling that not a single gryphon in the lot had made any objection to his assumption of leadership. “We owe loyalty-everything-to Urtho. We shouldn’t even consider abandoning him. But we do not have to tell him that. The mages all felt exactly the same way, but they were perfectly willing to use the fact that they could all pack up and leave as a bargaining-chit. We should do the same thing. If the situation was less dangerous for us than it is, I would never suggest this course of action, but I think we all know what life for the Sixth was like under Shaiknam, and we can’t allow a fool to throw our lives away.”

Heads nodded vigorously all around him as crest-feathers slowly smoothed down, ear-tufts rising with interest. “You’ve got to be the one, Black Boy,” Aubri called out from somewhere in the rear. “You’ve got to be the one to speak for us. You’re the best choice for the job.”

Another chorus, this time of assent, greeted Aubri’s statement. Skan’s nares flushed with mingled embarrassment and pride.

“I’ll tell you what, then,” he told them all, wondering if what he was doing was suicidally stupid, or would be their salvation. “I was trying to come up with a plan to get the confrontation over with quickly, before Shaiknam has a chance to entrench himself. Now, we all know that where Shaiknam goes, Garber follows, and I’m pretty certain he is going to be the one to try to bring us to heel initially. This is the tactic that just might work best. . . .”

Two messages came by bird from Garber, both of which he ignored. One of the gryphons who had a particularly good relationship with the birds smugly took the second one off for a moment when it arrived. When the gryphon was finished, the bird flew off. Shortly thereafter, messenger-birds rose in a cloud from the area around Shaiknam’s tent, and scattered to the far corners of the camp.

That left Shaiknam and Garber with no choice but to use a human messenger. The gryphons of the Sixth took to their lairs to hide while the rest made themselves scarce, and Skan was the only gryphon in sight. He reclined at his ease up on the sunbathing rock, as an aide-de-camp in the colors of the Sixth came trudging up the path to the lairs, looking for the gryphons Garber had summoned so imperiously.

The gryphons in question hid in the shadows just out of sight, although they had a clear view of Skan and the aide. They were not going to show so much as a feather until Skan gave them the word.

The young man glanced curiously around the area-which looked, for all intents and purposes, to be completely deserted. Skan wondered what was going on in his mind. The gryphons were not with their Trondi’irn, who obviously had not been told of this impromptu conspiracy. They were not on the practice grounds, nor on Zhaneel’s now-sanctioned obstacle course. They were not with the Command. They could only be at their lairs, unless they had all taken leave out of the area, and leave had not been approved.

Yet the lawn in front of the lairs was completely deserted. No sign of gryphons, nor where they had gone to. There was no one in the dustbathing pits, nor at the water-baths. No one lounged in the shady “porch” of his or her lair. No one reclined on a sunbathing rock.

Except Skan.

The Black Gryphon watched the man’s expression as he tried to reconcile his orders with what he’d found. Skan was not precisely assigned to the Sixth, but he had been flying cover for Zhaneel. Skan would have to do.

The aide-de-camp took another look around, then squared his shoulder, and marched straight up to the Black Gryphon. Skan raised his head to watch him approach, but said and did nothing else.

“General Shaiknam has sent two messenger-birds here to rally the gryphons of the Sixth,” the young man said crisply. “Why was there no answer?”

Skan simply looked at him-exactly the same way that he would have regarded a nice plump deer.

But the youngster was made of sterner stuff than most, and obviously was not going to be rattled simply by the stare of an unfriendly carnivore with a beak large and sharp enough to make short work of his torso. He continued bravely. “General Shaiknam orders that the gryphons of the Sixth report immediately to the landing field for deployment.”

“Why?” Skan rumbled.

The young man blinked, as if he had not expected Skan to say anything, much less demand information. He was so startled that he actually gave it.

“You’ll be making runs against the troops below Panjir,” he said. “Flying in at treetop level. Dropping rocks and-“

“And making ourselves targets for the seven batteries of ballistas and other sky-pointing missile-throwers,” Skan replied caustically. “Scarcely-moving targets, at that. There isn’t room between those cliff-walls for more than one gryphon to fly at a time, much less a decent formation. We’ll look like beads on a string. If the missiles don’t get us, the makaar will, coming down on us from the heights. You can tell the General that we’ll be declining his little invitation. Tell him the message is from the Black Gryphon.”

And with that, Skan put his head back down on his foreclaws, closed his eyes to mere slits, and pretended to go to sleep.

The aide’s mouth dropped completely open for a moment, then closed quickly. But to his credit, he did not try to bluster or argue; he simply turned on his heel and left, trudging back down the hill, leaving behind a trail of little puffs of dust. Skan watched him until he was well out of sight, then jumped to his feet.

“Now what?” one of the others called from the shelter of his lair.

“Now I go to Urtho before Shaiknam does,” Skan replied, and leapt skyward, wings laboring to gain altitude, heading straight for the Tower.

Where would Urtho be at this hour? Probably the Strategy Room. That wasn’t exactly convenient; he couldn’t go to something deep inside the Tower without passing a door and at least one guard. Skan was going to have to go through channels, rather than landing directly on Urtho’s balcony the way he would have preferred.

He backwinged down onto the pavement in front of the Tower, paced regally up to the guard just outside the door, and bowed his head in salute.

“Skandranon to see Urtho on a matter of extreme urgency,” he said politely and with strictest formality. “I would appreciate it if you would send him a message to that effect.”

He was rather proud of the fact that, despite his own agitation, his sibilants had no hissing, and he pronounced his r’s without a trill. The guard nodded, tapped on the door and whispered to someone just inside for a moment, and turned back to Skan.

“Taken care of, Skandranon,” he said. “If you’d care to wait, I don’t think it’ll take long.”

Skan nodded. “Thank you,” he replied. He longed to pace; his feet itched with the need to tear something up out of sheer nerves. But he kept as still and as serene as a statue of black granite-except for his tail, which twitched and lashed, no matter how hard he concentrated on keeping it quiet.

With every moment that passed, he expected to hear a messenger from Shaiknam running up behind him-messenger-birds still probably avoided the General and his underlings, so Shaiknam would have to use a much slower method of requesting his own audience with the Mage of Silence.

As time continued to crawl past, Skan wanted to grind his beak. He felt like a very large target in the middle of all the pale stone.

Finally, after far too long a wait, a faint tap on the door behind him caused the guard to open it and listen for a moment. He flung it wide, and gestured for Skan to enter. “Urtho will see you,” he said. “The Mage is in the Strategy Room.”

No point in the guard telling him the way, as they both knew. Skan was perfectly at home in the Tower. He simply nodded and walked in the open door. A second guard stationed inside gave him a brief nod of recognition as Skan passed. Urtho had planned most of his Tower with creatures like his gryphons in mind; the floors were of natural, rough-textured stone, so that claws and talons did not slip on them, the doors and hallways were all made tall and wide enough for things larger than a human to pass. There wasn’t a great deal to see, otherwise-just the hallway itself, plain and unadorned, with closed doors on either side of it. The room that Skan wanted was behind the third door on the right, and he hurried right to it.

The door opened for him, but by human agency, and not magical. Urtho stood behind the table-sized contour map used for all major planning sessions. Areas held by Ma’ar had been magically tinted red; everything else was blue. There was an alarming amount of red on that map.

“Urtho,” Skan began, as soon as he was in the door. “I-“

“You and the Sixth Wing gryphons are staging a revolt,” Urtho replied, with dangerous gentleness.

Skan’s ear-tufts flattened. “How did you know?” he blurted, backing up a pace or two. Behind him, a hertasi shut the door and took himself out of the room by a side passage, leaving the two of them alone.

“I am a mage,” Urtho reminded him. “While I don’t squander my energies, I do use them on occasion to keep an eye on something. I knew you lot wouldn’t care for having Shaiknam set over you, but I didn’t think you’d start a revolution.” He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed levelly at Skan. “That’s not a particularly clever thing to do. You can’t survive without me, you know.”

Ah, hells. Well, might as well drop it all at once.

“Yes, we can,” Skan replied, raising his head so that he looked down on Urtho, rather than dropping his eyes below the level of Urtho’s as all his training screamed at him to do. “I’m sorry, Urtho, but we don’t need you anymore. We know how to make ourselves fertile now. Zhaneel is the proof of that, if you doubt my unadorned word on it.”

He had never in all of his life seen Urtho taken aback before. Surprised, yes. Shocked, certainly. But completely dumbfounded-never.

The expression of complete blankness on Urtho’s face was so funny that Skan couldn’t help himself. He started laughing.

Urtho’s face flushed, and the blank expression he wore turned to one of annoyance and a little anger. “What are you laughing at, you overgrown chicken?” the mage spluttered. “What is so damned funny?”

Skan could only shake his head, still laughing. “Your face-“ was all he was able to manage, before he ran out of breath.

Urtho reddened a little more, but then, grudgingly, he smiled. “So, you think you have the upper hand, do you?” he said, challenge in his tone.

Skan got himself back under control, and quickly, even though laughter threatened to bubble up through his chest at any moment. “Yes and no,” he replied. “We can leave now. You no longer control us by means of our future, Urtho. That doesn’t mean we will leave, though, it just means that we won’t have to put up with idiots like Shaiknam and Garber who think we’re to be thrown away by the handful. Wait!” He held up a foreclaw as Urtho started to say something. “Listen to me first. This is what Shaiknam planned to do with the gryphons as soon as he got the Sixth out into the field again!”

He told Urtho what the aide had told him, then traced out the planned maneuvers on the map. “You see?” he said, as Urtho’s brow furrowed. “You see what that would do? Maybe we would provide a distraction for Ma’ar’s troops, but there are better ways of supplying distraction than sacrificing half the Wings!”

“I do see,” Urtho replied, nodding thoughtfully. “I do see.”

“We don’t want to make trouble, Urtho,” Skan continued earnestly, taking a cautious step nearer, “but we don’t want to be blackmailed into suicidal missions. Maybe that’s not how it seemed to you, but that was how it felt to us.” He raised his head a little higher. “You built our urges to reproduce as strongly as our will to eat and breathe, and used that to control us. We’d rather serve you out of loyalty than coercion.”

“I would rather have you out of loyalty,” Urtho murmured, blinking rapidly once or twice. He coughed, hiding his face for just a moment, then looked up again. “And just how did you obtain this knowledge?” he asked. “I’m sure it was you-I can’t think of another gryphon who would have tried, let alone succeeded.”

Skan gaped his beak wide in an insolent grin, hoping to charm Urtho into good humor. “That, Urtho, would be telling.”

Sixteen

For one brief moment when Skandranon defied him, Urtho had been in a white-hot rage. How dared this creature, a thing that he had created, presume to dictate the terms of this war? How dared this same creature usurp the knowledge it had no right to, and was not intelligent enough to use properly?

But that rage burned itself out as quickly as it came, for Urtho had lived too long to let his rage control his intellect. Intellect came to his rescue, with all of the answers to the questions of “how dared. . . .” Skan dared because he was not a “creature”; he was a living, thinking, rightfully independent being, as were all the rest of the gryphons. They were precisely what he had hoped and planned for and had never thought they would become in his lifetime. They had the right to control their own destinies. Perhaps he was responsible for their form, but their spirits were their own. He was now the one who “had no right” to dictate anything to them-and in a blinding instant of insight he realized that he was incredibly lucky that they didn’t harbor resentment against him for what he’d withheld from them. Instead, they were still loyal to him.

They would have been perfectly within their rights to fly off as they threatened, he thought, as Skan laughed at the expression on his face. It’s nothing short of a miracle that they didn’t. Dear gods, we have been lucky. . . .

He didn’t realize how lucky, until Skan told him just what Shaiknam had been planning. A quick survey of the topography of the area told him what it did not tell Skan; that Shaiknam had intended to launch an all-or-nothing glory-strike against the heavily-fortified valley. Such things succeeded brilliantly when they succeeded at all, but this particular battle-plan didn’t have the chances of a snowflake in a frying pan of working. It was just another one of Shaiknam’s insane attempts to pull off some maneuver that would have him hailed as a military genius and a hero.

The only trouble was that military geniuses and heroes had sound reasoning behind their plans. Shaiknam, unfortunately, had only wild ideas.

Urtho cursed the man silently as Skan pointed out all the ways that the gryphons would be cut down without being able to defend themselves. Shaiknam’s father was such a brilliant strategist and commander. How had the man avoided learning even the simplest of strategies from him?

Well, there was no hope for it; the only way to get rid of the man now would be to strip the Sixth of all nonhuman troops and mages on the excuse that all the other Commands were undermanned, and reassign the personnel elsewhere. Shaiknam could still be Commander of the Sixth, but he would only command foot-troops, all of them human. With no aerial support, and no mages, he would be forced into caution.

That should keep him out of trouble, and his inept assistant, Garber, too.

He growled a little when Skan refused to tell him who his co-conspirators had been, but it was a good bet that Lady Cinnabar was involved in this, right up to her aristocratic chin. And where you found Cinnabar, you found Tamsin, and probably Amberdrake. No doubt they got in when Cinnabar asked to “look at my records on the gryphons.” I thought she was looking for a cure for belly ache! The kestra’chern must have gotten a client to make him a set of “keys” for mage-locks; that would account for how they’d gotten into the book.

The wonder of it was that they had managed to penetrate past all the fireworks and folderol in order to find the real triggers for fertility.

“How many of you know the spell?” he asked, as reluctant admiration set in.

“All,” Skan said, without so much as blinking an eye. “And it’s not exactly a flashy spell, Urtho. It was simply good design. There was no point in holding the information back. Every gryphon outside this Tower knows the secret.”

He couldn’t help it; he had to shake his head with pure admiration. “And you’ve kept this whole thing from me all this time! Unbelievable.”

“We had reason to keep it among ourselves,” Skan replied. “Good reason. We didn’t know how you would feel or act, and we didn’t want you finding out before the time was right for me to tell you.”

“So you were the sacrificial goat, hmm?” Urtho eyed Skan dubiously. “I don’t know; a sacrifice is supposed to be savory, not scrawny.”

Skan drew himself up in an exaggerated pose. “A sacrifice is supposed to be the best of the best. I believe I fill that description.”

His eyes twinkled as he watched Urtho from beneath his heavy lids, and his beak gaped in a broad grin when Urtho laughed aloud.

“I submit to the inevitable, my friend,” Urtho said, still laughing, as he slapped Skan on the shoulder. “I suppose I must consider this as your test of adulthood, as the Kaled’a’in give their youngsters. You gryphons are certainly not my children any longer-not anyone’s children.”

Then he sobered. “I am glad that this has happened now, Skan. And I am glad that you are here. I need to pass along some grave news of my own, and this will probably be the best opportunity to do so.”

He called in the hertasi, who waited discreetly just on the other side of the door, and gave him swift instructions. “I wish you to summon General Shaiknam and take him to the Marble Office; once you have left him there, summon the commanders of the other forces to the Strategy Room.”

He turned back to Skan. “I am splitting the non-human manpower of the Sixth among all the other commanders-I have reason enough since all of them have been complaining that they are short-handed. That will leave Shaiknam in command of nothing but humans. Is there any commander that you think the gryphons of the Sixth would prefer to serve?”

For once, he had caught the Black Gryphon by surprise; Skan’s grin-gape turned into a jaw-dropped gape of surprise, and his eyes went blank for a moment. “Ah-ah-Judeth of the Fifth, I think.”

Urtho nodded, pleased with his choice. “Excellent. And she has had no real gryphon wings assigned to her forces until now, only those on loan from the Sixth or the Fourth. Consider it done.” Urtho regarded Skan measuringly. “Still, the gryphons should have their own collective voice, even as the mages do. There are things that you know about yourselves that no human could. There should be one gryphon assigned to speak for all gryphons, so that things will not come to the pass they have with Shaiknam before I come to hear about it.” He stabbed out a finger. “You. You, Skan. I hereby assign you to be the overall commander of all the gryphon wings and to speak for them directly to me.”

Skan’s surprise turned to stupefaction. His head came up as if someone had poked him in the rear. “Me?” he squeaked-yes, squeaked, he sounded like a mouse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Me? Why me? I am honored, Urtho, but-“

Urtho waved his objections aside. “You’ve obviously thought about becoming the leader of the gryphons, or why else would you have read all my history books about the great leaders of the past? The others clearly think that you should have that position, or why else would they have sent you here to confront me over Shaiknam?”

Is it unusually warm in here? Skan felt his nares flushing, and he hung his head. “They didn’t exactly pick me,” he admitted. “They couldn’t seem to do much besides panic and complain, so I . . . I took over. Nobody seemed to mind.”

“All the more reason to place you in charge, if you were the only one to take charge,” Urtho said implacably. “How do you think I wound up in charge of this so-called army?”

Skan ducked his head between his shoulder blades, his nares positively burning. “I’m not sure that’s a fit comparison-“

“Now, I have a few things to tell you,” Urtho continued. “I don’t know if you’ve been aware of it, but I’ve been sending groups of families and noncombatants into the west ever since we first thought we’d have to abandon the Tower.” He turned back to the map and stood over it, brooding. “I didn’t like having such a great concentration of folk here in the first place, and when I realized what chaos an evacuation would be, I liked it even less.”

Skan nodded with admiration. He hadn’t realized that Urtho was moving people out in a systematic way. That in itself spoke for how cleverly the mage had arranged it all.

“I’ve been posting the groups at the farthest edges of the territory we still hold, near enough to the permanent Gates there that they can still keep in touch with everyone here as if nothing had changed, but far enough so that if anything happens-“ Urtho did not complete the sentence.

“If anything happens, we have advance groups already in place,” Skan said quickly. “An evacuation will be much easier that way. Faster, too. And if the fighters know their families are already safe, their minds will be on defense and retreat, rather than on worrying.”

“I don’t want another Laisfaar,” Urtho said, his head bent over the table, so that his face was hidden. “I don’t want another Stelvi Pass.”

Skan had his own reasons to second that. The lost gryphons there sometimes visited him in dreams, haunting him. . . .

. . . fly again, as Urtho wills. . . .

“Who will you pick for your second, Skan?” Urtho asked after a long silence, briskly changing the subject. “I assume it’s going to be one of the experienced fighters. And-“ he cast a quick glance out of the corner of his eye at Skan, who caught a sly twinkle there. “-I count Zhaneel as an experienced fighter.”

Skan coughed. “Well, it will be Zhaneel, of course, but because she has the respect of the others. Even gryphons who haven’t trained on her course know how hard it is, and they admire her for all she’s accomplished. But there’s something else I’d like to ask you for as well.”

Urtho turned away from the table. “Oh?” he said, imbuing the single syllable with a multitude of flavorings.

Once again, Skan’s stomach and crop churned with anxiety, and his nares flushed. “I-ah-did a little exploring on that level of your Tower.”

“And?” Urtho’s face and voice were carefully neutral.

“I found the-the models.”

“How did you-“ Urtho exclaimed, flushing for a moment with anger, but he quickly calmed. “Never mind. What-“

Skan interrupted. “I met Kechara.”

Urtho stared at him blankly for a moment, then grew just a little pale. “I believe,” he said carefully, “that I had better sit down. You must hate me.”

Skan shook his head as Urtho lowered himself into a chair, and if he was any judge of human reactions, the Mage had been profoundly shaken. “How could I hate you? The more time I spent with her, the more I realized that you had done the best you could for her. And once I had a few days to think about it, I believe I managed to puzzle out why you had her up there, instead of down with the rest of the gryphons. It wasn’t just to protect her from being teased and getting her feelings hurt.” He took a deep breath, and ventured everything on his guess. “It was because she’s a very powerful Mindspeaker. Probably the most powerful you’ve ever seen.”

Urtho’s eyes widened, and he caught his breath. “Did she Mindspeak at you?” he asked.

Skan nodded, pleased that he had been clever enough to figure out the puzzle. “I realized that I had been getting a great deal more information from her than she had the words to tell me. That was when I remembered that she had hit me with a mind-blast just before she attacked me, and I figured out that she wasn’t just telling me things with her voice, but with her mind as well.”

He told Urtho the tale from beginning to end, saving only that he had gotten into the chamber in the first place with Vikteren’s mage-keys. “That’s why she’s in the Tower, in a room with such heavy shields, and why she creates the presence of a dozen gryphons when there’s only her. And that’s why Zhaneel and I would like to have her. We’ll protect her from teasing and ridicule, and she can act as-oh-a kind of relay for groups of gryphons that may need to speak with each other. We have Mind-speakers, of course, but none as powerful as she is.”

“I see that you put a great deal of thought into this.” Urtho mopped his forehead with a sleeve, as small beads of perspiration sprang up. “I must confess-that use for her had occurred to me. I was too softhearted to . . . well . . . misborn usually die young anyway, and I assumed that her nature would take care of the problems she represented for me. When she didn’t die, though, I had to do something about her. She’s as old as you are, Skan. She only seems younger because she’s so childlike, and because her memory for things longer ago than a year is very poor. I knew that if anyone ever discovered her and her power, she’d be a target for our enemies. In the wrong hands, she could be a terrible weapon. I was afraid that I would have to go to war just to protect her, and I couldn’t reconcile the safety and freedom of one misborn with compromising the safety of all those who depend on me. You see? That was why I hid her in the Tower and kept her existence secret. I simply could not protect her otherwise, and I would not risk a war over her.”

“Urtho, I hate to point this out, but we are in a war, and it isn’t over Kechara,” Skan retorted, with a little more sarcasm than he intended. “No one is going to get into this camp to steal her, and there isn’t much point in keeping her mewed up anymore.”

Skandranon sat down across from Urtho. He was rather surprised to learn that Kechara was as old as he was; as Urtho said, the misborn generally did not live past their teens, much less grow to be as old as he. It was something of a tribute to Urtho’s care that she had lived as long as she had.

Urtho sighed. “You’re right,” he admitted reluctantly. “She deserves a little freedom anyway. But keep her here-if not in the Tower, then near it.”

“Of course.” Skan nodded. “I should like to start moving the gryphon families out to where the other noncombatants are going, if you don’t mind. All pairs with nestlings and fledglings, and all fledged still in training. I don’t see any reason why they can’t complete their training elsewhere.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll tell them that you are concerned that with all of us consolidated here, we make a very tempting target for some terrible weapon. You want to get us spread out, so we aren’t quite so easy to get all at once.”

Urtho considered that as he studied the map. “What about here and here.” He pointed to two valleys, easily defended, at the farthest range for a permanent Gate. “I can set two of the Gates for those places, and move not only gryphons, but Kaled’a’in and all the nonhumans who are not combatants there. Anyone who wants to visit them, can.”

“I have an even better idea,” Skan suggested. “Set up a secondary Gate and put the gryphons out farther. Use the excuse that we are big eaters and need the territory. Send the Kaled’a’in to this valley in the south, and convalescents and volunteers there to the north. That gets them out from underfoot, and they can train your human youngsters while they’re recovering.”

Urtho snapped his fingers. “Of course-and what’s more, I’ll have the ambulatory and the youngsters run foraging parties! Make them as self-sufficient as possible!”

“Have them send the surplus here,” Skan added, with growing enthusiasm. “It won’t be much, but it will make them feel as if we need to have them out there. And a little fresh game now and then-“

His mouth tingled at the very thought. Herd beasts have no real flavor. A good raebuck, though. . . .

“With hertasi in charge, Skan, I am not certain I would be too ready to say that they ‘won’t send back much.’ Hertasi are remarkable scavengers.” Urtho’s eyebrows quirked a little. “That’s largely why I have them in charge of supply here. They find ways to make ten loaves feed a hundred fighters.”

But Skan noticed that Urtho was much more subdued than usual. Perhaps there is something he hasn’t told me? Are things even worse than I thought?

A light tap at the door prevented him from asking any further questions. Cautiously, Urtho’s chief hertasi stuck his snout inside.

“The commanders are here, Urtho,” the lizard said quietly. Urtho glanced over at Skan and shrugged.

“Let them in, Seri,” he said. “They might as well hear it all at once.”

The commanders filed in, General Judeth last of all, impeccable and austere in her chosen colors of black and silver. They gathered around the table, and Skan saw one or two turn a little pale when they looked over the latest conquests of Ma’ar’s forces.

Didn’t they know? Or does this mean something I can’t guess at?

“Gentlemen, ladies.” Urtho nodded to the group. “I brought you here for several reasons. The first-General Farle is dead. Assassinated, as far as we can tell.”

A sharp intake of breath around the table told Skan that none of the commanders had heard the bad news yet.

“I am afraid that under the circumstances, I must dismantle the Sixth as it has been known, and spread its nonhuman and magical resources among all of you. General Judeth.” As Urtho spoke her name, the lady sat up straighter, and lost her look of shocked dismay. “At the specific request of the new commander of all the gryphon wings, I am assigning the wings that formerly belonged to the Sixth to you. I know that you will command them well.”

The General did not salute or snap to attention, but she gave the impression that she had. “I will do my best, sir,” she replied simply.

“The rest of you may decide among yourselves how to apportion up the rest of the Sixth’s available manpower. General Shaiknam will command the human foot-soldiers, but all else will be available to you.” Urtho nodded, and Skan saw with satisfaction that the commanders were already getting over their shock and thinking about the situation. “I am certain that you will not allow any kind of rivalry to interfere with the best possible deployment of that manpower. Now-I am certain you all know Skandranon, the Black Gryphon, either on sight or by reputation.”

Nods and some slight smiles met that, as Skan bowed his head in a brief salute to all of them, but especially to General Judeth.

“I have appointed him to be the overall commander of the gryphon wings, in the same arrangement that I made with the mages.” Urtho paused and waited for their reaction.

Skan saw only slight frowns, and one or two nods. General Judeth was the first to speak.

She cleared her throat delicately, then spoke to both Urtho and to Skan. “The arrangement is working better with the mages than we had thought it would,” she admitted. “We thought it might make for problems, if not outright mutiny among the mages, but it didn’t work out that way.” Her mouth twitched a little, although she did not actually smile. “There are even some mages who have shown a remarkable increase in their abilities. Apparently, having someone to evaluate their performance who knows what they can do has made them a little more-eager-to do their best. I trust, both because Urtho has chosen you, Skandranon, and from some of your reputation, that you will act in a similar manner.”

Skan’s nares flushed, for there was no doubt just what the General meant by “some of your reputation,” but he answered her steadily enough.

“I can promise you that no gryphon will balk at anything he is asked to do without a reason for objecting,” Skan replied gravely. “We all understand that this is a war, and in war there is the risk of death. We only ask that we not be sent into a certainty of death. I can also promise you that if there are objections to what we are asked to do, it will be because the loss will outweigh the gain for all concerned. The gryphons will defend all the races.”

The General nodded at that, and turned her attention back to the table.

“I see that you are all concerned by the amount of territory that Ma’ar has taken,” Urtho continued. “You should be; I have only just updated the map, and a great deal of that gain has been within the last month. You all knew you’d lost ground, but none of you has seen the real scope of the loss until now. We are in trouble, and I will not hide that fact from you. In fact, we have lost so much, that Ma’ar himself has moved into the Palace and made it his headquarters.”

They took all that without flinching, although Skan was incensed at the idea that Ma’ar would have taken the Palace for his own. The idea of that-that beast, that tyrant, soiling the halls that great leaders had called home, soiling them with his bloody boots-

“It would be rather difficult to hide that we are in trouble, with this spread out before us,” General Movat said dryly. “The question is, what are your plans to deal with it?”

Urtho considered the map, as heavy silence reigned. “The first thing I intend to do is to begin a quiet evacuation of the noncombatants from around the Tower,” he replied. “Some preliminary work has been done in that direction, but now I want it to become a priority. I want to move them into the West. I’m going to take six of the permanent Gates here on the Tower grounds and activate them, targeting them to six points on the western border. That’s mostly wilderness area, mountains and forested valleys, too steep to farm and not really suited for grazing. My very first Tower was there,” he added wistfully, “and I rather liked keeping it wilderness.”

“Yes, well, now it’s a good thing it is wilderness,” General Korad said briskly. “Ma’ar won’t consider that you might have sent people into it.”

“My idea precisely.” Urtho tapped the map, pointing to the six places where the Gates would have their other ends. “If we have to abandon the Tower, we’ll have most of the people who would be trouble already out of the way. They, in turn, will have advance camps ready for us. If we inform our people that we are doing this only to spread out our resources and make one spot less of a target, I believe we can keep them from panicking.”

The Generals contemplated the plan quietly for some time, each one studying the map and making mental calculations. Urtho watched their faces; Skan watched Urtho.

He looks satisfied; well, if they have simply accepted the plan, that must mean it’s strategically sound. So that’s how he does it! He puts out a plan, waits to see what they think of it, and changes it with their suggestions and objections! I wondered how a mage had become such a good strategist!

General Judeth broke the silence first. “I’d like to have one strong mage with each group,” she said. “Adept-class. Perhaps this would be a good place to send those who are frail, or those who have moral objections to combative magics, and those who simply do not have skill at combative magics. This way, if further Gates need to be built, there will be someone at hand, rested, and prepared to build those Gates.”

Urtho nodded. “My Kaled’a’in will be here-“ he pointed. “They will have mages enough in their ranks to cover that point. If any of you can think of particular mages who would be suitable, please let me know, especially if they are familiar with this kind of terrain.”

If they can deal with primitive conditions, he means. Some of his older mages-well, they ought to go with the Kaled’a’in. The Clans can make a home anywhere, if they have to, and the horse-nomads are already set up for wandering.

There was more discussion, and they put together a tacit agreement. Skan was impressed. He hadn’t known that there were humans anywhere who could agree to so much with so few wasted words.

“But this is secondary,” General Korad said at last. “The real question is-how in the name of all the gods are we going to defend the Tower?”

Urtho hesitated, then asked humbly, “Are you certain that we should?”

A chorus of objections met that statement, but it seemed to Skan that most of them boiled down to-“of course we should, it’s your Tower.”

Urtho waved them to silence. “There is a great deal in the Tower that can’t be moved and shouldn’t be allowed to fall into Ma’ar’s hands. But things can be destroyed. The knowledge that made those things possible is as portable as the minds and the books that hold it. This place may be my home, and it is true that I have invested a great deal of my life in it, but that is no reason to remain here when the situation becomes untenable. Others have lost their homes; it would be arrogant of me to think mine was any more sacred than theirs. I would be as foolish as my critics have claimed if I clung to this Tower when every wise person would have fled.”

He pondered the map. “If Ma’ar breaches our defenses here and here, he can spread out his troops along this line. He has manpower far exceeding ours. If he does that, he can force us to try to counter him until we are spread so thin we can’t defend ourselves. From here, on the Plain, he has a clear run to the Tower itself. We cannot hold a line against him, unless we can suddenly multiply our own troops by a factor of ten.”

The Generals studied the map with varying expressions of gloom.

“You’re right,” Korad said, with no emphasis. “Damn, but I hate to admit it. If he can get that far, he’s got us.”

“If we remain at the Tower,” Urtho reminded them all. “If we retreat, we can pick our place to make a stand, or make no stand at all, simply keep retreating, making him string out his supply lines and his forces. Eventually, even Ma’ar must become sated with conquest! We can go west, then retreat to the farthest south, in the lands that the Haighlei Emperors hold.”

“The Black Kings?” said Judeth. Skan knew that referred not to their predilections, but their skin, which was supposedly as dark as a moonless, starless sky. “Would they help us?”

Urtho shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know they would shelter us against a conqueror and despot like Ma’ar, and their magic is so different from ours that I think even Ma’ar would hesitate before he attacked them. It’s not wise to attack an unknown.”

Judeth bit her lip, then nodded, slowly and grudgingly. “It’s our best hope, if Ma’ar gets that far. I am going to see that he doesn’t, if it takes every drop of blood in my body to stop him.” She sounded and looked grim, and Skan shivered in a sudden chill, as ice threaded down his spine as if a cold wind had just ruffled his feathers.

“How are you going to explain-everything-to Shaiknam?” Korad wanted to know, after an uncomfortable silence.

Urtho shrugged. “I’ll tell him that I’ve seen he is best with ground maneuvers, and I’m giving him the chance to concentrate on them without the distractions and annoyances of a mixed force. Then I’ll show him what I’ve shown you, and we’ll all meet tonight to plan the overall strategy to hold Ma’ar. Right now, I want you all to go to your people and get those who are not essential ready to evacuate. I’d like to start moving people out steadily starting tomorrow.”

That sounded like a dismissal to Skan, and so the other commanders took it. They saluted and filed out, with only General Judeth pausing long enough to have a brief word with the Black Gryphon.

“As soon as you’ve seen to your new command, come see me with the old Sixth Wingleaders,” she said. “And best of luck, Skandranon. I think Urtho’s chosen wisely.”

She turned smartly and left, leaving Skan to gape at her back as the door closed behind her. He turned to look at Urtho.

The mage smiled wearily. “I think I’ve chosen wisely, too, Skan,” he said. “Now-go deal with your people, while I see to mine. We both have a great deal to do, and only the Kaled’a’in Lady knows if we will be given the time to get it all done.”

Skan bowed, deeply and profoundly, but he hesitated at the door. Urtho had turned back to the map, staring at it blankly.

“Urtho-“ Skan said. The mage started, turned to face him, and stared at him as if he had not expected his new commander to still be in the room.

“I want you to know something. We never really considered flying off and abandoning you. We are not only loyal to you-we love you. That is why we are loyal to you. Love is harder to earn than loyalty, and you are more than my friend. You are my beloved Father.”

He turned quickly and left, and the door swung shut behind him-but for one moment, just before it closed completely, he thought he saw Urtho’s eyes glittering, as if with tears.

Packing too many people in this mess tent made it stiflingly hot. Amberdrake stood on a table and ran one hand through his damp hair, in a nervous gesture that had become habit over the past few days. Every kestra’chern in the camp had squeezed into the mess tent, and they all stared at him with varying levels of anxiety. Wild tales had spread all through the camp since word came from the Sixth that General Farle had been killed, and Shaiknam assigned to his old command again. Most of those tales were variations on older rumors, but some were entirely new. All the stories that Amberdrake had heard had been told with varying degrees of hysteria.

He held up a hand and got instant silence. Lamplight glittered in dozens of eyes, all fixed on him, all wide with fear or hope. “You’ve heard the rumors for weeks, now the rumors are coming true,” he said abruptly. “We are evacuating all noncombatants from around the Tower.” A murmur started, but he shook his head and the murmurings died away. “Urtho gave me complete control of what to tell you. I am going to tell you the whole truth because Urtho and I are counting on you to help keep people calm. Ma’ar is in a dangerous position for us. Urtho is telling people that he wants the noncombatants spread out so that we don’t make such a tempting target with everything clustered here. The real reason is that if he has to evacuate, he doesn’t want to have civilians at the Tower to get in the way, or have the ones left worry about them.”

He let them absorb that for a moment. “We will be one of the last groups out because we are also useful as Healers. I’m going to interview each of you tonight and tomorrow, and you will decide which of the six evacuation sites you wish to go to. I will give you an assignment-chit, and when the last of the civilians are gone, you will pack up your tents and go to your chosen sites. You will still be able to service your clients there; the Gates will be open for two-way traffic, and Urtho expects a certain amount of coming and going.”

Someone down in front waved his hand. “What if Urtho decides to evacuate completely? What about people who are visiting over here?”

“Good question. Anyone who goes from his evacuation site to the Tower must be aware that at any moment Urtho could call for a retreat. At that point, a noncombatant will have to fend for himself, and count himself lucky if he gets to any Gate, much less the one to his own site.” Amberdrake shrugged helplessly. “You would be much better off for your clients to come to you, rather than vice versa. We are going to try to discourage traffic from the sites to the Tower. For instance, there is going to be a curfew in force once the civilians are theoretically gone, and meals on the Tower side will be strictly rationed to those supposed to be there-no visitors allowed.”

He let them absorb that for a moment. Another hand appeared. “Is it really looking that bad?” asked a young woman with frightened eyes.

He hesitated a moment. “I can’t tell you everything,” he said finally. “But Urtho is seriously worried, and he has already undertaken the enormous task of stripping the Tower of as much as possible and sending it to safer places.”

Another murmur arose, but it died on its own. Finally Lily rose to her feet and lifted her head defiantly. “There has to be something else we can do!” she said. “You know very well that most of our clients are going to postpone visits until the civilian evacuation is over-so there must be something practical we can do to help!”

Amberdrake relaxed marginally as a chorus of agreement met her brave words. “Thank you, Lily,” he said softly. “I was hoping someone would bring that up. Yes. There is a great deal that we can do to help, both on this side of the Gates and the other.” He sat down slowly on the table top. “The very first job is to help with the children. . . .”

Gesten looked out beyond the campfire, counted noses, and came up with a satisfactory total. Every hertasi tribe had sent at least one representative, and most had sent several. Why he should have been chosen to be the leader of the whole lot, he had no notion, but Urtho said he was, and that was the end of it.

“Right,” he said, and dozens of eyes blinked at him. “You know the story. Nonfighters are pulling out, and we’re nonfighters. The only hertasi who are supposed to stay here after the civilians leave are the ones serving the Healers and the gryphons. Everyone else goes. Once you’ve gotten your own kit out, come back and start helping the families. The kestra’chern are minding the children, so you’ll be doing what we do best-you’ll be helping to pack up the households and get ‘em moving. Once that’s done, you go report to the Tower. If they need you, they’ll tell you. If they don’t, you get back over to your assigned place and stay there. Got it?”

“What if you’re doing split duty-with a Healer and a civilian, say?” someone called from the back.

Gesten’s briefing hadn’t covered that, but Urtho had told him that he could and should use his own judgment when it came to things that hadn’t been covered. “Depends on how close to the fighting you think you can stand to be,” he said, finally. “If you’re feeling brave, stay here, go full-time with the Healer. If you’re not, stay on the evacuation site and help with whatever needs doing. There’s going to be a lot that needs doing.” He tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes as he recited the list Urtho had given him. “We’ll need winter-proof housing built for everyone, and that includes the fighters, in case they have to come over. We’ll need food supplies located. We’ll need wells dug, sanitary and washing facilities set up. A lot of the families are going to consist of mothers with children; they’ll all need that extra hand to help. We’ll need facilities for the sick and injured, and overland vehicles in case we have to retreat from there.”

“Will there be mages to help us with all this?” asked an anxious voice. “And Healers? There are pregnant females with those civilians, and I don’t know a thing about birthing babies, especially not human babies!”

“We’ll have a lot of mages, all of the Apprentices, most of the Journeymen, and at least one Adept at each site,” Gesten promised. “The Healers are sending some of their Apprentices, a couple of Masters, and as soon as all the civilians are over, the kestra’chern will be joining them. There’re plenty of Healers with them, and they all have some Healer training.”

Gesten sensed an easing of tension at that. Hertasi considered the kestra’chern the most levelheaded of the humans, and the ones most likely to react properly in a crisis. “Right,” he said again. “We can do this.”

“We can do this,” they echoed.

It was, after all, the hertasi motto.

Amberdrake rubbed his blurring, burning eyes until they cleared, then turned his attention back to the list he was compiling. Protea to tend a creche of tervardi little ones; that will work. Loren with the Healers, putting together packs of supplies for the evacuees. Renton, Lily, Martina, Rilei-

Amberdrake? Have I come at a bad time?” He looked up, squinting across the barrier formed by the light from his lantern, and made out the face of Lionwind, the Clan Chief of his own Kaled’a’in clan of k’Leshya. “What are you doing still awake?” he asked, out of sheer surprise to see the perpetual Dawn greeter up and active long past the hour of midnight.

Lionwind stepped farther into the tent, his heavy braids swinging with each soft, silent step. “We had a clan meeting,” he said. “And we’d rather not go off with the rest of the Kaled’a’in, if it’s all right with Urtho.”

But Amberdrake shook his head. “You can’t stay,” he said flatly. “Urtho can’t make any exceptions.”

Lionwind half-smiled, and folded himself gracefully onto a stool on the other side of the desk. “We didn’t want to stay, we just want to be where the gryphons are,” he told Amberdrake. “We’ve supplied most of the Kaled’a’in Trondi’irn for the gryphons, we’ve worked with Urtho on his breeding program-and we like them. They’ll need someone besides hertasi with them, after all. Hertasi are all very well, but they don’t like to hunt, they can’t lift what a human can, and they’re a little short of imagination.”

Amberdrake listened to this calm assessment with growing relief. He’d wondered how the gryphons were going to manage, for Urtho’s plan called for a second Gate to be built from the Kaled’a’in evacuation site, and the gryphon families to be sent farther out from there. The gryphons were huge eaters, and it was doubtful that they would be able to stay anywhere that there was a large concentration of any other species. All of the Kaled’a’in Clans, for instance. But if k’Leshya was basically volunteering to be sent off beyond the rest, that would solve the problem neatly.

“Are you certain you want to do this?” he asked.

Lionwind shrugged. “I’m not certain we want to do anything at the moment,” he replied. “We don’t want to run, but we don’t want to stay here to be slaughtered either. We’d like it best if Urtho could suddenly produce a magic weapon that would eliminate Ma’ar and all his troops without harming anyone or anything else, but short of the Goddess working a miracle, that isn’t going to happen. So this is our best choice, and if Urtho will allow it, we’ll take it.”

“I’m certain he’ll allow it,” Amberdrake said, and rubbed his eyes again as Lionwind’s face blurred and went out of focus. “I’ll take care of it.”

Lionwind rose and leaned over the table. Amber-drake rubbed his eyes again, but they wouldn’t stop blurring.

“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked, blinking rapidly. That didn’t help, either.

“Only-get some rest,” Lionwind answered, leaning closer. “That’s your Clan Chiefs order.”

“I can’t, there’s too much to do,” he objected-as Lionwind reached across and touched his forehead. And only then did he remember, belatedly, that Lionwind was also a Mindhealer, fully capable of imposing his will on the most recalcitrant.

“ ‘The best attack is the one no one sees coming,’ kestra’chern,” Lionwind quoted, and chuckled, as sleep snatched him up in surprisingly gentle talons and carried him away. . . .

The six permanent Gates were enormous, quite large enough to accommodate the biggest of the floating land barges. Urtho had constructed them using fused-stone arches, and tied each of them into its own node to power it. Only Urtho had ever accomplished the construction of a Gate that did not require the internal knowledge and resources of a single mage to target and power the Gate.

Only Urtho had uncovered the secret of keeping such a Gate stable. Of all of his secrets, that was probably the one that Ma’ar wanted the most.

He had, for the first time in many years, left the Tower briefly to journey through one of his own creations and set up a second permanent Gate at that evacuation point. This one he targeted deep in the western wilderness, to a lovely valley he himself had once called home. The gryphon families, all those gryphons that were not fighters, and those who were injured, had all been sent there. Now the Kaled’a’in clan k’Leshya, of all the Clans, the only one not named for a totemic animal, but called simply “the Spirit Clan,” slowly filed through the first Gate to follow them.

He could not have said truthfully that he had a “favorite” Clan, but of all of them, k’Leshya held the greatest number of his favorite Kaled’a’in. Lionwind, the Clan Chief, was one of the wisest men he knew, with a wisdom that did not fit with the smooth, youthful face and the night-black hair that hung in two thick braids on either side of his face. Lionwind’s father and mother had both been shaman; perhaps that explained it. Or perhaps, as Lionwind himself had once claimed, only half in jest, he was an “old soul.” The Clan Chief-not then the Chief, but nearly as wise-had been of great comfort to Amberdrake when the young kestra’chern first joined his ancestral Clan. He continued to be of comfort, on the rare occasions that Amber-drake would permit anyone to help him.

Lionwind had been first through the Gate, riding his tall, rangy warmare. He had not looked in any direction but forward, although he surely knew he would never see the Tower again, and likely would not see many of those he left behind. He had made his farewells, as had all the Kaled’a’in, and it was not the Kaled’a’in way to linger over such things.

“Long farewells give time for the enemy to aim.” That was what Lionwind said to Urtho as he clasped his hand, and the words were sure to become a Kaled’a’in proverb. Although there was no enemy here, k’Leshya followed that precept now.

Urtho watched them go, hiding his pain beneath a calm smile. He did not know if he would ever see any of them again. All he could be certain of was that he had sent them into a safer place than this one. And now that the gryphons were in full control of their own destinies, he could at least be certain that no matter what Ma’ar undid of his, there would always be gryphons in the world. If Ma’ar conquered the Tower, they would scatter, using their mobility to take them beyond his reach.

So something of mine will survive, in spite of everything that Ma’ar can do.

Odd that it should be the gryphons, creatures that his contemporaries had considered eccentric toys. He had always had faith in them, though. Of everything he had created, they were his favorites. He had given them the ability to do great good; it only remained to see if they would fulfill that promise as well as they had fulfilled all the rest.

The last k’Leshya herdsman, driving the last of the Clan herds under a great cloud of dust, passed through the Gate. The Gate “sensed” that there was no one else waiting to cross it, and the view of the crowd of Kaled’a’in at the terminus faded, as the Gate shut itself down to conserve power. The space inside the arch went to black-then showed only what was on the other side of the physical arch.

Only then did Urtho realize that he was not alone.

Amberdrake stood behind and to one side of him, staring at the now-blank Gate. The kestra’chern was not wearing any of his elaborate robes or costumes, only a pair of breeches and a sleeved tunic in a soft, faded blue. His hair had been tied up into a tail at the nape of his neck, and he wore a headband of blue that matched his tunic.

Urtho regarded him with a touch of surprise. He had thought that it was understood that Amberdrake would go with his own Clan. The rest of the kestra’chern all had their assignments in the evacuation, and as soon as they had completed those tasks, they would head for their own evacuation sites. He was not needed as their leader anymore, and it was unlikely that anyone would have leisure in the coming days and weeks for the ministrations of a kestra’chern, however expert.

Amberdrake seemed to divine Urtho’s thoughts from his expression. He raised one elegant eyebrow in a gesture so graceful it could only have been unconscious. “You’re wondering why I’m still here,” he said. ‘ Urtho nodded.

“Winterhart is still here. She’s the Trondi’irn of the fighting gryphon wings of the Fifth, and I am not going to leave her alone in a camp that still holds her former lover.” There was a note of steel in his voice that was new to Urtho-or perhaps it had been there all along, and Amberdrake had simply hidden it better. “Skan is still here, and Zhaneel, and Gesten to serve the two of them. They are all the family I have.”

Urtho allowed a bit of steel to creep into his own voice. “I said, ‘no exceptions,’ and you are not excused from that. You heard it clearly enough, Kestra’chern Amberdrake. You do not belong here.”

“I am a Healer, Urtho. You can verify that with Lady Cinnabar if you wish; I volunteered for her group.” Pain and fear shadowed Amberdrake’s eyes for a moment, and Urtho knew why and marveled at his bravery. He knew all about Amberdrake’s past; he knew how much it would cost Amberdrake to work with the Healers, every waking hour-how vulnerable he was to losing control of his Empathic abilities-how he feared that pain, physical and mental, more than anything else.

Yet here he was, facing his worst fear, in order to remain with his odd and tenuous “family.” Urtho bowed his head a little in acknowledgment of courage.

“I stand corrected, Healer Amberdrake. You have every right to be here.” The lines at the corners of Amberdrake’s eyes softened a bit, and Urtho decided that he would ease another of Amberdrake’s worries. “There is a single mage still working with Shaiknam and the Sixth, at his own request. I approved his petition for field duty myself. I am told his name is Conn Levas.” He let his own eyebrow rise, just a little. “I believe the Sixth is currently away on assignment.”

Urtho turned then, not waiting for thanks. Already he had turned his mind to the next task.

And so, probably, had Amberdrake.

Long farewells give the enemy time to aim. And they did not dare give the enemy time for anything.

Seventeen

Aubri’s wings ached from shoulder to tip; they burned with exhaustion on the downstroke of each wingbeat. The heavy, damp air in this particular valley always meant difficult flying, but that was not why he was tired. He had been flying scout for the Fifth since dawn, and it only lacked a few hours until sunset. He had flown a double shift already, and by the time he finished, long after dark, it would be a triple.

At least all the innocents were far beyond the reach of any disaster now. The last of the noncom-batants, including the kestra’chern, had passed through the Gates to their new locations several days ago. And as Urtho had expected, there was steady traffic between the Tower and the evacuation points, but not in the opposite direction. The word that any noncombatant caught on the Tower side in an emergency would have to fend for himself kept the evacuees in their new homes. Aubri missed seeing the youngsters, missed the sound of fledglings playing-but he would rather miss these things than have them at the Tower lairs, and at risk. One slaughtered youngster was one too many-and he had seen the pathetic corpses of considerably more than one in the time he had been fighting for Urtho.

His chest muscles complained, growing tight and stiff from built-up fatigue poisons, and he knew that by the time he landed, he’d be one sore gryphon. At least on this second shift, he wasn’t fighting makaar. This was all simple coordination scouting, making sure that the Sixth and the First were where they were supposed to be, so that the mages with the Fifth didn’t hit their own troops with friendly fire.

Huh. “Friendly fire, isn’t.” That’s what the Kaled’a’in say anyway. Ma’ar’s generals hadn’t pressed an attack on this point all day, holding a purely defensive line, and Shaiknam hadn’t made any offensive moves, a reflection of the inertia here for the past two or three days. Both forces glared at each other from the opposite sides of a wide, shallow ravine, but the only attacking going on was from little presents the mages dropped which were easily deflected by their opposite numbers.

The situation was a stalemate, at least here.

No-wait. He caught a hint of movement through the heavy haze. Something’s going on down there!

Aubri circled higher, to get a better perspective on the situation. So far as he had been told, Shaiknam wasn’t supposed to order any kind of attack unless an opportunity too ripe to ignore arose, and Aubri hadn’t seen any evidence of that. Was this just false movement? A little shuffling in place to make the enemy think that Shaiknam was about to press an attack?

He pumped harder, gaining more height, and looked down half a minute later.

At first he couldn’t make out anything at all. Then the haze parted a little, giving him a clearer view of Shaiknam’s troops. His wingstrokes faltered with shock, and he sideslipped a little before catching and steadying himself in the air. Demonsblood! What does he-Why-He can’t be that stupid! Can he?

Shaiknam’s troops had parted right down the middle, and were pulling back, leaving the easiest place to cross the ravine wide open.

This would have been a classic move, giving the enemy a place to penetrate and then closing companies in on either side of him while the troops to the rear cut his forces off from the rest. The only problem was that there were no other companies in place, and no time to get any in place. Shaiknam had not been positioned directly protecting one of the two vital passes, but from here Ma’ar’s forces could easily get to one of those vital passes.

He’s bluffing. Ma’ar’s commanders won’t believe this and he knows it. He’s just giving them something to occupy them. . . .

He couldn’t hover; the best he could do was to glide in a tight circle, panting with weariness and disbelief. Even as Aubri watched, the two groups that had pulled back moved on in a clear retreat, and Ma’ar’s army marched across the ravine and into Urtho’s territory with all the calm precision of a close-order drill.

What in hell is going on here?

Now he wished he was one of those gryphons with any kind of Mindspeech; if only he could tell someone what was happening! By the time he lumbered through the sky to a message-relay, it would be too late to stop the advance.

Damn, it’s already too late. . . . III can’t stop it, maybe I’d better find out who ordered this. That’s what Skan would do. Has Shaiknam lost what little mind he used to have? Or have his troops somehow been sent false orders?

Aubri dropped through the haze, well behind the line of advancement, and landed just outside of Shaiknam’s all-but-deserted command post. He got out of sight, just in case someone from the other side was watching, under cover of a grove of trees right behind the command tent. Predictable, he thought savagely. Trust Shaiknam; ignore the fact that someone can sneak up to your tent in favor of the fact that you get to sit in the shade all day. I hope there’re red ants in those trees biting on his fat behind. He’d wondered why there seemed to be so little activity going on around the command tent, but he’d figured it was simply because there was no activity along this section of the front lines. Now I know, maybe. Either Shaiknam’s been assassinated or replaced or-

or something worse has been going on. He tried to emulate Skan, blessing Zhaneel for all those hours on the obstacle course, as he slithered on his belly through the underbrush. The lessons were second nature now; shove the branches aside with your beak, close your eyes, and let them slide over your neck and your tight-folded wings. Creep forward with forefeet until you were as stretched-out you could get, then inch the hindfeet up until your back hunched, and start over again. Vary the intervals and your steps. Make no patterns.

And why the hell aren’t there guards around the tent, after what happened to Farle? Because Shaiknam isn’t there? Or because he knows he doesn’t need guards? Or because he has no guards left?

He had concentrated so hard on his stealthy approach that he didn’t keep track of how far he’d come. The buff canvas of the tent suddenly loomed up in a wall from out of the underbrush a few talon-lengths in front of his beak, just as he heard voices coming from inside.

Well, there’s someone in there, anyway. He closed his eyes and listened. Whoever was in there murmured, rather than speaking in normal conversational tones, as if they wanted to be certain they weren’t overheard from outside.

“. . . going very well, my lord,” whispered an unctuous voice. “And Ma’ar is keeping his side of the bargain. By the time Judeth of the Fifth realizes what has happened, Ma’ar’s troops will have the Pass.”

“Well, good.” That was Shaiknam, all right; Aubri had heard his whining tones often enough to be certain of that. “Once he has the Pass, we can close behind him, and no one will know we let him through. His mages can set up Gates to pour troops down onto the plains, and I can ‘surrender’ with no one the wiser. My command and holdings will remain intact. And without you, Levas, I would not have been able to contact Ma’ar’s commander and bring all this to pass.”

Levas? Conn Levas? Wasn’t that the mage Winterhart used to-

“Thank you, my lord.” The unctuous voice was back. “I always make certain to be on the winning side, and I was pleased to find you are a commander as pragmatic as I.”

Shaiknam laughed. “I have another task for you, if you think you’re up to it. Urtho may yet be able to pull off a miracle; he has a disconcerting habit of doing so. But without Urtho . . .”

There was a certain archness to the mage’s reply that held Aubri frozen. “I am a mercenary, my lord; you knew that when we made our bargain. There will be an additional price for additional services.”

Shaiknam laughed very softly. “Name it,” he said, as arrogantly as if he had all the resources of all the world to call upon. “Whatever coin you choose.”

“Twenty-four thousand silver, and the coin of bodies, my lord.” The mage’s voice, already cold, grew icy. “Two bodies, to be precise, and both still alive and in a condition to be amusing to me. The Trondi’irn, Winterhart, and the kestra’chern, Amberdrake.”

“Done and done,” Shaiknam replied instantly. “Neither are combatants; they should be easy to subdue. Cheap at the price. You could have sold your services more dearly, mercenary.”

“Their value is peculiar to me-“

Aubri could bear it no longer.

I have to stop them! Now!

He lunged at the tent wall, slashing it open with his sharp talons, back agape to bite the spines of one or both of them in half-

And tumbled ignominiously to the ground, unable to move even his eyes. He landed with bone-bruising impact right at the feet of General Shaiknam, skidding a little on the canvas of the tent floor.

If he could have struggled, he would have, but there wasn’t a muscle of his body that would obey him. His heart continued to beat, and his lungs to breathe, but that was all the movement he was allowed.

He’d been the recipient of a spell of paralysis, of course. Idiot! Conn Levas is a mage, idiot! How could you have been so incredibly stupid?

General Shaiknam looked down at him with mild interest in his catlike eyes, then searched his pockets for a moment. Then he turned to Conn Levas, and flipped him a coin. The mage caught it deftly, and pocketed it. Shaiknam’s serene, round face produced a smile that went no further than his lips. “Payment for additional services,” he said, his voice ripe with satisfaction.

“Indeed, my lord,” Conn Levas replied. “As I expect payment on completion of your other task.”

Shaiknam shrugged, and his eyes reflected his boredom. “They have no interest for me. I will see that they are captured unharmed. It should not be terribly difficult.”

“What of-this-my lord?” A new voice, but another one that Aubri recognized. Garber.

Shaiknam’s second-in-command spoke from out of Aubri’s line-of-sight, but there was no doubt of where he was. A toe prodded him in the ribs, waking pain in his chest muscles.

“I can dispose of him if you like,” Conn Levas began, but Shaiknam held up a hand to forestall him.

“No,” he said. “There is a use for him. Ma’ar is rather fond of gryphons. I believe we should send him this one, as a gift, in earnest of many more to come.” He waved at the unseen Garber. “Package this up for me, would you, and deliver it to General Polden with my compliments to the Emperor.”

“So the Emperor enjoys the antics of these creatures?” Conn said with interest.

“He does,” Shaiknam replied. He smiled down at Aubri; the gryphon gasped, as the ice of horror and the chill of pure fear swept over him. “I hope you can learn some new tricks, beast,” he said sweetly. “Other than ‘playing dead.’ ‘Dance,’ for instance, or better yet, ‘beg.’ Make certain to learn ‘beg.’ The longer you entertain the Emperor, the longer you will live. Or so I’m told.”

Urtho flung a plate across the room; it shattered against the wall but did nothing to help relieve his feelings. “Gods!” he cried. The cadre of hertasi and human messengers ignored him. There were no messenger-birds in camp anymore; Urtho had not wanted to leave these smallest and most helpless of his creatures behind even by accident. They had been the first through the Gate, to go with k’Leshya and the gryphons.

Urtho paced the side of the map table, issuing orders as fast as hertasi and humans could take them, doing his best not to seize handfuls of hair and start yanking them out by the roots. What in the name of all the gods had happened? How had Ma’ar’s men gotten past the defensive line? Why hadn’t anyone noticed until they’d already taken the Pass of Korbast and had set up a Gate to bring more troops in?

Never mind, it’s happened, now deal with it! This was his worst nightmare come true; the Tower still full of things he hadn’t gotten out yet, the traps not yet set, and the enemy pouring down into the plain, behind his own lines. Already the Sixth and the Third had been cut off from the rest and from retreat; they would have to fend for themselves. Judeth was bringing the Fifth in, but no one knew for certain about the rest. They have mages, they can Gate here. They can even Gate straight to their evacuation sites. They’ll be all right. I have to believe that.

He sent the last of his messengers off on their errands with orders to send the Healers and other support personnel to their Gates, and forced himself to stop pacing. He clutched the edge of the table and stared down at it, as if staring at it fiercely enough would make the situation reverse itself.

“Sir!” A hertasi scrambled in the door, all out of breath. “The mage Conn Levas is here from the Sixth!”

He started and turned toward the door, just as Conn Levas pushed his way past the lizard. He looked as if he had personally fought his way through all of Ma’ar’s troopers to reach the Tower; his robes were filthy, torn, and bloodstained, his hair matted down to his head with sweat.

“Go.” Urtho told the breathless hertasi. “Find me Skan and bring him here. I’ll need him in a moment.”

The hertasi let the door swing shut behind Conn Levas as Urtho took three steps toward the mercenary mage. “What happened?” he cried, eager only to hear what had gone wrong.

Too late, he saw Conn’s hand move, saw an empty bag in it, and felt the stinging of a hundred thousand tiny needles in his face and hands, in every bit of flesh left exposed by his clothing. He brushed at his face frantically, while Conn Levas laughed.

“That won’t help,” the mercenary said very softly as Urtho tried to cry out for help and realized that he couldn’t do more than whisper. “Miranda thorns, Urtho. Very potent. Quite impossible to magic away. A little invention of my new employer; I believe you might have seen their effects, once or twice. Mages never do consider that someone might attack them physically.”

Urtho’s knees crumpled beneath him; he managed to stagger back enough that he landed in the chair behind him before his legs gave out altogether. His entire body tingled, burned, twitched uncontrollably. His lips moved, but nothing emerged. Strange swirls of light and color invaded his vision; the furniture stretched and warped. Conn’s head floated about a foot above his body as the mercenary mage approached, and the head looked down at him malevolently.

“It’s a poison, of course,” the head said, each word emerging from his mouth in flowing script, and encapsulated inside a brightly-colored bubble. “You should enjoy the effects. I knew that all the defenses of the Tower are keyed to you, of course, as well as the node beneath it, and I knew that if I slew you outright, I would die before I had a chance to escape. I expect Shaiknam knew that, too, and was counting on not needing to fulfill his part of the bargain. But you’ll live long enough for me to get clear, and he’ll just have to keep his word, hmm?”

Urtho’s chest nearly burst with the need to howl in anguish, but all that he could manage was a pathetic whimper. Conn Levas’ head floated around the room for a moment, then suddenly produced a new body as the old one faded away. A large, furry body, of an eye-searing pink. Urtho shuddered as the fur turned into spines, like those of a hedgehog. Then Conn shook his body, and all those spines shot forward, piercing Urtho’s limbs with excruciating pain. The furniture grew tentacles, and the walls opened up into pulsing starscapes.

“I see you can’t answer,” the mercenary said silkily. “No matter.”

He turned to go-that is, his head turned. His body remained the way it had been, and began walking backward toward the door. With every step he took, bleeding wounds appeared in the floor, and it felt to Urtho as if the wounds were to his flesh. He whimpered again, and Conn’s head turned back.

“Oh, one more thing,” the mage said casually. “In case you might have worried about that little misborn gryphon you named so charmingly. Kechara. I offered her a nice bit of rabbit and she followed me out to the Emperor’s new lines. I decided to make certain that Shaiknam would keep his word, by ensuring that the Emperor knows my name, and what he owes to me. She’s my gift to Ma’ar to pave the way for my new rank and position. I expect to be a Duke at the very least.”

Kechara! Oh, GODS! His anguish translated into more whimpers, and streams of blood began to flow from his open hands. Conn laughed and turned to open the door, which warped and deformed as he touched it, becoming a blood clot lodged in an open wound. The walls throbbed in time with Conn’s laughter.

But the door opened before Conn, and there was someone out there-

Skan hurried after the frantic hertasi, talons clicking on the stone of the floor. “Aubri missing, the Sixth gone silent, why did you leave that lying bastard alone with Urtho?” Vikteren scolded the little lizard, as they ran toward the Strategy Room.

“He told me to get you!” the hertasi wailed, caught in a dilemma between what he had been ordered to do and what Vikteren thought he should have done. “I couldn’t get you and stay there at the same time!”

“Leave it, Vikteren,” Skan snapped. “It’s done-let’s just hope that-“

The young mage sprinted for the door and shoved it open in the surprised face of Conn Levas. The mercenary mage recovered quickly from his surprise, and backed up a pace when Skan loomed up behind Vikteren.

From his greater height, Skan could see right past Conn, and spotted Urtho, clearly in terrible pain, collapsed into a chair in the corner. Conn followed his glance, paled, and began babbling.

“Urtho-“ he said. “He said he wasn’t feeling well. The strain-“

But Skan’s hearing was better than a human’s, and the word Urtho was forcing through spittle-frothed lips was “-poison-“

Skan’s vision clouded with the red of rage; he saw Conn’s hands move, and he didn’t hesitate. The Black Gryphon lashed out with an open talon, and caught the mage across the throat, tearing it out in a spray of blood. His second blow, the backhanded return of the talon-strike, flung the mercenary’s body across the room to slam against the table with the wet crack of a snapping spine.

There the body of Conn Levas lay atop the tiny space of land that was still theirs, blood pumping down onto the map, flooding the representation of the Tower and the plain around it with sticky scarlet.

Vikteren had headed straight for Urtho, as Skan stalked in through the doorway with every feather and hair erect in battle-anger. “Poison,” the young mage said shortly, his face flushed and his voice tight with grief. “Miranda-thorns, very rare, no antidote. The bastard probably had enough in his pockets to hit us both, too; that’s what he was reaching for when you got him.”

The hertasi gasped and scrambled off, presumably to fetch help.

Skan only heard and heeded one thing. “No antidote?” he roared, so that Urtho whimpered and Vikteren winced. “What do you mean, no antidote!”

“Skan, I can’t change the facts,” Vikteren shouted back. “There’s no antidote! It’s something Ma’ar created as an assassination-tool, and we haven’t seen more than three victims since the war started! All we can do is buy him some time and counteract some of the effects.”

“Do it,” Skan snapped, spreading out his bloodstained claws over the body of his creator and friend, invoking every tiny bit of magery he had. He opened himself to Urtho, found the places in his mind that the miranda had muddled, bringing hallucinations and pain, and joined with Vikteren to help Urtho straighten the mental paths and banish those symptoms.

He fought with every bit of his grief and rage, every atom of energy. And still, it was not enough. He saw for himself that Vikteren was right. The poison replicated itself within Urtho’s body, spreading like some evil, sentient disease, and with every passing moment it destroyed a little more of Urtho’s life-force, corroding it away inexorably.

At last, his mage-energies exhausted, he dropped his outstretched claw and opened the eyes he did not realize he had closed.

Vikteren supported Urtho in his chair, and the face that looked up at Skan was sane again. “The evacuation-“ Urtho whispered harshly. “Get me-Healers. I have to hold on-“

Vikteren looked up into Skan’s puzzled face. “I think he’s keyed some kind of destructive spells into himself-if he leaves the Tower, the place is going to go unstable. And if you thought what happened with that Gate at Jerlag Pass was impressive-“

The young mage left the rest unsaid. Leaves the Tower, or dies, he means. And there must be two dozen permanent Gates here, not to mention the Tower itself and everything still in it. The destructive potential staggered him. Anyone still here would be obliterated by the result, pulverized to dust-----

The noise of running feet from the hallway made him turn sharply, ready to attack again, but these were friends. The hertasi had returned with Tamsin and three more senior Healers, who squeezed through the door as one. Not Cinnabar. He must have sent her through the Gate while he could.

“We know,” Tamsin said shortly, taking Vikter-en’s place at Urtho’s side. “We’ll buy him all the time we can.”

Skan did not move out of the way. The Healers shoved past him, ignoring him as if he had been an inconveniently placed piece of furniture.

He started to say something, but Vikteren motioned to him to remain silent. Tears trickled down the mage’s face, and his shoulders shook, but he didn’t produce so much as a stifled sob to distract the Healers from their work.

Skan himself shook from beak to talons with the effort of repressing a keen of grief. He closed his eyes and clamped his beak shut, flexing his talons into the wood of the floor, feeling it splinter beneath them, and wishing he could kill Conn Levas a hundred more times.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, startling him, making him jump. His eyes snapped open and focused on Tamsin’s face, not more than a finger away from his beak.

“We’ve done all anyone can,” the Healer said, in a voice gone flat and dull with sorrow and exhaustion. “He needs to tell you something.”

The four Healers staggered out the door, holding each other in pairs and not once looking back. Vikteren still stood beside Urtho’s chair, tears falling steadily down his cheeks and dropping onto the breast of his tunic.

“Get all the gryphons you can find,” one of the Healers told the hertasi who waited, trembling, beside the door. “He’s going to try to get everything open that he can before the end, and he wants them to take all they can carry.”

The hertasi looked up at the Healer for a moment, too grief-stricken to reply. The man spoke again. “Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants,” he choked out. “Urtho said that.” And at that the hertasi ran to carry out the orders.

“Skan-there’s a weapon.” Urtho’s voice was the merest whisper, but his words were clear enough. “Never meant to use it, but-now, Ma’ar is coming. Help me-weapons room.”

Vikteren helped him to his feet and got under one shoulder, while Skan supported him on the other side. They both knew where the weapons room was, and that it was locked, to be unsealed by Urtho’s presence alone. They carried him across the Strategy Room and to the door across the hallway; Urtho had no more strength than a newborn kitten. He fell against the door to the weapons room to open it, and directed them both to a box on a stand in the far corner of the room.

“It’s-like the box I gave Zhaneel. But bigger. Got one on the Tower roof. Dissolves the bonds-of spells. Take it to Ma’ar when you can, trigger it. Same thing that happened at Jerlag.” Urtho did not look at Skan; the gryphon had the feeling that perhaps he couldn’t bear to. “Made it for gryphons. Stick your talons-in the holes. All at once.”

Skan saw then that what he had taken for decorative perforations in the side were actually holes made to fit a gryphon’s talons, in a pattern of two on each side to fit the two-forward, two back-curved talons of the foreclaws.

“You have-a count of a hundred-to get away,” Urtho finished. “Better have-a Gate handy. And closed fast.”

The Mage of Silence tried to smile, and coughed instead. “Go!” he whispered fiercely, when the coughing fit was over. “Go. Get Ma’ar later. Survive now.”

Skan lifted the box from its stand, and saw that it had a carry-strap meant to go around the neck. He pulled the strap over his head, awkwardly, and turned back to the Mage.

Urtho’s eyes were clouded with pain, and his lips formed the word, “Go.”

Beak clamped down on the death-keen, Skan backed out of the room. But before he left, he saw Vikteren helping Urtho to the next door to be unlocked.

And the first of the combat-gryphons arrived, to carry away what he could.

Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants. Unable to hold it back any longer, Skan fled down the hallway and into the sunset, his death-keen echoing through the Tower as he ran.

Winterhart flung books and packages through the Gate whenever there wasn’t someone actually traversing it, from the pile that formed as the gryphons brought them to her, her arms and back one long pulled muscle. There would be some time after Urtho succumbed before everything went dangerously unstable. They should all have time to get out.

All but Urtho. . . .

Her eyes stung with tears, but she would mourn him later, when they were all, temporarily at least, safe.

Somewhere on the other side of this Gate was another Trondi’irn, pitching packages through the Gate to k’Leshya. The farther away this dangerous knowledge went, the better off they would all be. She did not bother to think about how they would continue this war, or even if they would be able to regroup. The important thing now was simply to escape, to live, and to worry about the rest later.

Other gryphons, too exhausted to be of any use, staggered up to and through the Gate while she paused in her labor. Humans and hertasi, tervardi and kyree and dyheli also presented themselves for passage, burdened with everything they could carry. There were fewer of them now than there had been; as combatants staggered in from the field, they grabbed what they could and headed for their evacuation-Gates, and by now virtually everyone who could make it back, had.

That left only the few faithful, like her and Amberdrake, who would stay until the bitter end to help save as much as they could from the wreckage.

She still did not know why Urtho was reportedly dying, although she trusted the news. It could not have been something simple like heart failure, or the Healers would be able to save him. Had Ma’ar somehow penetrated their defenses with a mage-attack?

Another pair of exhausted gryphons and a pack of mud-stained kyree staggered up to the Gate, and she stopped long enough to let them pass. But before she could pick up another package from the pile, someone else appeared, a human this time. But he headed for her, and not the Gate, and it took her a moment to recognize Amberdrake.

His face was absolutely blank with shock, and he was as pale as snow. She leapt for him as he stumbled and started to fall, catching him and holding him upright.

“What-“ she began.

“I just saw Skan,” he replied dully. “I just said good-bye to him.”

Something in the way he phrased that made her freeze. Good-bye? As in-permanently?

“We have to get Zhaneel out of here, now, to k’Leshya,” he continued numbly. “We can’t let her find out Skan is gone, or she’ll try to follow him. Urtho gave him a weapon, and told him to use it to stop Ma’ar. Skan is determined that Urtho meant him to do it now.”

Winterhart realized that she was clutching her hand in her hair at the side of her head only when it began to hurt. She let go slowly. “Couldn’t you stop him?” she cried involuntarily.

“I tried. He wouldn’t listen.” Amberdrake stared at her, eyes blank and blind. “He told me that Shaiknam, Garber, and Conn Levas went over to the enemy.”

A cold ring of terror constricted her throat, cutting off her gasp. “But-“

“He said he caught Conn Levas right after he’d poisoned Urtho with miranda thorns, and he tore the traitor’s throat out. By then it was too late; there was nothing they could do for Urtho but buy him time.” She sensed his pain as if it were her own-if she wanted to mourn for Urtho, he would have ten times the grief to deal with-and ten times that for Skan.

“I’ll-wait, there she is.” Zhaneel came hurrying up with a bundle of books in her beak and another clutched to her chest, running on three legs with her wings spread to help her balance.

Winterhart grabbed the edge of her wing before she could put her burden down. “Zhaneel!” she cried, “I need someone on the k’Leshya side to make certain all this is carried as far away from the Gate as possible. We don’t know how unstable these things are-“

Zhaneel nodded and darted through the Gate without waiting for further explanation. “You go after her,” Winterhart ordered. “I’ll follow you as soon as I get the last of this stuff across.”

At least she had something to do. Something to keep her from thinking.

“Are you all right?” Amberdrake asked suddenly, a little life coming into his eyes. She knew what he meant.

Conn is dead. Conn is a traitor, and he’s dead. She paused and collected herself, examined her heart.

“It’s best that Skan took care of the problem,” she said firmly, looking deeply into Amberdrake’s eyes, so that he would know she meant what she said. “If he hadn’t-I’d have done so, but with less elegance. Myself.”

Beneath all the pain, all the grief, she saw a moment of relief. It was enough for now. She shoved him gently toward the Gate.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” she said. “Take care of her.” He took a last, long look at the Tower, then turned and stumbled blindly across the threshold.

She picked up another package as soon as he was clear, and pitched it across.

Skan knew exactly who he was looking for-the Kaled’a’in Adept, Snowstar, the person Urtho himself had appointed as the chief of all the mages. He knew Snowstar, knew that the man was truly second only to Urtho in knowledge and ability, and knew one other, crucial fact.

Snowstar had been working with Urtho long before the King collapsed. Snowstar was one of the mages that Urtho had with him when Cinnabar called them all to the Palace that terrible morning.

Snowstar knew the Palace as well as Skan did. Which meant that Snowstar, unlike many of the other mages, could build a Gate there.

And Ma’ar was at the Palace.

After three false tries, he located Snowstar at the Tower stables, turning away from the last empty stall. An odd place for a mage perhaps, unless the mage was Kaled’a’in, and the horses here were the precious warsteeds. Skan grinned savagely to himself; Snowstar had not expected an ambush-and doubtless intended to head straight for the Kaled’a’in Gate from here, hot on the heels of his beloved equines.

There would be a brief delay.

As he turned, Skan stood in the aisle between the stalls and spread his wings to block his way. The mage looked up at him blankly. “Skandranon? What-“

“I need a favor,” Skan said quietly, but with an edge to his voice. “And you don’t have a choice. I need a Gate to the old Palace, and I need it now.”

Snowstar’s eyes went wide and he shook his head with disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?” he cried, putting out his hands to shove Skan out of the way. “There’s no time for this kind of nonsense! We have to get out of here!”

“There is time and you will do this,” Skan hissed. “I have a prrresssent to deliver to Ma’ar. From Urtho.”

Snowstar blanched, and his eyes dropped to the box around Skan’s neck as if he had only just this moment noticed that it was there. Skan was gambling on a number of things. The Black Gryphon was known as Urtho’s confidant; Snowstar should assume that Urtho’s request was an order, and that it was not meant to be implemented at some far future date, but now. Snowstar knew very well what kind of shape Urtho was in; he would not risk a single precious moment by going to Urtho or sending a messenger to confirm what Skan had just told him. He might even assume that Urtho had ordered Skan to find Snowstar, knowing that the Adept would be one of the few at full strength and capable of building a Gate that far away.

Snowstar’s pupils widened and contracted, as all those thoughts-and likely, a few more-raced through his mind.

“Right,” he said then, still pale, but grimly determined. “I won’t Gate you into the Palace itself, if that is agreeable to you. I have no idea who or what Ma’ar has stationed where. I could Gate you into the servants’ quarters only to find out that he’s got it full of soldiers or traps. But there’s one place I know very well where you won’t find much opposition, and the little you find, I suspect you can silence.”

“The stables,” Skan breathed, amazed at Snowstar’s quick thinking.

“Exactly.” Snowstar shoved at Skan again, but this time to make some room to work, and Skan gladly moved over. “I’ll position the Gate to come out of the last stall in the back; it’s a big loose-box, partitioned off from the rest with floor-to-ceiling walls, and with no outside windows. We never put a horse in it unless it was one that was so sick it needed dark and quiet. No grooms are likely to change that.”

It sounded perfect, and Skan nodded. “Put it up, and bring it down once I’m through,” he said decisively. “Then get yourself out of here.”

“What about-“ Snowstar began, then saw the look in Skan’s eyes. The rage Skan held bottled up inside must have been blazing. Snowstar grew just a bit paler, then turned away, raised his hands, and began.

The Adept had had decades of practice to refine and hone his craft; the Gate went up with scarcely a ripple in mage-energies. Skan did not even wait to thank him; clutching his precious burden with one foreclaw, he dove through to the other side.

This is poorly planned, stupid gryphon, but there isn’t time. Urtho can’t die without knowing Ma’ar’s dead and gone. You don’t do helplessness well at all. And if you can’t save Urtho, you can still do something.

He landed, feet skidding a little in the straw, in the dark and empty loose-box. As Snowstar had guessed, it had not been used in so long that the straw covering the stone floor smelled musty and was full of dust. He suppressed a sneeze and moved cautiously to the door.

He listened carefully, all senses straining against the darkness.

Odd. Lots of voices, and the sound of something struggling. What did they have penned up in here, some kind of feral stallion?

“Are you sure that’s going to hold the beast?”

The voice was doubtful, and very frightened. “I tell you, orders or no orders, if that thing breaks free, don’t think I’m going to stand here and try to stop it!”

The crack of hand on flesh, and an exclamation of pain.

“You’ll do as you’re told, and like it, coward!” a second voice growled. “If I tell you to stand there and let the thing take your arm off, you’ll damned well do it!”

Not a stallion, then. A bull? Some new monster Ma’ar just dreamed up?

A muttered, sullen curse; the sound of spitting. Heavy boots, walking away. More struggles; chains rattling, muffled thuds, more mutters, a stream of ill-wishes directed against the second voice, his family, and all his progeny to come.

The thin, high wail of a young gryphon.

“Faaaather!”

A voice he knew! Kechara!

He pushed against the stall-door, and it swung wide while he stepped out and mantled. His eyes locked with those of one poor, spotty-faced groom clutching a pitchfork in one hand, a bloody rag held to his mouth with the other. The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He took one look at Skan, went pale as milk, and fainted dead away.

Skan stepped over him, and looked into the stall he’d been guarding.

There were two canvas-covered bundles there; one thrashing, one whimpering. The whimpering bundle was the smaller, and the whimpers were definitely in Kechara’s voice!

How did she-never mind. Conn Levas or Shaiknam, or both. Quickly, he squeezed into the stall, but he did not free the little one. Not yet. The larger bundle of the two also smelled of blood and of gryphon, and it was a scent that he thought he recognized.

“Hold still,” he whispered. “It’s Skan.”

The bundle stilled immediately. He took a moment to examine the situation.

Chains wrapped around the bundle, but they were not fastened to the stall itself. If he could get the gryphon inside to bend a little, he might be able to slip one loop off, and that would give him enough slack to undo the whole thing without having to unlock it.

“Can you bend this way?” he whispered harshly, pushing down on what he thought was the back of the gryphon’s head. It must have been; the place bent over in response to his pressure, and he was able to work the loop of chain off as he had hoped. Once he had the slack he needed, two more loops followed, and he worked the entire chain down, with the squirming assistance of the gryphon inside.

Now he could slit the canvas bag and see if the contents were who he thought it was. He ripped open the canvas with a slash of a talon, and a head popped out-a head covered in an enormous version of a falcon’s hood, with the beak tied firmly shut.

He pulled off the bindings, and the beak opened.

“Damn it, Skan,” Aubri croaked, in a whisper no louder than his had been. “You took your own sweet time getting here!”

It took both of them to convince Kechara that she had to be quiet, but for once Ma’ar’s men had done them all a favor. They had cut off all the primaries on both her wings and Aubri’s, and in Kechara’s case, that meant she wasn’t tripping over her own awkward wings.

Kechara wasn’t at all clear on how she had gotten there, but the picture in her mind, projected strongly, was of a blurred Conn Levas offering something that smelled lovely. Skan assured her that he had “gone away” and that Skan had made certain he wouldn’t come back.

Not in this lifetime, anyway.

Aubri was a lot clearer on what had happened to him, and kept his explanation down to a terse couple of sentences. He only wanted to know one thing.

“Urtho?” he asked, with a sideways glance to see if Kechara was listening.

Skan closed his eyes, letting his grief show for just the briefest of moments, and shook his head.

Aubri’s beak clamped shut, and when Skan opened his own eyes, the broadwing’s eyes were blazing as red with madness as any goshawk’s.

“I got Conn Levas,” Skan said, around the lump of rage and grief in his own throat. “This will take care of Ma’ar. If we can get it to him.” He tilted his head to one side. “I have to admit-I was told that I’d have a count of a hundred to get away, and then this thing will make Jerlag look like a campfire.” He shook his head. “If you can think of any way you can get yourself and Kechara out of range. . . .”

Aubri’s pupils dilated, and he produced a harsh bark of a laugh. “On clipped wings? I don’t think so. Besides, all I ever asked was to go down fighting. I’m sorry about the little one, but this is going to be clean, right?”

He nodded. “As clean as fire. And I can still send you both into the Light if all seems hopeless.”

As you’ve done too many times before-Urtho, why must we feel these burdens? Why?

“Well,” Aubri rumbled. “You need me. Bet we can even find a way Kechara’ll be useful. And if it gets Ma’ar-“ Aubri’s savage grin and the scrape of his talons on the stone told the rest. “And-ah, demonsblood, Skan, you always were the luckiest son of a vulture I ever saw. Your luck, you’ll find a way out for us. I’ll take my chances with you.”

Skan let out the breath he had been holding in. “Well,” he said lightly. “That was the hard part. Now the easy part.”

“Which is?” Aubri asked as Kechara gave a breathy squeal of glee and pounced on something. She stuffed it in her mouth and looked up innocently, the tail of a rat hanging out of one corner of her beak for a heartbeat, before she swallowed and it vanished.

Skan looked cautiously around the corner; the doors to the stable stood open wide, and the apparently-deserted stable-yard stretched between them and the Palace kitchens. “Oh, it’s nothing much,” he replied, offhandedly. “Just getting into the Palace and the throne room.”

The last Tower door had been opened; there were still books and devices here Urtho wished he could save, but the vital things had been carried off. He had persuaded Vikteren and the rest to leave. Now there was only the small matter of hanging on, living every possible second, for every second meant more time to ensure that all of his people who could, would reach safety.

The Tower echoed with the whisper of air through doors long locked, and the occasional thud of something falling, echoing through stone corridors suddenly more empty than imagination could bear. In all of his life, Urtho had never felt so alone.

He had never expected to die alone, much less like this. At least the mages and Healers had taken all the pain, blocked the hallucinations and the convulsions, and left him only with growing weakness.

He was so tired, so very, very tired. . . .

No! He had to fight it, to stay conscious, awake! Every heartbeat was vital!

All we have done, and all I have learned, and I cannot slow the progress of my own death by even a candlemark.

He had never thought much about revenge, but now he burned with longing for it. Revenge-no, I want to protect my people, my children! And when the Tower goes, I want it to be something more than the end, I want it to mean something, to accomplish some purpose! He had always hoped, if it came to that, he would be able to lure Ma’ar, or at least some chief mages of Ma’ar’s, into the Tower-turned-trap. He’d planned for that, all along; a desperate gambit that, if nothing else, would keep Ma’ar so busy cleaning up the damage that his children and his people would be able to get far beyond Ma’ar’s reach or ability to find.

Now, when he died, the Tower would die in an expanding ring of sound and light, and it would be no more than the most impressive funeral pyre the world had ever seen-

wait a moment.

Something stirred under the morass the poison had made of his mind. An idea, and a hope. Ma’ar cannot know that Conn Levas succeeded. What would happen if I challenged him?

There was a permanent Gate, a small one, big enough only for one human at a time, not more than a room away. It would take no effort at all to open it. A moment of clear thought, and it could be set for the Palace, the Throne Room. Urtho had used it to step directly from his own audience chamber into the King’s-an impressive bit of nonsense that never failed to leave foreigners gaping and a little frightened. That was how he had gotten to the Palace the night that Cinnabar had summoned him; he had opened a larger Gate elsewhere for Skan. He hadn’t been certain what the effect of trying to squeeze through a too-small Gate might be, and that had not been the moment to find out.

The odds are good that he’ll be in the Throne Room, waiting to hear from his army. What if I opened that Gate and challenged him to come over? A fierce and feral joy flooded him, and for the first time he understood how his gryphons felt at the kill. I open the Gate; he can’t fight me through the Gate, he has to come over. I close it. He can’t reopen it while I keep him busy, and by the time he gets his own Gate up, I’m dead. And so is he. If I were alive, I would never consider it-but I am dead already.

That terrible joy gave him the strength to rise to his feet, stagger into the next room, and take his place on his own, modest version of a throne. Hardly a throne at all, really, just a large, comfortable chair, raised off the floor on a platform about half a stair-step high. He had never seen any reason to build a dazzling audience chamber; everything in the small room was made of old, time-mellowed wood. On the few occasions that he had needed to impress someone, he’d transformed the whole place with illusions. Much cheaper, and much easier to clean.

He gasped with effort as he stumbled up onto the platform and lowered himself down into his throne. The exertion left him dizzy and disoriented for a moment; he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, there was a faint haze of rainbow around everything.

The hallucinations, or what’s left of them. I don’t have much time. If this doesn’t work-at least I tried. And Skan can make his own try, someday. That in itself comforted him, a little. Skan would get to safety, plot and plan with the sharpest minds of the Kaled’a’in, and make his own attempt. Ma’ar had not, and would not, win. Not while there was a single gryphon or Kaled’a’in left to oppose him.

He stared fixedly at the ornamental arch across the room from him, an arch built right into the wall, that seemed only to frame a shallow, purposeless nook. He wrapped his mind and his fading powers around the mage-energies woven into wood and stone beneath, and twisted.

Within the frame of the arch, the blank wall writhed, then turned into a swirling haze of colors, like oil on water, for just the barest instant.

Then the colors darkened, steadied-and Urtho looked across the leagues into the Throne Room of the Palace of High King Leodhan, a massive room constructed of six different kinds and colors of the rarest marbles, a place that seemed vast even when it was packed full of courtiers. Now it held only one man, but that man had presence enough to fill it.

Ma’ar stared fixedly at the Gate that had suddenly opened up in his Throne Room, a Gate he clearly had no notion ever existed. He had not been born a handsome man, but over the years he had sculpted his body into the image of a young god. His square-jawed face, with precisely chiseled cheekbones and sensuous mouth, framed with a mane of hair of dark copper, topped a body that would be the envy of any warrior in his ranks. All that remained of the old Ma’ar were the eyes; small, shrewd, and of an odd yellow-green.

“Kiyamvir Ma’ar,” Urtho said genially. “It has been a very long time.”

Ma’ar recovered his poise much more quickly than Urtho would have credited him for. “Urtho.” He leaned back in his throne, a real throne, much more impressive than the alabaster bench the King had used. This one might not be solid gold, but it certainly looked as though it was, and the single red-black ruby over Ma’ar’s head, carved in the shape of the head of a snarling cat, was twice the size of the largest such stone Urtho had ever seen. “Have you called on me to offer your surrender?”

Urtho smiled, gently. “Not at all,” he countered. “I recall that you used to enjoy a gamble. I am offering you just that.”

Ma’ar barked his laughter. “You? And what have you to offer me that I cannot take?”

Urtho waved, a gesture that made him dizzy again. “Why, this. I’m sure you realize that I’ve had as much carried away as I could-but I am sure you also realize that there is far more than could ever be carried away. I’m sure you also realize that what I did at Jerlag, I can do here.”

Ma’ar’s face darkened, and his lips formed a soundless snarl.

“However-“ Urtho held up a finger to forestall any reply. “I’m proposing a challenge. The prize-the Tower and everything that’s left. If you kill me, I obviously cannot trigger the destructive spells.” And let’s hope he hasn’t figured out, as Conn Levas did, that it isn’t a spell that does the destruction, it’s the lack of one. “You have the Tower and everything you want. If, on the other hand, I kill you-well, I suspect that your underlings will immediately begin fighting among themselves, and leave me and mine alone. The bickering is inevitable, and I will have protected my own.”

Ma’ar frowned, but he was obviously intrigued. “You underestimate what I have done here, Urtho. I took a weak land, torn apart by internal quarreling and wrecked by the greed of shortsighted idiots who thought no further than their own fat profits. I forged it into an Empire that will live long beyond me, and I intend to live a very long time! What makes you think I would risk all that for your stupid wager?”

Urtho leaned forward in his chair, ignoring another wave of dizziness, and spoke two words. “Knowledge. Power.”

Then he settled back, and closed his eyes. “Think about it, Kiyamvir Ma’ar. You win, or I do. All the knowledge, and all the power. I can afford to wait, but feel as though I should retire. Your army is on the way, and I prefer to reset this Gate to-somewhere else, somewhere very warm, and leave your army with an unpleasant surprise.”

He slitted open his lids just a little, and saw to his satisfaction that Ma’ar was staring at the Gate, chewing his lip in vexation.

He’s going to do it!

“I always said you were the luckiest-“ Aubri muttered, before Skan hushed him.

“It’s not luck,” he muttered back. “It’s memory. Cinnabar used to play with the Princes, and she showed me all the secret passages. I took a chance that Ma’ar wouldn’t have found them all, and that I could take care of the traps he put in the ones he did find.”

He didn’t like to think of how Cinnabar had shown him all the secret passages; she’d impressed them directly into his mind, and it hadn’t been a pleasant experience. Nor had the circumstances been pleasant. She’d put him in charge of searching the passages for that damned dyrstaf, because he was the only mage there she could do that to.

She took the human-sized passages, and I took the ones big enough for a gryphon. . . .

He shook off the memory; it didn’t matter, anyway. What mattered was how many guards Kiyamvir Ma’ar had with him in that Throne Room.

Please, please, please, O Lady of the Kaled’a’in, make him so arrogant that he does without guards entirely! Please. . . . The gryphons didn’t have a deity as such, and this was the first time he’d ever felt the urgent need to call on one. The gryphons had only had Urtho and themselves.

And when this is over-take Kechara somewhere safe and warm, and bring Urtho to her-and keep Amberdrake and Zhaneel happy.

There were no peepholes in this passage, and no human would have been able to hear what was going on in the Throne Room. Anyone using the entrance here would have to do so blindly, trusting that there was no one there.

Unless that someone was a gryphon.

He closed his eyes, and concentrated, becoming nothing in his mind but a pair of broad, tufted ears, listening. . . .

He’s talking to someone? Demonsblood! It’s now or never!

“Go!” he hissed at Aubri. The broadwing hit the release on the doorway, and rammed it with his shoulder, tumbling through as the panel gave way. Skan leapt his prone body and skidded to a halt on the slick marble, Kechara romping puppylike behind him.

Ma’ar swung around to stare at the open panel, and now faced away from-

Urtho? Oh, Star-Eyed Lady, is that a Gate?

What else could it be, when Urtho lay back in a chair framed by an archway, with a faint shimmering of energy across the portal?

Skan did not even stop to think about his incredible, unbelievable good fortune; did not stop to think about the poleaxed expression on Urtho’s weary face. “Aubri!” he screeched, “Get Kechara across now.”

But Aubri didn’t have to do anything. Kechara spotted Urtho on her own, screamed, “Father!” in a joyful, shrill voice, and shot across the intervening space like an arrow, squeezing through the Gate as if she’d been greased.

Aubri followed-and stuck.

Skan reached for the box, while Ma’ar stared at all of them as if he thought they were some kind of hallucination. Finally he spoke.

“All of this was to save two gryphons?”

The Black Gryphon held the weapon before him and slid his foreclaws home, and triggered the box.

“No. To save all of us.”

He ducked out of the carry-strap, and slung the whole thing across the floor at Ma’ar, who dodged in purest reflex. But dodging didn’t help; the box’s strap caught his feet and tripped him. The fall knocked the breath out of him, and delayed any reaction he might have for a crucial moment.

Ma’ar clutched at the box, which glowed and sparked when his hands touched it. His expression changed from one of indignation to one of surprise and then-fear. Then insane anger. He stood, trembling with rage, and kicked the box aside. It clattered on the marble floor to rest by the throne.

“You think this is it?” he screamed. “This toy of Urtho’s is supposed to kill me, gryphon? Watch.”

The Emperor drew a glittering silver knife-and with both hands, drove it into his own chest.

His face wrenched into a maniacal grin and he locked his eyes on Skandranon’s. As blood streamed down his sumptuous clothing, the grin grew wider.

“You see, I know some things you don’t. I have won! I will live forever! And I will hate you forever-all of Urtho’s people, all your children, and their children, and I will hunt you all down. Do you hear?”

Skandranon Rashkae! Will you wake up? Ma’ar is playing for time! He’ll keep you occupied with his little spectacle until the box goes and takes you with it!

The gryphon snapped himself awake from Ma’ar’s mesmerizing speech. Ma’ar withdrew the dagger from his chest; blood blossomed anew and dripped to the floor. Without saying anything else, the Emperor’s face went ashen, and he fixed his gaze of madness on Skandranon. With both hands, he held the dagger’s point to his throat, behind the chin-and in one swift movement, thrust the long dagger upward.

Skandranon was running toward the Gate before Ma’ar fell. Behind him, over the clatter of his own talons, he could hear the dagger’s pommel strike chips from the stone floor, muffled only by the sound of the body. The Black Gryphon hurtled to the Gate at full speed; Aubri was still wedged there, and if this didn’t work, they were both doomed.

He hit Aubri from behind with all of his weight.

With a scream of pain from two throats, they ripped through, leaving behind feathers and a little skin, and the Gate came down so quickly that it took off the end of Skan’s tail.

Kechara was already cuddling in Urtho’s lap, unable to understand why her Father looked so sick. Skan picked himself up off the floor and limped over to the mage, who looked up with his eyes full of tears.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” he whispered hoarsely. “What did you think you were doing? I meant you to save that weapon-“

But before Skan could reply, he shook his head, carefully, as if any movement pained him. “Never mind. You are the salvation of everyone, you brave, vain gryphon. Everyone we saved will be safe for the rest of their lives. I have never been so proud of any creature in my life, and never felt so unworthy of you.”

Skan opened his beak, trying to say something wonderful, but all he could manage was a broken, “Father-I love you.”

Urtho raised one trembling hand, and Skan moved his head so that the mage could place it there.

“Son,” he said, very softly. “Son of all of the best things in me. I love you.”

Skan’s throat closed, as Urtho took his hand away, and he was unable to say anything more.

Kechara looked at them both with bewildered eyes. “Father?” she said timidly to Urtho.

“Father has to go away, Kechara,” Urtho said, gently. “Skan will be your Father for a while, do you understand? It may be for a long time, but Skan will be your Father, and when the bad men who hurt you are all gone, you can come join me.”

She nodded, clearly unhappy, but her one taste of the “bad men” had been enough. She gazed up at Urtho in supreme confidence that he could and would deal with the “bad men,” and nibbled his fingers in a caress.

Aubri limped over to both of them. “ ‘Scuse me, Urtho?” he asked humbly. “Can that Gate go somewhere else?”

Urtho closed his eyes, then opened them with visible effort.

“I can try,” he said.

Amberdrake thought that he was prepared for the inevitable, but when the great flash of light in the East turned night into full day for one long, horrible moment, he realized that he was not ready. He had accepted the loss of Skan, of Urtho, of everything he had known with his mind, but not his heart. The entire world turned inside out for a fraction of a heartbeat; as if he had crossed a Gate, the universe shook and trembled, his vision blurred-but there was no Gate, it was all in himself.

Then everything was normal again. The night sky returned, spangled with stars, but wreathed in the East with ever-expanding multi-colored rings of light, and a cool breeze brought the scents of crushed grass and dust.

Normal-except all was gone.

“No!” he cried out, one voice of fruitless denial among a multitude. “Nooooooo-“

He started to fall to his knees-a terrible moaning burst from his chest, and tears etched their way down his face in long trails of pain. Urtho-Skan-

Hands caught him and supported him; Winterhart. But another set of hands took his shoulders and shook them.

“Dammit, man, no one can fall apart yet!” Vikteren snarled at him, tears of his own leaving trails down his dusty face. “We aren’t safe! Didn’t you feel what happened, back there? When the Tower went up, something more happened than even Urtho thought! Gods only know what’s going to happen now, we need to get under shields.”

“But-“ he protested. “But-“

“Just don’t fall apart on me. People are watching you! You can collapse after I get the shields organized.” Vikteren punctuated every word with another shake of his shoulders, and Amberdrake finally nodded weakly. Vikteren let him go, and he got a wavering grip on his emotions, turning his face into the serene mask of the kestra’chern, although deep within, pain was eating him alive.

Vikteren turned away from him, and waved his arms frantically over his head. “Listen!” he shouted, over the keens, the weeping. “Everybody! This-the trap didn’t do what we thought, all right? We don’t know how much is left of Ma’ar’s forces, we don’t know how far away is safe, we don’t know who or how many of the rest survived. All we do know is that what happened was worse than we thought, and we have a couple of hours to get ready for it! It’s going to be a-we’ll have to call it a mage-storm, I guess. I can’t tell you how bad. Just listen, I need all the mages over here with me, no matter how drained you are, and the rest of you, start getting things tied down, like for a really bad storm, the worst you’ve ever seen!”

Somehow the desperation in his words penetrated; hertasi carried the bad news to the rest of the camp, to those who had been too far away to hear him. Mages pushed their way through the crowd to reach his side; the others stopped milling and started acting in a purposeful manner, glancing at the slowly-expanding rings of light with a new respect and no little fear.

Winterhart went looking for her gryphons; her first duty was to them. Amberdrake let her go, then stumbled through the darkness to the small floating barge that held his own belongings.

But once there-it all left him. There was nothing left in him but the dull ache of grief. He couldn’t even bring himself to care what might happen next.

He sat down on the side of the barge, and his hand fell on the feather he still had tied to his belt. Zhaneel’s feather.

How would he tell her? She still didn’t know___

There’s nothing left, nothing left for any of us.

He didn’t even hear them come up beside him, he was so lost in despair so dark that not even tears served to relieve it. One moment he was alone; the next, Zhaneel sat beside him, and Winterhart took a place next to him on the edge of the barge.

“When he did not follow, I guessed,” Zhaneel said, her voice no more than a whisper, and although he had not thought that his grief could grow any greater, it threatened to swallow him now.

The tears choked his breath and stole his sight, and left him nothing.

:Nothing?: said a voice in his mind, as a hand closed over his.

“Nothing?” said Zhaneel aloud. “Are we nothing?”

And Amberdrake sensed the two of them joining, reaching into his heart to Heal it, reaching to bring him out of the darkness. The gryfalcon touched one talon to the feather he still held.

“Will you not redeem this now, my friend, my brother?” she asked softly. “We need each other so much.”

“And the rest of them need you,” Winterhart added. “I’ve heard you used to ask, ‘who Heals the Healer’-and we have at least one answer for you.”

“Those he Healed,” Zhaneel said. “Giving back what he gave.”

Blindly, he reached for them; they reached back as he held tightly to feathered shoulder and human and shook with sobs that finally brought some release.

The first flood of tears was over, for the moment at least, when he heard someone snouting his name.

“Amberdrake!” It sounded like Vikteren. “Amberdrake! The Gate! It’s opening again!”

The what? He stumbled to his feet, and ran back to the site of the old Gate-terminus, a roughly-made arch of stone. Sure enough, there was a shimmer of energy there, energy that fluxed and crackled and made him a little sick to look at.

“What is it?” he asked, as Vikteren ran across the clearing to him.

“I don’t know-can’t be Ma’ar-“ The energy inside the Gate surged again. “Whatever it is, whoever, it’s been affected by the mage-blast.” He turned hopeful eyes on Amberdrake. “You don’t suppose it’s Skan, do you?”

Amberdrake only shook his head numbly, heart in mouth. The energies built a third time; the mouth of the Gate turned a blinding white-

And Kechara tumbled through, squalling with fear. Winterhart and Zhaneel both cried out and ran to her to comfort her, but before they could reach her side, the Gate flared whitely a second time, and Aubri leapt across the threshold, smelling of burned fur and feathers, to land in an exhausted heap.

“Skan!” the broadwing screeched, turning his head blindly back toward the Gate. “Skan! He’s still in there!”

The Gate fluxed-and collapsed in on itself, slowly, taking the stones of the arch with it. The entire structure began to fall as if in a dream.

“No!” Vikteren screamed.

Amberdrake was not certain what the young mage thought he was doing; he was only supposed to be of Master rank, and Amberdrake had always been told that only Adepts could build Gates. But Vikteren reached out his hands, in a clutching, clawlike motion, and Amberdrake felt the energies pouring from him into the collapsing Gate, seizing it-and somehow, holding it steady!

Amberdrake sensed Vikteren faltering, and added his own heart’s strength to the young mage’s-

and felt Winterhart join him, and Zhaneel-

The Gate flared a third and final time, but this time it was so bright that Amberdrake cried out in pain, blinded.

Vikteren cried out too, but in triumph.

Amberdrake’s vision cleared after much blinking and eye-rubbing, and lying before them was Skandranon-shocked senseless, and no longer as he-was. The elegant black form they had known was thinner and bleached to snow-white, but it was unmistakably Skandranon.

The Gate and Vikteren collapsed together.

Then there was no time to think of anything, as the Eastern horizon erupted with fire-again. And for some reason Amberdrake could not understand, he could feel the death, far away, of the Mage of Silence, content that his people, including those he loved most, were safe at last.

They had just enough time-barely-to establish their shields before the double mage-storm hit. The worst effects lasted from before dawn to sunset. But their preparations held, and they all emerged from shelter to find a blood-red sun sinking over a deceptively normal landscape.

Normal-until you noticed the places where trees had been flattened; where strange little energy-fields danced over warped and twisted cairns of half-melted rocks. Normal-until night fell, and did not bring darkness, but an odd half-light, full of wisps of glowing fog and dancing balls of luminescence.

“We can’t stay here,” Winterhart said wearily as she returned to Amberdrake’s hastily-pitched tent. It was the only one big enough to hold four gryphons-Skan and Aubri, and Zhaneel and Kechara, the former two because of their injuries, and the latter because they would not leave Skan’s moon-white form.

“I’d assumed that. We’ll have to pack up and move West, I suppose.” He looked up at her and smiled, then turned his watchful gaze back down to the slumbering Skandranon. “I don’t mind, if you don’t.”

“Well, I wish we knew how many of the others survived,” she sighed. “But the mages can’t get anything through this-whatever it is. Magical noise and smoke. No scrying, no mage-messages, and we don’t want to risk the poor little messenger-birds. The tervardi don’t want to scout, the kyree are as scared as we are, the hertasi are traumatized, and the gryphons don’t trust the winds. We’ll have to go West and assume any others are doing whatever they have to.”

“So we’re back to ordinary, human senses.” He reached out for her, caught her hand, and drew her down beside him. “Not so bad, when you come to think about it.”

“I have no complaints.” She leaned her head on his shoulder, and stroked one ice-white wing-feather of the still-shocky Skandranon. “Except one.”

“Oh?” he replied. She probably wishes we could stay here long enough to rest-but at least we know there won’t be anyone following us-

“This-“ she pointed to Skandranon, curled around Zhaneel like a carving of the purest alabaster, “-is going to make him twice as vain as he was!”

“Of course it will,” came a sleepy rumble. A pale, sky-blue eye opened and winked slyly. “And deservedly so.”

Amberdrake smiled and held his beloved. No matter what tears were shed or what trials were faced, some things would stay the same. There would always be day and night, stars and sky, hope and rest. There would always be love, always compassion, and there would always be Skandranon. And forever, in the hearts of all the Clans, there would be Urtho-and for his memory, a moment of silence.