Vree stayed calm on Darkwind’s shoulder after they passed the protections at the entrance to the Vale, even though until recently the bondbird had not wanted to enter the Vale itself. The rogue energies of the Heartstone had disturbed Vree badly, and the bondbirds of every other scout as well, but the additional shielding on the Stone seemed to be having some beneficial effect.
:Are you all right?: he asked Vree, just to be sure. :We can turn around and leave if you want; I can hold the scouts’ meeting at the ekele just as well as here. The mages will just have to climb a rope ladder instead of a staircase, and they‘II all have to squeeze into my rooms. I think it would bear their weight.:
Vree ducked his head a little, and yawned. :Fine. Happy,: he replied sleepily. Then, anxiously, :Food soon?:
:Soon,: he assured the bird. :Quite soon. As soon as we get to the meeting.: The other scouts would have hungry birds as well; the hertasi would have provided a selection of whole game birds and small mammals for the raptors, along with some kind of meal for the birds’ bondmates.
For the first time in a very long time, this would be a meeting of day-watch scouts and scout-mages. Stormcloud would hold a similar meeting for those on night-watch. Yesterday Darkwind had asked them to gather because there was something important to be addressed. He hadn’t specified what that was.
He had been the scouts’ representative to the k’Sheyna Council during the most divisive period in their history - the period when Starblade, as directed by Momelithe Falconsbane, was creating rifts between mages and nonmages, to weaken the Clan and make it easier for Falconsbane to destroy them. Darkwind had been willing to serve then, knowing that no one else had the edge he did, having his own father as chief of the Council. It was a bitter truth that his advantage then was not in currying favor, but knowing the other’s weaknesses. He had sometimes been able to manipulate his father. Equally painful to recall was the fact that Starblade had done the same to him.
But now that he was devoting more time to mage-craft, he had less time to spend elsewhere. The scouts were his friends and charges, and with his attentions divided so, they could conceivably suffer for it.
It was time for a change. Now the question was whether or not he could get the others to agree with him. In general the kind of person who became a successful scout was not the kind who enjoyed being in a position of authority, or who relished dealing with those who were.
The best place for the gathering was the central clearing that had been used for the celebration, but that was closer to the Heartstone than Darkwind liked, shielding or no shielding. So he had asked them all to gather in the smaller clearing beneath the tallest tree in the Vale; the one that the scouts had used for dancing.
When he arrived, he found a near replication of the celebration, except that there was no music or dancing, the clothing was more subdued, and the conversation level was considerably quieter. Birds stood on portable perches, the exposed roots of trees, or in the branches, most of them with talons firmly in their dinner, the rest eyeing the mound of fur and feathers with a view to selecting something choice. Brighter mage-lights than those conjured for the celebration hung up in the branches, illuminating everything below with a clear yellow light, sunlike but for its intensity. Tayledras sprawled all over the clearing, eating, talking, or both. Darkwind did a quick mental tally and came up a few names short, as Vree yearned toward the heap of “dinner,” making little plaintive chirping noises in the back of his throat.
:Hungry!: he urged his bondmate, as Darkwind tried not to laugh at the ridiculous sounds he made. The uninitiated were often very surprised at the calls of raptorial birds; most of them, other than the defiant screams of battle and challenge, were very unimpressive chirps, clucks, and squeals. One species, the Harshawk, even croaked, sounding very like a duck with a throat condition. And owls hissed; not the kinds of things one expected to hear from the fierce hunters of the sky.
But silly sounds notwithstanding, Vree’s hunger was very real and quite intense, and the bondbird had more than earned his dinner. Darkwind took him on the gauntlet and tossed him into the air, to give him a little height. Vree gave two great beats of his wings, reaching the lowest of the branches, then dove straight down at the pile, shouldering aside lesser and less-famished birds to get at a fat, choice duck. One of the Harshawks quacked indignantly as the tasty morsel was snatched right from under his talons, and two of the owls hissed angrily at being shouldered aside, but Vree ignored them all. The gyre heaved himself and his prize up into the air, and lumbered off to a nearby branch, where he mantled both wings over it and tore into it with his sharp, fiercely hooked beak.
“Here - ” Shadowstar shoved sliced meat and bread at Darkwind, and snatched back her fingers, laughing, when he grabbed for it as if he were a hungry forestgyre himself. “Heyla! Sharpset, are we? In yarak?”
“Something like,” he admitted, “It’s been a long day, with a mage-duel at the end of it.” He took a healthy bite of the food, and bolted it, suddenly realizing just how hungry he was. “Where are Summerstar and Lightwing? And - ah - ” it took him a moment to remember the names of the mages that had been assigned to help the two scouts.
Shadowstar beat him to it. “Songlight and Winddance. Gone to get injuries tended again; they ran into Change-wolves. Nothing serious.”
A tentative Mindtouch from an unfamiliar source reassured him. :Songlight here. We are mostly soaking bruises, Darkwind. I will stay in Mindtouch and relay to the others, if you like.:
:Please,: he replied, taking a seat where he could see the others. :This shouldn’t take long.:
He took out his dagger and rapped the hilt of it on the side of the tree; it rang hollowly, and got him instant attention and instant silence.
“I hope that most of you have guessed why I asked for these meetings - ” he began.
Shadowstar stood up, interrupting him. “We pretty much figured it out,” she said dryly, as the others nodded. “We were talking it all over before you got here. And we’re all agreed that while we don’t want to lose you as our leader, you deserve a rest, and you aren’t going to get one at the rate you’re going.”
Nods all around confirmed her words, and Darkwind felt an irrational surge of relief - both that the scouts still wanted him as leader, and that they were willing to let him go.
“Have any of you got a candidate in mind?” he asked. Surprisingly, it was one of the mages who answered him.
“Winterlight,” the young man said promptly. “He did it before you had the position, and now that we aren’t at each others’ throats, he says he would be willing to take it again.”
Darkwind turned to his old friend, one of the oldest scouts in the Clan, raising an eyebrow inquisitively. Winterlight coughed and half-smiled. “I know the job,” he answered, confirming the mage’s words. “And since it’s no longer the trial that it was - “
Darkwind grinned openly. “Then as far as I am concerned, the position is yours, my friend - if the rest agree, that is.”
He was going to open the meeting up to discussions, but the others forestalled him with their unanimous assent. Even the bondbirds seemed pleased with the choice. It was a good one; although he was not a mage, Winterlight seldom dyed his hair, and wore it long, as a mage did. So he looked like a mage, and he was a contemporary of Starblade and Iceshadow, which made him doubly acceptable to the Elders of the Council.
“As long as the night-watch agrees, then, it’s yours,” he told Winterlight happily. “And if they come up with a different candidate, you’ll have to deal with that yourself.”
“If they come up with a different candidate, we’ll split the duties,” Winterlight replied immediately. “I’ve had my fill of dissension.”
Darkwind shrugged. “That’s fine with me,” he responded.
Winterlight smiled. “It wasn’t just a rest that the youngsters decided you need,” he said, in a confidential whisper. “I overheard one of them saying that you’ve been living like a sworn celibate and you needed to take that pretty Outlander off to a bower and - ”
The rest of Winterlight’s whispered suggestion made Darkwind flush so hard he was afraid he was glowing.
The rest of the scouts howled with laughter.
Winterlight just smiled enigmatically and asked if Darkwind needed to borrow any feathers. Darkwind deliberately turned his attention first to Vree to make sure the gyre was all right, then to his food, both to cover his confusion. When he looked beside him again, Winterlight was gone -
- but the Shin’a’in shaman Kethra had taken his place.
Oh, my. I wonder what I owe this pleasure to.
He brushed invisible crumbs from his tunic, selfconsciously. Kethra was another source of confusion entirely for him, and not just because she was his father’s lover.
Although that was a part of it -
“Is Father well?” he asked her, quickly.
She nodded, her bright green eyes as cool and unreadable as a falcon’s, and smoothed her long black hair in back of her ears. She wore a birdfetish necklace that sparkled in the magelight, and a braided length of cord adorned with feathers hung from her left temple.
“He is relatively well,” she told him, as the assembled scouts collected their birds as if at an unspoken signal, and drifted not-too-casually off, back to their respective ekeles. There wasn’t any people-food left, and the few carcasses that remained were taken by those who lived outside the Vale.
Kethra, however, was not leaving. “There are some things I need to discuss with you before I proceed to the next steps with him. They concern you, and your relationship to him.”
“What about it?” he asked, more brusquely than he intended. Suddenly it seemed as if everyone in k’Sheyna was interested in his private life! Am I to be allowed no thoughts to myself? He glanced around the clearing, hoping for a distraction, but all of the scouts who had thronged the area had evaporated like snow in the summer sun, as if there was some kind of conspiracy between them and the Shin’a’in. She only pursed her lips and shook her head at him, allowing him no evasions.
“I need to know what you think of him now - and what you think of me.” She fixed him with an unflinching gaze. “You know I am Starblade’s lover.”
He flushed, painfully embarrassed. “Yes,” he said shortly. “And Iceshadow told me why - why it was necessary.”
“What did he tell you?” she asked. “Humor me.”
He averted his eyes for a moment, but she recaptured them. “Because so many of the things that were done to Father, and the magics that were cast to control him, were linked with sex, it has required sexually oriented Healing to undo them. That meant Father’s Healer should be a lover as well.”
Kethra nodded, and leaned back, her slender hands clasped around one knee. “That is quite true,” she said quietly, “And in case you had wondered, I knew that was the case when I came here at Kra’heera’s request. But had you also deciphered that I am your father’s love as well as his lover, and he has become mine as well?”
Darkwind tried to look away in confusion, and found that he could not. “I - it had occurred to me,” he admitted. “I am not blind, and your attitude toward one another shows.”
She set her jaw with the perpetual half-smile that shaman always seemed to have. “And what do you think of that?” she asked bluntly, a question he had not expected. “What do you think of me, when you picture me in that role?”
Gods of my fathers. She would ask that. “I am confused,” he said, as honestly as he could. “I do not know what to think. I admire you for yourself, shaman. You are a very strong, talented, and clever woman. You force my father to be strong again, as well. I think that he must need this, or you would not do it. I see you encourage him to go to his limits; you permit him to do for himself what he can. Yet you do not let him fall when you can steady him, and you match your talents with his when he cannot do something alone.”
“You are describing a partner,” Kethra said calmly. “An equal. Someone who is likely to go on being one for the foreseeable future.”
He nodded, reluctantly, aware that his uneasiness was making him sweat.
“And this makes you ill at ease.” She stated it as an observation rather than a question. “Uncomfortable in my presence whether or not I am with your father.”
He sighed. “Yes, lady. It is not just because you are a shaman, though there is something to that.”
Kethra chuckled. “Shaman make you nervous?”
Darkwind took a deep breath and chose his words carefully. “Shaman as a rule can make one uncomfortable by seeing more than one would like. That is not the whole of it, though. I do not know what to say to you, or how to treat you. You are the first of my father’s lovers who has been a full partner since my mother’s death. And when I am looking objectively at my memories, it seems to me that you have more patience and compassion than my mother had. And yet - ”
“And yet, what of your loyalty to your true mother, now that I have come to replace her? Surely I seem an interloper. I suffer by comparison with your memory of her.”
“It is easy to regard someone who is dead as without peer,” he told her candidly. “I have lost enough friends and loved ones to be aware of that.” He cocked his head to one side, and nibbled his lower lip. This was, possibly, one of the oddest conversations he had ever taken part in. “Say this. I know that I can call you friend. I think if you will give me time, I can even come to call you more than that. Will this serve?”
Her smile widened, and she reached out a hand to clasp his, warmly. “It will serve,” she told him. “Friend alone would have served; I am pleased you think of me that well. I was not sure, Darkwind. You are adept at hiding your true feelings - you have had need to, I know. That is not unique to Tayledras, Shin’a’in, or any other people. Trust me, we shaman need to hide our feelings ourselves sometimes, to struggle through pain.”
He shrugged. “We all have needed to hide true feelings here, to one extent or another. Events have made it necessary.”
She nodded. “Well, at least you and I have looked beneath the masks, and not run from what we have found.”
He smiled, impressed by her steadfast sense of humor. “Now the unpleasant news. Your father is still far from recovered. It will not take weeks or even months to cure him; it will be a matter of years.”
He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair. He felt his shoulders slumping, and remembered that it made a poor impression of strength, but he knew Kethra would see through any attempts to hide his emotions, either by words or body language. He closed his eyes. “I had thought so, but I had not liked to believe it. Father has always been so - strong. He has always recovered quickly from things. Are you quite certain of this?”
A deep, somewhat strained male voice spoke from behind them.
“You must believe it, my son,” said Starblade. Darkwind jerked his head up and turned to face him. Starblade wore a thin, loose-cut resting-gown that Songwind . . . Darkwind had designed for him a decade ago. The Adept walked slowly into the clearing, and now that he knew the truth, Darkwind saw the traces of severe damage done to him, physically as well as mentally.
Starblade found a space beside Kethra and joined her. “You must. I am but a shadow of what I was. In fact,” he chuckled as if he found the idea humorous, “I have considered changing my use-name to Starshadow. Except that we already have a Shadowstar, and that would be confusing for everyone.”
Darkwind clenched his hands. It wasn’t easy hearing Starblade confess to weakness; it was harder hearing him admit to such profound weakness that he’d thought of altering his use-name. That implied a lasting condition, as when Songwind had become Darkwind, and sometimes an irreparable condition.
Starblade sat carefully down beside the shaman, and took her hand in his. His left hand - the one that Darkwind had pierced with his dagger as part of his father’s freeing from Mornelithe Falconsbane. It showed a glossy, whitened scar a half-thumblength long now that the bandages had been removed. “I hope that you and I have reconciled our differences, my son,” he said, as Darkwind tried not to squirm, “because I must tell you that I do not trust my decision-making ability any more than I can rely on my faded powers.”
Darkwind started to blurt out a protest; his father stopped him. “Oh, not for the small decisions, the everyday matters. But for the decisions that affect us all deeply - and the ones I made in the past - I do not feel that I can continue without another view to temper mine. In our Healings, I see my actions laid on bare earth, without order. As I am rebuilt, Kethra helps me to understand the motivations behind those actions, and reject those that Falconsbane engineered. It is a slow process, Darkwind. I do not know which of the decisions I have made were done out of pride, out of good judgment, or out of the direction of our enemies. I need you, my son; I need your vision, and I need your newly regained powers. More so: k’Sheyna needs them.”
Now Darkwind was numb. At the moment, all he could do was to nod. But this - this was frightening, inconceivable. Even at his worst, when Starblade had been trying to thwart him at every turn, he had been in control, he had been powerful. He had been someone who at least could be relied upon to know what he was doing, a bastion of strength. Full of certainty.
This was like hearing that the rock beneath the Vale was sand, and that the next storm could wash it away.
Kethra and Starblade both were waiting for some kind of response, so he got himself under some semblance of control, and gave them one. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.
“I want your opinions, your thoughts,” Starblade told him, his lined and weary face showing every day of his age. “I need them. The most pressing concern is the Heartstone; what do you think we should do about it? You know enough to make some educated guesses about it. We cannot stabilize it, not without help. I do not think that we can drain it, either. When we try, it fluxes unpredictably. And after you have given me your opinion, I want your help in doing whatever it is that we must to end this trouble - I want you to take my place as the key of the Adepts’ circle.”
He shook his head at that, violently. “Father, I can’t. I haven’t even begun to relearn all I’ve forgotten and - ”
“The strength of your will and youth will counter that lack of practice,” Kethra said, interrupting him. “The key need not be the most experienced Adept, but he must be the strongest, and you are that.”
Starblade coughed, then settled himself, fixing Darkwind with a sincere look. “I will explain it to you in this light, then. Your mother and I raised you to be a strong and responsible person, Scout or Mage. Now, the strength that I taught you has been taken from me. You are at least in part the vessel of my old personality. I would appreciate relearning what I was from you, and learning your strength.”
Given a choice, he would have told them it was impossible; turned and fled from the Vale, back to his ekele. But he had no choice, and all three of them knew that. He bowed to their will. “If that is truly what you want,” he said unhappily. “If it is, then I shall.”
“Thank you,” Starblade said, simply. As Kethra stood up, he rose to his feet to place one hand on his son’s shoulder. “This - confession has cost me a great deal, but I think it has gained me more. I have given over wanting you to be a copy of me, and I wish that Wintermoon and I had not drifted so far apart that I cannot say those same words to him and be believed. Perhaps in time, he will not be lost to me. I do not wish you to be anything but yourself, Darkwind. Whatever comes of this, it will have happened because you went to the limit of your abilities, and not the sum of my expectations. In all that happens, I shall try to be your friend as well as your father.”
With those words, which surprised him more than anything else that had happened tonight, Starblade turned and walked slowly back into the shadows, with Kethra at his side.
Vree swooped down off his perch, and backwinged to a new one beside his bondmate. He swiveled his head, turning it upside down to stare at Darkwind from a new angle, as only a raptor would do. Hard to manage, with his crop bulging as if the bird had swallowed a child’s ball. And possibly the silliest pose any bird could take.
:Sleepy,: he announced. :Sleep now?:
Darkwind held out his gauntlet automatically, and Vree swiveled his head back and hopped onto his bondmate’s wrist. :I think so,: he replied, absently, all the while wondering if, after all this, he still could get to sleep.
He flailed up out of slumber, arms windmilling wildly, with sparkling afterimages of confused dream-scenes still in his mind and the impression of someone shaking him.
Someone was shaking him. “What?” he gasped.
“Who?” The hammock-bed beneath him felt strange, the proportions of the room all wrong.
Light flared, and he blinked, dazzled; the shaker was Sathen, the hertasi who usually tended Starblade’s ekele for him. The little lizard was holding a lit lantern in one claw, with the other on Darkwind’s shoulder. And the proportions of the room were wrong because he was not in his own ekele, he was in Starblade’s, in the guest quarters. Vree dozed on, oblivious, on a block-perch set into the wall, one foot pulled up under his breast-feathers and his head hunched down so far there was nothing visible in the soft puif of white and off-white but a bit of beak.
I need to find Father a new bondbird, came the inconsequential thought, as Sathen waited patiently for him to gather his wits and say something sensible.
“What?” he obliged, finally. “What’s wrong?”
“Trouble,” the little hertasi whispered. “Trouble-call it is, from Snowstar. Needing mage. Needing mages,” he corrected. “More than one.”
Marvelous. Well, I’m probably the least weary. “What for?” he asked. It couldn’t be for combat; by the time he reached Snowstar’s patrol area, any combat would have been long since resolved. He reached for his clothing and pulled on his breeches. Well, at least this means that someone else will have to take our patrol in the morning. And I don’t have to be the one to decide who it is.
“Basilisk,” Sathen said, his nostrils closing to slits as he said it. The lizard-folk did not like basilisks - not that anyone did, but basilisks seemed to prefer hertasi territories over any others.
Darkwind groaned, and pulled his tunic over his head, thinking as quickly as his sleep-fogged mind would permit. “Go leave a message for Winterlight that - ah - Wingsister Elspeth and I went out to deal with the basilisk, and he’ll have to get someone else on day-watch to cover for us. Then go wake up the Outlander and tell her I’ll be coming for her in a moment.”
Fortunately Elspeth’s ekele was not that far from Starblade’s. She wasn’t going to like being awakened out of a sound sleep - but then, who did? She took the oath, he told himself a little smugly as he pulled on his boots. He splashed water from the basin Sathen had left onto his face to wake himself up. She might as well find out what it means.
Besides, being shaken awake in the middle of the night might also shake up that attitude problem of hers. And once she saw a basilisk for herself, he had a shrewd notion that she might start paying better attention to him when he told her something. Particularly about the dangers that lurked out in the Uncleansed Lands, and how you couldn’t always deal with them combatively.
This would be a good exercise in patience for her, as well; now that he thought about it, he realized he couldn’t have planned this encounter more effectively.
Other than staging it by daylight instead of darkness.
For a basilisk could not be moved by magic power - it grounded attacks out on itself, sent the power out into the earth, and ignored the attackers. And it could not be moved by force.
It could only be dealt with by persuasion. And a great deal of patience, as Elspeth would likely discover the hard way.
He took the gracefully curved stairs down to the ground, jumping them two at a time, suppressing the urge to whistle.
This promised to be very, very entertaining.
It was not just any basilisk. It was a basilisk with a belly full of eggs.
Snowstar held his torch steady, no doubt trusting in the cold to keep the creature torpid. It blinked at them from the hollow it had carved for itself in the rocky bank of the stream, but remained where it was. Torchlight flickering over the thing’s head and parts of its body did nothing to conceal how hideous the poor creature was.
“Havens, that thing is ugly,” Elspeth said in a fascinated whisper. Basilisks came in many colors - all the colors of mud, from the dull red-brown of Plains-mud, to the dull brown-black of forest-loam mud, and every muddy variation in between. This one was the muddy gray-green of clay. With the face of a toad, no neck to speak of, the body of an enormous lizard, a dull ash-gray frill running down the head and the length of the spine and tail, a mouth full of poisonous half-rotted teeth, and a slack jaw that continuously leaked greenish drool, it was definitely not going to appeal to anything outside of its own kind. And when you added to that the sanitary habits of a maggot, and breath that would make an enraged bull keel over a hundred paces away, you did not have anything that could be considered a good neighbor.
And that was when it was torpid. As soon as the sun arose, and warmed the thing’s sluggish blood, it would go looking for food. It wasn’t fussy. Anything would do, living or dead, so long as it was meat.
But as soon as the blood warmed up, the brain would warm up, too - and when that happened, nothing nearby would be safe. Not that the basilisk was clever; it wasn’t - it wasn’t fast either, or a crafty hunter. It didn’t have to be. It simply had to feel hunger and look around for food, and everything within line-of-sight would freeze, held in place by the peculiar mental compulsion it emitted.
Then it could simply stroll up to its chosen dinner, and eat it.
As Snowstar explained this to Elspeth, Darkwind created a heatless mage-light and sent it into the basilisk’s shelter, so he could get a better idea of how big it was. Elspeth shuddered in revulsion as the light revealed just how phenomenally hideous the creature was.
“Are we going to kill it now?” she asked; Darkwind had the feeling that she wanted to get this over with quickly. Well, he didn’t blame her. Being downwind of a basilisk was a lot like being downwind of a channel pit.
Snowstar answered for him. “Gods of our fathers, no!” he exclaimed. “If you think it stinks now, you don’t want to be within two days’ ride of a dead one! That’s assuming we could kill it. It has three hearts, that warty skin is tougher than twenty layers of boiled hide, and it can live for a long time with what we’d consider a fatal wound. It can live without two legs, both eyes, and half its face. Altogether. Assuming you could get near enough to it to take out an eye. Personally, I’d rather not try.”
Elspeth shook her head, not in disbelief, but in amazement. “What about magic?”
“Magic doesn’t work on them,” Darkwind told her, as he reckoned up the length of the beast and judged it to be about the size of three horses, not counting the tail. “It just passes around them and goes straight into the ground. We should have shields like that! An amazing animal.”
“You sound like you admire it,” Elspeth replied in surprise.
He shrugged, and walked around a little, to see if the basilisk noticed him, or if it had gone completely torpid. “In a way I do,” he said, noting with satisfaction that the creature’s eyes tracked on him. “It is said that they were created by one of the Great Mages, not as a weapon, but as a way of disposing of the carcasses of those creatures that were weapons, that even dead were too dangerous to touch and too deadly to leave about. Nothing else will eat a dead cold-drake, for instance.” His brief survey complete, he returned to Elspeth’s side. “They weren’t supposed to be able to breed, but neither were a lot of other creatures. Most of their eggs are infertile, but there are one or two that are viable now and again.”
He turned to Snowstar. The scout wiped the back of his hand across his watering eyes, and stood a little straighter. Snowstar was one of the youngest of the scouts; Darkwind was grateful that he had known enough to send for help and not attempted to move the basilisk himself. It could be done without magic, but the odds of success, especially in the uncertain weather of fall or spring, were not good. “Have you found any place for us to put her?” he asked.
“Yes, but it’s not as secure as I’d like,” the scout replied, wiping his eyes again. The wind had turned, and the fumes were - potent. Darkwind’s eyes had started to burn a few moments ago, and Snowstar had been here for some time. Small wonder he had watering eyes. “I’ve got a rock-bottomed gully along this stream; the sides are too steep to climb and there’s always lots of things falling into it to die. The only problem is that the mouth of the valley is open to the stream, and I couldn’t see a way to close it off.”
“Isn’t there a swamp somewhere off that way?” Darkwind asked, waving vaguely in the direction where he thought he sensed water.
“Can you get the thing that far?” Snowstar asked, incredulously. “If you can, that would be perfect. There’s plenty for it to eat, no hertasi like it because it’s full of sulfur springs, and the sulfur’s enough to make sure any eggs it lays won’t hatch.”
“If we can get it moving, we can get it that far,” Dark-wind told him. “The problem is going to be getting it moving without getting it worked up enough to think about being angry or frightened. If it’s either, it’ll start trying to fascinate everything within line of sight.”
“Right.” Snowstar spread his hands. “I’ll leave that up to you. Get it moving and I’ll guide you to the nearest finger of the swamp and make sure nothing interferes with you on the way.”
“That will do.” Darkwind studied the hideous beast, trying to determine whether it was better to lure it out of its rudimentary den, or force it out.
Force it out, he decided at last. He didn’t think that the beast was going to take any kind of bait at the moment.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, turning to Elspeth, who still watched the basilisk with a kind of repulsed fascination. “It’s comfortable and it feels secure in that den. You and I are going to have to make it feel uncomfortable and insecure, and make it come out. Once it’s out, it will try to go back in again; we’ll have to prevent that. Then we’ll have to herd it in the direction we want it to go.”
Elspeth licked her lips and nodded, slowly. “We use magic, I presume?”
“That, or mind-magic, or a combination of the two,” he told her. He yawned as he finished the sentence, and hoped he wasn’t going to be too fuddled from lack of sleep to carry this off. Elspeth looked as if she felt about the same. “Got any ideas about what might drive it out?”
She leaned back against a tree trunk and frowned at the beast. “Well, what would drive you or me out of bed? Noise?”
Interesting idea. “That’s one nobody I know of has tried.” He thought for a moment. “If it were warmer, we could lure her out with an illusion of food, but she isn’t hungry in the semi-hibernation she’s in right now. Heat and cold in her cave - no, too hot and she’ll just wake up more, and we don’t want that. Too cold and she’ll go torpid.”
“How about rocks in her bed?” Elspeth hazarded. “Sharp, pointy ones. Maybe combine it with noise.”
“Good. Good, I like that plan. It should irritate her without making her angry, and if we make her uncomfortable she won’t want to go back in there.” He scratched his head. “Now, which do you want? Rocks or noise?”
“Rocks,” she said, surprising him. “I’ve got an idea.”
Since he already had a notion about the noises that might irritate the basilisk, that suited him very well. He had been afraid that Elspeth wouldn’t think herself capable of manifesting good-sized stones, but evidently she already had a solution in mind.
“Do it, then,” he said, shortly, and concentrated all his attention on a point just behind the basilisk’s body. The one thing he didn‘t want to do was frighten her - just make her leave her lair. If he frightened her, she might be aroused enough to set all her abilities working, and that would do them no good at all.
Fine thing if I met my end as a late-night snack for afoul-breathed, incredibly stupid monster.
He already knew how some pure, high-pitched sounds irritated wolves and birds; he reasoned the same might well be true of this beast. It just had to be loud enough and annoying enough.
Dissonance, he thought suddenly. That might work even better; two pure tones out of tune with each other.
He’d done this before as a kind of game, when he was just learning very fine control. He’d gotten good enough that he had been able to produce recognizable voices out of the air. Producing pure tones wasn’t all that hard, it just took a lot of energy.
He started near the top of the human-audible scale, figuring to go up if he had to. It took him a moment to recall the trick of it, but when he got it, Snowstar jumped as a nerve-shattering squeal rang out from the basilisk’s lair. The young scout clapped both hands over his ears, his expression pained. Darkwind wished he had that luxury. He had to listen to his creation in order to control it.
When he glanced out of the corner of his eye at Elspeth, he saw she had blocked both her ears with her fingers, and her brow was creased with concentration.
His sounds didn’t seem to be having any effect, although already he noticed the basilisk shifting her weight, as if she found her position uncomfortable. He raised the notes another half step and waited to see the effect.
Another increment followed that, until he had gone up a full octave, and still he was not getting the reaction he wanted, although the monster turned occasionally to snap at the empty air, as if trying to rid her lair of its noisy visitor.
Finally, he took the sounds up past the range where even he could hear it, and he had one of the longest ranges in the Clan. Elspeth had taken her fingers out of her ears two steps earlier, and Snowstar had taken his hands down before that, with an expression of deep gratitude. This was the range that animals other than man could hear; he wasn’t about to give up this plan until he’d passed the sounds that bats used. And from the look on Elspeth’s face, she wasn’t going to give in until she had produced rocks the size of small ponies.
Neither of them had to go that far, although whether it was Darkwind’s dissonant howls or Elspeth’s stones that finally tipped the balance, he couldn’t tell. The basilisk had been snapping and shifting uncomfortably for some time when he changed the tone again, and the basilisk came pouring out of her lair, burbling with anger and frustration.
She stood there for a moment, wavering between the discomfort of the lair, and the exposure of the outdoors. If she dove back in again, they might never get her out.
Before Darkwind could say anything, Elspeth solved the problem for him. He sensed her grabbing the underlying web of earth-energies at the mouth of the half-dug lair and yanking.
The lair collapsed in on itself, leaving the basilisk nowhere to go.
The monster rumbled deep in her chest, and turned, heading downstream and away from them, into the darkness. “That will do for a few furlongs, but then we’re going to have to turn her out of this stream when it forks,” Snowstar said, as the basilisk plodded out of the range of his torch and Darkwind’s mage-light.
“Don’t worry, I think we can deal with it,” he said, breaking into a trot along the graveled streamside, sending his mage-light winging on ahead until it illuminated the unlovely rump of the basilisk. She was moving at a pretty fair pace; he’d had no idea they could move that fast. In fact - was he going to be able to keep up with her?
Elspeth supplied his answer, as she and the Companion trotted up alongside and she offered him a hand up. “Gwena can carry two for a while,” she said. He took her at her word and got himself up behind her. “Are you going to use that sound of yours to drive that thing?” she asked once he was settled and Gwena was bounding after the tail of the monster.
“Yes,” he said - shortly, as it was difficult to speak when bouncing along on the rump of a trotting mount. “That - was - the - idea - ”
:I have another idea,: Elspeth said by Mindspeech. :lt’s a reptile, which means it can probably sense heat very well. Let’s create a ball of warmth about her size, and lure her along with it. Keep it a couple of lengths ahead of her until she’s where we want her, then dissipate it. What do you think?:
He switched to Mindspeech as well. :That is an excellent idea. This is going to be great news when we get back to the Vale,: he told her, and smiled at the glow of well-earned self-congratulation that met his words. :You’ve helped uncover something entirely new, and very useful to us. The other forms of driving these monsters have all been much riskier. You are going to make your Clansibs quite happy with this news.:
For that matter, she was making him quite happy. The basilisk responded to guidance-by-noise and the heat lure beautifully. They were going to be returning to the Vale much sooner than he had thought.
Much sooner, and flushed with success. Not a bad combination.
Not a bad combination at all.
Everyone wanted to hear about the basilisk drive. This was the first time that a basilisk had been moved with fewer than a dozen people and with no injuries. Small wonder that the Vale had been astir when they returned, and that the mages had all wanted to hear the story in detail. It seemed that if he and Elspeth hadn’t used unorthodox tactics because there had only been two of them, they would never have budged the thing. And if Snowstar hadn’t been so inexperienced in the ways of basilisks, he’d never have called for just a pair of mages.
“You weren’t lucky,” Iceshadow finally said. “Snowstar was relatively lucky because he got you. But you two - you were quite clever. Or am I being overly optimistic?”
Darkwind laughed tiredly, and drank another full beaker of cold water - the aftereffect of all that basilisk stench was incredible dehydration. He and Elspeth together had drained a small lake, it seemed, and they were still thirsty.
“No, we were bright enough that if we hadn’t been able to budge the old girl with methods that wouldn’t enrage her, we would have called for help,” he assured the Adept. “I pledge you that. I don’t trust anything that can entrance you to the point that you let yourself be swallowed whole.”
When the others finally left them in peace, Darkwind realized that he was much too keyed up to sleep, at least not without a long soak in hot water to relax him.
He stood up abruptly, catching Elspeth by surprise; she jumped when he moved and looked up at him with round eyes.
“I need a bath and a soak,” he said, “And the pool under your ekele is the nearest two-layered one I know of. Would it disturb you if I used it?”
“Would it disturb you if I joined you?” she asked.
At first, he thought she was making some kind of an overture, but a moment of reflection told him that she couldn’t possibly be doing anything of the sort. She was just as tired as he was - even if she wasn’t bruised from riding for furlongs on the sharp and protruding hipbones of her Companion. Even if the two of them had been ready to tear one another’s clothes off in a fit of unbridled lust, neither of them would have had the energy to do so. No, she was just being polite.
But at least she wasn’t as shy as she had been. And she was still an attractive woman. There might be some hope after all.
“It surely won’t disturb me,” he told her, and offered her a polite hand to help her rise. “In fact, I doubt very much if it would disturb me to share a pool with - “
He stopped himself before he said “with that basilisk”; realizing at the last moment that the comment could be construed as saying that he did not find her attractive. Which was not the case, at all.
“ - half the Clan,” he concluded. “All I want is to get this stink off and soak my muscles until I can sleep.”
“Good plan,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll make you a bargain. If you find some of that fruit drink, I’ll get soap, robes and towels from my treehouse.”
“I’ll take that,” he said instantly. Elspeth disappeared into the greenery while he sought one of the storage areas, and dug out a tiny keg of a peculiar, mineral-rich drink Elspeth had gotten very fond of. Normally he didn’t care much for the stuff, but when he was as parched and exhausted as he was now, he downed it with the same enthusiasm as she did.
Keg under one arm and a pair of turned wooden mugs in the other hand, he retraced his path and followed in Elspeth’s wake. When he arrived at the pool, he found that she had been as good at keeping her word as he. There was strongly herb-scented soap beside the lower of the two heated pools, and towels and robes hanging nearby on a couple of branches, with one small mage-light over each pool providing just enough light to see by.
Elspeth was already in the upper soaking pool. He left the keg and mugs beside it as she waved at him indolently from the steam, then he stripped and plunged straight into the lower pool.
It took three full soapings before the last of the stench was gone and he felt clean again. By then he was more than ready for a mug and a long, soothing soak.
“I think I took all my skin off,” Elspeth complained languidly from her end of the pool as he slipped across the barrier between the pools and into the hotter water of the second. “I scrubbed and scrubbed - every time I thought I was clean, I could still smell that thing.”
“Worse than skunk or polecat,” he agreed. She seemed very relaxed for the first time since he had met her. “Did you see how much Iceshadow liked that idea of yours, moving the basilisk with noise?”
“But it was your idea to use pure-tones in dissonance,” she said immediately. “I had just thought of using volume, or maybe make it sound like the cave was falling in.”
He allowed himself to feel pleased about that part of it. “Well, I guess that I’m going to have to admit that you are right about trying new things even in magic. Just because they aren’t the way we’ve always done something, that doesn’t mean new ideas aren’t going to work. Change comes to the Vales; quite a concept.”
She laughed heartily. “I thought I’d never hear you say that! But I have to make a confession to you, though. I have been pushing you, just because you were being such a - mud-turtle about things. Not wanting to try anything new. But - well, now I know that there’s good reasons why some things aren’t done in the Vales and in this one in particular. Hydona’s been explaining things to me. ...”
Her voice trailed off, and he thought she was finished, until she spoke up again. “You know, Hydona reminds me a great deal of Talia.”
That old friend of hers. The one that’s some kind of aide to her mother, and not the one that‘s the weapons teacher.
“In what way?” he asked.
She waved steam away from her face. “She made me give her a promise back when I was a child - that I would never simply dismiss anything she told me just because I didn’t want to hear it, or that I was angry at her or anything else. That I would always go away and think about it for a day. Then if I couldn’t agree with any of it, I had the right to be angry, but if I could see that she was right in at least some of what she’d said, I would have to come back to her and we’d talk about it as calmly as we could.”
Well, if that isn‘t an opening chance to talk about her attitude -
“I know we don’t know one another as well as you and Talia do,” he said tentatively, “but could you grant me that same promise as a Wingsib?”
“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice full of ironic chagrin. “Been a bitch , have I? “
He wanted to laugh, and decided against it. Still, he smiled. “Not exactly a bitch. But your attitude hasn’t been helping me teach you. That was one reason why, when the gryphons volunteered to help, I agreed.”
“Attitude?” she asked; her voice was carefully controlled to the point of being expressionless. Not a good sign.
“Attitude,” he repeated, getting ready for an outburst. “You’re very self-important, Elspeth. Very aware of your own importance, and making sure everyone else is aware of it, too. Take what you just said, about being a bitch. You laughed about it; deep down, you thought it was funny. You think you are so important it doesn’t matter if you’re offending those around you. You just make some perfunctory apology, smile and laugh, and that’s that. But nothing has really changed.”
She was quite silent over there in the steam, but he wondered if he’d just felt the temperature of the water rise by a bit. That silence was not a good sign, either.
“The truth is, Elspeth, right now you’re an enormously talented liability.” She wasn’t going to like that, one bit. “I never heard of your land, outside of something vague from the old histories. You could be a bondslave from Valdemar, and we would be treating you the same as we are now. Your title doesn’t matter, your country doesn’t matter, and your people don’t matter. Not to us.”
Little waves lapped against him as she shifted, but she remained silent.
“What does matter is that you did help us; for that, we made you a Wingsib. Because we made you a Wingsister, you became entitled to training. Not because of a crown, and not because of a title. Not even because you asked us. Because you are part of the Clan. And what’s more, the only ones willing to train you were myself and the gryphons. Everyone else has more important matters to attend to.”
That wasn’t precisely the truth, but it was close enough that it might shake her up a bit.
“So.” No doubt about it, she was angry. “I don’t matter, is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. You matter; your title doesn’t.” He hoped she could see the difference. “So you might as well stop walking around as if there was a crown on your head. Kings don’t mean much, out here. Anyone can call himself a king. Having the power to enforce authority - that’s something else again. Until you have that, you’d best pay a little closer attention to the way you treat those around you because we are not impressed.”
“Oh, really?” He sensed an angry retort building.
But then, she said nothing. Nothing at all. He tensed, waiting for an outburst that never came. He wondered what she was thinking.
Finally she yawned and stretched, water dribbling from her arms.
“I’m tired,” she said, yawning again. “Too tired to think or react sensibly. I’ll sleep on what you just said.”
“Please do, and carefully, Elspeth. More could depend on it than amiable learning conditions.” He looked down and sighed. “I do like you, and would prefer not to spend my time with you deciphering what you really mean under the royal posturing.”
She rose, surprising him, and hoisted herself out of the pool, wrapping a towel around her wet hair, then bundling one of the thick, heavy robes around herself. She turned and looked down at him.
“You’ve said quite a bit,” she told him quietly. “And I’m not sure what to think. Except that I’m certain you weren’t being malicious. So - good night, Darkwind. If there’s anything to say, I’ll say it tomorrow.”
She gathered her dignity about her like the robe, and walked off into the darkness, leaving him alone.