Mercedes Lackey - The Silver Gryphon

Skan groaned. “You mean we could have just followed the river and we probably would have found them?”

Regin grinned sourly. “That’s exactly what I mean. But look on the bright side; now we know they’re alive and they’re probably all right.”

Skan nodded, as Regin signaled to Bern to start hunting for a trail. But as Bern searched for signs, Skan couldn’t help noticing a few things.

For one thing, the piles of discarded material had a curiously ordered-disordered look about them, as if they had been tossed everywhere, then gathered up and crudely examined, then sorted.

For another, there were no messages, notes, or anything of the sort to give a direction to any rescuers. Granted, the children might not have known whether anyone would find the camp, but shouldn’t they have left something?

And last of all, there was no magic, none at all, left in any of the discarded equipment. So the surmise had been correct, something had drained all of the magic out of their gear, and from the signs of the crash, it had happened all at once. And yet none of the search-party gear had been affected—yet.

So what had done this in the first place? What had sorted through the remains of the camp?

And what had made the children flee into the unknown and trackless forest without even leaving a sign for searchers to follow?

Was the answer to the third question the same as the answer to the other two?

Tad entered the cave, sloshing through ankle-deep water at the entrance, carefully avoiding Blade’s three fishing lines. Blade held up some of her catch, neatly strung, and he nodded appreciatively.

“Water’s higher,” he told her. “In places it covers the trail here.”

That was to be expected, considering how much is falling out of the sky. “Well,” Blade said with resignation. “At least we have a steady water supply— and we don’t have to leave the cave to fish anymore.” It had not stopped raining for more than a few marks in the middle of the night ever since they had arrived here. She’d wondered what the rainy season would be like; well, now she knew. The stream of water running down the middle of the cave had remained at about the same size, only its pace had quickened. The river had risen, and now it was perfectly possible for them to throw lines into the river itself without going past the mouth of the cave, with a reasonable expectation of catching something.

That was just as well, since they were now under siege, although they still had not seen their hunters clearly. The flitting shadows espied in the undergrowth had made it very clear that there was no getting back across the river without confronting them.

Tad nodded, spreading his good wing to dry it in front of the fire. He had gone out long enough to drag in every bit of driftwood he could find, and there was now a sizable store of it in the cave. He’d also hauled in things that would make a thick, black smoke, and they had a second, extremely nasty fire going now. It stood just to one side of the stream at the rear of the cave, putting a heavy smoke up the natural “chimney.” Whether or not there was anyone likely to see it was a good question; this was not the kind of weather anything but a desperate or suicidal gryphon would fly in.

On the other hand—how desperate would Skandranon or Tad’s twin be by now? Desperate enough to try?

Blade both hoped so and hoped that they would have more sense; their pursuers were getting bolder, and she hadn’t particularly wanted Tad to go out this afternoon. The stalkers were still nothing more than menacing shadows, but she had seen them skulking through the underbrush on the other side of the river even by day, yesterday and this morning.

“I think they might try something tonight,” Tad said, far too casually. “I know I was being watched all the time, and I just had that feeling, as if there was something out there that was frustrated and losing patience.”

“I got the same feeling,” Blade confessed. She hadn’t enjoyed taking her shields down and making a tentative try at assessing what lay beyond the river, but it had felt necessary. In part, she had been hoping to sense a rescue party, but the cold and very alien wave of frustrated anger that met her tentative probe had made her shut herself up behind her shields and sit there shivering for a moment. “I—tried using that Empathic sense, and I got the same impression you did. They would like very much to get a chance at us.”

She hoped that Tad wouldn’t make too big a fuss about that confession; he’d been at her often enough to use everything she had. Now she’d finally given in to his urgings, she was not in the mood for an “I told you that was a good idea.” She wasn’t certain that it was a good idea; what if those things out there had been able to sense her just as she sensed them?

Then again, what would they learn? That she was hurt, and scared spitless of them? They already knew that.

Fortunately for him, Tad just nodded. “It’s good to know that it’s not just my own worry talking to me,” he said, and sighed. “Now I don’t feel so badly about setting all those traps.”

“What—” she began. At that moment, one of her fishing lines went tight, and she turned her attention to it long enough to haul in her catch. But after rebaiting the hook and setting the line again, she returned to the subject.

“What other traps do you think would work?” she asked. “On our side of the river, that is. Where could we set more?”

Thus far, they hadn’t had any luck with deadfalls like the one that had marked one of the shadows before. It was as if, having seen that particular sort of trap, the hunters now knew how to avoid it. Large snares hadn’t worked either, but she hadn’t really expected them to, since there was no way to conceal them. But perhaps now, with water over the trail, trip-wires could be hidden under the water.

“I tended to that during my ‘walk’ earlier. There’s only one good place, really,” he told her. “The river’s gotten so deep and fast that there’s only one place where I think they might try to cross—that’s downstream, past where we crossed it when we first got here. I didn’t set a trap right there, though—what I did was rig something that’s harmless but looks just like the rockfall I rigged later on.” He gryph-grinned at his own cleverness, and she could hardly blame him.

“So they’ll see the harmless decoy, and then walk right into the rockfall?”

He nodded, looking very proud of himself. “It’s a good big one, too. If they actually try coming after us, at least one of them is going to be seriously hurt or killed, unless they’ve got lightning reflexes and more luck than any one creature deserves to have.”

“Just as long as you don’t hurt someone coming to rescue us!” she warned. Yesterday she might have argued with him about the merits of setting something meant to kill rather than discourage—but that was before she had opened herself to the creatures across the river. She still might not know what they looked like, but now she knew what they were. Killers, plainly and simply, with a kind of cold intelligence about them that made her wish for one good bow, two good arms, and three dozen arrows. She would debate the merits of permitting such creatures the free run of their own territory some other time; and if they gave up and left her alone, she would be perfectly happy to leave them alone. But if they came after her or Tad, she would strike as efficiently and with the same deadly force as they would.

There was still the question of whether or not these creatures were the “hunting pack” of someone or something else; she did not have the ability to read thoughts, even if these creatures had anything like a thought. But she hadn’t sensed anything else out there with them; all of the creatures had been of the same type, with a definite feeling of pack about them.