Mercedes Lackey - The Silver Gryphon

She moved toward the barricade by edging along the side of the cave to keep herself in the shadows as much as possible. Tad did the same on the other side. The rain had indeed slackened off early for once; instead of illuminating a solid sheet of water in front of her nose, the intermittent flashes of lightning showed the other side of the river, with the churning, rolling water between.

There was no sign of anything on the other side of the river, and that wasn’t good. Up until now, there had always been at least one lurking shadow in the bushes over there; now there was nothing. That was just one more indication that Tad’s instincts and her reading of the hunters’ impatience were both correct. They were going to try something tonight.

She glanced over at Tad; when lightning flickered, she could see his head and neck clearly, although he was so still he could have passed for a carving. He kept his eyelids lowered, so that not even a flicker of reflection would betray his presence to anything watching. His natural coloration blended beautifully with the stone behind him, and the lines of his feathers passed for rock-striations. It was amazing just how well camouflaged he was.

His ear-tufts lay flat along his head, but she knew better than to assume that meant he wasn’t listening; the ear-tufts were largely decorative tufts of feathers that had nothing to do with his hearing. No, he was listening, all right. She wondered how much he could hear over the roar of the waterfall beside them.

But when the noise of his trap coming down thundered across the river, it was not at all subtle; in fact, it was loud enough that even the rock of the cave mouth vibrated for a moment. She jumped, her nerves stretched so tight that she went off-balance for a moment, and had to twist to catch herself with her good hand. She regained her balance quickly and moved to go outside. He shot out a claw, catching her good wrist and holding her where she was.

“Wait until morning,” he advised, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear it over the roaring water. “That killed something. And they aren’t going to be able to move the body.”

“How much rock did you pile up?” she asked incredulously. How had he been able to pile up anything with only a pair of talons instead of hands, and with one bad wing?

“Enough,” he replied, then chuckled with pardonable pride. “I didn’t want to boast until I knew it had worked—but I used a little magic to undermine part of the cliff-face that was ready to go. I honestly didn’t know how much was going to come down, I only knew it would be more than I could manage by stacking rocks.”

“From the sound of it, a lot came down,” she answered in awe. What a brilliant application of a very tiny amount of magic! “Did you feel it through the rock?”

He nodded. “There could be a problem, though,” he added. “I might have given them a bridge, or half a bridge, across the river. There was that chance that the rock would fall that way.”

But she shrugged philosophically. If he had, he had; it might well be worth it to find out just what, precisely, had been stalking them all this time.

“And the cliff could have come down by itself, doing the same thing,” she answered. “There’s no point in getting upset until we know. I doubt that we’re going to see any further trouble out of them for tonight, anyway.”

She was quite right; the rest of the night was as quiet as anyone could have wished, and with the first light, they both went out to see what, if anything, Tad’s trap had caught.

When they got to the rock-fall, they both saw that it had indeed come sliding down into the river, providing a bridge about halfway across, though some of it had already washed farther downstream. But as they neared it, and saw that the trap had caught a victim, Blade was just as puzzled by what was trapped there as she had been by the shadows.

There had been some effort made to free the creature; that much showed in the signs of digging and the obvious places where rubble and even large stones had been moved off the carcass. But it was not a carcass of any animal she recognized.

If a mage had taken a greyhound, crossed it with a serpent, and magnified it up to the size of a horse, he would have had something like this creature. A deep black in color, with shiny scaled skin just like a snake or a lizard, and a long neck, it had teeth sharper and more daggerlike than a dog’s. Its head and those of its limbs not crushed by the fallen rock were also doglike. They couldn’t tell what color its eyes were; the exposed slit only showed an opaque white. She stared at it, trying to think if there was anything in all of the stories she’d heard that matched it.

But Tad had no such trouble putting a name to it.

“Wyrsa,” Tad muttered. “But the color’s all wrong. . . .”

She turned her head to see that he was staring

down at the thing, and he seemed certain of his identification. “What’s a wyrsa?” she asked sharply.

He nudged the head with one cautious talon. “One of the old Adepts, before Ma’ar, made things like this to mimic kyree and called them wyrsa. He meant them for a more formidable guard dog or hunting pack. But they couldn’t be controlled, and got loose from him — oh, a long time ago. Long before Ma’ar and the War. Aubri told me about hunting them; said that they ran wild in packs in some places.” His eyes narrowed as he concentrated. “But the ones he talked about were smaller than this. They were white, and they had poison fangs and poison talons.”

She bent down, carefully, and examined the mouth and the one exposed foot for poison sacs, checking to see if either talons or teeth were hollow. She finally got a couple of rocks and carefully broke off a long canine tooth and a talon, to examine them more closely. Finally she stood up with a grunt.

“I don’t know what else is different on these beasts, but they aren’t carrying anything poisonous,” she told him, as he watched her actions dubiously. “Neither the teeth nor the claws are hollow, they have no channel to carry venom, and no venom sacs at the root to produce poison in the first place. Venom has to come from somewhere, Tad, and it has to get into the victim somehow, so unless this creature has poisonous saliva. . . .”

“Aubri distinctly said that they were just like a poisonous snake,” Tad insisted. “But the color is different on these things, and the size. Something must have changed them.”

They exchanged a look. “A mage?” she asked. “Or the storms?” She might know venom, but he knew magic.

“The mage-storms, if anything at all,” Tad said flatly. “If a mage had changed wyrsa deliberately, he wouldn’t have taken out the venom, he’d have made it worse. I’ll bet it was the mage-storms.”

“I wouldn’t bet against it.” Blade knelt again to examine the head in detail; it was as long as her forearm, and most of it was jaw. “Tad, these things don’t need venom to hurt you,” she pointed out. “Look at those canines! They’re as long as my finger, and the rest of the teeth are in proportion. What else do you know about wyrsa?”

He swallowed audibly. “Aubri said that the bigger the pack was, the smarter they acted, as if part of their intelligence was shared with every other one in the pack. He also said that they were unbelievably tenacious; if they got your scent, they’d track you for days—and if you killed or hurt one, they would track you forever. You’d never get rid of them until they killed you, or you killed them all.”

“How comforting,” she said dryly, standing up again. “And we’ve hurt one and killed one. I wish we’d known this before.”