Mercedes Lackey - The Silver Gryphon

Tad just shuffled his feet, looking sheepish. “They might not connect us with the rockfall,” he offered tentatively.

“Well, it’s done and can’t be undone.” She caught something, a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head.

And froze. As if, now that she and Tad knew what the things were and the wyrsa saw no reason to hide, a group of six stood on the bank across from them. Snarling silently. Tad let out his breath in a hiss of surprise and dismay.

Then, before she could even blink or draw a breath, they were gone. She hadn’t even seen them move, but the only thing across from them now was a stand of bushes, the branches still quivering as the only sign that something had passed through them.

“I think we can safely assume that they do connect us with the rockfall,” she replied, a chill climbing up her spine. “And I think we had better get back to the cave before they decide to try to cross the river again.”

“Don’t run,” Tad cautioned, turning slowly and deliberately, and watching where he placed his feet. “Aubri said that would make them chase you, even if they hadn’t been chasing you before.”

She tried to hide how frightened she was, but the idea of six or more of those creatures coming at her in the dark was terrifying. “What charming and delightful creations,” she replied sarcastically. “Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

He shook his head, spraying her with rain. “That’s all I remember right now.”

She concentrated on being very careful where she walked, for the rain was getting heavier and the rocks slicker. It would do no one any good if she slipped on these rocks and broke something else.

Well, no one but the wyrsa.

“Has anyone ever been able to control these things?” she asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

The navigable part of the track narrowed. He gestured to her to precede him, which she did. If the wyrsa decided to cross the river, he did make a better rear guard than she did as soon as he got turned around. “Not that I’ve ever heard,” he said from behind her. “I suppose that a really good mage could hold a coercion-spell on a few and make them attack a target he chose, but that would be about the limit of ‘controlling’ them. He wouldn’t be able to stop them once they started, and he wouldn’t be able to make them turn aside if they went after something he didn’t choose. I certainly wouldn’t count on controlling them.”

“So at least we probably don’t have to worry about some mage setting this pack on our trail after bringing us down?” she persisted, and stole a glance over her shoulder at him. His feathers were plastered flat to his head, making his eyes look enormous.

“Well . . . not that I know of,” he said hesitantly. “But these aren’t the same wyrsa I know. They’ve been changed—maybe they are more tractable than the old kind. Maybe the poison was removed as a trade-off for some other powers, or it contributed to their uncontrollability. And a mage could have brought us down in their territory for amusement without needing to control them, just letting them do what they do.”

“You’re just full of good news today, aren’t you?” she growled, then repented. I shouldn’t be taking our bad luck out on him. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m just not exactly in a good frame of mind right now.”

“Neither am I,” he said softly, in a voice in which she could clearly hear his fear. “Neither am I.”

Tad kept a watch all day as Blade concentrated on fishing. Once or twice a single wyrsa showed itself, but the creatures made no move to cross the river to get at them.

Of course not. Night has always been their chosen hunting-time, and that should be especially true of wyrsa with this new coloration. Swift, silent, and incredibly fierce, he would not have wanted to face one of this new type, much less an entire pack.

I wonder how big the pack is, anyway? Six? Ten? More?

Were they the sport-offspring of a single female? Wyrsa were’only supposed to litter once every two years, and they didn’t whelp more than a couple at a time. If these are all from twin offspring of a single litter, back when the storms changed them — how many could the pair have produced? Four years to maturity, then two pups every two years. . . .

There could be as few as the seven that they had seen, and as many as thirty or forty. The true answer was probably somewhere in between.

He and Blade ate in silence, then she banked the fire down to almost nothing while he took the first watch. As soon as it was fully dark, he eased several rocks into place to disguise his outline, then pressed himself up against the stone of the floor as flat as he could. He hoped he could convince them that he wasn’t there, that nothing was watching them from the mouth of the cave. If he could lure one out into the open, out on the slippery rocks of the riverbank, he might be able to get off a very simple bit of magic. If he could stun one long enough to knock it into the river—well, here below the falls it would get sucked under to drown. Nothing but a fish could survive the swirling currents right at the foot of the falls. That would be one less wyrsa to contend with.

He didn’t hear Blade so much as sense her; after a moment’s hesitation, she touched his foot, then eased on up beside him.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mouthed into his ear. He nodded. Stupid, maybe, but she had good cause for insomnia.

She pressed herself even farther down against the stone than he had; anything that spotted her from across the river would have to have better eyesight than an owl.

The rain is slacking off. That was both good and bad news; he had an idea that the wyrsa didn’t much care for rain, and that they were averse to climbing around on rain-slick rocks. Like him, they had talons, but he didn’t think that their feet were as flexible as his. Those talons could make walking on rock difficult.

On the other hand, as the rain thinned, that made visibility across the river better, especially if the lightning kept up without any rain falling.

Something moved on the bank across from his position. He froze, and he felt Blade hold her breath.

Lightning flickered, and the light fell on a sleek, black form, poised at the very edge of the bank, peering intently in their direction. And now he saw that the white glazing of the dead one’s eyes had been the real color; the wyrsa’s eyes were a dead, opaque corpse-white. The very look of them, as the creature peered across the river in their direction, made his skin crawl.

He readied his spell, hoarding his energies. No point in striking unless everything was perfect. . . .

He willed the creature to remain, to lean forward more. Lightning flickered again; it was still there, still craning its neck, peering.

Stay . . . stay. . . .

Now!

He unleashed the energy; saw the wyrsa start, its eyes widening—

But instead of dropping over, stunned, it glowed for a moment. Blade gasped, so Tad knew that she had seen it, too, as a feeling of faintness and dis-orientation that he had experienced once before came over him. He wheezed and blinked a few times, dazzled, refocusing on the wyrsa.

The wyrsa gaped its mouth, then, as if recharged, the creature made a tremendous leap into the underbrush that nothing wholly natural could have duplicated, and was gone.

And with it went the energy of the spell. If the wyrsa had deflected it, the energy would still be there, dissipating. It hadn’t. The spell hadn’t hit shields, and it hadn’t been reflected.