The Black Gryphon

Still, he didn’t want her to think that he was some kind of ragged-tailed hooligan. The gods only knew what she’d heard about him; Drake and Gesten wouldn’t repeat half of the stories they said they’d heard about him. But then again, he had only their word for the fact that they’d heard these stories at all. . . .

It was a good thing that this was a relatively large tent, made for two gryphons as patients, and only holding Skan at the moment; once Commander Loren brought his young gryphon in, things became just a little crowded.

“This is Zhaneel, my lords,” Loren said formally. “Lord Urtho, Skandranon, this is young Zhaneel, who today disposed of three makaar single-handedly.”

While Urtho made the usual congratulatory speech, Skandranon kept very quiet and examined Zhaneel. She was small and lightly built, with a deep keelbone but narrow chest. Her ear-tufts were compact and dainty, her feathers very smooth, and she had no neck-ruff at all. In color she was a light brown with a dusty-gold edge to her primaries; like most gryphons except the unassigned, her primary feathers had been bleached, then dipped in the colors of her wing—in this case, red and gold. On her head and face, she had malar-stripes of a slightly darker brown, and eye-markings flowing down her cheeks, like soft-edged tear tracks.

While Loren and Urtho spoke, she kept her head down and turned to the side, as if shy or embarrassed—the gryphon equivalent of blushing. Was she simply shy, or was she truly uncomfortable in their presence? Most of the gryphons that Skan knew might have been subdued in the presence of their overlord and creator, but they wouldn’t have acted like this.

When Loren finally coaxed her to speak, her voice was low and soft, and she spoke in simple sentences with a great deal of hissing and trilling—and yet it was not because she was stupid. A stupid gryphon would not have been able to do what she had done. It was as if she simply could not get the words past her shyness.

“It wasss nothing,” she insisted. “I only fly high, verrry high. Sssaferrrr it isss. Makaarrr cannot fly ssso high. I ssssee them, thrrree, below me.”

Skan could readily picture it in his mind’s eye; especially if she had been flying as high as he thought she was. Those tapering wings—surely with wings like those the aspect ratio would be remarkable, and the narrow leading edge would complement the long primaries. The makaar would have been halfway between her and the earth; she would have been invisible to them.

“Too farrr to rrreturrrn to rrreport, it wasss,” she continued. “They would be gone when warrrri-orrrsss came. They mussst have been looking for sssomething. Ssssent. They would have found it and gone.”

Now Skan nodded. “True,” he rumbled, and Zhaneel started at the sound of his voice. “Quite true. Your duty was to try to stop them.”

Her hissing had made him conscious of his own speech; normally he only hissed and trilled when he was under stress or very, very relaxed, among friends. When he chose, he could speak as well as any human, and he chose to do so now. Perhaps it would comfort her.

“But how did you kill them?” Urtho persisted.

She ducked her head. “I wasss high. They could not sssee me. I sssstooped on them; hit the leader. Like thissss—”

She held up one foreclaw, fisted.

“I ssstruck hissss head; he fell from the sssky and died.”

No doubt; coming from the height Zhaneel had been at, she must have broken the leader’s neck on impact, and the ground finished him.

“I followed him down; the othersss pursued, but I climbed again, too fassssst for them to follow.” She pantomimed with her foreclaw, and Skan saw then what he had not noticed before—a reason she may not have struck to slash, or bind to her quarry as he would have. Her talons were actually very short; her “toes” long and flexible, very like stubby human fingers. A slash would only have angered the makaar unless she had managed against all odds to slash the major artery in the neck.

“I go high again, verrry high; the two follow, but cannot go sssso high. I turrrrrn, dive, hit the first asss he fliesss to meet me.” She sat back on her hindquarters and mimed that meeting with both of her odd foreclaws; how the makaar struggled to gain height, how she had come at him head-on, angling her dive at the last possible moment to strike the top of his head with her closed fists.

“He wasss ssstunned; he fell, brrroke hisss neck when he hit. I follow him down, to be sssure, then turrrn dive into climb again.” She would not look at any of the three of them, keeping her eyes fixed on some invisible point on the ground. “The thirrrd one, he isss afrraid now, he trrries to rrrrun. I go high again, asss high asss I can, and dive. He isss fassst, but my dive isss fassster. I hit him. He fallssss.” She ducked her head. “It isss overrr. It isss nothing ssspecial.”

Nothing special—except that these were tactics few, if any, gryphons had tried before. Spectacularly successful tactics, too, if Zhaneel’s experience was anything to go by. Most gryphons, when they fought makaar, closed for the kill, binding to the prey’s back and bringing it down, or slashing with talons in passing strikes. Hawk and eagle tactics, not falcon. Zhaneel had fought as would a very hungry—or very brave—falcon, when taking a goose or very large duck, prey that would outweigh her twofold or more—knocking the prey out of the sky, and