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 puff 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 redbrown 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.
