The Silver Gryphon

have the emotional reaction to seeing people going out on a quasi-military mission, and that fact that it is my daughter that is doing so only makes the reaction worse.” He smiled thinly. “You cannot reason with an old emotional problem, I am afraid.”

She looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, and made little patterns with her forefinger, tracing the grain of the wood. What on earth did he expect her to say? What could she say? That was years and years ago, before I was even born. Can’t he have gotten over it by now? He’s supposed to be the great magician of the emotions, so why can’t he keep his own trained to heel? What could possibly go wrong with this assignment? We’ll have a teleson with us, we ‘II be reporting in, and if there is a life-threatening emergency and they can’t get help to us quickly, they ‘II take the risk and Gate us back!

But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and it wouldn’t help anything to say it. “I can understand. At least, I think I can. I’ll try,” she finished lamely.

True, it is nothing but wilderness between here and there—but when we get “there,” we’ll be in a fortified outpost built to withstand storm, siege, or earthquake. And, granted, no one has even tried to explore all the rainforest in between, but we’ll be flying, not walking! What could possibly knock us out of the sky that our people or the Haighlei wouldn‘t have encountered a long, long time ago ?

It was—barely—possible that some mage-made creatures of Ma’ar’s survived from the Cataclysm. It was less likely that any of them could have made it this far south. And even if they did, there had never been that many of them that could threaten a gryphon. The last makaar died ages ago, and there never was anything else that could take a flying gryphon down. We’ll be flying too high for any projectile to hurt us, and even if we weren‘t, there‘II be the mass of the carry-basket and all our supplies between us and a marksman.

“Father, I promise you, we’ll be fine,” she only said, choking down a last dry mouthful of bread. “Makaar are extinct, and nothing less could even ruffle Tadrith’s feathers. You’ve seen him; he’s one of the biggest, strongest gryphons in the Silvers!”

But Amberdrake shook his head. “Blade, it’s not that I don’t trust or believe in you, but there is far more in this world than you or Tadrith have ever seen. There were more mages involved in the Mage Wars than just Urtho and Ma’ar; plenty of them created some very dangerous creatures, too, and not all of them were as short-lived as makaar. I will admit that we are a long distance from the war zones, but we got this far, so who’s to say that other things couldn’t?”

He’s not going to listen to me, she realized. He’s determined to be afraid for me, no matter what I say. There was more likelihood of moving the population of the city up to the rim of the canyon than there was of getting Amberdrake to change his mind when it was made up.

“What’s more, as you very well know, the mage-storms that followed the Cataclysm altered many, many otherwise harmless creatures, and conjured up more.” His jaw firmed stubbornly. “You ask Snowstar if you don’t believe me; some of the territory we passed through was unbelievable, and that was only after a year or so of mage-storms battering at it! We were very, very lucky that most of the things we encountered were minimally intelligent.”

“Sports and change-children die out in less than a generation,” she retorted, letting her impatience get the better of her. “That’s simple fact, Father. There’re just too many things wrong with most magic-made creatures for them to live very long, if they’ve been created by accident.”

He raised an elegant eyebrow at her, and the expression on his face told her she’d been caught in a mistake.

“Urtho was not infallible,” he said quietly. “He had many accidents in the course of creating some of his new creatures. One of those accidents was responsible for the creation of intelligence in kyree, and another for intelligence in hertasi. And neither race has died out within a generation.’ ‘

She had already spotted the flaw in his argument. “An accident may have been responsible for the intelligence of the creature, but not the creature itself,” she countered. “Creature creation takes great thought, planning, and skill. An accident is simply not going to be able to duplicate that!”

He looked as if he were going to say something, but subsided instead.

“Besides,” Blade continued, taking her advantage while she still had it, “people have been going to this outpost for years, and no one has seen anything— either there or on the way. Don’t you think by now if there was going to be any trouble, someone would have encountered it?”

Amberdrake dropped his eyes in defeat and shook his head. “There you have me,” he admitted. “Except for one thing. We don’t know what lies beyond that outpost and its immediate area. The Haighlei have never been there, and neither have we. For all we know, there’s an army of refugees from the wars about to swarm over you, or a renegade wizard about to take a force of his own across the land—”

“And that,” Blade said with finality, “is precisely why we will be there in the first place. It is our duty to be vigilant.”

He couldn’t refute that, and he didn’t try.

Blade extracted herself from her parents with the promise that she and Tad would not take off until they arrived. With one pack slung over her back and the other suspended from her shoulder, she hurried up the six levels