The Silver Gryphon

As Tad spoke, Blade shivered, although the sun was high enough now that it had driven off the fog and replaced the cool damp with the usual heat and humidity. The pain, weariness, the drugs—all of them were taking their toll on her endurance. Her hands shook; her pale face told him that it wasn’t fear that was making her shake, it was strain. This just might be the event that broke her nerve.

Tad had tried to be completely objective; he had tried only to report what he had seen, not what he had felt. Out there, faced with the evidence of their watchers, he had sensed a malignant purpose behind it all that he had no rational way of justifying. But Blade evidently felt the same way that he did, and rather than break, this new stress made her rally her resources. Her face remained pale, but her hands steadied, and so did her voice.

“We haven’t a choice now,” she said flatly. “We have to get out of here. We can’t defend this place against creatures that can come and go without a sign that they were there. If we’re lucky, they’re territorial, and if we get far enough out of their territory, they’ll be satisfied.”

Once again, the wildlife of this place was mysteriously absent from their immediate vicinity; only a few birds called and cried in the canopy. Did they know something that the two below them did not?

“And if we’re not, we’ll be on the run with no secure place to hole up,” he argued. His focus sharpened, and he felt the feathers along his cheeks and jaws ripple. “If they can come and go without our seeing them, they can track us without our knowing they’re behind us! I don’t want some unseen enemy crawling up my tail. I want to see whoever I am against.” That unnerved him, and he was not ashamed to show it. The idea that something could follow them, or get ahead of them and set an ambush, and he would never know it until it was too late. . . . It just made his guts bind and crawl.

Blade was quiet for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. All around them, water dripped slowly from the leaves, making the long fall to splash into puddles below, and the air was thick with the perfumes of strange flowers. “Look,” she said, finally. “We didn’t fly all that far before we were brought down. Twenty, maybe thirty leagues at most. We can go back in the direction of our previous campsite. That was defensible; remember, there was a cliff nearby? And remember the river that ran alongside it?”

Nervously, Tad flexed his talons into the loam. New scents rose to his nostrils, of earth and old leaves, dampness and the sharp aroma of a torn fungus. “You have a point.” He thought about her suggestion, mentally trying to figure out how long it would take two injured people to walk the distance that two uninjured people had flown. It isn‘t so much the distance, as what we have to cross to get there. “It might take us as much as four days,” he pointed out. “We don’t have any real way of getting good directions other than the north-needle, and we’re going to be crawling through leagues of this—” He waved his claw at the tangled undergrowth. “We’re going to be carrying packs, we’ll have to guard our backtrail and watch ahead for ambushes, and we’re both injured. All of that will delay us; in fact, we probably ought to assume that we’re going to be creeping through the forest, not hiking through it.”

If we’re going to do this, I want to creep. I want to go from bit of cover to bit of cover; I want to walk so that we leave no sign and little scent. I want to leave traps behind.

“But when we get there—we’ll be at a cliff face, Tad. That means caves, probably at least one waterfall; even if we don’t find the river at first, we can work our way along the cliff until we do find the river. We’ll at least have someting we can put our backs against!” She looked unbelievably tense, and Tad didn’t blame her. Of the two of them, she was the most vulnerable, physically, and the least able to defend herself, knife skill or not.

Not that either of us will be particularly good at it. In terrain like this, I’m at a distinct disadvantage. If anything gets in front of me, I can probably shred it, but at my sides and rear I’m badly vulnerable at close quarters.

If they left this camp, their choice of how to proceed was simple; pack out what they could, or try to live off the land with very little to aid them. Take the chance that they could improvise, or—

Or find out that we can’t. We’re hurt; we are going to need every edge we can get. That means tools, weapons, food, protection.

“The one advantage that we have is that whatever these creatures are, they don’t know us, so they can’t predict us,” she persisted. “If we move now, we may confuse them. They may linger to look over what we left. We aren’t going to lose them unless they lose interest in us, but we may leave them far enough behind that it will take them a while to catch up.”

If only they had some idea of what kind of creature they were up against! The very fact that they would be trying to slip quietly through the forest rather than running might confuse their foes.

Or it might tempt them into an attack. They might read that as an admission of weakness. There was just no way of knowing.

He nodded, grinding his beak a bit. “Meanwhile, if we stay, they can study us at their leisure,” he admitted. “And that makes us easy targets.”

Go or stay? Remain where they were or try to find some place easier to defend?

Either way, they were targets. The only question was whether they made themselves moving targets or entrenched targets.

Aubri and Father always agreed on that; it’s better to be a moving target than a stationary one. “All right, I agree,” he conceded. “Let’s make up two packs and get out of here. You might as