The Silver Gryphon

She drew her knife and wriggled around until she was crouched in place. With a yell, she threw off the mat and leaped out—inadvertently kicking him in the stomach as she did so.

His attack-cry was considerably spoiled by this. Instead of a fierce scream of defiance, all he could emit was a pitiful grunt, remarkably similar to a belch. But he managed to follow her out, if not in a rush, at least in a hurry.

There wasn’t anything there, which, although an anticlimax, was also a relief. “Sorry,” she said, apologetically. “My foot slipped.’1

What could he say? “It happens,” he managed, as graciously as possible—not very, but he doubted that she blamed him at the moment for not speaking with an Ambassador’s tact and dissimulation. “Let’s go check that deadfall.”

When they got close to where the trap had been, it was quite clear that it was going to be empty, for the remains of the vegetation they had used to conceal it were scattered all over the area. The trap itself was quite empty—though there was a trace of blood on the bark of one of the logs.

“We marked him,” Blade said, squatting down beside it to examine it further. “How badly—well, probably not too badly. Maybe a scrape, or a minor cut. Possibly a broken bone. But we did hurt him a little.”

She stood up and looked toward the tree where the decoys were hidden. “We’d better go see how they reacted.”

When they reached the base of the tree, they finally saw something of what their trackers could do, and some clues as to their nature.

Persistent. And . . . possibly angry. But not foolishly persistent.

There were scratches, deep ones, in the bark of the tree, about twice as high up on the trunk as Blade was tall. So the decoys had worked, at least for a while, and the hunters had been unable to resist trying to get at the quarry when it was openly in sight.

Or else they were so angry when one of their number got caught in the deadfall that they tried to get to us no matter how difficult it was going to be.

Now they knew this much: the hunters could leap respectable distances, but they couldn’t climb the tree trunk, which at least meant that they were not great cats. The ground at the foot of the tree was torn by claws, either as the hunters tore at the ground in frustration, or when they tried to leap up to drag their prey down out of the tree.

On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of damage to the tree trunk itself; the hunters had made several attempts, but it didn’t look as if they had tried mindlessly, over and over, until they were exhausted.

That meant that they were intelligent enough to know when their task was impossible.

Or intelligent enough to recognize that the decoys were just that. In that case, they might well have reasoned that we would have to come back to get the packs before we left, no matter where we hid ourselves overnight.

And if it had been anger that motivated their attack, their anger did not overcome them for long.

Blade looked around, shivering, as if some of the same thoughts had occurred to her. “Let’s get the packs and get out of here,” she urged. “Fast. They haven’t shown themselves by day before, but that doesn’t mean they won’t now. We might have given them a reason to.”

He swarmed up the tree far more quickly than he had thought possible a few moments before, and this time he didn’t notice his sore muscles. There was no need to concern himself with ropes on the way up, which made things simpler. He untied the packs when he got there, and dropped them and the rope that held them in place down to the ground, leaving the decoys stuck in the forks of the branches. If the shadow-lurkers were still deceived by the decoys, they might linger, giving him and Blade that much more of a head start.

He went down the tree twice as fast as he had gone up. Every nerve in his body jumped whenever an unexpected sound occurred, and the quicker they left, the happier he would be. There was just a moment more of delay during which they stowed the rope and donned the packs, and then they were on their way without even a pause for a meal.

He wasn’t hungry, and he suspected that Blade wasn’t either. His insides were all knotted up with tension, and he kept hearing old gryphon proverbs in the back of his mind, about well-fed gryphons and the inability to fly out of danger.

Not that I can fly out of danger now—but it’s better to run or fight on an empty stomach than a full one!

It was barely dawn by the light, and the morning fog had not yet lifted. The entire world was painted in dim grays and blues, vague gray shapes and columns appearing and vanishing in white mist. In a way, that was all to the good, for rather than using the trees as cover, they counted on the fog itself for primary concealment. They