The Silver Gryphon

Gielle nodded. “Yes, sir. And it was just a freak accident, something you’d have to have been an Adept to pull off, though. Some senile old fart who should never have been put in charge of anything was given an unfamiliar teleson to recharge and reversed the whole spell. Basically, he sucked all the magic out of it, made it just so much unmagical junk.” Gielle shrugged. “The only reason he could do that was because he was an Adept. Senile, but still an Adept. We make those telesons foolproof for a good reason. Tadrith couldn’t have done that, even by accident and a thousand tries a day, and even if someone actually smashed the teleson, I’d still be able to activate it and get a damaged echo-back. If it had been shattered by spell, the telltale would still mark the area magically. I don’t know what to think about this.”

Snowstar pursed his lips, his forehead creasing as he frowned. “Neither do I. This is very peculiar. . . .”

Skan looked from one mage to the other, and back again. He caught Redoak’s eye; the Kaled’a’in just held up his hands in a gesture of puzzlement.

“The signature of an Adept is fairly obvious,” Redoak said slowly. “All Adepts have a distinctive style to even a moderately-trained eye. Urtho’s was his ability to make enchantments undetectable—his mark was that there was no mark, but as far as I know, he could only veil spells he himself had crafted. The Haighlei would have seen something like this situation, I wager, by now. An Adept usually doesn’t refrain from doing magic any time he can, especially not one of the old Neutrals. They were positively flamboyant about it. That was one of the quarrels that Urtho had with them.”

“I have an idea,” Snowstar finally said. “Listen, all of you, I’ll need all your help on this. We’re going to do something very primitive, much more primitive than scrying.” He looked around the room. “Redoak, you and Gielle and Joffer put all the small worktables together. Rides-alone, you know where my shaman implements are; go get them. Lora, Greenwing, come with me.” He looked at Skan. “You go to the Silvers’ headquarters and get me the biggest map of the area the children were headed into that you can find or bully out of them. They might give me an argument; you, they won’t dare.”

“They’d lose a limb,” Skan growled, and he went straight for the door. He did his best not to stagger; he hadn’t used that much mage-energy in a long time, and it took more out of him than he had expected.

All right, gryphon. Remember what you told yourself earlier. You have experience. You may fall on your beak from fatigue and tear something trying to fly in and save the day, but you have experience. Rely on experience when your resources are low, and rely on others when you can—not when you want to, vain gryphon. Work smarter. Think. Use what you have. And don’t break yourself, stupid gryphon, because you are running out of spare parts!

He saw to his surprise that it was already dark outside; he hadn’t realized that he had spent so long with the mages, trying to find the children. No wonder he was tired and a bit weak!

The Silvers’ headquarters was lit up as if they were holding high festival inside, which made him feel a bit more placated. At least they were doing something, taking this seriously now. Too bad Snowstar had to convince them there was a threat to their own hides before they were willing to move.

They should have just moved on it. Wasn’t that the way we operated in the old days? He barged in the front door, readied a foreclaw and grabbed the first person wearing a Silver Gryphon badge that he saw, explaining what he wanted in a tone that implied he would macerate anyone who denied it to him. The young human did not even make a token protest as the talons caught in his tunic and the huge beak came dangerously near his face.

“S-stay here, s-sir,” he stammered, backing up as soon as Skan let go of him. “I’ll f-find what you w-want and b-bring it right here!”

Somehow, tonight Skan had the feeling that he was not “beloved where e’re he went.” That was fine. In his current black mood, he would much rather be feared than beloved.

People have been thinking of me as the jolly old fraud, the uncle who gives all the children pony rides, he thought, grating his beak, his talons scoring the floor as he seethed. They forgot what I was, forgot the warrior who used to tear makaar apart with his bare talons.

Well, tonight they were getting a reminder.

The boy came back very quickly with the rolled-up map. Skan unrolled it just long enough to make certain that they weren’t trying to fob something useless off on him to make him go away, then gruffly thanked the boy and launched himself out the door.

Despite the darkness, he flew back with his prize. When he marched through Snowstar’s door, he saw at once that the workroom had already been transformed. Everything not needed for the task at hand had been cleared away against the wall. Other projects had been piled atop one another with no thought for coherence. It was going to take days to put the workroom back into some semblance of order, but Skan doubted that Snowstar was going to be thinking about anything but Blade and Tad until they were found.

At least we have one friend who took all this seriously without having to be persuaded.

The several small tables were now one large one, waiting for the map he held in his beak. The moment he showed his face at the door, eager hands took—snatched!—the map away from him and spread it out on the table. Redoak lit a pungent incense, filling the room with smoke that just stopped short of being eye-watering. The mage that Snowstar had called Rides-alone, who came from one of the many odd tribes that Urtho had won to his cause,