The Silver Gryphon

had a drum in his hands. Evidently he was going to be playing it during—whatever it was they were going to do.

“Right.” Snowstar stood over the table, the only one who was standing, and held a long chain terminating in a teardrop-shaped, rough-polished piece of some dark stone. “Redoak, you watch what the pendulum does, and mark what I told you out on the map. Rides-alone, give me a heartbeat rhythm. The rest of you, concentrate; I’ll need your combined energies along with anything else I can pull up out of the local node. Skan, that goes for you, too. Come sit opposite me, but don’t think of Tad or Blade, think of me. Got that?”

He was not about to argue; this looked rather like one of those bizarre shamanistic rituals that Urtho used to try, now and again, when classical spell-casting failed. He simply did as he was told, watching as Snowstar carefully suspended the pendulum over the map at the location where the youngsters had last been heard from. Rides-alone began a steady drum pattern, hypnotic without inducing slumber; somehow it enhanced concentration. How that was managed, Skan could not begin to imagine.

For a long time, nothing happened. The stone remained quite steady, and Skan was afraid that whatever Snowstar had planned wasn’t working after all. But Snowstar remained impassive, and little by little, he began to move the pendulum along a route going north and east of the point of the youngsters’ last camp.

And abruptly, without any warning at all, the pendulum did move.

It swung, violently and abruptly away from the spot Snowstar had been trying to move it toward. And in total defiance of gravity, it hung at an angle, as if it were being repelled by something there.

Snowstar gave a grunt, although Skan could not tell if it was satisfaction or not, and Redoak made a mark on the map with a stick of charcoal. Snowstar moved his hand a trifle.

The pendulum came back down, as if it had never exhibited its bizarre behavior.

Snowstar moved it again, a little at a time, and once again came to a point where the pendulum repeated its action. The strange scene was repeated over and over, as Redoak kept marking places on the map and Snowstar moved the pendulum back.

It took uncounted drumbeats, and sweat was pouring down the faces of every mage around the table, when Snowstar finally dropped the pendulum and signaled to Rides-alone to stop drumming. There was an irregular area marked out in charcoal dots on the map, an area that the pendulum avoided, and which the youngsters’ flight would have bisected. Redoak connected the dots, outlining a weirdly-shaped blotch.

“I would lay odds that they are in there, somewhere,” Snowstar said wearily. “It’s an area in which there is no magic; no magic and no magical energy. Whatever is given off in the normal course of things by animals and plants is immediately lost, somehow, and I suspect magic brought into that area is drained away as well. I can only guess that is what happened to their basket when they flew over it.”

“So the basket became heavier, and they couldn’t fly with it?” Redoak hazarded, and whistled when Snowstar nodded. “That’s not good. But how did you know what to use to find all this?”

Snowstar shrugged modestly. “It was Gielle that gave me the idea to look for a negative, and I remembered shamanic dowsing; you can look for something that is there, like metal, or something that is not there, like water. Urtho taught it to me; we used to use it to make certain that we weren’t planting our outposts atop unstable ground.” He looked across the table at Skan, who was trying very hard to tell himself that it wasn’t likely for all the magic infused into the basket to drain off at once. He did not want to think about what that would have meant for poor Tadrith if the basket regained its normal weight in a single moment while aflight.

“Take that map with you, and tell Judeth what we’ve found,” the Adept told Skan. “I’ll work with the mages I’m sending out with the search teams. There’s probably something about the area itself that we can shield against. I doubt that a mage caused this. It might just be a freak of nature, and the Haighlei would never have seen it, because they were looking for magic, not for its absence.”

Skan nodded, and Redoak brushed a quick-drying varnish on the map to set the charcoal. The fumes warred unpleasantly with the lingering scent of the incense, but the moment the map was dry, the younger mage rolled it up and handed it to the Black Gryphon. Skan did not wait around to see what the rest of the mages were going to do; he took the map and fled out the door for the second time that evening.

This time he went straight to the planning room—which Judeth still referred to as the “War Room” out of habit. And it looked very much as if they were planning for a wartime situation. Judeth had a map spread out over the table, there were aides darting everywhere, Aubri was up on his hindquarters tracing out a line with one talon when Skan came in through the door.

“Snowstar thinks he has a general area,” Skan said, as silence descended and all heads but Judeth’s swiveled around at his entrance. “That’s what he wanted the map for. Here.”

He handed the map to the nearest aide, who spread it out on the table over the existing one at Judeth’s nod.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at-the blobby outline on the map.

“It’s an area where there isn’t magic,” Skan replied. He repeated what Snowstar had told him, without the details about shamanic dowsing. “That would be why we can’t raise the teleson. Snowstar thinks that anything