The Silver Gryphon

wyrsa to contend with.

He didn’t hear Blade so much as sense her; after a moment’s hesitation, she touched his foot, then eased on up beside him.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mouthed into his ear. He nodded. Stupid, maybe, but she had good cause for insomnia.

She pressed herself even farther down against the stone than he had; anything that spotted her from across the river would have to have better eyesight than an owl.

The rain is slacking off. That was both good and bad news; he had an idea that the wyrsa didn’t much care for rain, and that they were averse to climbing around on rain- slick rocks. Like him, they had talons, but he didn’t think that their feet were as flexible as his. Those talons could make walking on rock difficult.

On the other hand, as the rain thinned, that made visibility across the river better, especially if the lightning kept up without any rain falling.

Something moved on the bank across from his position. He froze, and he felt Blade hold her breath.

Lightning flickered, and the light fell on a sleek, black form, poised at the very edge of the bank, peering intently in their direction. And now he saw that the white glazing of the dead one’s eyes had been the real color; the wyrsa’s eyes were a dead, opaque corpse-white. The very look of them, as the creature peered across the river in their direction, made his skin crawl.

He readied his spell, hoarding his energies. No point in striking unless everything was perfect. . . .

He willed the creature to remain, to lean forward more. Lightning flickered again; it was still there, still craning its neck, peering.

Stay . . . stay. . . .

Now!

He unleashed the energy; saw the wyrsa start, its eyes widening—

But instead of dropping over, stunned, it glowed for a moment. Blade gasped, so Tad knew that she had seen it, too, as a feeling of faintness and dis-orientation that he had experienced once before came over him. He wheezed and blinked a few times, dazzled, refocusing on the wyrsa.

The wyrsa gaped its mouth, then, as if recharged, the creature made a tremendous leap into the underbrush that nothing wholly natural could have duplicated, and was gone.

And with it went the energy of the spell. If the wyrsa had deflected it, the energy would still be there, dissipating. It hadn’t. The spell hadn’t hit shields, and it hadn’t been reflected.

It had been inhaled, absorbed completely. And what was more—an additional fraction of Tad’s personal mage-energy had gotten pulled along behind it as if swept in a current.

“Oh. My. Gods,” he breathed, feeling utterly stunned. Now he knew what had hit them, out there over the forest. And now he knew why the wyrsa had begun following them in the first place.

The wyrsa were the magic-thieves, not some renegade mage, not some natural phenomena. They ate magic, or absorbed it, and it made them stronger.

Blade shook him urgently. “What happened?” she hissed in his ear. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

He shook off his paralysis to explain it to her; she knew enough about magic and how it worked that he didn’t have to explain things twice.

“Goddess.” She lay there, just as stunned for a moment as he was. And then, in typical fashion, she summed up their entire position in a two sentences. “They have our scent, they want our blood, and now they know that you produce magic on top of all that.” She stared at him, aghast, her eyes wide. “We’re going to have to kill them all, or we’ll never get away from here!”

Nine