The Black Gryphon

There the body of Co

Vikteren had headed straight for Urtho, as Skan stalked in through the doorway with every feather and hair erect in battle-anger. “Poison,” the young mage said shortly, his face flushed and his voice tight with grief. “Miranda-thorns, very rare, no antidote. The bastard probably had enough in his pockets to hit us both, too; that’s what he was reaching for when you got him.”

The hertasi gasped and scrambled off, presumably to fetch help.

Skan only heard and heeded one thing. “No antidote?” he roared, so that Urtho whimpered and Vikteren winced. “What do you mean, no antidote!”

“Skan, I can’t change the facts,” Vikteren shouted back. “There’s no antidote! It’s something Ma’ar created as an assassination-tool, and we haven’t seen more than three victims since the war started! All we can do is buy him some time and counteract some of the effects.”

“Do it,” Skan snapped, spreading out his bloodstained claws over the body of his creator and friend, invoking every tiny bit of magery he had. He opened himself to Urtho, found the places in his mind that the miranda had muddled, bringing hallucinations and pain, and joined with Vikteren to help Urtho straighten the mental paths and banish those symptoms.

He fought with every bit of his grief and rage, every atom of energy. And still, it was not enough. He saw for himself that Vikteren was right. The poison replicated itself within Urtho’s body, spreading like some evil, sentient disease, and with every passing moment it destroyed a little more of Urtho’s life-force, corroding it away inexorably.

At last, his mage-energies exhausted, he dropped his outstretched claw and opened the eyes he did not realize he had closed.

Vikteren supported Urtho in his chair, and the face that looked up at Skan was sane again. “The evacuation-“ Urtho whispered harshly. “Get me-Healers. I have to hold on-“

Vikteren looked up into Skan’s puzzled face. “I think he’s keyed some kind of destructive spells into himself-if he leaves the Tower, the place is going to go unstable. And if you thought what happened with that Gate at Jerlag Pass was impressive-“

The young mage left the rest unsaid. Leaves the Tower, or dies, he means. And there must be two dozen permanent Gates here, not to mention the Tower itself and everything still in it. The destructive potential staggered him. Anyone still here would be obliterated by the result, pulverized to dust-----

The noise of ru

“We know,” Tamsin said shortly, taking Vikter-en’s place at Urtho’s side. “We’ll buy him all the time we can.”

Skan did not move out of the way. The Healers shoved past him, ignoring him as if he had been an inconveniently placed piece of furniture.

He started to say something, but Vikteren motioned to him to remain silent. Tears trickled down the mage’s face, and his shoulders shook, but he didn’t produce so much as a stifled sob to distract the Healers from their work.

Skan himself shook from beak to talons with the effort of repressing a keen of grief. He closed his eyes and clamped his beak shut, flexing his talons into the wood of the floor, feeling it splinter beneath them, and wishing he could kill Co

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, startling him, making him jump. His eyes snapped open and focused on Tamsin’s face, not more than a finger away from his beak.

“We’ve done all anyone can,” the Healer said, in a voice gone flat and dull with sorrow and exhaustion. “He needs to tell you something.”

The four Healers staggered out the door, holding each other in pairs and not once looking back. Vikteren still stood beside Urtho’s chair, tears falling steadily down his cheeks and dropping onto the breast of his tunic.

“Get all the gryphons you can find,” one of the Healers told the hertasi who waited, trembling, beside the door. “He’s going to try to get everything open that he can before the end, and he wants them to take all they can carry.”

The hertasi looked up at the Healer for a moment, too grief-stricken to reply. The man spoke again. “Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants,” he choked out. “Urtho said that.” And at that the hertasi ran to carry out the orders.

“Skan-there’s a weapon.” Urtho’s voice was the merest whisper, but his words were clear enough. “Never meant to use it, but-now, Ma’ar is coming. Help me-weapons room.”

Vikteren helped him to his feet and got under one shoulder, while Skan supported him on the other side. They both knew where the weapons room was, and that it was locked, to be unsealed by Urtho’s presence alone. They carried him across the Strategy Room and to the door across the hallway; Urtho had no more strength than a newborn kitten. He fell against the door to the weapons room to open it, and directed them both to a box on a stand in the far corner of the room.

“It’s-like the box I gave Zhaneel. But bigger. Got one on the Tower roof. Dissolves the bonds-of spells. Take it to Ma’ar when you can, trigger it. Same thing that happened at Jerlag.” Urtho did not look at Skan; the gryphon had the feeling that perhaps he couldn’t bear to. “Made it for gryphons. Stick your talons-in the holes. All at once.”

Skan saw then that what he had taken for decorative perforations in the side were actually holes made to fit a gryphon’s talons, in a pattern of two on each side to fit the two-forward, two back-curved talons of the foreclaws.

“You have-a count of a hundred-to get away,” Urtho finished. “Better have-a Gate handy. And closed fast.”

The Mage of Silence tried to smile, and coughed instead. “Go!” he whispered fiercely, when the coughing fit was over. “Go. Get Ma’ar later. Survive now.”

Skan lifted the box from its stand, and saw that it had a carry-strap meant to go around the neck. He pulled the strap over his head, awkwardly, and turned back to the Mage.

Urtho’s eyes were clouded with pain, and his lips formed the word, “Go.”

Beak clamped down on the death-keen, Skan backed out of the room. But before he left, he saw Vikteren helping Urtho to the next door to be unlocked.

And the first of the combat-gryphons arrived, to carry away what he could.

Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants. Unable to hold it back any longer, Skan fled down the hallway and into the sunset, his death-keen echoing through the Tower as he ran.

Winterhart flung books and packages through the Gate whenever there wasn’t someone actually traversing it, from the pile that formed as the gryphons brought them to her, her arms and back one long pulled muscle. There would be some time after Urtho succumbed before everything went dangerously unstable. They should all have time to get out.

All but Urtho. . . .

Her eyes stung with tears, but she would mourn him later, when they were all, temporarily at least, safe.

Somewhere on the other side of this Gate was another Trondi’irn, pitching packages through the Gate to k’Leshya. The farther away this dangerous knowledge went, the better off they would all be. She did not bother to think about how they would continue this war, or even if they would be able to regroup. The important thing now was simply to escape, to live, and to worry about the rest later.

Other gryphons, too exhausted to be of any use, staggered up to and through the Gate while she paused in her labor. Humans and hertasi, tervardi and kyree and dyheli also presented themselves for passage, burdened with everything they could carry. There were fewer of them now than there had been; as combatants staggered in from the field, they grabbed what they could and headed for their evacuation-Gates, and by now virtually everyone who could make it back, had.