The White Gryphon

I shouldn't be relaxed,he tried to tell himself. This is a perilous and horrible situation. There is a killer among us, a killer who is likely also a traitor, who kills in terrifying and obscene ways. It could be anyone! Well, almost anyone. Four ladies of the Court are dead— I did not know them, but still, I should not be sitting here thinking about being able to enjoy a meal for the first time in days....

On the other hand, there was nothing more that he could do, and his Emperor was acting again like the Shalaman he knew, the warrior, the leader.

And he was seeing a side to the foreigners, especially Amberdrake, that he had never, ever guessed. They had seemed so different from the Haighlei before this moment—alien, tricky, crafty, possibly deceitful.

Amberdrake, in particular, had seemed too opaque to be trustworthy. How could he not have noticed that this very opacity was like Silver Veil's ma

I thought that Silver Veil was unique. Is this how all northern kestra'chern are? Oh, perhaps not. Anyone can call himself a kestra'chern, after all. We have kestra'chern who are hardly worthy of the name. And there have been very few even of the good ones who have risen to the rank of Advisor.

But here were two who were worthy of the name and the highest of ranks—Silver Veil and Amberdrake—and an equally brilliant soul, if of a different order, in Winterhart. The strangers had turned out to be not so strange after all, despite their odd ways and their even odder friends, the gryphons.

Perhaps— one day I shall venture to read the gryphons. If they can be the friends of Amberdrake, then I think I should be in no danger of harm....

With a start, he realized that the conference was coming to an end, at least as far as he was concerned.

"You may go, Leyuet," Shalaman said, dismissing him with a wave of his hand. "We have taken up enough of your rest as it is. In the morning, see that Palisar and Silver Veil learn of what we have discussed, but keep it all among yourselves."

Unspoken, but obvious to Leyuet—he should keep to himselfthe King's near-debacle in the matter of honor.

It was not the first time that he had kept such things to himself. That was something of the nature of a Truthsayer; he examined and watched the King more often than the King himself knew.

He rose, smiled his farewells, and bowed himself out.

But not to go to his rooms.

Silver Veil would probably learn of all of this from Amberdrake; he could make sure of that in the morning.

But the rest of this was critical enough that Palisar should hear of it now.

Let Shalaman preserve his illusion that his Advisors wasted time on sleep when there was a delicate situation to be handled. Leyuet knew his duty, and so did Palisar. It would be a long night, but one well-spent.

Besides,he thought, humming a little to himself, suddenly I seem to have much more energy than I did earlier.

I wonder why that is?

Eight

Skandranon woke early and went scouting on the wing, just after dawn, despite the late hours they had all kept the night before. He was restless and found it hard to sleep with so many problems burning away at him.

First and foremost, of course, was whothe murderer was, and how he was accomplishing his crimes.

Skan was so angry that his muscles were all tight, but it was not the kind of hot, impulsive anger that had driven him in the past. This was a slow, smoldering rage, one that would send him wherever he had to go, to do whatever he had to do to catch the culprit. And when he caught the blackguard—well, he would probably wish that Leyuet and his Spears of the Law had gotten there first. Whoever this smelly chunk ofsketi is, he has to be getting into those rooms somehow. Maybe he left some sign on the roofs. Maybe I can find it. I doubt that Leyuet's people were really looking for it, not after they'd made up their minds that Drake or I had killed those people.

He flung himself off the railing of his balcony and up into the air with a great lunge of his hind legs—a lunge no longer accompanied by the plaint of his muscles, although there was a tiny creak of his joints that was probably unavoidable. At least his campaign of reconditioning himself had worked. The creaking was because of the damp, and there wasn't much to be done about that. This place was always damp; cool and damp by night, hot and damp by day. The climate made for some spectacular foliage, thick with lushly beautiful flowers that were even now sending their fragrances up on warm thermals, but it was also rather bad for middle-aged joints.

It belatedly occurred to him as he took to the air and began a series of slow, lazy circles in the damp morning air that he made a dreadfully conspicuous target. It isn't as if there are a lot of creatures the size of a horse or larger, pure white, flying about in the sky around here. If someone who happened to like one of those women happened to decide to take the law into his own hands, I could be in deep—

Something sent a warning shrilling along his nerves.

Only years of dodging the inventive weaponry used by Ma'ar's soldiers—and the fact that his fighting instincts were coming back with a vengeance—saved him at that moment.

He thought later that he must have caught a hint of swift movement coming up from below, movement so subtle it didn't register consciously. His nerves just screamed a sudden alarm at him, and he sideslipped in the air, violently and unpredictably altering his path.

What in— oh,sketi!

And an arrow passed through the part of the sky where his chest had been a moment before, actually whiffling through his outermost three primaries on his left wing without touching the wing itself.

It was close enough that he reached out, still without thinking, to snatch it out of the sky.

A foolish move, of course—although it did give him the satisfaction that his reactions were quite good enough now that he caught it. He spiraled violently away before a second arrow could follow it, sca

There was nothing, of course. Whoever had sent off the shot wasn't willing to risk a second. And he wasn't about to show himself with a bow in his hand, either.

The arrow was plain, quite ordinary, without owners' marks or fancy fletching. It was probably nothing more than a plain target arrow, one of a hundred thousand like it in this city alone. It might not even have been shot at him; someone might have been stupid, overly exuberant, or a very bad hand with a bow.

Oh, yes. Surely. And pigs are flying in parade formation around the sun at this moment.

There was no point in pretending that this arrow had come zinging at him with any i

But this arrow carried far more implications than that. For someone among the Haighlei to bypass law, custom, and protocol and go shooting at Skandranon personally meant that the situation had eroded to a very dangerous point indeed. These people simply did not dothat. They were so law-abiding that it was ridiculous.

And neither he, nor anyone else, had taken that possibility into their considerations last night. It might be a lot more dangerous to be the chief suspect of all these killings now than they had thought. That put Amberdrake in a very precarious position.