Page 75 of Gryphon in Light

“I think that’s what me and Jak saw,” Jefti said, in a voice that trembled. “What is that thing?”

“I don’t know,” Firesong said, slowly and unhappily. “I’ve never seen nor heard of such a thing in my life.”

Hallock spent the rest of the night awake. He didn’t have to be, he supposed, but it felt like he should be. He wasn’t the only one, of course; the gryphons, the dyheli, and the kyree all left sentries on guard, who lay among their fellows with their heads up and eyes and ears open. When the sentry yawned, he’d pick someone else to nudge awake, and the new sentry would take up the vigil.

Hallock didn’t have anyone to relieve him, and neither did Firesong. So both of them stayed awake, much to Silverfox’s disapproval, though he did bring them more hot tea to help them stay awake.

Of course Hallock had a hundred questions. Is there more than one? was one, and Is it coming back? was another, and a lot more after that.

But Firesong clearly did not know the answer, and asking questions like this was only going to frustrate him, possibly anger him, and certainly distract him. So Hallock sat on his questions as best he could.

But it was a very, very long night.

It was a very long night. Half of Kel’s mind was going, That thing, whatever it is, is probably all by itself, is just a kind of animal and we’re overreacting. The other half was going, Hallock is right, this is the Pelagirs, we can’t assume anything is innocent or alone. Half of him just wanted to go to sleep. The other half of him wanted to go into protective overdrive.

The more time that passed, the more the second half won out.

The long night turned into morning, a morning that brought no relief. Kel was baffled and, frankly, furious. Gryphons tended to be very emotional creatures, and they tended to see things in terms of extremes. There was no proof that the thing was harmless, and therefore, in his mind, it must be dangerous. But he was also furious at himself, at his own senses, for letting him down. The thing, whatever it was, had been right there in front of him, but to magic senses, there had been nothing unusual at all. Not even a void where ambient magic should have been.

He was also furious because this thing violated all the rules! Gryphons liked rules, even when they violated them. Rules defined the world, and let you anticipate what you should do. Rules allowed the world to make sense. And this thing did not, in any way, make sense. It acted intelligent, at least as intelligent as a fox or a rabbit. But no one, not even Sharpsight, who had animal Mindspeech, had sensed thoughts of any kind. It was physically present. They could see it! And while he might have thought it was an illusion, there had been not a trace of someone or something that could cast an illusion. But there was another answer to that argument, that guaranteed it wasn’t an illusion: there were enough mages here who could see right through even the strongest of illusions that it couldn’t possibly have been any known kind of illusion.

But despite being something you could see, it had gone through the thorn branches as if they weren’t there, or rather, the thorn branches had gone through it as if the creature was nothing more than the smoke it resembled. And there were no such things as living, corporeal creatures made of smoke, not in the records of the Tayledras, nor the records of White Gryphon. So it had to be magic. Didn’t it? How could smoke be alive, unless it was a creature made mostly of magic, given form only by the smoke?

So it made sense that you’d be able to find it with mage-sight. But when anyone looked for it with mage-sight, there was nothing. The vrondi had been consulted, but they had nothing to say except a less-than-useless “It isn’t from here.” Aside from the ambient magic present everywhere, there was nothing, no magical creatures evident anywhere near the camp.

Even Serenshey and Jak said they had never seen or heard of anything like the creature, and even they couldn’t detect it with anything other than their eyes. This thing doesn’t have a right to be here! he fumed. Everything about it is wrong! And never mind that there were an awful lot of things in the Pelagirs that had no “right” to exist—at least they all followed the rules! If you could see them, they couldn’t pass through things. If they were magic, they radiated that magic as an aura.

But underlying the anger—and the reason why he was cultivating that anger—was a growing fear. He needed that anger to help squash the fear, and the growing realization that he had just encountered something for which he had absolutely no attack or defense. And they needed both! Just because it was intangible, that didn’t mean it couldn’t harm or kill them.

Were there more of them? He didn’t know that, either, because there was no way of detecting them except to see them! He certainly wasn’t going to go flying around out there in the rain—in which he was at a great disadvantage—and he wasn’t going to let anyone send the Iftel gryphons, either.

By the time dawn arrived he was exhausted, angry, frightened, and confused. So confused. His head hurt. He felt all knotted up inside. This situation was intolerable! He wanted answers! But answers weren’t forthcoming.

And it was worse that with the rain, everything out there was as dark as the inside of a cave, and no one wanted to put up any kind of light past the perimeter on the chance the light would attract the thing back, or worse, attract more of them. Firesong had made the shield glow slightly from the very top, so there was faint light being cast over the entire clearing. But that wasn’t really helping, because the light glinted off the rain, making a kind of curtain that it was hard to see through.

Finally, the first light of dawn crept across the clearing. The entire group, both the exhausted who had been sleepless all night and the ones who had tried to rest and might or might not have gotten any sleep, all assembled under the canvas as that blasted rain continued to come down. As they attempted to revive themselves with food and tea, Silverfox recounted what had happened for those who had missed it.

“I’m baffled,” Silverfox said flatly. “And so is everyone else who saw it.”

“Treat it as hostile,” Hallock advised bluntly, as Kel had known he would. “And assume there are more. I don’t mean that you should attack it if it shows up again, but assume that it will attack us. Because from everything you all were talking about last night, right now we don’t have a way to strike back at it. And frankly, I don’t think even the tervardi song-weapon would touch it.” He turned toward the two tervardi, who shook their heads. The male, Lyreren, spoke up. Even his speaking voice sounded like song. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps we would only make it angry. Perhaps we would make it stronger. What if it thrives on sound?”

Hallock groaned at that, but Kel nodded. If they didn’t know what the thing was, how could they guess what would make it stronger?

The hertasi had unearthed the kettles, distributed all of the soup, and quickly made flatbread. Once everyone had food, they began cleaning as they usually did. But instead of taking the cleaned kettles and griddles and starting the preparation for the next round of food, they stacked the implements next to the barges and moved all the consumables back into storage in the barges. To Kel’s eyes, they looked uneasy at best and frightened at worst.

The leaden sky felt oppressive. People glumly drank soup from their bowls and ate flatbread as if it was wood and had no taste. No one spoke, not even in murmurs, once Silverfox had finished explaining last evening’s incident. Only the rain drummed relentlessly down on the canvas and the barge tops. Not even birds sang.

Is that normal? Did that thing frighten them into silence? Do the birds know something we don’t?

And beneath it all for anyone who knew their history was the unspoken question: What if this was some creature of Ma’ar’s?

It wasn’t impossible. After all, here they were, in the modern times, gryphons, hertasi, and tervardi, all creatures of Urtho’s creation. Up until the most recent times, as far as the Valdemarans and the Tayledras had known, all three races had been lost in the mists of time. And no one in history or memory had been nearly as powerful as Ma’ar and Urtho, which meant any assumptions about them and their creations were subject to change at any moment.

True, it could be something a modern mage had created . . . but the problem with that idea was that, as far as anyone knew, you couldn’t work such powerful magic without alerting other mages to the fact that you were doing it.

Maybe it was something left over from Falconsbane? Falconsbane had been the most powerful evil sorcerer anyone of this generation had encountered. The problem with that theory was that Mornelithe Falconsbane hadn’t had the brains or the patience to make something like this smoke creature.

But Ma’ar? Definitely. And if these things didn’t obey the rules of the natural world, there was no reason they couldn’t be virtually immortal. If you are made of smoke, if you have no more physical presence than that, if you can’t be harmed, why should you ever die?