Page 76 of Gryphon in Light

And that just made things all the more perilous. Kel was cold, inside and out, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the uncertainty and the peril they’d stumbled into.

“I think we need to leave,” Kel replied into the silence that followed Hallock’s advice. “I know we are all tired, but I think we need to get the barges off the ground and get everybody and everything through that Gate and destroy it. No coming back for the anchor. I can feed an awful lot of power into the Gate when everyone is through, power that Firesong can turn in on the Gate itself to destroy it. I don’t think we dare take the chance that this thing can follow us. We don’t know what it wants, we don’t know how it found us, and Hallock is right—we have to assume that it’s hostile.”

Sharpsight and Redlance, mages both, looked pained at that. So did Torandi and Daria. And Kel didn’t blame them for being upset at his advice that they destroy the Gate; it was a tremendous waste of power and effort to just destroy a Gate anchor like that. He understood it, and he sympathized with it. If you weren’t him, magic power was finite. It was hard to gather and hard to store, and if you didn’t have a Heartstone attached to you the way he did, there was a hard limit as to how much you could sequester.

But that was dangerous thinking right now. It made you reluctant to destroy something that took a lot to make.

They can’t let themselves fall for the sunk-cost fallacy. They can’t! He clamped his beak shut and looked to Firesong; Firesong was the one they all looked to in matters of magic, just as they looked to Silverfox in matters of organization.

To Kel’s brief relief, Firesong nodded wearily, big dark circles under his eyes visible despite the mask. “I don’t like doing anything that wasteful, but I also do not think keeping an anchor intact is worth any lives. We Tayledras don’t often come across something we haven’t seen or don’t understand, and this thing is both. What’s worse, we’re a small group, and very far away from the resources of a Vale. We don’t have a choice here. Hallock is right, we have to treat this thing as hostile. That doesn’t mean we should attack it; we absolutely should not do that. But we do have to get away from it, as far away and quickly as we can. This thing is potentially more dangerous than anything Falconsbane produced, and he very nearly destroyed an entire Vale.”

Mostly people nodded, though the mages didn’t look at all happy about this. The Ghost Cat fighters, however, looked baffled and rebellious. “But there’s only one!” Rina shouted in frustration. “Why are you all so frightened of one creature?”

To Kel’s surprise, Firesong didn’t jump down her throat for being so obtuse. Maybe he was too tired. Or maybe he didn’t have the energy to spare for anything but convincing people to pack up and go while they all still could. “Rina, we don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it can do—other than apparently it can move through things like the smoke it looks like, which is more than enough to frighten me. Weapons aren’t going to have an effect on it. It hasn’t attacked us yet, but what if it comes back and brings more like itself? I think Hallock is right, and I think Kelvren is right. We need to leave as soon as we can. Now, ideally. Before it’s too late.”

“Uh . . .” Hallock said in a strangled tone. Kel turned to look at Hallock, who had gone pale. “It’s too late.”

He turned to look behind himself, where Hallock was looking, and wished he could turn pale too. Right at the spot where the thing had been last night—it was back.

And it had brought friends.

A lot of friends.

He went not just cold all over, but icy, and his stomach knotted. Every hackle on his neck rose involuntarily, and he felt his claws flexing into the dirt on their own. But not with the urge to attack. This time it was the urge to flee. Every instinct shrieked at him to get into the air and away, get up above the clouds and flee.

I think we can assume these things are hostile. Or at least hungry. Because they don’t look intent on greeting strangers.

The things had arranged themselves in a group, flowing restlessly around and sometimes even through each other, like a bevy of otters did when they were confronting something on land. Or like wyrsa, evaluating possible prey. They slithered through the air, knotting and unraveling through each other, made all the more confusing by the rainfall. They stayed around hertasi-high from the ground without displacing a twig.

The things completely ignored the thorn branches, passing right through those as well. It appeared that they were uncertain what to do about the shields that Firesong had established around the camp. It was hard to tell how many of them there were—but more kept emerging from the forest, by ones and twos, to join the rest. Even though they flowed through each other, they kept their individual coherence: churning funnels of smoke, leading end rather pointed, trailing end fanned out a bit. They were a color something like the leaden underside of a thundercloud that is about to unleash a storm—and they looked a lot like stormcloud-stuff too. Roiling, tumbling in midair, thickening and thinning, but always keeping the pointed end toward the expedition. He didn’t think it was his imagination that they seemed to exude an air of menace. They certainly kept their pointed ends “facing” the group huddled under the canvas wings, and as more of the creatures arrived, they increased their movement. Kel’s mouth dried with fear, and his talons clenched again.

“How can we fight a thing made of smoke?” cried Parthan, one of the Iftel gryphons, a note of panic in his voice.

If you’d been a Silver Gryphon, you’d already know. You don’t fight, you rescue!

“The shield seems to be keeping them out for now,” Silverfox said loudly, his voice sounding firm and calm. Kel clung to that calm, even though he knew this was just Silverfox using his kestra’chern training to get everyone to listen to him and act rationally. As if you could be rational in the face of creatures that defied the laws of Nature! “But if they get through, if they attack . . . we can’t face these things without knowing what they are and how to hold them off. They don’t even present us with an obvious target or weakness. Firesong and Kelvren are right. We need to get out of here before they get tired of watching us and decide to do something.” And when no one stirred, in a stern bark, he ordered, “Now! Move!”

That jolted everyone into action, and in the face of growing terror, thankfully they all reverted to their usual roles—except that those jobs were undertaken at speed.

The dyheli positioned themselves at their barges, waiting to be harnessed; the hertasi threw everything that had been set out—not much—back in the barges and rolled the canvas wings back into place. They didn’t do a thorough job, but it would hold for a Gate-crossing. The bondbirds went to high perches near the Gate or on the tops of the barges, ready to fly through it the instant it opened; the kyree lined up at the Gate below them. The two tervardi joined the kyree at the Gate and the humans harnessed the dyheli in record time; every single dyheli was in harness, the better to get the barges moving as quickly as possible. Serenshey and Jak were the only two who didn’t help pack up. Instead, they stationed themselves side by side between the expedition and the creatures, feet firmly planted, poses aggressive, saying with everything but words, You’ll have to get past us, and we are sent by gods. And then, as if to prove that last, Jak glowed with an ethereal white light, and Serenshey literally lit up with flames—Kel didn’t think they were illusory, either, since the rain hissed as it passed through them.

So that’s why they’re called “Firecats”—

“Kel!” Firesong shouted. “Gate power!”

Kel started, and shouted, “Gryphons! Through the Gate first, then help the dyheli pull!” The Iftel gryphons leapt to, bounding to the first barge and finding purchase to surge ahead when the shimmer was stable. Kelvren joined Firesong at the Gate, fanned his wings rapidly to collect magical energy, and uncorked his Heartstone for Firesong. Sharpsight, Redlance, and Snowfire stepped to their respective barges and activated the floating spells in the barges.

And that was when the smoke creatures went wild.

They went into a complete frenzy, tangling around each other like hellish worms, smashing their front ends into the shield over and over and over again, and all in complete silence. Either their efforts at “pounding” on the shield were completely silent, or the hits were so quiet they couldn’t be heard over the rain.

Kel felt those efforts, though; every hit on the shield vibrated all the ambient magical energy, which translated into something that he sensed in his indusvenarum. The result felt like fists pounding him all over, but from the inside. Or maybe like the pounding of great drums, or a bout of rolling thunder that shook everything, except without a single sound. That frightened him even more; that wasn’t supposed to be possible! Nothing was supposed to affect the indusvenarum but magic!

The Gate opened with a visible shudder, the reflections in its surface pulsating instead of turning into a still, silvery pool, as if it, too, sensed those vibrations. Firesong cut corners, dropping the membrane between locations that equalized air pressure, so a mist of water droplets followed the stabilization through. “GO!” Firesong screamed, and the gryphons, kyree, and bondbirds all streamed through it. The gryphons turned once through and aided the dyheli in getting the barges in motion.

“Shield!” shouted Firesong, and those holding the line of protection turned as one, away from the Gate, to face down the creatures trying to break through.

The smoke creatures redoubled their efforts to get through the shield. The three Ghostcat warriors drew weapons and positioned themselves beside Jak and Serenshey, though what on earth they thought they were going to do, Kel couldn’t imagine.