“I don’t like it,” Sariana said.
He smiled at that. “You rarely do approve of any of my suggestions, lady.”
“You don’t give suggestions. You give commands.”
“I just want you to be as safe as possible.”
“I know,” she said with a cheeky grin. “The fact that I can sense your intentions are well meant is the only reason I even listen to you at times like this.”
Gryph raised his eyes to the strip of dawn sky overhead. “Save me from empathic females.” He picked up a blade bow and handed it to her. “Pay attention, Sariana. I’m going to leave this behind with you. It’s a good, all-purpose weapon and it can also be a useful tool. See all these different blades?”
Sariana studied the small quiver of blades. Each was a slightly different shape. Many had attachments such as tiny ropes or nets that were cleverly bound to the shaft of the blade. The specialized attachments unfurled or uncoiled or snapped into position when the blade was fired.
“What about them?”
“You slide the one you want into firing position like this.” Gryph demonstrated with cool precision. “You fire it by releasing this trigger.”
“Clever,” Sariana said dryly.
“Sure. That goes without saying. It was invented by a westerner.”
He gave her one last, hard kiss and then he walked out of the cove without glancing back. He pushed all the hot memories of the previous night out of his mind, including Sariana’s soft declaration of love. He had to keep his mind on his task or both of them and much of the populace of the western continent might wind up paying with their lives.
He would deal with the issue of love later.
Gryph made good time through the gorge. He walked swiftly along the river’s edge. His fingers played on the prisma lock and in his mind he focused on the rays of light beyond the visible range that Sariana had helped him pick up last night. He kept a small portion of his awareness fixed on his surroundings. It would be stupid to become some hawkbeetle’s dinner at this stage.
The pulsing beam of invisible light that was peculiar to live prisma was clear in his mind now. It was beyond the range of human eyesight, but through some poorly understood process, it could be channeled through another bit of prisma. When that happened, a receptive, tuned mind could pick it up.
Gryph had practiced long and hard as a boy learning how to focus, channel and control his awareness so that the strange prisma rays could be detected and tracked.
That had been only the initial part of his training. The other half had consisted of learning how to tune his mind to the frequency of the emitting beam of light and jam it.
The theoretical middle ground which no Shield had ever attempted as far as Gryph’s people knew was to tune into the frequency of live prisma and resonate with it. It would be difficult to do, but once the frequency was under a man’s control, he just might be able to stabilize it to the point where he could detonate the weapons in a deliberate, controlled manner.
It was far more likely such an experiment would result in wiping out everything and everyone in the vicinity, including the crazy Shield working the prisma.
By late afternoon Gryph had followed the pulsing beams to a point several kilometers from where he had left Sariana. He stopped when he realized how close to the source he was. All the hunting instincts and skills that had been bred and trained into him were fully alert.
The gorge had deepened. The walls rose dizzyingly high overhead, revealing only a tiny strip of sky. Evening shadows were already thick on the valley floor.
The river was a rough and tumble cascade now. White water foamed over boulders and squeezed through twists and turns in the narrowed riverbed channel.
Gryph used the shadows, although he was relatively certain he wouldn’t be noticed, even if someone up ahead was watching. There was enough natural cover in the area to hide his movements. Even another Shield would be unable to sense his presence. The pulses of the live prisma were so strong Gryph was certain they masked everything, including the weaker pulse of the neutralized prisma in his lock.
The tricks he had learned fighting bandits in the frontier provinces were second nature to him. He used them without conscious thought while he fine-tuned his focus on the live prisma.
For a moment he was confused. The beams he had been following seemed to be emanating from overhead, not from a point farther along the gorge floor. He looked up, seeking a possible cave or ledge large enough to hold a ship. He used his mind link to narrow the search for the ship while he used other skills to hunt for signs of human beings.
Half an hour later, just as night threatened to overtake the gorge completely, Gryph found what he was looking for. A vapor lamp flared briefly high up on the canyon wall.
He hadn’t been able to spot it from the base, but Gryph knew now there had to be an entrance into the rock up there somewhere. From the records he had studied as a young student, he knew that the ships on Windarra had frequently been hidden in small caves dug into such mountainsides as this one.
There had to be a way to climb to the place where he had caught the glimmer of a vapor lamp.
The canyon wall proved to be less sheer than it had looked from a distance. The climb toward his goal was easier than Gryph had originally thought it would be. In fact, it was more of a scramble over tumbled boulders and small landslides than a real rock climb.
A surprisingly short while after he had left the valley floor, Gryph was crouching within a few meters of his destination. From his vantage point it was easy to see the wide mouth that looked as if it had been gouged out of the canyon wall. A vapor lamp burned deep inside, but there was no sign of anyone around the lamp.
Nor was there any sign of a weapon ship. But the pulsing strength of the prisma rays focusing through his weapon kit lock and coalescing inside his brain was all the evidence Gryph needed of a ship’s presence. The rays swamped the area, bathing it in invisible light. No single, cut piece of prisma could produce so much power.
For the first time in his life, Gryph thought, he was doing what he had been created to do. He had tracked a prisma ship to its lair.
This close to the source of live, uncut prisma, Gryph could not hope to isolate the small, delicate ray that would identify another Shield’s lock. It was just as well. The masking effects of the stronger beams also concealed his own lock from anyone who might be monitoring the night for intruders.
Gryph watched the cave entrance for a while longer, willing someone to come fetch the vapor lamp. Whoever had put it there would surely want to retrieve it before long. It made no sense to leave the damp burning with no one around.
Time slipped past with excruciating slowness and no one appeared. If it hadn’t been for the burning lamp, Gryph wouldn’t even have guessed there were humans in the vicinity. He was cold, cramped and bored. The best frontier training did not teach a man how to ignore the discomforts of a night watch. It just taught him how to endure them.
Gryph’s patience was rewarded shortly before dawn.
The figure of a man appeared from the upper reaches of the gorge wall, following an unseen path that he must have found at the lip of the canyon. He carried a vapor lamp. The tiny light zigzagged slowly down the steep rock Wall. Gryph watched it closely.
The man, who was draped in a stylish, knee-length cloak against the predawn chill, was only a dark shadow behind the lamp, but Gryph was ready for him. The figure passed no more than a couple of meters from Gryph’s hiding place.
Gryph slipped silently out into the open, closing in on his target from behind. It would have been easy to kill the man, but that was the last thing Gryph intended in that moment. He needed answers, not the silence of death.
He took his victim around the throat, choking off any potential scream. The man flailed frantically as his airway was closed. The small vapor lamp he had been c
arrying dropped onto the rocks with a tiny clatter.
Gryph regretted the small noise, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He concentrated on subduing his quarry. He didn’t want to spend any more time out in the open than necessary.
He was in the process of dragging his victim back into the shadows when a ball of fiery light and blazing pain burst inside his head.
Gryph had never experienced such agony in his life. It wasn’t like the night he had first linked with Sariana and it wasn’t like the silent explosion of light that had rendered him momentarily unconscious the previous night. He sensed vaguely that it was an effect of prisma, but it was nothing he had been trained to handle.
He fought back out of instinct. He held onto consciousness desperately, and rode the light rays in his mind the way he rode a normal prisma beam. There was something drastically abnormal about these rays, but he couldn’t take time to analyze them.
Gryph groped for the frequency and locked onto it. His fingers burned into his weapon kit lock as he fought to reverse the strangely pulsing rays.
The battle to force the blinding mental rays out of his mind was unlike any combat he had ever faced. He was learning as he went along. There was nothing like necessity to spur the educational process.
With a surge of effort he managed to tangle and jam the rays long enough to clear his mind. Gryph didn’t hesitate. He sensed a second assault was already underway and he was too weak from the first battle to deal with it.
Mentally he studied the tangle of prisma beams he had just created, aware that it was already jamming and neutralizing itself. He knew he needed a barrier against the next slamming prisma ray. The only thing that could stop prima was more prisma.
Not completely aware of how he was doing it, but driven by the need to survive, Gryph grabbed mentally at the disintegrating rays of the first assault. He touched his lock and deliberately tried to strengthen the retreating frequencies, sending them back toward their source with a positive rather than neutral force.
He had never tried anything like it before in his life, and the roar of anger that echoed in the canyon a moment later took him as much by surprise as anything else that had happened. It came from a figure who was even now staggering from the wide entrance of the cave.
“You bastard, you’re almost as strong as I am and that’s saying something.”
Gryph opened his eyes, maintaining his fierce mental grip on the retreating frequencies. He was aware the rays he was trying to send back to their source had been halted by the other Shield. He also sensed that if he relaxed his grip for even a moment the other man would nail him.
It was a mental standoff, but it left Gryph physically helpless. It took every ounce of his energy and will to hold off the assault the other Shield was trying to send into his mind.
The cloaked figure Gryph had been about to drag off into the shadows coughed and sat up slowly. He looked at the two frozen Shields confronting each other and pushed back the hood of his cloak.
“Well,” Etion Rakken said in a hoarse voice, “this is an interesting development. I always wondered what would happen if two Shields did battle with each other. I wonder what’s going on inside your minds?”
“Get him in a twist,” the other Shield grated through his teeth. “Hurry. He’s far stronger than I would have guessed.”
“Of course, Targyn,” Rakken said soothingly. “I’ll take care of everything. After all, we’re partners, aren’t we?”
Gryph was helpless to defend himself from Rakken as the banker deftly locked him in a twist, the device used on the frontier to chain bandits.
A few minutes later he was dragged into the cave and down a short corridor lined in a strange gray metal to a small chamber paneled in the same material.
When he was lying bound and helpless on the floor of the chamber the energy that had been beating at Gryph ‘s mind finally relaxed.
Gryph looked up at the other Shield who was leaning against the door of the chamber and taking deep breaths to regain his strength.
“So much for a glorious death at the hands of bandits,” Gryph remarked. “I hate to see a good legend ruined by reality, Targyn.”
“The reality of what I am going to do with the prisma ship I have found in this mountain will create a legend that will last for a thousand years, Chassyn,” Targyn said with grim satisfaction. He turned to Rakken. “Strip him.”
Rakken glanced at Targyn. “Why? All we need is his weapon kit.”
“You fool. Do you really think that all of a Shield’s weapons are in his kit? A trained Shield can make a weapon out of almost anything. Strip him. He’s safe enough while he’s in that twist. When you’re done I’ll go through his clothing. Then you can give him back his trousers and his shirt. We’ll leave him barefoot, however. A good pair of boots is a potential tool for a skilled man.”
Etion Rakken hovered over his captive, loosening Gryph’s clothing. Targyn went through everything carefully, removing a number of small nondescript strips of metal. When he was satisfied he flung the garments down on the floor. “Get dressed,” he ordered.
Gryph slowly pulled on his clothes. The twist allowed very slow, very careful movements. His muscles felt weak and shaky from the mental battle he had fought earlier.
“That should take care of him for now,” Targyn decided. He smiled humorlessly at his captive. “We’ll have more to say to each other later, Chassyn.” He picked up Gryph’s weapon kit.
“Let me have that,” Rakken said quickly. “I am very curious about these weapon kits. I would like to examine one more closely.”
“What good will that do?” Targyn asked impatiently. “You can’t possibly open it. Even I can’t open another Shield’s kit.”
“Nevertheless, I would like to take a close look at it,” Rakken insisted.
“As you wish, partner.” Targyn slammed the door shut on the small chamber.
Gryph heard a standard western style lock click shut outside the room. If he could have gotten his hands on that lock, he could have probed its secrets in a matter of minutes.
But he could no more reach the lock through the door than he could reach the moon. Or Sariana.
Gryph wondered if she was already on her way back to Little Chance. The only hope now was that Delek would get back in time with enough Shields to deal with Targyn and the prisma ship.
Gryph wondered how many of his friends would die before they figured out how to fight another Shield who had learned the trick of turning prisma into a mind-to-mind weapon.
Chapter
16
THE harsh ball of light slammed into Sariana’s head and burst into a thousand fragments.
It vanished in the next second.
Sariana awoke with a cry and jerked upright amid the folds of the travel quilt. She sat motionless on the gently rocking sled, her palms damp with sweat, her heart pounding. Lucky stuck its head out of a cloak pocket nearby and hissed inquiringly.
“It’s all right,” she whispered huskily to the lizard. “At least, I think it’s all right. Just a nightmare.”
Sariana waited for pieces of the dream to trickle back into her consciousness, but there was nothing. No lingering images or even people.
But she was filled with a sense of dread that no amount of rationalization could dispel. And as she calmed down she forced herself to acknowledge what she secretly feared: Something had happened to Gryph.
Sariana looked up at the narrow wedge of night sky overhead. It would be dawn soon. She dared not wait any longer.
“Come on, Lucky. We’d better get moving.”
The lizard sat on top of a storage locker and supervised Sariana’s frantic preparations for departure.
“I wish I had paid more attention yesterday when Gryph showed me how to operate this thing,” Sariana admitted to Lucky as she fumbled with the sled’s prop
eller mechanism. The truth was she hadn’t expected to have to run the boat on her own.
But her memory for detail stood her in good stead. Sariana pushed the sled farther out into the river, hopped back on board and settled herself on the bench Gryph had used. She took a firm hold on the hand grips and pulled back. With a soft slap of blades and fins hitting water, the river sled obediently leaped forward. The sled’s cleverly designed system of gears, belts and pulleys created tremendous mechanical advantage that was translated into propulsion power. Another ingenious western invention, Sariana decided wryly. It was just as well her own people were so astute when it came to business and law. They were going to need whatever advantage they could get during the next few years to hold their own with the westerners.
There was barely enough starlight filtering down to the base of the canyon to enable Sariana to tell water from land. She aimed the craft deeper into the gorge. Lucky hopped onto Sariana’s shoulder and settled there.
“I know he wanted us to go back to Little Chance,” Sariana told the lizard; “but there isn’t time. Something has happened. I have to get to him.”
Sariana strained to see the dark river and wondered how angry Gryph would be when he discovered her latest act of disobedience.
“He can yell at me all he wants as soon as we find him, Lucky. And you can bet your tail he will yell. He seems to have been born with the odd notion that other people should always do what he tells them. I just hope that arrogance hasn’t gotten him into real trouble this time.”
She was chatting to calm herself again, Sariana realized. The truth was she was scared to death because she couldn’t analyze the earlier explosion of light inside her head. There had been a sense of pain, but she had known it wasn’t her own pain she was feeling. That meant it had to be Gryph’s. But the sensation had vanished quickly along with the bursting beam of light.
She knew Gryph had to be a long distance away from her and it scared her to think of how devastating that light beam had been to have been reflected all the way from Gryph’s mind to hers. Gryph had said the link between them was highly erratic and unpredictable. It worked best in moments of passion or moments of danger. Whatever had happened to Gryph, it definitely qualified as a moment of danger.