Page 72 of Gryphon in Light

“You’re right,” sighed Silverfox. “It is.” He cast a slightly accusatory glance at Firesong. “Some of us spent all night fretting about it, in fact.”

Hallock let out the breath he had been holding in. “Well, that’s half my work done. The other half is convincing you to keep us camped here until we figure out if the Things Invisible are hostile or not.”

Firesong tugged on his mask a little and Silverfox looked into his partner’s eyes in a way that suggested they were probably Mindspeaking with each other.

“Two conditions,” said Silverfox. “One, Hallock, that you spend as much time as you can reinforcing the camp defenses before dark. We’ll put wards of many kinds on the camp, but frankly, we don’t know as much about physically fortifying a camp as you do. When we leave our Vales to hunt or Cleanse something, we do so in small groups, and we camp up in the treetops, rather than on the ground. So that’s the first condition. And second, we send Kel and—” He glanced at Snowfire. “Who in the Iftel Wing was the near-silent female that can anchor a Gate?”

“Torandi,” supplied Snowfire.

“Right. Her. I want them to find a good spot to set up a Gate a half-day’s flight ahead of us. You and Firesong can get this side up and linked, and the gryphons can come back here by going through it. That way we don’t get too far behind our schedule.” Silverfox scratched the back of his head. “It’s not as if we make as much headway in this rain anyway, so the Gate will put us right where we would have been if we hadn’t stopped.”

“That’s all sound planning,” Hallock agreed. “All right. One more thing I want to do is order—advise—that no one leaves the camp alone. Always in pairs at least; three or four is better still. Silverfox, that’s better coming from you than me.”

“And it will come from me,” Silverfox agreed. He and Firesong stood up. “I’ll make the announcements.”

Things must be more serious than I thought. Firesong is dressed plainly. In fact, he had little more adornment than a headscarf and hat. Even his mask and neck drape were unmarked. Maybe out here, his reputation would give no advantage, so he’d rather keep it secret from whoever we may encounter. Or may encounter us first. Or, Hallock reasoned, he might simply be too somber right now for ornate clothing. Hallock knew Firesong was probably twice his age, and gathered that the Adept had been through enough emotionally to crush ten men. No stranger to pain and loss, then, so the masks may be more than a courtesy to others. A masked face doesn’t require conscious effort to hide feelings.

When they all left the barge, it was pretty clear that everyone was expecting an announcement, because everyone, including the three Hawkbrothers who took night watch and would ordinarily be asleep by now, was gathered in under the canvas, watching for them to emerge.

Hallock reflected, as the group listened to Silverfox, that an observer who did not know Hawkbrothers would have been hard put to point a finger at any of the outsiders as not belonging—except for Jak, of course, who stood out like a white sheep in a herd of black. He, Genni, and Jefti had all adopted Tayledras field clothing: hard-wearing, practical outfits of long-sleeved tunics and breeches made of leather and soft linen canvas, with woolen pieces tucked away until needed, dyed in mottled “patterns” of greens and browns and flexible leather patches wherever wear—or likelihood of injury from a fall—would be highest. There were sorts of overcoats of dyed string and rags that made the wearer almost invisible among the vegetation or perched among the branches overhead, but they weren’t practical for hard traveling, and no one had them on at the moment. And just before they had left, Jefti had decided on a facial tattoo—an abstract of curling lines and sharp points. Redlance and Swiftfoot both sported facial tattoos that were very similar.

Hallock paid very little attention to what Silverfox was saying; instead, he concentrated on the Hawkbrother’s audience. Most kept eating while he spoke, but they were all listening carefully, and as far as he could tell, there were no objections. The Ghost Cat warriors were napping after being a partial night watch, and would serve as extra muscle when they were up. Ransem and a couple of the dyheli nodded along with the speech, and that was enough for the rest of the dyheli. They thought and acted as a herd, and if Ransem went along with this, the rest would follow. He couldn’t read the tervardi at all, but their feathers weren’t flattened to their bodies as would have been the case if they disagreed with Silverfox. The kyree were, as far as he could tell, perfectly happy to go along with anything they were presented with. And the hertasi all appeared to be in agreement.

Only the Iftel gryphons looked slightly dubious, and sure enough, Vindaria spoke up when Silverfox was finished.

“Wouldn’t it be better to hunt these things down—if they exist, and we are not jumping at shadows?” she asked. The other gryphons, including Kel, who had grouped himself with them, all nodded.

“Actively trying to hunt for them has a lot of disadvantages, and no strategic advantage that either Hallock or I can see,” Silverfox replied, in such a reasonable tone of voice that Hallock would have been inclined to agree with him even if this had not been his idea in the first place. Silverfox continued, ticking off the reasons on the fingers of his upheld hand. “This is their territory, not ours, and they know all the hiding places—and ambush spots—in it. If they think we are hunting them, that might spur them to attack us, when they would otherwise simply stay out of our way. We’re going to need everyone to lend a hand with hunting, fodder-gathering, fortifying the camp, and putting up Gates. And lastly, it’s been the Tayledras’s long experience that we learn more about Pelagir weirdlings by pretending to ignore them. I don’t mean really ignore them, and I do mean we should assume they are hostile and dangerous, but pretending we don’t know they are there is likely to lure them close enough to study.”

Vindaria turned her head to look at her Wing and Kel, and found them all nodding. She turned back to Silverfox. “Very well, then. Which of us do you want to fly off to create the other end of the Gate? I assume Kelvren, to power it?”

Silverfox nodded. “And Torandi to construct it with Kel’s help. It would be very good if Kel learned Gate construction.” Kel laid his ear-tufts back, as if he didn’t much like having another thing to learn piled on top of him when he was already coping with quite a bit, but nodded reluctantly.

“So, Torandi and Kelvren to fly as far as they can in a day and establish one end of a Gate,” said Silverfox, as cheerfully as if Kel had been enthusiastic about this. “Firesong, Longsight, and Snowfire to establish this end. Hallock will tell off the work crews.”

That startled Hallock a little, but he drew on his experience as a Second and a Captain, and named off groups of two and three. The five kyree all went with human hunters, though in two cases, “hunter” did not mean “meat-hunters,” but rather gatherers and scroungers. The humans in those cases were Genni and Jefti, and Jefti visibly swelled with pride when he realized he was being sent out on his own like an adult, with Jak instead of a dyheli. With each hunter group went a dyheli to pack the results of the hunt back to the camp. The rest of the gryphons were sent out in pairs to look for really substantial prey.

Hallock organized the rest into two groups who would stay within earshot of the camp and each other. One group to bring in fodder for the dyheli and Jak, and one group to bring in as many thorn bushes as they could find. Those bushes would be the camp’s first line of defense, outside the wards and shields Firesong would supply later.

When everyone had dispersed into the rain, he remained in the camp with a skeleton crew of hertasi, including Ayshen. He sighed. He was not looking forward to this.

At least it’s not a cold rain. “Jylan?” he said, glancing around and trying to figure out which of the nearly identical hertasi, in their short, hooded rain-capes, was Jylan.

“Yes—what can I do to help?” chirped one, who stepped forward and looked up at him eagerly.

“We’re going to make a barricade to keep things out physically,” he told Jylan. “We need either small axes or very big brush-clearing knives.” He glanced around at the others. “The rest of you can do whatever you think you need to do to help fortify the camp.”

“Traps?” asked one, brightly. “We’re very good at traps.”

He shook his head. “Too easy for one of us to blunder into. But alarms, certainly. And barricades if you can build one.”

“Defensive channeling traps into killboxes, then.” The hertasi grinned.

Jylan trotted off and returned with both a hatchet and a brush-knife. Hallock took the hatchet and took Jylan with him to the perimeter of the camp. He picked out saplings about two thumbs broad, to cut and sharpen into long poles, which he drove into the ground around the perimeter using the hatchet as a hammer. Jylan couldn’t reach the tops of the poles to pound them in, so she supplied him with poles while he hammered.

When the thorn bushes started coming in—cut exactly as he had specified, just above the ground—it took maneuvering by himself and three hertasi to get them “impaled” on the poles. But once they were there—and more importantly, once the branches started to mesh with each other—he reckoned this barrier would withstand at least a charge by a determined bull.

It was a long morning’s work, but by the time he decided he could stop for a noon meal, half the perimeter had been set up with a thorn-bush barrier as tall as he was, and as thick as Vindaria was long.