Until he woke on an uncomfortable bed.
What a curious dream! Climbing mountains to see gryphons! thought Shennan.
He moved his hand and felt twigs and fir-needles. His bed was a nest.
Shennan sat up with a crackle of sticks. The nest lay in a small cave. Light shimmered in through a throatlike entrance, revealing no less than three winged figures hunched around him. The traveller smiled disarmingly.
"Well," said Shennan. "Good day to you, my feathered friends." He thought of the priests' treasures and made to unstrap his pack. "I bring you gifts from the land of men --"
His groping hand found nothing. He spotted his statuette on the rocky floor, a gryphonian foreclaw clamped over it. The chamois wrappings of the treasure lay nearby.
"-- Which you have discovered already. Good, good."
"Why you to trespass on Lake Mountain Eyrie, human?" asked one of the lion-birds in a deep, parrotlike voice.
"Well," said Shennan. He rose with a hiss of dry leaves. "I have been appointed by an august group of gentlemen to deliver a message of greeting and friendship."
The lion-birds huddled and spoke in a language full of beak-clacks and caws and "Hraak"s.
"Uh," began the traveller. The bird-beasts eyed him much as hens eye worms. Shennan swallowed loudly. "I would extend my thanks to whoever caught me after I so foolishly fell off your mountain," he finished.
The gryphon in the middle stepped forward. This one had patches of brilliant blue along its wings.
"Wing-Sister Rai-kak snagged you, human," said the gryphon with the figurine.
Before Shennan could open his mouth, Rai-kak spoke.
"Safe your tanks, human. A human dett at Lake Mountain Eyrie means trouble for the Folk."
The third bird-beast reached down and plucked up something in its hard orange beak: the letter. Rai-kak sat up like a trained lion and took it in one handlike foreclaw. Upright, the creatures towered over a human.
"We haff read tiss message of frien'ship," she said. "We want not'ing uff the Temple of Enkidu."
Shennan swallowed.
"If there have been, eh, differences of opinion, perhaps the Enkidu-ans wish to make overtures of reconciliation."
"Clorp?"
Rai-kak leaned toward the holder of the statuette, who spoke quickly in their avian language as if translating. The blue-feathered gryphon bristled like a fighting cock.
"Difference uff opin-yun?"
She dropped to all fours, becoming in an instant a beast of nightmare. Shennan toppled back into the nest. The gryphon climbed halfway after him.
"T'e priests of Enkidu are uff the Brotherhood of Purity," she hissed. "All chimerae should be slafes or die, to t'em. A tousant years after all other Brotherhood fall, t'iss t'ey still belief!"
The Brotherhood of Purity, thought Shennan. "Temple of Enkidu" meant nothing to him, but everyone knew of the Brotherhood: They despised all races not of human form -- and vice-versa.
"Last season t'ree Folk are gone-missing. Enkidu are giving them to One-Eyes for torture. Kis-Ree escaped to tell. After t'ey took hiss eyes!"
Shennan did not care for the way that huge ripping beak hung over his crotch. He gathered his wits quickly.
"Your pardon, wise Wing-Sister," he said coolly. "I was misinformed. The priests who accosted me seemed quite anxious for friendly relations with your people."
Rai-kak hissed again, her gold eyes shimmering to red. The "translator" whispered into her pointed ear again, and she pulled back. Shennan sighed in relief.
The gryphons sat primly, like cats. Rai-kak's plumage settled, and she spoke again.
"You are saying, hyu-man, you are not knowing t'is about Enkidu?"
Shennan worked his way up from the mass of brush again. He wiped sweat from his brow.
"By the Thrice-Great One, good Rai-kak, I swear this part of their doctrine escaped my notice."
The she-gryphon narrowed her eyes.
"You are not knowing much uff Enkidu if you are not knowing t'at."
The human brushed leaves and bark from his leggings.
"That is true, I fear, good Rai-kak," said Shennan with what he hoped was proper humility. "I accepted my post of ambassador rather because of, eh, the remuneration offered."
The third gryphon padded around the side of the nest and pecked up something. No worm, judging by the clinking. It stepped back with one of Taresh-Tar's coin bags.
"All know what hyu-mans will do for gholt," said Rai-kak harshly. To Shennan's surprise, however, she and her companions backed away.
"But t'e Folk are not immune to its call, eit'er, 'ambassator'. In t'at way we are alike. T'uss, we let you leaf."
The human removed his cap -- somehow clinging to his scalp through it all -- and brushed back his auburn hair.
"Good gryphon folk -- in no fashion did I mean to offend --"
Rai-kak and her companions gathered near the doorway, leaving the gold, the gifts, the parchment, and the statuette standing like chess pieces on the stone floor.
"Perhaps you meant not harm," said the blue-winged gryphon, "but wurt sprets, and ot'er Folk will see you as no different from tose who sent you."
The wanderer nodded.
"In that way, too, we are alike."
He took up his pack and set the gold and gems and parchment within. He cradled the statuette in his hands.
"Please -- this image of your folk was my gift, not the Temple's. It is not gold or gem-encrusted, but I would be honored if you would accept it. . ."
The gryphons clucked and clacked at one another. Finally they humped their wings in what had to be a shrug.
"Ferry well. Tere is a shelf over tere," said Rai-kak.
Shennan placed the little gryphon on a wide, dusty shelf, or rather projection of the stone wall. He re-packed his travelling wallet and slipped it on as hard avian eyes watched.
"Follow," ordered Rai-kak.
She rose and padded out the round entrance. Shennan passed the other gryphons with a weak smile, and their claws scraped the floor as they fell in line behind him.
The portal opened into a great corridor down which all three gryphons could have walked abreast. Rai-kak turned left, and the human followed.
Sunlight streamed through holes in the mountainside. Bronze mirrors reflected the light into entrances like the one from which the man and gryphons had just emerged. Beaked heads appeared at these openings. Whispers filled the air like the twitter of sparrows. The gryphons and the human passed other tunnels, turned right and left, and finally Shennan stepped out into a chamber that surely took up most of the mountain peak.
The traveller followed Rai-kak across the domed amphitheater. The clucks, clicks, whistles, and hawk-calls of the gryphon language filled the air. A hundred lion-birds padded in and out of tunnel mouths, preened on balconies, or fluttered up to high perches. Shennan adopted his most nonchalant stride, designed to make the eyes of unfriendly guards and drunken rogues slide over him without notice. It did not work. The gryphons stared down, nudged their neighbors with their wings, and, by Tehuti, called their dog-sized fledglings to come watch the passing show.
Rai-kak led Shennan toward an oval entrance in the side of Lake Mountain; five gryphons, wings out tip-to-tip, could not have filled it. The human consoled himself with the thought of his bags of coins. He wondered how Taresh-Tar would take his failure. Perhaps he and his fellow Enkidu-ans would ask for a return of their investment. Shennan decided to send them a cordial letter informing them of his efforts.
The earth shuddered beneath the human's boots. Wings rose and beaks clacked. Rai-kak glanced around.
As well she might, thought Shennan. It is not "earth" beneath us, but solid granite, stretching into the depths of Icelos.
The floor of the eyrie shuddered again and kept shuddering, a dull vibration like the after-grumble of thunder.
"What is it?" asked the human. "An earthquake?"
The gryphons looked about like a flock of waddling geese. Rai-kak hissed.
"Lake Mountain Eyrie does not shake like a sparrow's nest, human. T'at was not uff nature."
The strident cries of cheetah and lynx and leopard echoed out of the tunnels. Gryphons trotted into the domed chamber in a sleet-storm of claw-steps.
Rai-kak sprang away from Shennan and confronted the first bird-beast from the corridors. Shennan interpreted their exchange as a field marshal receiving a soldier's report of defeat.
Gryphons fluttered down from ledges and clicked toward the tunnels. A collective hiss filled the air as a jaundice-yellow smoke billowed from the corridors. Lion-birds charged into the smoke only to return hacking and staggering, wings askew.
Shennan followed Rai-kak to the rear of the gallery.
"What is it?" he yelled over the hawk cries and cat snarls. "A fire?"
The blue-winged gryphon looked back, bristling.
"Not t'at much to burn in Lake Mountain!"
"Then what?" demanded the human.
Rai-kak exchanged words with a dun colored bird-beast. She clacked her beak so hard Shennan was surprised it did not break.
"No one is knowing, but t'e fledglings' chamber is cut from us!"
The Wing-Sister backed up, hunched like an angry cat. Shennan winced and followed. The corpse-yellow vapor carried a wretched, eye-watering stench, like sulphur, and minks' dens, and many layers of sweat and grime impregnating someone's winter hose, and the liquid goat's cheese they favored in the deserts of Axenea. Shennan blinked out huge tears; Rai-kak slid some transparent membrane over her eyes.
"You are correct, Rai-kak," gasped the human. "That is not the smoke of wood or cloth or grain."
Gryphons still braved the ghastly fog, but every one either turned back or collapsed on the stone floor.
A bellow shook the mountain. Shennan clapped his hands over his ears. A thousand lions could not have emitted that reverberance; only volcanoes in full eruption and oceans pouring into new beds might have matched it. The gryphons chattered like gulls one second and froze like stalking lizards the next.
"Lamashtu," whispered a bird-beast with tiger stripes.
"Lamashtu, hissed a leopard-spotted neighbor.
"Who?" asked the wanderer.
The blue-feathered Wing-Sister spun around quick as a Garaman hunting dog. Shennan jumped in his tracks.
"Treacherous Hyu-man!" she cried. "You haff brought Lamashtu into our midst!"
The traveller raised his hands in alarm.
"I assure you, good Rai-kak, I am not acquainted with this personage."
The gryphoness rose on her hind legs, head wavering two or three cubits above the human's, wings spread like a billowing storm. Shennan felt fear and awe at once; this was the reverence priests and prophets spoke of. Did people see the gods as gryphons, the temples would swell each sevenday rather than echo tomblike.
Shennan dodged. Talons missed, but not the skiff's-length of wing. The azure pinion struck like a club against his legs. He landed on his side, and a huge foreclaw clamped like a craftsman's vice on his pack. A scimitar of a beak swung down, barely missing his nose.
"Enkidu invoke the Demon Queen, man!" hissed Rai-kak. "We haff wards against demons -- one must bring one in, invite it! Deny you are bringing her!"
Shennan tried to do just that, but his lips trembled like caterpillars as he attempted to speak.
Then the Roar came again, and a monstrous black form appeared in a fog-choked tunnel. Rai-kak pulled away. Shennan could only stare, frozen momentarily like the Wing-Sister and the other bird-beasts.
The tunnel roof hung eight cubits high, but the form bent double within it. It straightened in a new billow of noxious smoke as it stepped into the main gallery.
Lamashtu's head was massive and leonine, with fang-filled rectangular jaws and a shaggy black mane. Two long, incongruous ears, like those of a donkey, poked out of the hairy bush of mane. Bristly fur, like a boar's covered her body, even the two hanging breasts that marked her as female. She lifted her arms, revealing that she, like the gryphons, bore clutching eagle-claws for hands.
The Demon Queen scanned the great hall with hellfire eyes, looking upon the gryphons as a man might look upon a yard of new-hatched chicks.
"I reiterate, Rai-kak," gasped Shennan, "I would remember meeting her."
The gryphons nearest Lamashtu screeched and sprang at the demon. To Shennan they resembled pups frisking with their master. The lion-demon bellowed, and within her yawning jaws he glimpsed a swirling crimson inferno.
She is filled with hellfire, he thought. She is hell, encased in a walking, bellowing bestial envelope!
Shennan marveled that anything, even the fearsome gryphons, would leap upon this horror. One bird-beast tore and pecked at Lamashtu's face; a second clung to her arm and clambered up like a cat on a tree. The lion-demon seized the first in a claw and ripped it free as a man might pluck loose a burr. She craned her neck and bit the second gryphon, which beat its wings like a sparrow nabbed by a fox.
More bird-beasts loped forward. The demon pointed a black claw at one that sprang high over Shennan. He heard a low, wet pop like a wineskin dropped from a roof, and bloody chunks of a furred and feathered body splattered on the stone floor.
The human struggled to hold down his gorge. Lion's hindquarters lay twitching only an ell away; the gryphon's front half crashed some distance beyond, looking like an ordinary eagle now save for the trailing intestines.
Shennan rose to his knees. Something fluttered down onto his right hand like a leaf: one of the dead gryphon's ears. He shook it off.
The Rite of the Chimera joined eagle with lion long ago, thought the wanderer frantically. This Demon Queen seems to reverse the process.
Shennan climbed shakily to his feet. The gryphons hurled themselves onto Lamashtu until a column of wings and lion-skin completely hid the demon. They fell, however, one by one, ripped by claws, crushed by fangs, or grotesquely un-chimeraed.
Shennan hobbled, then trotted, toward the entrance. He felt a stab of shame at his retreat, but, by the Twelve Gods, what could he do?
"I brought that in, Rai-kak claimed -- that!"
He emerged into the weak sun and cold air of the mountain peak. The entrance opened onto a narrow butte from which the gryphons simply dropped into space.
"How could I have transported yon hell-thing here? Do they think I snatched it up by the scruff of the neck and dropped it in my pack?"
Shennan skidded to a stop. He looked over the wide plains below, the walls of Kelonis catching the sunlight in the distance.
How did one summon a demon? There were long, complicated rituals, yes, but legend spoke of amulets, rings, and other artifacts that could hold even the mightiest fiend -- a spirit that might later emerge when the jewelry hung about a neck or rode on a finger.
(The slope below the ledge was steep, but Shennan could descend more readily than climb. . .)
. . . This Lamashtu might have ridden in one of the Enkidu "gifts", but why did she not erupt right out of Shennan's pack, a most unpleasant Jack-in-the-box? She emerged from the depths of the mountain -- from the very tunnel Shennan and his escorts traversed.
"And the only thing back there that was not there before is my tiny gryphon," he muttered.
Shennan scampered like a mouse along the perimeter of the gallery. The bird-beasts knew no fear; they sprang upon the Demon Queen though she smote them to the rock floor, some rising again, some not. Lamashtu herself waved her log-thick arms and shambled drunkenly, invisible within a shawl of feathers, fur, and slashing claws. The screeches and bellows of the struggle shook the whole peak.
The ghastly smoke rose like any other, thank Tehuti; Shennan trotted half-crouched, edging around several hacking and writhing gryphon forms. Rai-kak had turned left, right, left, before, which meant he would turn right, left, right on the way back --
There! Yellow fumes still trickled from a round opening in the granite wall. Shennan ducked in, finding the shelf more by touch than by sight in the murk. He swept his fingers along the cold stone, touched the glazed clay --
"By Oggni-Pur!" he exclaimed. "Hot as the moment it left the kiln!"
The jaundiced smoke seeped from it as it might through the pores of a sponge. Shennan glanced over its cracked base -- broken off, then replaced? Many folk hid treasure in such innocuous objects.
He hurled the small gryphon to the floor as the demon hurled the real creatures nearby. The statuette shattered, and within something flashed crimson.
"Aha!" cried the wanderer.
He shrugged off his pack and yanked out a silk kerchief. He knelt by a red-gold medallion, a pentagon on a chain with a fiery ruby -- or something -- winking at the center.
He folded his kerchief twice and swept up the medallion. He ran back along the corridors, coughing in the lingering hell-fog. He reached the domed entry hall and skidded to a halt.
The playing field had cleared considerably in the past few minutes. Gryphons lay scattered about in varying degrees of injury. Lamashtu slapped away a bird-beast as a man might wave his cap, then she stood essentially alone in the grotto.
Alone save for you, Shennan. I wish you had planned beyond this point.
The furnaces of Lamashtu's eyes tilted down to find Shennan. She bellowed again, a deafening thunder marked with fetid smoke and jets of flame.
The traveller held up the gold medallion.
"Begone, foul demon!" he cried. "Return now to the Pit that spawned you!"
The black leonine lips wrinkled back in a ghastly smile. The yellow fog leaked from the rows of dagger-tusks. Shennan blinked away perspiration.
I am but a mountebank in her eyes -- an edible one, at that.
"Lamashtu!" he continued. "I command you to leave Lake Mountain Eyrie -- in the names of Jaertha, the Great Mother, Wironis, the Protector, and Tehuti, the Wise!"
The Demon Queen let out a reverberation Shennan interpreted as laughter. She flexed her vultureish talons and stepped forward. The granite floor shuddered like a ship beaching.
This is not working, thought the traveller.
Before he could run, a blue-brown form swept in from his right. Rai-kak! The Wing-Sister snatched the talisman from Shennan's hand.
"Leave the fingers!" he gasped.
The female gryphon flipped around with a single beat of a wing. She landed on her hind paws and held up the medallion as the human had. She gobbled out a long tirade in her language.
Lamashtu clapped her bird-claws over her donkey ears. She opened her lion's jaws and bellowed anew, this cry carrying a higher pitch than before.
The smoke flowed from the Demon Queen's maw in long streamers. Rai-kak chanted on; it sounded like so much goose-honking to Shennan, but it worked. The yellow fog swirled around Lamashtu. It spun like a whirlwind. The demon's roar heightened into a screech of despair. The fog thickened, twining, billowing, pulsating. Lamashtu might have been enveloped by a rod-high cocoon.
Shennan clapped his hands.
"Well! You have the situation under control, I see," he called over the screech of demon and rush of wind. "I'll just take my leave --"
The whirling spindle of Lamashtu flared like lightning. Something caught up the traveller and hurled him into pain and darkness.
He blinked his eyes, feeling twinges along his spine, a sharper pain in his skull. He moved his hand and felt twigs and leaves.
"Will I never leave the nest?" he muttered.
He sat up, or struggled to, and branches rubbed and snapped with his movement. He was not surprised to find Rai-kak sitting in the cave room, flanked by her two officers.
"You are asleep long," said the blue-winged lion-bird.
"I shall be grateful I woke at all," remarked Shennan. He stood and brushed himself off. "What of that most unpleasant spirit?"
"T'e Demon Queen is gone for now," said Rai-kak. "Our wardings are renewed. T'e spirit amulet is destroyed."
"Nine Folk died before the Demon Queen," said the gryphon on her left.
Shennan felt a chill.
"Good gryphon folk -- had I any idea I carried that abomination on my back --"
The gryphons' beaks opened just a crack. Despite the lieutenant-beast's grim announcement, Shennan had the odd feeling they were smiling.
"Holt your apologies, hyu-man," said Rai-kak. "We are knowing you are not to accuse. You are finding spirit amulet and bringing it to me."
"Why, yes -- precisely my plan," said Shennan.
"Some Folk did accuse you," said the third bird-lion, "but Lamashtu's final strike is there for all to see. The Folk know you are her enemy."
"Final strike?" asked Shennan. "What do you mean?"
The gryphons looked at one another with seeming amusement. Rai-kak tossed her head like a horse.
"Step wit' me to sun mirror. I explain."
The blue-winged gryphon clicked out into the hallway. Shennan followed, passing once more by her companions.
"Long ago we are repulsing men of Enkidu," the she-gryphon explained. "t'ey set upon us the Demon Queen Lamashtu. Great was battle. Many Folk slain, but we defeat her. In her anger, she is setting her Mark upon us. All Folk carry her Mark ever since."
"Her Mark?" asked Shennan.
Rai-kak stopped before a bronze mirror wide as a war-gong. She looked at her reflection and perked her ears.
"Part uff her chimera-form. She is chimera like us. She giffs us her ears -- ears uff t'e wild ass."
Shennan stepped up beside the Wing-Sister.
He froze. He blinked.
He reached up slowly to his temples and touched what he saw reflected there. Ears. Long, brown, pointed ears. He tugged them until they hurt. They would not come off. He barely heard Rai-kak's words.
"Great desert jackass is strong, swift, and wild. The Folk are proud to be part of t'em, as much as uff lion and eagle."
Shennan exhaled.
"Ah, Wise Tehuti!" he said. "I should not call upon you with such familiarity."
"Tehuti?"
The human smiled wistfully at the gryphon's reflection.
"The Thrice-Great One. Known also as Thoth and Hermes. He is the embodiment of knowledge, yet I forgot -- he is the Trickster as well. And I invoked his name frequently during my quest."
"Clorp?"
Shennan grinned.
"A quest to learn where gryphons got their ears."
Rai-kak let out a dry rasp that was probably laughter.
"You are knowing now."
Shennan winced and scowled and finally made the pointed ears tilt out and back by themselves.
"They may take a little getting used to -- but I will be proud to wear the ears of the gryphon," he promised.
The Wing-Sister stepped away again.
"Come, Shennan Gryphon-Ears. When Folk win battle, t'ere is celebration. Meat -- not-worry; cooked as well as not -- honey, bread, cheese, and trink. Usually too much trink."
Shennan set his hand on the gryphon's feathery shoulder.
"And in that way, too, we are alike, Rai-kak."