"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

no enemy but storms and accident. But I still have the emotional reaction to seeing people going out on a
quasi-military mission, and that fact that it is my daughter that is doing so only makes the reaction worse."
He smiled thinly. "You cannot reason with an old emotional problem, I am afraid."
She looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, and made little patterns with her forefinger,
tracing the grain of the wood. What on earth did he expect her to say? What could she say? That was
years and years ago, before I was even born. Can't he have gotten over it by now? He's supposed
to be the great magician of the emotions, so why can't he keep his own trained to heel? What
could possibly go wrong with this assignment? We'll have a teleson with us, we'll be reporting in,
and if there is a life-threatening emergency and they can't get help to us quickly, they'll take the
risk and Gate us back!
But that wasn't what he wanted to hear, and it wouldn't help anything to say it. "I can understand. At
least, I think I can. I'll try," she finished lamely.
True, it is nothing but wilderness between here and thereтАФbut when we get "there," we'll be
in a fortified outpost built to withstand storm, siege, or earthquake. And, granted, no one has
even tried to explore all the rainforest in between, but we'll be flying, not walking! What could
possibly knock us out of the sky that our people or the Haighlei wouldn't have encountered a long,
long time ago?
It wasтАФbarelyтАФpossible that some mage-made creatures of Ma'ar's survived from the Cataclysm.
It was less likely that any of them could have made it this far south. And even if they did, there had never
been that many of them that could threaten a gryphon. The last makaar died ages ago, and there
never was anything else that could take a flying gryphon down. We'll be flying too high for any
projectile to hurt us, and even if we weren't, there'll be the mass of the carry-basket and all our
supplies between us and a marksman.
"Father, I promise you, we'll be fine," she only said, choking down a last dry mouthful of bread.
"Makaar are extinct, and nothing less could even ruffle Tadrith's feathers. You've seen him; he's one of
the biggest, strongest gryphons in the Silvers!"
But Amberdrake shook his head. "Blade, it's not that I don't trust or believe in you, but there is far
more in this world than you or Tadrith have ever seen. There were more mages involved in the Mage
Wars than just Urtho and Ma'ar; plenty of them created some very dangerous creatures, too, and not all
of them were as short-lived as makaar. I will admit that we are a long distance from the war zones, but
we got this far, so who's to say that other things couldn't?"
He's not going to listen to me, she realized. He's determined to be afraid for me, no matter
what I say. There was more likelihood of moving the population of the city up to the rim of the canyon
than there was of getting Amberdrake to change his mind when it was made up.
"What's more, as you very well know, the mage-storms that followed the Cataclysm altered many,
many otherwise harmless creatures, and conjured up more." His jaw firmed stubbornly. "You ask
Snowstar if you don't believe me; some of the territory we passed through was unbelievable, and that
was only after a year or so of mage-storms battering at it! We were very, very lucky that most of the
things we encountered were minimally intelligent."
"Sports and change-children die out in less than a generation," she retorted, letting her impatience get
the better of her. "That's simple fact, Father. There're just too many things wrong with most magic-made
creatures for them to live very long, if they've been created by accident."
He raised an elegant eyebrow at her, and the expression on his face told her she'd been caught in a
mistake.
"Urtho was not infallible," he said quietly. "He had many accidents in the course of creating some of
his new creatures. One of those accidents was responsible for the creation of intelligence in kyree, and
another for intelligence in hertasi. And neither race has died out within a generation."
She had already spotted the flaw in his argument. "An accident may have been responsible for the
intelligence of the creature, but not the creature itself," she countered. "Creature creation takes great
thought, planning, and skill. An accident is simply not going to be able to duplicate that!"