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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 hie had deepened The walls rose dizzyingly high overhead, revealing only a tiny strip of sky Evening shadoere already thick on the valley floor

The river was a rough and tumble cascade now White water foah twists and turns in the narrowed riverbed channel

Gryph used the shadows, although he was relatively certain he wouldn't be noticed, even if soh natural cover in the area to hide his movements Even another Shield would be unable to sense his presence The pulses of the live pris, including the weaker pulse of the neutralized pris bandits in the frontier provinces were second nature to hiht while he fine-tuned his focus on the live prisma

For asee froe 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 huht threatened to overtake the gorge co for A vapor lah up on the canyon wall

He hadn't been able to spot it from the base, but Gryph kne there had to be an entrance into the

rock up there so student, he knew that the ships on Windarra had frequently been hidden in s into such mountainsides as this one

There had to be a way to clilimmer of a vapor lamp The canyon wall proved to be less sheer than it had looked frooal

was easier than Gryph had originally thought it would be In fact, it was more of a scramble over tumbled boulders and sly short while after he had left the valley floor, Gryph was crouching within a few e point it was easy to see the wide ed out of the canyon wall A vapor lan of anyone around the la strength of the pris inside his brain was all the evidence Gryph needed of a ship's presence The rays swale, cut piece of prisma could produce so ht, 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 er beaht be ht for intruders

Gryph watched the cave entrance for a while longer, willing someone to come fetch the vapor lamp Whoever bad put it there would surely want to retrieve it before long Itwith no one around

Ti slowness and no one appeared If it hadn't been for the burning lauessed there were humans in the vicinity He was cold, cra did not teach a ht watch It just taught him how to endure them