Shield's Lady

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 carrying 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