“Ayeeee!” Sheer defiance, not only
of the beast he fronted, but of the Wyverns as well, brought that
old rallying cry to his lips—the call used on the Dumps of
Tyr to summon gang aid against outsiders. Fork-tail had crouched
again for a spring, but that throat-crackling blast appeared to
startle it.
Shann, blade ready, took a dancing step to the right. The thing
was scaled, perhaps as well armored against frontal attack as was
the shell-creature he had fought with the aid of the wolverines. He
wished he had the Terran animals now—with Taggi and his mate
to tease and feint about the monster, as they had done with the
Throg hound—for he would have a better chance. If only the
animals were here!
Those eyes—red-pitted eyes in a gargoyle head following
his every movement—perhaps those were the only vulnerable
points.
Muscles tensed beneath that scaled hide. The Terran readied
himself for a sidewise leap, his knife hand raised to rake at those
eyes. A brown shape with a V of lighter fur banding its back
crossed the far range of Shann’s vision. He could not believe
what he saw, not even when a snarling animal, slavering with rage,
came at a lumbering gallop to stand beside him, a second animal on
its heels.
Uttering his own battle cry, Taggi attacked. The
fork-tail’s head swung, imitating the movements of the
wolverine as it had earlier mimicked the swaying of the disk in the
Wyvern’s hand. Togi came in from the other side. They might
have been hounds keeping a bull in play. And never had they shown
such perfect team work, almost as if they could sense what Shann
desired of them.
That forked tail lashed viciously, a formidable weapon. Bone,
muscles, scaled flesh, half buried in the sand, swept up a cloud of
grit into the face of the man and the animals. Shann fell back,
pawing with his free hand at his eyes. The wolverines circled
warily, trying for the attack they favored—the spring to the
shoulders, the usually fatal assault on the spine behind the neck.
But the armored head of the fork-tail, slung low, warned them off.
Again the tail lashed, and this time Taggi was caught and hurled
across the beach.
Togi uttered a challenge, made a reckless dash, and raked down
the length of the fork-tail’s body, fastening on that tail,
weighing it to earth with her own poundage while the sea creature
fought to dislodge her. Shann, his eyes watering from the sand, but
able to see, watched that battle for a long second, judging that
fork-tail was completely engaged in trying to free its best weapon
from the grip of the wolverine. The latter clawed and bit with a
fury which suggested Togi intended to immobilize that weapon by
tearing it to shreds.
Fork-tail wrenched its body, striving to reach its tormentor
with fangs or clawed feet. And in that struggle to achieve an
impossible position, its head slued far about, uncovering the
unprotected area behind the skull base which usually lay under the
spiny collar about its shoulders.
Shann went in. With one hand he gripped the edge of that
collar—its serrations tearing his flesh—and at the same
time he drove his knife blade deep into the soft underfolds,
ripping on toward the spinal column. The blade nicked against bone
as the fork-tail’s head slammed back, catching Shann’s
hand and knife together in a trap. The Terran was jerked from his
feet, and flung to one side with the force of the beast’s
reaction.
Blood spurted up, his own blood mingled with that of the
monster. Only Togi’s riding of the tail prevented
Shann’s being beaten to death. The armored snout pointed
skyward as the creature ground the sharp edge of its collar down on
the Terran’s arm. Shann, frantic with pain, drove his free
fist into one of those eyes.
Fork-tail jerked convulsively; its head snapped down again and
Shann was free. The Terran threw himself back, keeping his feet
with an effort. Fork-tail was writhing, churning up the sand in a
cloud. But it could not rid itself of the knife Shann had planted
with all his strength, and which the blows of its own armored
collar were now driving deeper and deeper into its back.
It howled thinly, with an abnormal shrilling. Shann, nursing his
bleeding forearm against his chest, rolled free from the waves of
sand it threw about, bringing up against one of the rock pillars.
With that to steady him, he somehow found his feet, and stood
weaving, trying to see through the rain of dust.
The convulsions which churned up that concealing cloud were
growing more feeble. Then Shann heard the triumphant squall from
Togi, saw her brown body still on the torn tail just above the
forking. The wolverine used her claws to hitch her way up the spine
of the sea monster, heading for the fountain of blood spouting from
behind the head. Fork-tail fought to raise that head once more;
then the massive jaw thudded into the sand, teeth snapping
fruitlessly as a flood of grit overrode the tongue, packed into the
gaping mouth.
How long had it taken—that frenzy of battle on the
bloodstained beach? Shann could have set no limit in clock-ruled
time. He pressed his wounded arm tighter to him, lurched past the
still-twitching sea thing to that splotch of brown fur on the sand,
shaping the wolverine’s whistle with dry lips. Togi was still
busy with the kill, but Taggi lay where that murderous tail had
thrown him.
Shann fell on his knees, as the beach around him developed a
curious tendency to sway. He put his good hand to the ruffled back
fur of the motionless wolverine.
“Taggi!”
A slight quiver answered. Shann tried awkwardly to raise the
animal’s head with his own hand. As far as he could see,
there were no open wounds; but there might be broken bones,
internal injuries he did not have the skill to heal.
“Taggi?” He called again gently, striving to bring
that heavy head up on his knee.
“The furred one is not dead.”
For a moment Shann was not aware that those words had formed in
his mind, had not been heard by his ears. He looked up, eyes
blazing at the Wyvern coming toward him in a graceful glide across
the crimsoned sand. And in a space of heartbeats his thrust of
anger cooled into a stubborn enmity.
“No thanks to you,” he said deliberately aloud. If
the Wyvern witch wanted to understand him, let her make the effort;
he did not try to touch her thoughts with his.
Taggi stirred again, and Shann glanced down quickly. The
wolverine gasped, opened his eyes, shook his miniature bear head,
scattering pellets of sand. He sniffed at a dollop of blood, the
dark, alien blood, spattered on Shann’s breeches, and then
his head came up with a reassuring alertness as he looked to where
his mate was still worrying the now quiet fork-tail.
With an effort, Taggi got to his feet, Shann aiding him. The man
ran his hand down over ribs, seeking any broken bones. Taggi
growled a warning once when that examination brought pain in its
wake, but Shann could detect no real damage. As might a cat, the
wolverine must have met the shock of that whip-tail stroke relaxed
enough to escape serious injury. Taggi had been knocked out, but
now he was able to navigate again. He pulled free from
Shann’s grip, lumbering across the sand to the kill.
Someone else was crossing that strip of beach. Passing the
Wyverns as if he did not see them, Thorvald came directly to Shann.
A few seconds later he had the torn arm stretched across his own
bent knee, examining the still bleeding hurt.
“That’s a nasty one,” he commented.
Shann heard the words and they made sense, but the instability
of his surroundings was increasing, while Thorvald’s handling
sent sharp stabs of pain up his arm and somehow into his head,
where they ended in red bursts to cloud his sight.
Out of the reddish mist which had fogged most of the landscape
there emerged a single object, a round white disk. And in
Shann’s clouded mind a well-rooted apprehension stirred. He
struck out with his one hand, and through luck connected. The disk
flew out of sight. His vision cleared enough so he could sight the
Wyvern who had been leaning over Thorvald’s shoulder
centering her weird weapon on him. Making a great effort, Shann got
out the words, words which he also shaped in his mind as he said
them aloud: “You’re not taking me
over—again!”
There was no emotion to be read on that jewel-banded face or in
her unblinking eyes. He caught at Thorvald, determined to get
across his warning.
“Don’t let them use those disks on us!”
“I’ll do my best.”
Only the haze had taken Thorvald again. Did one of the Wyverns
have a disk focused on them? Were they being pulled into one of
those blank periods, to awaken as prisoners once more—say, in
the cavern of the veil? The Terran fought with every ounce of will
power to escape unconsciousness, but he failed.
This time he did not awaken half-drowning in an underground
stream or facing a green mist. And there was an ache in his arm
which was somehow reassuring with the very insistence of pain.
Before opening his eyes, his fingers crossed the smooth slick of a
bandage there, went on to investigate by touch a sleep mat such as
he had found in the cavern structure. Was he back in that set of
rooms and corridors?
Shann delayed opening his eyes until a kind of shame drove him
to it. He first saw an oval opening almost the length of his body
as it was stretched only a foot or two below the sill of that
window. And through its transparent surface came the golden light
of the sun—no green mist, no crystals mocking the stars.
The room in which he lay was small with smooth walls, much like
that in which he had been imprisoned on the island. And there were
no other furnishings save the mat on which he rested. Over him was
a light cover netted of fibers resembling yarn, with feathers
knotted into it to provide a downy upper surface. His clothing was
gone, but the single covering was too warm and he pushed it away
from his shoulders and chest as he wriggled up to see the view
beyond the window.
His torn arm came into full view. From wrist to elbow it was
encased in an opaque skin sheath, unlike any bandage of his own
world. Surely that had not come out of any Survey aid pack. Shann
gazed toward the window, but beyond lay only a reach of sky. Except
for a lemon cloud or two ruffled high above the horizon, nothing
broke that soft amber curtain. He might be quartered in a tower
well above ground level, which did not match his former experience
with Wyvern accommodations.
“Back with us again?” Thorvald, one hand lifting a
door panel, came in. His ragged uniform was gone, and he wore only
breeches of a sleek green material and his own scuffed-and-battered
boots.
Shann settled back on the mat. “Where are we?”
“I think you might term this the capital city,”
Thorvald answered. “In relation to the mainland, we’re
on an island well out to sea—westward.”
“How did we get here?” That climb in the slab, the
stream underground . . . Had it been an
interior river running under the bed of the sea? But Shann was not
prepared for the other’s reply.
“By wishing.”
“By what?”
Thorvald nodded, his expression serious. “They wished us
here. Listen, Lantee, when you jumped down to mix it with that
fork-tailed thing, did you wish you had the wolverines with
you?”
Shann thought back; his memories of what had occurred before
that battle were none too clear. But, yes, he had wished Taggi and
Togi present at that moment to distract the enraged beast.
“You mean I wished them?” The whole idea was
probably a part of the Wyvern jargon of dreaming and he added,
“Or did I just dream everything?” There was the bandage
on his arm, the soreness under that bandage. But also there had
been Logally’s lash brand back in the cavern, which had
bitten into his flesh with the pain of a real blow.
“No, you weren’t dreaming. You happened to be tuned
in on one of those handy little gadgets our lady friends here use.
And, so tuned in, your desire for the wolverines being pretty
powerful just then, they came.”
Shann grimaced. This was unbelievable. Yet there were his
meetings with Logally and Trav. How could anyone rationally explain
them? And how had he, in the beginning, been jumped from the top of
the cliff on the island of his marooning into the midst of an
underground flood without any conscious memory of an intermediate
journey?
“How does it work?” he asked simply.
Thorvald laughed. “You tell me. They have these disks, one
to a Wyvern, and they control forces with them. Back there on the
beach we interrupted a class in such control; they were the novices
learning their trade. We’ve stumbled on something here which
can’t be defined or understood by any of our previous
standards of comparison. It’s frankly magic, judged by our
terms.”
“Are we prisoners?” Shann wanted to know.
“Ask me something I’m sure of. I’ve been free
to come and go within limits. No one’s exhibited any signs of
hostility; most of them simply ignore me. I’ve had two
interviews, via this mind-reading act of theirs, with their rulers,
or elders, or chief sorceresses—all three titles seem to
apply. They ask questions, I answer as best I can, but sometimes we
appear to have no common meeting ground. Then I ask some questions,
they evade gracefully, or reply in a kind of unintelligible
double-talk, and that’s as far as our communication has
progressed so far.”
“Taggi and Togi?”
“Have a run of their own and as far as I can tell are
better satisfied with life than I am. Oddly enough, they respond
more quickly and more intelligently to orders. Perhaps this
business of being shunted around by the disks has conditioned them
in some way.”
“What about these Wyverns? Are they all female?”
“No, but their tribal system is strictly matriarchal,
which follows a pattern even Terra once knew: the fertile earth
mother and her priestesses, who became the witches when the gods
overruled the goddesses. The males are few in number and lack the
power to activate the disks. In fact,” Thorvald laughed
ruefully, “one gathers that in this civilization our opposite
numbers have, more or less, the status of pets at the best, and
necessary evils at the worst. Which put us at a
disadvantage from the start.”
“You think that they won’t take us seriously because
we are males?”
“Might just work out that way. I’ve tried to get
through to them about danger from the Throgs, telling them what it
would mean to them to have the beetle-heads settle in here for
good. They just brush aside the whole idea.”
“Can’t you argue that the Throgs are males, too? Or
aren’t they?”
The Survey officer shook his head. “That’s a point
no human can answer. We’ve been sparring with Throgs for
years and there have been libraries of reports written about them
and their behavior patterns, all of which add up to about two
paragraphs of proven facts and hundreds of surmises beginning with
the probable and skimming out into the wild fantastic. You can
claim anything about a Throg and find a lot of very intelligent
souls ready to believe you. But whether those beetle-heads
squatting over on the mainland are able to answer to
‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘it,’ your
solution is just as good as mine. We’ve always considered the
ones we fight to be males, but they might just as possibly be
amazons. Frankly, these Wyverns couldn’t care less either; at
least that’s the impression they give.”
“But anyway,” Shann observed, “it hasn’t
come to ‘we’re all girls together’
either.”
Thorvald laughed again. “Not so you can notice.
We’re not the only unwilling visitor in the
vicinity.”
Shann sat up. “A Throg?”
“A something. Non-Warlockian, or non-Wyvern. And perhaps
trouble for us.”
“You haven’t seen this other?”
Thorvald sat down cross-legged. The amber light from the window
made red-gold of his hair, added ruddiness to his less-gaunt
features.
“No, I haven’t. As far as I can tell, the
stranger’s not right here. I caught stray thought beams
twice—surprise expressed by newly arrived Wyverns who met me
and apparently expected to be fronted by something quite physically
different.”
“Another Terran scout?”
“No. I imagine that to the Wyverns we must look a lot
alike. Just as we couldn’t tell one of them from her sister
if their body patterns didn’t differ. Discovered one thing
about those patterns—the more intricate they run, the higher
the ‘power,’ not of the immediate wearer, but of her
ancestors. They’re marked when they qualify for their disk
and presented with the rating of the greatest witch in their family
line as an inducement to live up to those deeds and surpass them if
possible. Quite a bit of logic to that. Given the right
conditioning, such a system might even work in our
service.”
That nugget of information was the stuff from which Survey
reports were made. But at the moment the information concerning the
other captive was of more value to Shann. He steadied his body
against the wall with his good hand and got to his feet. Thorvald
watched him.
“I take it you have visions of action. Tell me, Lantee,
why did you take that header off the cliff to mix it with
the fork-tail?”
Shann wondered himself. He had no reason for that impulsive act.
“I don’t know—”
“Chivalry? Fair Wyvern in distress?” the other
prodded. “Or did the backlash from one of those disks draw
you in?”
“I don’t know—”
“And why did you use your knife instead of your
stunner?”
Shann was startled. For the first time he realized that he had
fronted the greatest native menace they had discovered on Warlock
with the more primitive of his weapons. Why had he not tried the
stunner on the beast? He had just never thought of it when he had
taken that leap into the role of dragon slayer.
“Not that it would have done you any good to try the ray;
it has no effect on fork-tails.”
“You tried it?”
“Naturally. But you didn’t know that, or did you
pick up that information earlier?”
“No,” answered Shann slowly. “No, I
don’t know why I used the knife. The stunner would have been
more natural.” Suddenly he shivered, and the face he turned
to Thorvald was very sober.
“How much do they control us?” he asked, his voice
dropping to a half whisper as if the walls about them could pick up
those words and relay them to other ears. “What can they
do?”
“A good question.” Thorvald lost his light tone.
“Yes, what can they feed into our minds without our
knowledge? Perhaps those disks are only window dressing, and they
can work without them. A great deal will depend upon the impression
we can make on these witches.” He began to smile again, more
wryly. “The name we gave this planet is certainly a misnomer.
A warlock is a male sorcerer, not a witch.”
“And what are the chances of our becoming warlocks
ourselves?”
Again Thorvald’s smile faded, but he gave a curt little
nod to Shann as if approving that thought. “That is something
we are going to look into, and now! If we have to convince some
stubborn females, as well as fight Throgs, well”—he
shrugged—“we’ll have a busy, busy
time.”
“Ayeeee!” Sheer defiance, not only
of the beast he fronted, but of the Wyverns as well, brought that
old rallying cry to his lips—the call used on the Dumps of
Tyr to summon gang aid against outsiders. Fork-tail had crouched
again for a spring, but that throat-crackling blast appeared to
startle it.
Shann, blade ready, took a dancing step to the right. The thing
was scaled, perhaps as well armored against frontal attack as was
the shell-creature he had fought with the aid of the wolverines. He
wished he had the Terran animals now—with Taggi and his mate
to tease and feint about the monster, as they had done with the
Throg hound—for he would have a better chance. If only the
animals were here!
Those eyes—red-pitted eyes in a gargoyle head following
his every movement—perhaps those were the only vulnerable
points.
Muscles tensed beneath that scaled hide. The Terran readied
himself for a sidewise leap, his knife hand raised to rake at those
eyes. A brown shape with a V of lighter fur banding its back
crossed the far range of Shann’s vision. He could not believe
what he saw, not even when a snarling animal, slavering with rage,
came at a lumbering gallop to stand beside him, a second animal on
its heels.
Uttering his own battle cry, Taggi attacked. The
fork-tail’s head swung, imitating the movements of the
wolverine as it had earlier mimicked the swaying of the disk in the
Wyvern’s hand. Togi came in from the other side. They might
have been hounds keeping a bull in play. And never had they shown
such perfect team work, almost as if they could sense what Shann
desired of them.
That forked tail lashed viciously, a formidable weapon. Bone,
muscles, scaled flesh, half buried in the sand, swept up a cloud of
grit into the face of the man and the animals. Shann fell back,
pawing with his free hand at his eyes. The wolverines circled
warily, trying for the attack they favored—the spring to the
shoulders, the usually fatal assault on the spine behind the neck.
But the armored head of the fork-tail, slung low, warned them off.
Again the tail lashed, and this time Taggi was caught and hurled
across the beach.
Togi uttered a challenge, made a reckless dash, and raked down
the length of the fork-tail’s body, fastening on that tail,
weighing it to earth with her own poundage while the sea creature
fought to dislodge her. Shann, his eyes watering from the sand, but
able to see, watched that battle for a long second, judging that
fork-tail was completely engaged in trying to free its best weapon
from the grip of the wolverine. The latter clawed and bit with a
fury which suggested Togi intended to immobilize that weapon by
tearing it to shreds.
Fork-tail wrenched its body, striving to reach its tormentor
with fangs or clawed feet. And in that struggle to achieve an
impossible position, its head slued far about, uncovering the
unprotected area behind the skull base which usually lay under the
spiny collar about its shoulders.
Shann went in. With one hand he gripped the edge of that
collar—its serrations tearing his flesh—and at the same
time he drove his knife blade deep into the soft underfolds,
ripping on toward the spinal column. The blade nicked against bone
as the fork-tail’s head slammed back, catching Shann’s
hand and knife together in a trap. The Terran was jerked from his
feet, and flung to one side with the force of the beast’s
reaction.
Blood spurted up, his own blood mingled with that of the
monster. Only Togi’s riding of the tail prevented
Shann’s being beaten to death. The armored snout pointed
skyward as the creature ground the sharp edge of its collar down on
the Terran’s arm. Shann, frantic with pain, drove his free
fist into one of those eyes.
Fork-tail jerked convulsively; its head snapped down again and
Shann was free. The Terran threw himself back, keeping his feet
with an effort. Fork-tail was writhing, churning up the sand in a
cloud. But it could not rid itself of the knife Shann had planted
with all his strength, and which the blows of its own armored
collar were now driving deeper and deeper into its back.
It howled thinly, with an abnormal shrilling. Shann, nursing his
bleeding forearm against his chest, rolled free from the waves of
sand it threw about, bringing up against one of the rock pillars.
With that to steady him, he somehow found his feet, and stood
weaving, trying to see through the rain of dust.
The convulsions which churned up that concealing cloud were
growing more feeble. Then Shann heard the triumphant squall from
Togi, saw her brown body still on the torn tail just above the
forking. The wolverine used her claws to hitch her way up the spine
of the sea monster, heading for the fountain of blood spouting from
behind the head. Fork-tail fought to raise that head once more;
then the massive jaw thudded into the sand, teeth snapping
fruitlessly as a flood of grit overrode the tongue, packed into the
gaping mouth.
How long had it taken—that frenzy of battle on the
bloodstained beach? Shann could have set no limit in clock-ruled
time. He pressed his wounded arm tighter to him, lurched past the
still-twitching sea thing to that splotch of brown fur on the sand,
shaping the wolverine’s whistle with dry lips. Togi was still
busy with the kill, but Taggi lay where that murderous tail had
thrown him.
Shann fell on his knees, as the beach around him developed a
curious tendency to sway. He put his good hand to the ruffled back
fur of the motionless wolverine.
“Taggi!”
A slight quiver answered. Shann tried awkwardly to raise the
animal’s head with his own hand. As far as he could see,
there were no open wounds; but there might be broken bones,
internal injuries he did not have the skill to heal.
“Taggi?” He called again gently, striving to bring
that heavy head up on his knee.
“The furred one is not dead.”
For a moment Shann was not aware that those words had formed in
his mind, had not been heard by his ears. He looked up, eyes
blazing at the Wyvern coming toward him in a graceful glide across
the crimsoned sand. And in a space of heartbeats his thrust of
anger cooled into a stubborn enmity.
“No thanks to you,” he said deliberately aloud. If
the Wyvern witch wanted to understand him, let her make the effort;
he did not try to touch her thoughts with his.
Taggi stirred again, and Shann glanced down quickly. The
wolverine gasped, opened his eyes, shook his miniature bear head,
scattering pellets of sand. He sniffed at a dollop of blood, the
dark, alien blood, spattered on Shann’s breeches, and then
his head came up with a reassuring alertness as he looked to where
his mate was still worrying the now quiet fork-tail.
With an effort, Taggi got to his feet, Shann aiding him. The man
ran his hand down over ribs, seeking any broken bones. Taggi
growled a warning once when that examination brought pain in its
wake, but Shann could detect no real damage. As might a cat, the
wolverine must have met the shock of that whip-tail stroke relaxed
enough to escape serious injury. Taggi had been knocked out, but
now he was able to navigate again. He pulled free from
Shann’s grip, lumbering across the sand to the kill.
Someone else was crossing that strip of beach. Passing the
Wyverns as if he did not see them, Thorvald came directly to Shann.
A few seconds later he had the torn arm stretched across his own
bent knee, examining the still bleeding hurt.
“That’s a nasty one,” he commented.
Shann heard the words and they made sense, but the instability
of his surroundings was increasing, while Thorvald’s handling
sent sharp stabs of pain up his arm and somehow into his head,
where they ended in red bursts to cloud his sight.
Out of the reddish mist which had fogged most of the landscape
there emerged a single object, a round white disk. And in
Shann’s clouded mind a well-rooted apprehension stirred. He
struck out with his one hand, and through luck connected. The disk
flew out of sight. His vision cleared enough so he could sight the
Wyvern who had been leaning over Thorvald’s shoulder
centering her weird weapon on him. Making a great effort, Shann got
out the words, words which he also shaped in his mind as he said
them aloud: “You’re not taking me
over—again!”
There was no emotion to be read on that jewel-banded face or in
her unblinking eyes. He caught at Thorvald, determined to get
across his warning.
“Don’t let them use those disks on us!”
“I’ll do my best.”
Only the haze had taken Thorvald again. Did one of the Wyverns
have a disk focused on them? Were they being pulled into one of
those blank periods, to awaken as prisoners once more—say, in
the cavern of the veil? The Terran fought with every ounce of will
power to escape unconsciousness, but he failed.
This time he did not awaken half-drowning in an underground
stream or facing a green mist. And there was an ache in his arm
which was somehow reassuring with the very insistence of pain.
Before opening his eyes, his fingers crossed the smooth slick of a
bandage there, went on to investigate by touch a sleep mat such as
he had found in the cavern structure. Was he back in that set of
rooms and corridors?
Shann delayed opening his eyes until a kind of shame drove him
to it. He first saw an oval opening almost the length of his body
as it was stretched only a foot or two below the sill of that
window. And through its transparent surface came the golden light
of the sun—no green mist, no crystals mocking the stars.
The room in which he lay was small with smooth walls, much like
that in which he had been imprisoned on the island. And there were
no other furnishings save the mat on which he rested. Over him was
a light cover netted of fibers resembling yarn, with feathers
knotted into it to provide a downy upper surface. His clothing was
gone, but the single covering was too warm and he pushed it away
from his shoulders and chest as he wriggled up to see the view
beyond the window.
His torn arm came into full view. From wrist to elbow it was
encased in an opaque skin sheath, unlike any bandage of his own
world. Surely that had not come out of any Survey aid pack. Shann
gazed toward the window, but beyond lay only a reach of sky. Except
for a lemon cloud or two ruffled high above the horizon, nothing
broke that soft amber curtain. He might be quartered in a tower
well above ground level, which did not match his former experience
with Wyvern accommodations.
“Back with us again?” Thorvald, one hand lifting a
door panel, came in. His ragged uniform was gone, and he wore only
breeches of a sleek green material and his own scuffed-and-battered
boots.
Shann settled back on the mat. “Where are we?”
“I think you might term this the capital city,”
Thorvald answered. “In relation to the mainland, we’re
on an island well out to sea—westward.”
“How did we get here?” That climb in the slab, the
stream underground . . . Had it been an
interior river running under the bed of the sea? But Shann was not
prepared for the other’s reply.
“By wishing.”
“By what?”
Thorvald nodded, his expression serious. “They wished us
here. Listen, Lantee, when you jumped down to mix it with that
fork-tailed thing, did you wish you had the wolverines with
you?”
Shann thought back; his memories of what had occurred before
that battle were none too clear. But, yes, he had wished Taggi and
Togi present at that moment to distract the enraged beast.
“You mean I wished them?” The whole idea was
probably a part of the Wyvern jargon of dreaming and he added,
“Or did I just dream everything?” There was the bandage
on his arm, the soreness under that bandage. But also there had
been Logally’s lash brand back in the cavern, which had
bitten into his flesh with the pain of a real blow.
“No, you weren’t dreaming. You happened to be tuned
in on one of those handy little gadgets our lady friends here use.
And, so tuned in, your desire for the wolverines being pretty
powerful just then, they came.”
Shann grimaced. This was unbelievable. Yet there were his
meetings with Logally and Trav. How could anyone rationally explain
them? And how had he, in the beginning, been jumped from the top of
the cliff on the island of his marooning into the midst of an
underground flood without any conscious memory of an intermediate
journey?
“How does it work?” he asked simply.
Thorvald laughed. “You tell me. They have these disks, one
to a Wyvern, and they control forces with them. Back there on the
beach we interrupted a class in such control; they were the novices
learning their trade. We’ve stumbled on something here which
can’t be defined or understood by any of our previous
standards of comparison. It’s frankly magic, judged by our
terms.”
“Are we prisoners?” Shann wanted to know.
“Ask me something I’m sure of. I’ve been free
to come and go within limits. No one’s exhibited any signs of
hostility; most of them simply ignore me. I’ve had two
interviews, via this mind-reading act of theirs, with their rulers,
or elders, or chief sorceresses—all three titles seem to
apply. They ask questions, I answer as best I can, but sometimes we
appear to have no common meeting ground. Then I ask some questions,
they evade gracefully, or reply in a kind of unintelligible
double-talk, and that’s as far as our communication has
progressed so far.”
“Taggi and Togi?”
“Have a run of their own and as far as I can tell are
better satisfied with life than I am. Oddly enough, they respond
more quickly and more intelligently to orders. Perhaps this
business of being shunted around by the disks has conditioned them
in some way.”
“What about these Wyverns? Are they all female?”
“No, but their tribal system is strictly matriarchal,
which follows a pattern even Terra once knew: the fertile earth
mother and her priestesses, who became the witches when the gods
overruled the goddesses. The males are few in number and lack the
power to activate the disks. In fact,” Thorvald laughed
ruefully, “one gathers that in this civilization our opposite
numbers have, more or less, the status of pets at the best, and
necessary evils at the worst. Which put us at a
disadvantage from the start.”
“You think that they won’t take us seriously because
we are males?”
“Might just work out that way. I’ve tried to get
through to them about danger from the Throgs, telling them what it
would mean to them to have the beetle-heads settle in here for
good. They just brush aside the whole idea.”
“Can’t you argue that the Throgs are males, too? Or
aren’t they?”
The Survey officer shook his head. “That’s a point
no human can answer. We’ve been sparring with Throgs for
years and there have been libraries of reports written about them
and their behavior patterns, all of which add up to about two
paragraphs of proven facts and hundreds of surmises beginning with
the probable and skimming out into the wild fantastic. You can
claim anything about a Throg and find a lot of very intelligent
souls ready to believe you. But whether those beetle-heads
squatting over on the mainland are able to answer to
‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘it,’ your
solution is just as good as mine. We’ve always considered the
ones we fight to be males, but they might just as possibly be
amazons. Frankly, these Wyverns couldn’t care less either; at
least that’s the impression they give.”
“But anyway,” Shann observed, “it hasn’t
come to ‘we’re all girls together’
either.”
Thorvald laughed again. “Not so you can notice.
We’re not the only unwilling visitor in the
vicinity.”
Shann sat up. “A Throg?”
“A something. Non-Warlockian, or non-Wyvern. And perhaps
trouble for us.”
“You haven’t seen this other?”
Thorvald sat down cross-legged. The amber light from the window
made red-gold of his hair, added ruddiness to his less-gaunt
features.
“No, I haven’t. As far as I can tell, the
stranger’s not right here. I caught stray thought beams
twice—surprise expressed by newly arrived Wyverns who met me
and apparently expected to be fronted by something quite physically
different.”
“Another Terran scout?”
“No. I imagine that to the Wyverns we must look a lot
alike. Just as we couldn’t tell one of them from her sister
if their body patterns didn’t differ. Discovered one thing
about those patterns—the more intricate they run, the higher
the ‘power,’ not of the immediate wearer, but of her
ancestors. They’re marked when they qualify for their disk
and presented with the rating of the greatest witch in their family
line as an inducement to live up to those deeds and surpass them if
possible. Quite a bit of logic to that. Given the right
conditioning, such a system might even work in our
service.”
That nugget of information was the stuff from which Survey
reports were made. But at the moment the information concerning the
other captive was of more value to Shann. He steadied his body
against the wall with his good hand and got to his feet. Thorvald
watched him.
“I take it you have visions of action. Tell me, Lantee,
why did you take that header off the cliff to mix it with
the fork-tail?”
Shann wondered himself. He had no reason for that impulsive act.
“I don’t know—”
“Chivalry? Fair Wyvern in distress?” the other
prodded. “Or did the backlash from one of those disks draw
you in?”
“I don’t know—”
“And why did you use your knife instead of your
stunner?”
Shann was startled. For the first time he realized that he had
fronted the greatest native menace they had discovered on Warlock
with the more primitive of his weapons. Why had he not tried the
stunner on the beast? He had just never thought of it when he had
taken that leap into the role of dragon slayer.
“Not that it would have done you any good to try the ray;
it has no effect on fork-tails.”
“You tried it?”
“Naturally. But you didn’t know that, or did you
pick up that information earlier?”
“No,” answered Shann slowly. “No, I
don’t know why I used the knife. The stunner would have been
more natural.” Suddenly he shivered, and the face he turned
to Thorvald was very sober.
“How much do they control us?” he asked, his voice
dropping to a half whisper as if the walls about them could pick up
those words and relay them to other ears. “What can they
do?”
“A good question.” Thorvald lost his light tone.
“Yes, what can they feed into our minds without our
knowledge? Perhaps those disks are only window dressing, and they
can work without them. A great deal will depend upon the impression
we can make on these witches.” He began to smile again, more
wryly. “The name we gave this planet is certainly a misnomer.
A warlock is a male sorcerer, not a witch.”
“And what are the chances of our becoming warlocks
ourselves?”
Again Thorvald’s smile faded, but he gave a curt little
nod to Shann as if approving that thought. “That is something
we are going to look into, and now! If we have to convince some
stubborn females, as well as fight Throgs, well”—he
shrugged—“we’ll have a busy, busy
time.”