The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

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 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 back lash from one of those disks draw you in?”
    “I don’t