The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

not be given to a stranger while their owners live. However.…” She turned again with an abruptness foreign to the usual Wyvern manner and faced the older Terran.
    The officer might have been obeying an unvoiced order as he put out his hands and laid them palm to palm on those she held up to him, bending his head so gray eyes met golden ones. The web of communication which had held all three of them snapped. Thorvald and the Wyvern were linked in a tight circuit which excluded Shann.
    Then the latter became conscious of movement beside him. The younger Wyvern had joined him to watch the clak-claks in their circling of the bare dome of the skull island.
    “Why do they fly so?” Shann asked her.
    “Within they nest, care for their young. Also they hunt the rock creatures that swarm in the lower darkness.”
    “The rock creatures?” If the skull’s interior was infested by some other native fauna, he wanted to know it.
    By some method of her own the young Wyvern conveyed a strong impression of revulsion, which was her personal reaction to the “rock creatures.”
    “Yet you imprison the Throg there—” he remarked.
    “Not so!” Her denial was instantaneous and vehement. “The other worlder fled into that place in spite of our calling. There he stays in hiding. Once we drew him out to the sea, but he broke the power and fled inside again.”
    “Broke free—” Shann pounced upon that. “From disk control?”
    “But surely.” Her reply held something of wonder. “Why do you ask, star voyager? Did you not also break free from the power of the disk when I led you by the underground ways, awaking in the river? Do you then rate this other one as less than your own breed that you think him incapable of the same action?”
    “Of Throgs I know as much as this.…” He held up his hand, measuring off a fraction of space between thumb and forefinger.
    “Yet you knew them before you came to this world.”
    “My people have known them for long. We have met and fought many times among the stars.”
    “And never have you talked mind to mind?”
    “Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no communication between us, neither of mind nor of voice.”
    “This one you name Throg is truly not as you,” she assented. “And we are not as you, being alien and female. Yet, star man, you and I have shared a dream.”
    Shann stared at her, startled, not so much by what she said as the human shading of those words in his mind. Or had that also been illusion?
    “In the veil…that creature which came to you on wings when you remembered that. A good dream, though it came out of the past and so was false in the present. But I have gathered it into my own store: such a fine dream, one that you have cherished.”
    “Trav was to be cherished,” he agreed soberly. “I found her in a broken sleep cage at a spaceport when I was a child. We were both cold and hungry, alone and hurt. So I stole and was glad that I stole Trav. For a little space we both were very happy.…” Forcibly he stifled memory.
    “So, though we are unlike in body and in mind, yet we find beauty together if only in a dream. Therefore, between your people and mine there can be a common speech. And I may show you my dream store for your enjoyment, star voyager.”
    A flickering of pictures, some weird, some beautiful, all a little distorted—not only by haste, but also by the haze of alienness which was a part of her memory pattern—crossed Shann’s mind.
    “Such a sharing would be a rich feast,” he agreed.
    “All right!” Those crisp words in his own tongue brought Shann away from the window to Thorvald. The Survey officer was no longer locked hand to hand with the Wyvern witch, but his features were alive with a new eagerness.
    “We are going to try your idea, Lantee. They’ll provide me with a new, unmarked disk, show me how to use it. And I’ll do what I can to back you with it. But they insist that you go today.”
    “What do they really want me to do? Just rout out that Throg? Or try to talk him into being a go-between with his people? That does come under the heading of dreaming!”
    “They want him out of there, back with his own kind if possible. Apparently he’s a disruptive influence for them; he causes some kind of a mental foul up which interferes drastically with their ‘power.’ They haven’t been able to get him to make any contact with them. This Elder One is firm about your being the one ordained for the