The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

which his best efforts could not free him. The pitching of the ship was more pronounced. Remembering the two vessels he had seen pounded to bits on the reef, Ross wondered if the same doom loomed for this one. But that disaster had occurred during a storm. And, save for the fog, this had been a calm night, the sea untroubled.
    Unless—maybe the shaking his body had received during the past few moments had sharpened his thinking—unless the Foanna had their own means of protection at the sea gate and this was the result. The dolphins.… What had made Tino-rau and Taua react as they did? And if the Rover ship was out of control, it would be a good time to attempt escape.
    “Loketh!” Ross dared to call louder. “Loketh!” He struggled against the drying strands which bound him from shoulder to mid thigh. There was no give in them.
    More sounds from the upper deck. Now the ship was answering to direction again. The Terran heard sounds he could not identify, and the ship no longer rocked so violently. Loketh moaned.
    As far as Ross could judge, they were heading out to sea.
    “Loketh!” He wanted information; he must have it! To be so ignorant of what was going on was unbearable frustration. If they were now prisoners in a ship leaving the island behind.… The threat of that was enough to set Ross struggling with his bonds until he lay panting with exhaustion.
    “Rossss?” Only a Hawaikan could make that name a hiss.
    “Here! Loketh?” But of course it was Loketh.
    “I am here.” The other’s voice sounded oddly weak as if it issued from a man drained by a long illness.
    “What happened to you?” Ross demanded.
    “The fire…the fire in my head—eating…eating.…” Loketh’s reply came with long pauses between the words.
    The Terran was puzzled. What fire? Loketh had certainly reacted to something beyond the unceremonious handling they had received as captives. This whole ship had reacted. And the dolphins.… But what fire was Loketh talking about?
    “I did not feel anything,” he stated to himself as well as to the Hawaikan.
    “Nothing burning in your head? So you could not think—”
    “No.”
    “It must have been the Foanna magic. Fire eating so that a man is nothing, only that which fire feeds upon!”
    Karara! Ross’s thoughts flashed back to those few seconds when the dolphins had seemed to go crazy. Karara had then called out something about the Foanna. So the dolphins must have felt this, and Karara, and Loketh. Whatever it was. But why not Ross Murdock?
    Karara possessed an extra, undefinable sense which gave her contact with the dolphins. Loketh had a mind which those could read in turn. But such communication was closed to Ross.
    At first that realization carried with it a feeling of shame and loss. That he did not have what these others possessed, a subtle power beyond the body, a part of mind, was humbling. Just as he had felt shut out and crippled when he had been forced to use the analyzer instead of the sense the others had, so did he suffer now.
    Then Ross laughed shortly. All right, sometimes insensitivity could be a defense as it had at the sea gate. Suppose his lack could also be a weapon? He had not been knocked out as the others appeared to be. But for the bad luck of having been captured before the raiders had succumbed, Ross could, perhaps, have been master of this ship by now. He did not laugh now; he smiled sardonically at his own grandiose reaction. No use thinking about what might have been, just file this fact for future reference.
    A creaking overhead heralded the opening of the hatch. Light lanced down into the cubby, and a figure swung over and down a side ladder, coming to stand over Ross, feet apart for balancing, accommodating to the swing of the vessel with the ease of long practice.
    Thus Ross came face to face with his first representative of the third party in the Hawaikan tangle of power—a Rover.
    The seaman was tall, with a heavier development of shoulder and upper arms than the landsmen. Like the guards he wore supple armor, but this had been colored or overlaid with a pearly hue in which other tints wove opaline lines. His head was bare except for a broad, scaled band running from the nape of his neck to the mid-point of his forehead, a band supporting a sharply serrated crest not unlike the erect fin of some Terran fish.
    Now as he stood, fists planted on hips, the Rover presented a formidable figure, and Ross recognized in him the air of