The Beast Master

10

Although it was close to dark when they returned to the outer valley, Storm set about building a screen of rocks behind which they could shelter a night fire, with Gorgol’s one-handed aid. There was, of course, the cave in which he had been imprisoned. But that was the width of the valley away. And, in addition, he shrank from experiencing again its turgid air and the faint exhalation of stale death he recalled only too vividly.

Rain had been turned loose to graze. Should the stallion be sighted from the heights by any lurking Nitra or outlaw sentry he would be thought a stray from the destroyed Survey camp. And with Surra on guard there was no danger of a thief getting close enough to steal the mount. Perhaps he could even be used as bait in some later plan.

Storm suggested as much to Gorgol and the Norbie agreed with enthusiasm. Such a horse as Rain was a treasure – a chief’s mount – a trophy to be flaunted in the faces of lesser men.

There remains the road –” Storm’s fingers moved in the firelight after they had eaten. The path that we found today is not for herd-driving. We must discover their other road –”

“Such a way does not lie through this valley,” Gorgol answered with conviction.

Their explorations before the flash flood seemed to confirm that. The Survey party had discovered no evidence of frawn-grazing around the mounds. Storm drew his knife and with the point began to scratch out a map of the valley as he knew it – in its relation to the outlaws’ hold. He explained as he went and the Norbie, used to his own form of war and hunting maps, followed with concentration, correcting, or questioning.

When they had pooled their knowledge of the terrain Storm could see only one explanation for the lack of a connecting link between the valleys – save for the narrow cleft they had explored that day. There must be a way from the southeast or southwest, running between the heights that separated the two cups of lowland.

“In dark – Nitra maybe raid –” Gorgol had been watching their handful of fire thoughtfully. “In dark Norbie see good –night raid big trick on enemy – good against Butchers.” He glanced at Storm. “You no see so good in dark –? Maybeso not. But cat – she does!”

The Terran aroused at that half-hint for more immediate action. Norbie scouts would not hang about the outlaw camp too long. The Nitra they had sighted on watch today might well hole up for the first part of the night and then raid the horses of the Xik hideout in the early hours of the morning, a favourite trick of the natives. If a man were on the spot, then he could learn a lot in the ensuing confusion.

However, it was a very thin chance, depending so much on luck and on factors over which Storm had no control. He had taken slim chances before and had been successful. This was like the old days. A well-remembered prickle ran along the Terran’s nerves, and he did not know it but the yellow light of the flames gave him something of the look of Surra, Surra when she crouched before taking off in deadly spring.

“You will go.” Gorgol signed. “We shall try for the lower way now – wait then for the zamle’s hour –”

“You too?”

The Norbie’s thin grin was answer enough, but his fingers added:

“Gorgol is now a warrior. This is a good trail with much honour on it. I go – seeing ahead our path –”

They ate of the frawn meat methodically. And to that more

tasty food Storm added two of the small concentrate tablets from his service days. If they had to go without food for a full day or more, they would not feel the lack.

He gave Surra her silent orders, noting that the dune cat moved with much of her old strength and litheness, and swung Hing on his shoulder. Night exploits were not for Baku, but the Terran knew that with the coming of light the eagle would be up and questing. Should her aid be required then he could summon her.

They reclimbed the frawn pass and came out once more upon the plateau. Surra charged forward and something half her size scuttled away from the body of the yoris, leaving a musky odour almost as strong as the hunting reptile’s stench hanging in the air. The dune cat coughed, spat angrily, plunging on into the growth below as if she must wipe that contagion from her fur.

Storm had to admit to himself within five minutes that, had it not been for Surra and the Norbie’s excellent night sight, he would have had to call off his ambitious plan. The thick growth on the ancient terraces cut off the sky, doubled the gloom of the night. He locked hands with Gorgol, his other arm protecting Hing against his body lest she be swept from her hold by low-swinging branches. But somehow, with raw scratches on his face and the welts of lashing boughs crisscrossing his shoulders and ribs, Storm made it to the floor of the valley.

By day he could have used the terraces for cover, and indubitably now both cat and Norbie could have taken that way with ease. But the Terran knew he must keep to the fringe of the open land or give up entirely. Luckily the frawns would bed down for the night well out in the open. Though they would gallop away from a mounted man, to meet them on foot was a different matter, as Dort and Ransford warned him during his early days on Arzor. Frawns were curious and they were hostile, especially in calving season. A man fronted by a suspicious bull and caught afoot was in acute danger.

It was not until they were almost in line with the disguised ship that Storm saw the first light. Perhaps long immunity had made someone careless. But that prick showed clearly from the base of one huge peak whose bulk furnished the major northern wall of the second valley. And there was no mistaking the nature of that blue glare. It was cast by no fire or atom-powered lamp such as the settlers used, but was a type of installation Storm had seen before, half the galaxy away.

Using the grounded ship as a mark point, the Terran fixed the general location of that bright dot. Then he pressed his fingers to Gorgol’s wrist, giving the Norbie’s arm a slight jerk in one of the simple signals they had agreed to use in the dark. Gorgol’s fingers tightened on his twice in assent and Storm dropped his hold, getting down to his knees, with Hing now riding crouched low on his back and Surra to act as his advance guard.

Leaving the Norbie in the screen of bushes, the three worked their way into the open, making for the vicinity of the ship. Luckily the frawns had not grazed this section, and the rank grass grew so high that Storm had to rise from hands and knees at intervals to be sure he was on course. But he came at last to the edge of a pit.

Under his exploring hands the earth was wet, the clay very recently disturbed. He wriggled forward until his head and shoulders projected over the drop, and aimed his torch on its lowest power into the emptiness below. He was right, the digging was recent and it was not yet finished, for only half of the soil had been cleared away from around the fins of the ship. The cruiser had been buried after it had been landed, partly to help conceal it, partly to keep it steady in a proper position for a take-off where there was no cradle to hold it. If a storm here had battered it off fin level, with no port cranes to right it, the ship would be useless scrap until it rusted away.

But this digging now meant that it was about to be recommissioned. Storm wished he knew more about its type. He moved the torch from the nearest half-unearthed fin upward to the body. All ports were sealed. His light went back to the fins again. Had he still been able to order both Ho and Hing, a little judicious excavation under one fin to overbalance the other two, he might have caused trouble enough to spoil Xik plans. But the job below was too big for one meerkat, no matter how willing, in the limited time granted them tonight.

Hing had plans of her own. Scrambling down from Storm’s shoulders she patted the soft earth approvingly with her digging paws and half-rolled, half-coasted down into the pit of shadows about the excavation where she went to work vigorously, snorting with disgust when Storm called her back. And she took her own time about obeying, sputtering angrily as she climbed, avoiding the Terran’s hand as he would have pulled her to him again.

He tried to restore her good will with an order. She consented grumpily and then chirruped in a happier frame of mind as she scuttled off to the first of the net ties, digging at the stake that held it. There was just a faint chance that the tightly drawn net itself helped to steady the ship in the pit, now that the digging was in progress, and to release the main ropes could rock it off centre. Any gamble was worth the effort and this was something the meerkat could do.

Storm made his retreat to the terraces backwards, pulling up as best he could the grass he had beaten down. He could not erase all traces of his visit, but what could be done to confuse the trail he did. Surra’s paw marks threading back and over his would make a queer pattern for any tracker to unravel, since no native Arzoran creature would leave that signature.

As Storm came back to the bushes Gorgol met him and they locked hands once more, the Norbie giving him a squeeze to indicate he had discovered a hideout. It proved to be a small hollow between two sections of terrace wall that had given way long ago under the impetus of landslips, and they crouched there together with Surra – to be joined sometime later by Hing who nudged at Storm’s arm until he accepted some treasure she was carrying in her mouth and cuddled her to him.

They would wait, they had decided, until dawn. If there was no disturbance engineered by the Nitra before that hour, there would be none later. Of course, the scout they had seen that afternoon might have decided that the hideout was too tough a proposition. Storm dozed, as he had learned to sleep between intervals of action, but he was halfway to his feet when a flaming ball arched across the sky – to be followed by another – and then a third.

The first fire arrow struck on fuel and a burst of flame flashed up. Storm heard the high, frightened scream of a horse as the third ball landed. The fire was burning along a line perhaps five feet above the level of the ground – it could be following the top of some wall or corral. Wall or corral – he remembered a precaution Larkin had used on two different nights along the trail when yoris attacks were to be feared – a temporary corral topped with thornbushes to keep the scaled killers at bay. And dried thorn burned very easily.

The shrill whinnies and squeals of the horses were answered by shouts. The distant prick of light they had spotted earlier suddenly grew into a wide slit that must mark an open door.

Gorgol moved, scraping by Storm with a brief tap of a message on the Terran’s shoulder. The milling horses had been freed from the burning corral somehow, the thud of hoofs on the ground, as they raced from the fire, carried to the two in hiding. And the Norbie was about to take advantage of the confusion to catch a mount. The native had the stun rod and so was better prepared to defend himself in the darkness where Storm’s bow was largely useless.

Now they both heard a high yammering cry that had been torn from no off-world throat – a Nitra in trouble? Yet surely the native would be busy among the horses racing from the blazing corral. The thornbush fire lit up a whole scene as men ran across the area around it, covering the ground in zigzag advance patterns that told Storm all he needed to know about their past activities. Those were troops who had known action, snapping into defence positions with veterans’ ease and speed.

Then a light that swallowed up the glow of the fire snapped on – to make a sweeping path reaching almost to the ship. The beam moved, catching and centring on running horses. And did one of those have a figure crouched low on its back? Storm was not sure, but the mount he thought suspicious did dodge out of the line of the light with almost intelligent direction.

Again the light tried to catch the horses, but this time they were not so closely bunched, spreading out – two or three taking the lead by lengths from the others.

There was a crack of sky-splitting thunder and purple fire lashed up from the sod to the far left. Storm’s teeth clicked together, he was on his feet, Surra pressed tight against his thigh, snarling in red rage. That was not new either, they had both seen that whip of destruction in action before, lashing out to herd fugitives, only that time the fugitives had not been horses! Gorgol! If he could only call the Norbie back to safety. This was no time to try to catch one of those maddened animals, not with someone using a force beam so expertly. And the native knew nothing of Xik weapons or their great range.

The Terran went down on one knee. He was loath to risk Surra, but he must give Gorgol a chance. With his hands resting lightly on the dune cat’s shoulders, his thumbs touching the bases of her large sensitive ears, Storm thought his order. Find the Norbie – bring him back –

Surra growled deep in her throat and the force beam struck again – this time to the right. Their safety would depend on how far the operator could revolve his beam base, or the full extent of its power. A skilful gunner made force lashing an art and Storm had seen incredible displays of Xik-held worlds.

The cat strained a little against his touch. She had her briefing and was ready to go. Storm lifted his hands and Surra disappeared into the high grass. The air tickled his throat, carrying with it the stench of burning where that man-made lightning had left only scorched earth, black and bare.

Now the first of the horses ran past him – another, a third. He could see them only as moving shadows. Let them pound on at that mad pace into the frawn herd and they would start a real stampede. If only Surra could get Gorgol back –!

Again the power beam slapped the earth, making eyes ache with its burst of force. Horses wheeled, ran back from that horror – but the three leaders had gotten through. And had one of them carried a rider? Gorgol – Where was the Norbie – and Surra? To be caught out there was to be in peril not only from the crack of the lightning flash, but also from the horses now racing in a mad frenzy. There was no possible hope of capturing any one of them.

Storm set himself to watch the play of the beam, trying to judge the farthest extent of its reach. Unless the operator was purposely keeping it keyed to a low frequency, it did not touch near the ship, nor hit the terraced slopes behind the Terran. If the Norbie would only return, they could climb to safety. Storm, as resourceful as he was, had a very healthy respect for the weapons of the enemy.

The slaps of the beam were coming closer together, cutting in a regular fan pattern from their source. It would appear that the operator of the machine was now under orders to work over the whole meadowland between the western wall of the mountain and the ship. The Terran’s hands jerked toward his ears as the terrible tortured scream of an animal in dire pain answered one flash. They must be deliberately cutting down the horses! The use of the lash had not been just to stop their getaway!

Were the Xiks sacrificing their own animals to get any Norbies who might be trying to round up the runaways? That form of sadistic revenge went well with the character of the enemy as he knew it. Storm fought down his wave of rage, made himself stand and watch that slaughter, adding it to the already huge score he had long ago marked up against the breed of alien men out there, if you could even deem them ‘men”.

Horses continued to die and Storm could not control the shudders that answered each agonized cry from the meadow. Surra! Surra and Gorgol. He did not see how they could escape unless they already had won to the terraces.

King cried, digging her claws into his skin, her shivering body pressed tight to his chest. Then Storm jumped backward and – in a moment – felt immense relief when soft warm fur pressed against him and Surra’s rough tongue rasped his flesh. He fondled her ears in welcome and then caught out in the dark, his fingers scraping across yoris hide – Gorgol’s corselet.

The Norbie swung around, only a very dimly seen bulk, bringing his other side against the Terran. He was half-supporting another body, slighter, shorter than his own. Storm’s hand was on frawn skin fabric in rags, on flesh, on a belt like his. The rescued one was no tribesman, but someone in settler dress.

Storm located that other’s dangling arm and hitched it across his shoulders so that now Gorgol and he shared the weight between them. As they made their way onto the first terrace the limp stranger roused somewhat and tried to walk, though his stumbling progress was more of a hindrance than a help to his supporters.

They struggled up two terraces, pausing for breath at forced intervals. The clamour in the meadow was stilled now, though the force beam still beat methodically back and forth. Nothing lived there – it could not – yet it seemed the Xiks were not yet satisfied.

A third terrace, one more and they would be on a level with the pass. The stranger muttered, and once or twice moaned. Though he did not seem fully conscious and had never replied coherently to Storm’s questions, he was more steady on his feet and obeyed their handling docilely.

To climb the terraces and then to force one’s way along them was a difficult task. And had not the vegetation proved to be thinner near the upper rim of the valley they might have been held to a dangerously slow pace. The sky was grey when they reached the edge of the plateau where the dead yoris had lain. Surra glided back to give the alert. There was danger standing between them and the pass.

If he could be sure that only a Norbie opposed them, Storm would have given the big cat the order she wanted and let her clear the way. But an Xik outlaw armed with a slicer or some other of their ghastly array of weapons was more than the Terran would let her risk meeting. Storm signed caution to Gorgol to take to cover, working his way on to the pass alone.

Again Surra’s acute hearing had saved them. There was a guard stationed there right enough. And he had holed up, well protected in a rock niche, taking a position from which he could sweep the whole approach. There was no advancing until he was somehow picked out of that shell. Storm squatted behind a rock of his own and studied the field. It was plain to him now that the outlaws had been willing to sacrifice their horse herd to insure the death of someone. And a quick process of elimination suggested that that someone was the stranger Gorgol had rescued. He might even be the same man the Norbie had seen earlier in Xik hands, on the day they had accounted for the Survey party.

Doubtless every way out of the valley was now under guard. The next logical move for the enemy would be to start a careful combing of the terraces, driving their prey toward one of the known exits and so straight into the blaster sights of the men stationed there. It was a systematic arrangement that Storm, though it was used against him now, could approve as an example of good planning. But then the Xik forces could never be accused of stupidity.

Who was this stranger – that his recapture was of such great importance? Or was it a case like that of the murder of the Survey people – a killing ordered because no one who knew of this base could be allowed to escape? The why was not important now. What was important was that Storm and those with him win past this check point before that drive started down in the valley or before the one man now ahead could be reinforced.

He had one good trick left. If it worked! Storm’s head went down until it rested on his crooked arm. He closed his eyes to the plateau. But he held in his mind the picture of the enemy guard in his rock post – making it as vivid as he could. Clinging to that image, the Terran drew upon that other sense he had never tried to name, launching a demanding call. Surra he was sure of. Hing could be controlled only by hand and voice, her sly mind touching his on the far edge of the band that united the team. But Baku – now he must reach the eagle. She would be up in the air at dawn, cruising for sight of him. If he could attract her by that unvoiced call –!

That tenuous thing that he could not rightly call power but which tied him to cat, eagle, and meerkats, centred now on that one purpose. For so long they had been united in their life and efforts that surely the bond had been strengthened until he could rely upon it now for the only help that would mean anything to them. Baku – come in, Baku! Storm sent that strong soundless call up into the grey-mauve sky, a sky he did not see except as a place that might hold a wheeling black eagle.

11

Baku – Storm’s will became a cord – a noose tossed high in the lighting heavens to find and draw down that wide-winged shape. Once before, more than a Terran year earlier, he had summoned the great eagle to a similar task and she had obeyed, with all the power in her fearless body and those raking talons. Now – could he do it again?

Surra crowded against him, he could feel through fur and flesh the tension of the cat’s nervous body, as if she had joined her untamed will to his, strengthening his calling. Then the dune cat growled, so almost noiselessly that Storm felt rather than rightly heard that warning.

The Terran raised his head from his arm, opened his eyes to the morning sky. It seemed to him that he had been using his will for hours, but the space of time could not have been more than a few moments. The Xik guard was still there, still half-crouched by one of the rocks he had chosen for his improvised fort, staring downslope, slightly to Storm’s left.

“Ahuuuuuuu!” That cry might have been a scream from the furred throat of one of Surra’s large kin. Once it had been the war shout of a desert people, now it summoned the team to battle.

The strike of a falcon or eagle is a magnificent piece of precision flying. It is also one of the most deadly attacks in the world. The guard at the pass could have had a second of apprehension, but only a second, before those talons closed in his flesh, the beak tore at his eyes, and the wings beat him close to senselessness.

Storm sped from one side, Surra from the other. The attack was all over in moments. And the Terran stripped from the other’s body those weapons that would go a long way to insure the safety of his own party. Then he dragged the body of the guard along to thrust it into a crevice where it would lie hidden unless there were a detailed search. No man would now recognize the badly torn features, but Storm did not need to see that faintly green skin, the welling blood that was a different colour from his own, to identify the species of the dead man. The Xiks were humanoid – perhaps more so in appearance than the Norbies, setting aside such small differences as colour of skin and texture of hair. But there was a kinship of feeling between the horned and hairless Norbies and the Terran-descended settlers, which could never exist between man and Xik. So far no common meeting ground with the ruthless invaders had been discovered, in spite of patient search. And though they could and did mouth each other’s speech understandably, there was no communication between his species and the Xiks that reached below surface exchange of information. Dramatically opposed aims drove the two peoples. Failure upon disastrous failure had followed every contact between them.

The Terran could not control his instinctive aversion as he dragged the body into hiding – and that feeling was far more than his dread of touching the dead – just as he could not and had not tried to smother the rage that ate into him that night before when he had been forced to witness the cold-blooded torture slaying of the horses. There was no understanding the invader mind. One could only guess at the twisted motives that drove them to do the things they did. The destruction of Terra had been one result of their kind of warfare – and perhaps it was just as useless as the continued carnage in the meadow below, for spread throughout the galaxy in numberless colonies the Terran breed had survived the destruction of their first home, while here the prisoner the Xik had thought to catch in the power net was now also on his way to safety.

Gorgol had only been waiting to have their path cleared. Already he was moving at the best pace he could force his charge to maintain across the plateau to the pass itself. The Norbie’s greater height was pulled to one side as he supported the wavering stranger. And Storm, having set Surra and Baku to scout duty and having slung the plundered blaster over his shoulder, hurried to lend a hand.

In the increasing daylight it was easy to see that the rescued man had been brutally handled. But not as badly as some captives Storm had helped to release from Xik prison camps. And the very fact that he was able to keep on his feet at all was in his favour. But when Storm came up to steady the shuffling body, Gorgol allowed the full support to shift to the Terran. He had pulled his wounded arm out of its sling, and now he signed swiftly:

“Horses – free – on the side trail. We shall need them – I bring –”

Before Storm could protest he sped away. They could use the mounts right enough. But the sooner they were safe out of this sinister valley, the better. And goodness only knew how far the beaters in that drive for the fugitive had advanced below. The Terran kept on through the pass, staggering a little under the lurching weight of the stranger.

Surra he stationed in the pass. If Gorgol did flush horses up that narrow trail, she would help to herd them in. The big cat was tiring, but she was able to do sentry duty awhile, while Baku would provide them with eyes overhead. King scampered along before them, pausing now and then to turn over some flat stone and nose out an interesting find.

A band of aching muscles began to tighten about Storm’s legs, his breath came in short, hard gulps that ended in a sharp stitch in his side. Must be out of condition, he thought impatiently – too long at the Centre. He tried to plan ahead. Their camp on the gravel bar was too exposed – and they could not push the stranger too far into exhaustion, even if Gorgol did produce horses to ride. That meant they must discover a hiding place down in the flooded valley.

Storm knew of only one, much as he disliked it, the cave into which Rain had blundered during the cloudburst. That lay to the east of the pass they now threaded, perhaps a mile from the gravel bed. Surely the water had fallen well below its entrance now. Water – Storm ran a dry tongue over drier lips and turned his thoughts resolutely from the subject of water.

There would be no time to rest in the camp – just gather together their few supplies and mount the stranger on Rain, then get moving at once. And now Gorgol’s try for horses no longer seemed so reckless. If successful, it would make very good sense. That is – if the poor brutes hadn’t been run until they were almost foundered. Mounts could mean the difference between disaster and safety for the fugitives.

“You’re – not – Norbie –” Though the words came in slow pauses from those cut and battered lips, they startled Storm. He had been unconsciously considering his companion as so much baggage that had to be supported and tended, but that had no individual will. To be addressed intelligently by the stranger surprised him.

The face half-turned to his was a mass of cuts and bruises, so well painted with dried blood that it was hard to guess at the fellow’s normal features. Nor did Storm realize that his own attempt at camouflage war paint did almost as well to make him equally a mystery.

“Terran –” He replied with the truth and heard a little gasp from the other, which might have been in answer to that statement or because the stranger stumbled and slapped one dangling hand inadvertently against an outcrop.

“You – know – who – they – are –?”

Storm needed no better identification for that “they”. “Xiks!” he returned tersely, using the very unflattering service term for the invaders.

The explosive sound of that word was echoed by the walls of the pass, but above it sounded the pounding of hoofs. Since Surra had given no warning, Gorgol must have been successful. Storm drew the stranger back against the wall and waited.

It would have taken an expert horseman to see any value in the three animals that picked their way down the slope, their heads hanging, the marks of dried foam on them, their eyes glazed. None could be called upon for any great effort now, save that of keeping on its feet and moving. But Gorgol strode after them, the ivory of his horns glowing in the growing light of the morning as he held his head high in this small triumph. He clapped his hands together, the small report loud enough to turn the weary shuffle of his charges into a limited trot. Then leaving them to drift on downslope to the outer valley, he came to help Storm with his charge.

“You have had good hunting!” the Terran congratulated him.

“No time – or hunting – would have been better. The Butchers are foolish – few horses are left to them now – but still they do not try to round them up –” Gorgol replied before he used his hands for the purpose of aiding the injured man.

With the Norbie to take half the burden, the three covered the rest of the distance to the floor of the valley in better time. The horses, too exhausted to graze, stood with drooping heads, while Rain cantered up, full of interest, to inspect the newcomers. Beside the overdriven trio the stallion was a fine sight as he stood, pawing at the sod with one forehoof, the wind pulling at his red mane and forelock.

“That – is – all – horse!” The battered stranger had come to a halt, half-braced against his supporters, but the eyes in his pulped face were all for Rain.

Think you can stick on him?” questioned Storm. “Sorry, fella, but we’ll have to keep moving for a while.”

“Can – try –”

Together Norbie and Terran boosted their rescued man up on the nervous stallion. He tried to crook his fingers into the mane for a hold and failed. And Storm, seeing for the first time the condition of those fingers, snapped a few sharp and biting words in the native tongues of at least two worlds.

There was a ghost of an answering laugh from the other. “All that and more,” he mouthed. They play pretty rough, those Xiks of yours, Terran. Once – a long time ago – I thought I was tough –”

He slumped so suddenly that Storm could not have saved him from falling off Rain’s back. But the Norbie moved more quickly.

“He is hurt –”

Storm did not need to be told that. That way –” he pointed.

“Beyond the mound where Dagotag and the others lie – a cave in the cliff wall –”

Gorgol nodded, steadying the stranger’s now limp body while Storm went ahead, Rain obediently following him.

They located the cave and Storm left the stranger with the Norbie and Hing, then rode back to collect their supplies. On the return trip he was accompanied by Surra and hazed before him the horses from the other valley, knowing that the two mares and the yearling colt would be protected by Rain. And with the stallion alert they would not stray too far from the new camp after they recovered their normal strength.

Gorgol met him at the cave entrance with news he had not expected – which a week earlier would have been exciting.

This Sealed Cave once.” Taking Storm by the arm, the native drew him farther in to point out the unmistakable marks of tools on roof and walls. He waved his hand toward the darkness beyond. “Hidden place – go far in –”

Would the Norbie refuse to stay here now, Storm wondered wearily. The Terran was too exhausted himself to care. Knowing that if he so much as sat down he would not be able to fight off sleep, Storm packed in the supplies and then went to look at the stranger. Stretched out on the floor of the cave, his head pillowed on a blanket roll, the Arzoran seemed to have shrunk in a curious way. His bruised face rested against the blanket, his breath caught a little now and then as if he were a child who had cried himself to sleep.

Storm sent Gorgol for water to be boiled over the fire the native had built, and laid out the supplies from the aid kit. Then delicately, with all the gentleness he could muster, he went to work, first to wash away the blood from those battered features, and then to assess the rest of the stranger’s injuries. The other moaned once or twice under the Terran’s ministrations, but he did not come to full consciousness.

At the end of a good half-hour’s work Storm drew a deep breath of relief. Judging by Xik standards, they had hardly started to use their unpleasant methods of breaking a prisoner. It would be several days before the stranger would have full use of his hands, the lash weals on his back and shoulders would also be tender at least that long, and his face would display a rainbow-coloured mask for some time. But there were no bones broken, no disabling wounds.

Leaving his patient as comfortable as possible, Storm went down to the lake, stripped, washed from head to foot, coming back to roll up in a blanket and sleep with the complete surrender of sodden exhaustion.

A tantalizing smell pulled him at last out of the mazes of a dream in which he ran across gradually rising mountains in pursuit of an Xik ship that, oddly enough, fled on human legs and twice turned to look at him with the face of Brad Quade. And he sat up to see Gorgol toasting grass hens on peeled spits over a fire. The process was watched with close attention by a mixed audience of Hing, Surra, and the stranger, now very much aware of his surroundings and sitting up backed by a brace of saddle pad and supply boxes.

Outside it was night, but they saw little of that save a patch of sky framing a single star, for the barrier once left by the landslip had been partly restored to mask their camp from anyone who did not have Baku’s powers of elevation. And Baku, as if Storm’s thought had once more summoned her, stirred now on a perch on the top of that barrier where she sat staring out on the valley.

But it was the rescued stranger who drew most of Storm’s attention. He had been too tired, too absorbed in the task at hand when he had worked over the other, to really look objectively at the man whose wounds he tended. Now, in spite of the bruises, the bandages and the battering, he noted something that brought him upright, betraying surprise as much as Hosteen Storm could ever register it.

Because beneath the bruises, the bandages, the temporary alterations left by Xik treatment, Storm knew those features. He was facing now not just one of his own general human kind, but a man – a very young man – of his own race! Somehow – by some strange juggling of fate – he was confronting across this dusky cave another of the Dineh.

And the other’s eyes, the only part of him that was not Dineh – those startling blue eyes – were focused back on the Terran with the same unwavering look of complete amazement. Then the swollen lips moved and that other asked his question first:

“Who, in the name of Seven Ringed Thunders, are you?”

“Hosteen Storm – I am Terran –” He repeated his former self-introduction absently.

The other raised a bandaged hand clumsily to his own jaw and winced as it touched the swelling there.

“You won’t believe this, fella,” he said apologetically. “But before I took this workin’ over, you an” I looked somethin’ alike!”

“You are of the Dineh –” Storm slipped into the tongue of his boyhood. “How did you come here?”

The other appeared to be listening intently, but when Storm was finished, he shook his head slowly.

“Sorry – that’s not my talk. I still don’t see how I got me a part-twin on Terra. Nor how he turned up to help pull me out of that mess back there. Enough to make you think the smoke drinkers know what they’re talkin’ about when they say dreams are real –”

“You are —?” Storm, a little deflated by the other’s refusal to acknowledge a common speech, asked in a sharper tone.

“Sorry – there’s no mystery about that. I’m Logan Quade.”

Storm got up, the firelight touching to life the necklace on his breast, the ketoh on his wrist as he moved. He did not know, and would not have cared, what an imposing picture he made at that moment. Nor could he guess how the eagerness mirrored in his face a moment earlier had been wiped away, to leave his features set and cold.

“Logan – Quade –” he repeated without accent, evenly. “I have heard of the Quades –”

The other was still meeting his gaze with equal calmness though now he had to look up to do so.

“You and a lot of others – including our friends back yonder. They seemed to like Quades just about as much as you do, Storm. I can understand their dislike, but when did a Quade ever give you a shove, Terran?”

He was quick, Storm had to grant him that. Too quick for comfort. The Terran did not like this at all. For a moment he felt as if he had a raging frawn bull by the tail, unable either to subdue the animal or to let it free. And that was an unusual feeling of incompetence that he did not find easy to acknowledge.

“You’re on the wrong track, Quade. But how did the Xiks pick you up?” It was a clumsy enough change of subject and Storm was ashamed of his ineptitude. To make matters worse he had a well-founded idea that Quade was amused at his stumbles.

They gathered me in with the greatest of ease after settin’ up some prime bait,” Logan answered. “We’ve a range a little south of the Peaks and our stock has been disappearin’ regularly in this direction. Dumaroy and some of the other spread owners around here yammer about Norbies every time they count noses and miss a calf. There’ve been a lot missin’ lately and Dumaroy’s talkin’ war talk. That sort of thing can blow up into a nasty mess. We’ve had minor differences with some of the wild tribes right enough, but let Dumaroy and his hotheads go attackin’ indiscriminately and we could make this whole planet too hot for anyone who didn’t wear horns on his head!

“So – not swallowin’ Dumaroy’s talk about the terrible, terrible Norbies, I came up to have a look around for myself. I chose the wrong time – or maybe the right, if we consider it from another angle – and found the- trail of a big herd bein’ driven straight back into the mountains where they had no business to be. And, bein’ slightly stupid as my father likes to point out occasionally, I just followed hoofprints along until I was collared. A simple story – with me the simplest item in it.

Then these gentle Xiks thought maybe I could supply some bits of information that they considered necessary to their future well bein’. Some things I honestly didn’t know and, while they were tryin’ to encourage my reluctant tongue, somebody pulled a raid on their horse corral and rather disrupted things. I believe that they had considered their situation entirely safe here and that when they were attacked they came unlaced at the seams for a few minutes. I took advantage of a very lucky break and headed for the hills. Then Gorgol here stumbled on me and so – you know the rest.”

He waved a bandaged hand and added in a far more serious tone, “What you don’t know – and what is goin’ to hurry us out of here – is that we’re sittin’ right on the edge of a neat little war. These Xiks have been deliberately stirrin’ up trouble to set the settlers and the Norbies at each others’ throats. Whether it’s just that they thrive on pure meanness, or whether they have some plans of their own that can only be ripened in a war, is anybody’s guess. But they are plannin’ a full-sized raid on the range below the Peaks, disguised as Norbies. And in turn a couple of raids on Norbie huntin’ camps doublin’ as settlers. I don’t know whether you know about the Nitra tribe or not. But they’re not the type any man with any sense excites. And the Xiks have been twistin’ their tails regularly – in a manner of speakin’ – pushin’ them straight into a stampede that might smash every spread on the Peak Range. Get the Norbies mad enough and they’ll unite in a continent-wide drive. Then” – he waved his hand again – “good-by to a pretty decent little world. With all the best intentions in the galaxy the Peace Officers will have to call in the Patrol. There’ll either be guerrilla warfare for years, with the Norbies against everythin’ from off-world – or else no Norbies. And since I believe that the Norbies are a pretty fine lot, I’m just a little bit prejudiced. So now we’re faced with a big job, fella. We have to try and stop the war before the first shot is really fired!”

12

The pattern fitted, not only with the situation as Storm already knew it, but with tactics the Xiks had used elsewhere in the galaxy. The enemy had apparently learned nothing from their defeat, and were starting their old games over again. Did this handful of holdouts believe Arzor was going to furnish them with a nucleus for a new empire? Yet that vision was no more grandiloquent than the one they had always held and that the Confederacy had had to expend every effort to defeat. Storm sighed. There had been no end after all to the conflict that had wiped Terra from the solar map.

“How many Xiks are there?” He was already occupied with the practical side of the matter.

Logan Quade shrugged, let out a little involuntary yelp of pain, and then added:

They kept me busy, a little too busy to count noses. Five in the bunch that first downed me. But all of those weren’t alien –at least two were outlaws of our own breed. And there was an officer of sorts in command of the questionin’. Him I want to meet again!” The hands in their bandage mittens moved on Logan’s knees. “I saw maybe a dozen aliens – about half as many outlaws – they don’t mix too well –”

They wouldn’t.” The Xiks had had human stooges on other worlds, but it was always an uneasy cooperation and seldom worked. “How many settlers in the Peak country?”

There’re seven ranges staked out. Dumaroy’s the largest so far. He has his brother, nephew, and twelve riders. Lancin –Artur – he has a smaller holdin’ – though his brother’s comin’ out to join him as soon as he’s mustered out of the Service. They have five Norbies ridin’ for them. And our range – six Norbies and two riders m” father sent up from the Basin. Maybe ten-twelve men can be combed out of the small outfits. Not a very big army – at least you’ll figure that after being with the Confed forces –”

“I’ve seen successful move-ins accomplished by even fewer,” Storm returned mildly. “But your Peak people must be pretty well scattered –”

“Just let me get to the first of the line cabins and there’ll be a talker to call ‘em in. We aren’t so primitive as you off-worlders seem to think!”

“And that line cabin – how far away?”

“I’d have to take a looksee from some height around here. This is new territory as far as I’m concerned. I’d guess – maybe two day’s easy ridin’ – fifteen hours if you pushed with a good mount under you.”

“Rain’s about the only one of those we have. And there’ll be a pack of Xiks out to nose our trail.” Storm wasn’t arguing, he was simply stating the odds as he saw them. “Also, we haven’t yet found a way out of this valley that we can take a horse over. The road in was blocked by a landslide.”

“I don’t care how we do it,” Logan fired back. “But I’m tellin’ you, Storm, it has to be done! We can’t let Dumaroy and the Norbies mix it up just to please those Xiks! I was born on Arzor and I’m not throwin’ this world away if it’s at all possible to save it!”

“If it’s at all possible to save it –” echoed Storm, the old chill of loss eating into him.

“Yes, you, more than all of us, know what those Xiks can do when they play the game according to their rules.”

Storm turned now to Gorgol and his fingers outlined as much of Logan’s story as he could find the proper movements to explain. He ended with the question that meant the most now:

There is a way out of valley for man – horse?”

“If there is – Gorgol find.” The Norbie stripped two of the small birds from his roasting spits, tucked them into a broad leaf and gathered them up. “I go look –” He scrambled over the barrier and was gone.

“You been long on Arzor?” Logan asked as Storm divided up the other birds and brought Quade’s portion to him.

“A little over a month – my time –”

“You’ve settled down quickly,” the other commented. “I’ve seen men born here who can’t make finger-talk that fast or accurately –”

“Perhaps it comes easier because my own people once had a sign language to use with strangers. Here – let me manage that.”

The bandaged hands were making clumsy work of eating and Storm sat down beside Logan, to feed him bite by bite from the point of his knife. Surra blinked at them in drowsy content and Hing draped herself affectionately over Logan’s outstretched legs.

“Where did you get the animals – they’re off-world? And that trained bird of yours – what is it?” the younger man asked as Storm paused to dismember another grass hen.

“I’m a Beast Master – and these are my team. Baku, African Black Eagle, Surra, dune cat, Ring, meerkat. They are all natives of Terra, too. We lost Hing’s mate in the flood –”

“Beast Master!” There was open admiration in the tone, even if the battered features could not mirror it. “Say – what is this Dineh you spoke of earlier –?”

“I thought you did not understand Navajo!” Storm countered.

Now those blue eyes were very bright. “Navajo,” Logan repeated thoughtfully, as if trying to remember where he might have heard the word before. He put up his mittened hand to the ketoh on Storm’s wrist, and then lightly touched the necklace that swung free as the other offered him more food. Those are Navajo, aren’t they?”

Storm waited. He had an odd feeling that something important was coming out of this. “Yes.”

“My father has a bracelet like this one –”

That was the wrong thing, the words pushed Storm into remembering what he had avoided these past few weeks. Involuntarily he jerked away from Logan’s hand, got to his feet.

“Your father” – the Terran spoke gently, quietly, very remotely, though there was danger under the veneer of that tone – “is not Navajo!”

“And you hate him, don’t you?” Logan said without accusation. He might have been commenting upon the darkness of the night without. “Brad Quade has a lot of enemies – but not your sort of man usually. No, he’s not Navajo – he was born on Arzor – but of Terran stock – He is part Cheyenne –”

“Cheyenne!” Storm was startled. It was easier to think of Quade, the enemy, as coming from the old, arrogant, all-white stock who had lied, cheated, pushed his people back and back – though not into the nothingness the white man wanted for them. No – never into nothingness!

“Cheyenne – that’s Amerindian –” Logan was starting to explain when he was interrupted.

Surra was on her feet, her drowsy content gone as if she had never sprawled half-asleep a moment earlier. And Storm reached swiftly for the blaster he had taken from the pass guard. It was Xik issue but enough like a Confed weapon for him to use. He only wished he had more than one clip for it, but the invaders must be running low on ammunition themselves.

It was Gorgol who squeezed through and the news he brought was not good. Not only had he been unable to prospect for another exit from the valley, but there was a Nitra war party camped in the southern end of the flooded land, and lights showed to the north along the cliffs.

”The horses,” Storm decided first, “and water. Get the mounts in here and as much water as we can store. Perhaps we can sit out a search and the Xiks may tangle with those Nitra –”

They worked fast, dousing the fire and widening the opening so that Rain and the three horses from the other valley could be brought into the cave. On their return they found Logan on his feet, using Storm’s torch and exploring into the dark tunnel they had all avoided earlier.

“I wonder,” he speculated, “whether this hole couldn’t run on through the mountain. This might not have been one of the regular Sealed Caves but a passage from one valley to the next. You say you got into this valley through a tunnel – well, couldn’t this one be the way out?”

But Storm eyed the dark hole in which the beam of the torch was so quickly lost with no favour at all. The air was dead the farther one moved in from the entrance, and he had a feeling that to go into that unknown region would be merely to walk to one’s death. Unless he were driven to it he would have no part of such exploration.

“Queer air –” Logan limped on, one supporting hand against the wall. “Seems to be dead – light plays tricks here too.”

And Storm noticed that the horses were huddling together in the middle of the expanse, showing no desire to push into the tunnel – that Surra avoided the dark mouth of the place and Hing, whose curiosity had led her in the past to the most reckless venturing, did not patter along at Logan’s heels, but sat on her haunches, rocking from side to side, her pointed nose high, making snuffling noises of suspicion.

With Gorgol, the Terran set about building up the front of the cave, obliterating hoof prints as far back as the edge of the water. Then they loaded to the brim the three canteens and Gorgol’s water carrier of lizard skin. From the edge of the still shrinking lake Storm saw those dots of light along the cliffs. If the Xiks had discovered the body of the guard, they might well be more cautious about advancing in the dark.

It was the middle of the night when the fugitives stopped their work of disguising the cave and crawled into hiding. It seemed to Storm, as he settled down to get what sleep he could, that the inert atmosphere of the place was expelling the fresh air that came in through a small opening they had left. And, when he closed his eyes and could no longer sight that scrap of sky, his imagination presented a picture of his being fastened in some box he could not batter open.

“Sealed Caves’ – he had always thought that that name had been given because they were actually walled up. But now he could believe that that which sealed them was inherent in the caves themselves. Reason told Storm that they were doing the best thing now, that if they could stay undercover until he and Gorgol, scouting the hills, found a path out, they would have better than a fifty-fifty chance. But his body was tense, every nerve in him resisted holding up here.

Morning came and the three in hiding discovered that the cave had one good property besides offering concealment – it was cool, while the sun in the valley was a bright glare generating dank heat. Logan wriggled up to share Storm’s lookout.

“Big dry’s comin’ early this year,” he remarked. “Sometimes works that way when the storms in the mountains are too heavy early in the season. We’ve more than one reason for gettin’ out of here on the gallop.”

“The Survey party crossed a river coming in,” Storm replied. “High with rainfall, of course, but would it dry up entirely?”

“The Staffa, no. But that runs pretty far south of this region, rises in the East Peak country. I don’t know about this other one you mention. To try to make the Staffa and trail it out would just about double your ridin’ time and you’d be in the edge of the Nitra raidin’ country –”

“Then we had better make our break soon –” Storm stopped almost in mid-word as the fan-shaped piece of valley he could sight from his vantage point was suddenly peopled. Through his lenses those distant figures leaped into clear detail. They were wearing Norbie corselets and boot leggings, but they had not taken the trouble to continue the deception farther than their clothing. That pale greenish skin, the lank, bleached hair hanging in curled rats’ tails down to their shoulders in the back, marked two of the riders as Xiks, while their three companions were plainly of the settler race. Two of the latter had bows, but the former were armed with off-world weapons. And one of them bore across his saddle a tube of dead white colour.

Storm had accepted the presence of slicers, the blaster he now half lay upon, the force beam he had seen at its deadly work in the other valley. But still he jibbed at the white tube and what it meant. There were few enough of them, a development produced so close to the end of the war that it had never been in wide use. And certainly the last place the Terran would expect to see it carried casually on horseback was here in the wastes of a frontier planet. Two, captured in outposts so quickly overrun by Confed forces that the defenders had not been able to blow them up and so avoid surrender, had been tested on barren asteroids. And, witnessing the result, the Con-fed command had ordered that all others found were to be destroyed at once.

The tubes could be used, yes – and the results would be disastrous to the enemy before their sights – only there was in addition an upredictable backlash of energy, though it might not affect the Xiks as adversely as it did the Confed force that tested the weapons. Built on a principle not unlike that of the disrupters, used to dispose of inanimate material, the tubes were far more powerful than any Confed disrupter of three times their size and range.

“More trouble?” Logan asked.

Storm held out the lenses, steadying them for the other.

“See that tube on the second horse – that’s the worst trouble I know.” The Terran added what he had heard about that weapon.

“Coin’ to make sure of somebody – or somebodies,” commented the Arzoran dryly. “I don’t particularly care for Nitra warriors. We’ve had our differences, and until you have a Nitra double-barbed arrow cut out of you, fella, you don’t know just how much you can sweat over a little knife work. No – I’ve never felt kindly toward Nitras. But any disputes we’ve had have been on a more or less even basis. Usin’ that tube against Norbies’s more like puttin’ up a grass hen against your Surra and tyin’ the hen’s feet into the bargain.”

Storm made signs for Gorgol, repeating as well as he could the information about the Xik weapon. The Norbie nodded that he understood and watched the riders round the lake, to be hidden by a series of mounds linked together by a brush wall.

“Nitra there”- last night. Maybeso not so now. Nitra do not wait like bug one sets foot upon! This evil thing – better we take it –”

“Not so,” Storm returned regretfully. “Made only to be used by evil men – we touch – we killed!” He used the most emphatic of the death signs.

The rider with the tube appeared on the far side of the end mound. He dismounted, with none of the easy grace of a settler or the litheness of a Norbie, but in a scrambling way that informed Storm that to the alien the animal he had bestridden was merely a means of transportation and no more. Seeing that, the Terran could understand better how the Xiks had been able to cut down the frightened animals in the other valley undisturbed by the brutality of the act.

Having shouldered the tube, the invader climbed to the top of the mound and set about the business of putting together the rubble there to form a base for it. He moved expertly but with no hurry. Yet Storm did not miss that flash through the air, was able to pick out with the aid of the lenses the arrow, head down and still quivering, planted in the soil just a foot short of its target. But that must have been a specially lucky shot as no more arrows hit the mound.

The Nitra are shooting.” Storm passed the lenses again to Logan.

“Poor devils,” the other commented, “they must be cornered –they wouldn’t take such a chance unless they were.”

The other riders burst into sight, with the outlaws well to the fore, urging their mounts in a retreat that held panic as part of its haste.

“Drawing them on –” Storm speculated aloud. “Those idiots are really planning to use that thing!”

He squirmed around on the bank of earth and stone, jabbing a fist at Gorgol’s shoulder to urge him down. Another sweep of Storm’s arm sent the blaster skidding to the cave floor ahead of him, as he took a grip on Logan’s belt and jerked the younger man down with him. Surra? The cat was on the floor – Baku – Baku!

The eagle had gone foraging an hour ago. Storm beamed as best he could a message to keep up – up and safe in the high heavens.

“Get those horses back! All the way back into the tunnel mouth!”

“What’s the matter? They set up that thing about a mile from here and facin’ the other way –” Logan protested, but he was limping toward Rain, flapping his arms at the mares.

Together they forced the horses back into the mouth of the tunnel. Storm glanced back despairingly at that window on the outer world. But there was no time to close it.

“Get down!” He set the example, throwing himself flat on the floor, and saw Gorgol and Logan obey. “Your eyes! Cover your eyes!” He shouted that to Logan, signed it to the Norbie. Then he lay waiting, his face buried in the crook of his arm.

The heartlessness of the aliens was never more plain than in this move. They would wipe out the pocket of Nitras right enough – but they would also doom most of the living things in this valley into the bargain. The Terran grinned without mirth as he remembered those outlaws riding for their lives. If he knew Xiks they would hardly delay long enough to give their colleagues a good start to safety. The chance for those riders to survive was so slender as to be practically nonexistent.

Surra had flattened herself beside Storm, and Hing was endeavouring to dig her way under him, scraping fruitlessly at the rock floor and whimpering, until he reached out an arm and gathered her in between him and the cat. He heard the horses stamp, but they did not venture out of the tunnel mouth where Logan had driven them. It was as if they were as alert to the warning in Storm’s mind as the other animals.

He had nothing to guide him except those army reports. But those, using the terse language of such communications, had been circulated widely among all Commando outfits where the men or beast and man teams engaged in mopping-up activities might chance upon the new and horrific weapon. And service reports were not prone to exaggerate.

Why were the effects of the thing so much worse on non-Xiks? How long now before it would blow? Storm tried counting off seconds in the dark and was not aware he was doing it aloud until he heard a sound that could only be a chuckle coming from Logan’s direction.

“I hope you’re not makin’ us pull this burrow trick for nothin’,” the other remarked. “How long before the world comes apart?”

His words might have been a cue. For their world, dark and stuffy as it was, did come apart then. Storm could never later describe what happened to him in that space of time lifted out of the ordinary stream of seconds, minutes, hours. The experience was like being caught up in a giant’s hand, rolled into a conveniently sized ball, and tossed up in the air to be caught again. There was no thinking – no feeling – nothing but emptiness, with himself blown through it – on and on – and on –

And it was not wholly physical, that assault upon the stable foundations of his small portion of the planet. One part of Storm clung to the solid cave floor as an anchor for the part that whirled and flew. And inside he was torn because he so clung.

How long did it last? Was he unconscious toward the end of that weird struggle between substance and nonsubstance? Did the rocks about them keep them safe by turning the worst of the unknown radiation? He only knew that they did endure the backlash and lived.

Again he felt the warmth coming from Surra through the icy chill that blanketed the cave. He shrank from the scratching of King’s claws as she squirmed and kicked.

For a long moment he lay still, as an insect might cower beneath a rock if it could foresee that in a moment that shelter would be lifted and it would be exposed to unforeseeable danger. Then, in the midst of his blinding, unreasoning panic, a spark of resolution sprouted. The Terran lifted his head from his arm and for a terrified minute thought he was blind. For there was no more small slit of sky – nothing but thick darkness – a chill darkness filled with the dead air native to this place.

Storm sat up, feeling Surra rise with him. She growled and spat. And then, out of the dark, Logan spoke with determined lightness:

“I think somebody just slammed the door!”

13

Storm used the torch, aiming it at the mouth of the cave. His mind refused to accept what his eyes reported – there was no longer any opening there. It had been closed once by the landslip – but that had been a different matter, an affair of earth and stone. This was a black oozing over that same earth and stone, a thick stuff in drips and runnels forming a complete curtain across.

“What in the –?”

The Terran heard Logan’s amazed demand as he walked closer to that strange wall, focusing the torch on the widest of the black streaks. Storm could recognize the stuff now. It was the substance of that wedge rail the Survey party had trailed into the valley, the stuff that had walled the tunnel of the entrance gorge. Yet now it had been melted as tar might have softened and run from the breath of a blaster. Though he had not noticed it earlier, the building material of the long-ago aliens must have rimmed this cave, to be released by the backlash of the Xik weapon!

Storm handed the torch to Gorgol with a gesture to keep it trained on the widest of the surface streams. He rammed the stock of the blaster against that black runnel with all the strength he could put into a swinging blow. The light alloy of the butt gave off a metallic ring, rebounded with force enough to jar Storm back a step or two, yet the black stream showed no dent or mark.

The Terran reversed the weapon, set its dial to maximum and pressed the trigger. A point of vivid, eye-searing flame bored into the black stain for an instant, until Storm flicked the control. Again there was no impression on the alien coating.

“Nothing happened?” Logan limped around Gorgol to examine the wall for himself. “What is that anyway?”

Storm explained almost absently. He had taken the torch back from Gorgol and was pacing along the front of the cave. Some trick of chance – or could it be that the ancient owners had prepared a booby trap for the unwary? – had cemented the barrier all the way across. Those black streams had run in just the places where they could best weld together rocks and earth. Perhaps Hing might be able to dig her way to freedom, but no effort could clear a large enough space to release the rest of them.

Which left – the tunnel.

Storm traversed the new wall for a second time, hoping against the evidence of his eyes to find some break they could enlarge. He met Logan face to face as he turned back.

“I still don’t see what happened – or why!” The Arzoran studied the wall beside him. “If they had turned that little machine of theirs on us, yes. But the tube was facin’ the other way – and a mile off at that!”

“The Confed Lab men after the first experiment said the results were a matter of vibration. And this stuff has been moulded like plasta-flesh. Must have turned every bit of it in this valley fluid for a time –”

“I hope,” Logan stood away from the wall, “that it caught every one of those devils stickin’ in it tight! No chance of breakin’ through this?”

Storm shook his head. “The blaster was our best hope. And you saw what happened when I tried that.”

“All right. Then we’ll have to go explorin’. And I would suggest we move now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, but there’s been a change in our air.”

That quality of staleness that Storm had met on his first imprisonment here was indeed very noticeable. And using the blaster had not helped to clear the atmosphere any. They would have to try the tunnel or face a very unpleasant death where they were.

Packing their supplies on the horses, with Surra padding in the lead beside Storm, they moved reluctantly into the tunnel. The Terran kept his torch on the lowest unit of its force. No use exhausting its charge when he had only one spare cartridge. And by its light they saw that they were out of the natural roughness of the cave into a cutting, which, if it had not been bored by intelligent beings, had been surfaced by them, for the walls changed abruptly from the red stone of the natural rock to the black of the alien material.

“Good thing your vibrations didn’t reach this far,” Logan commented and then coughed. “If this had been melted we would have been finished.”

Just as the period of the Xik attack had been lifted out of normal time for Storm, so did now this journey appear to take on the properties of a march through a nightmare. They must have been progressing at the rate of a normal walking pace, yet to the Terran the sensation of wading through some vast delaying flood persisted. Perhaps it was the inert quality of the air that affected his reactions, slowed his mind. Had it been minutes – or hours – since they had left the cave to enter this long tube where the flat black of walls, floor, roof sucked the air from a man’s lungs and the light from the torch?

Then Surra left his side. She was a tawny streak in the torch light, leaping ahead, to be absorbed utterly by the gloom. He called after her and was nearly sent sprawling as Rain nudged against him. The horses were as eager as the cat to hurry ahead.

“Air!”

Storm caught that hint of breeze also. And it was more than just fresh air to battle the deadness of the passage; that puff of wind carried with it its own freshness and scents – strange perhaps, but pleasant. Storm stumbled on at a half-run, hearing the others pounding after him.

There was a turn in the corridor, the first they had found. Then light shone ahead, squares of light. Storm snapped off the torch and headed for that goal. He squeezed past Rain, urged one of the mares aside and nearly stumbled over Surra, who was standing on her hind legs, her paws resting on a crossbar of a grill-like closing, her head blotting out one of its squares.

Storm steadied himself with a grip on the bars, looked ahead.

But not into the open day as he thought he would. Instead he was surveying a section of what might be a garden. Yet there was not one of the plants sprawling there that he could name, not among those in the first bed, at any rate.

In the next – No! Storm’s hands twisted tightly on the bar. He had been shaken when he had unrolled the package Na-Ta-Hay had sent him. But not as much as now. That small stretch of good clean green grass, the pine a little beyond – not a spizer, nor a candlestick gum, nor a Langful, but a true Terran pine!

“Pine!” He could make a song of that word, a song that would have power enough to pull the Faraway Gods across the void of space. His hands battered at the grill gate and then strove to find the release of its lock – let him through – out to stand beneath that pine!

“Storm – bar – other side –”

Somehow those words penetrated his excitement. There was a bar on the other side of the grid, the mechanism of its lock, as far as he could see through the holes, strange. But there was some way of opening it, there had to be!

The Terran worked his arm through one of the grill openings, pounded with his fist along the bar. His impatience built to a rage with the stubborn thing that kept them prisoners in the tunnel when all that fresh world lay beyond. Then his self-control began to assert itself once more. He withdrew his arm and unsheathed his belt knife.

Half-crouched, Storm flattened his body against the grill once more and picked with the knife point at every possible opening in and around that circle of metal that apparently locked the bar into place. Logan and Gorgol kept back the crowding animals while he worked. The sweat made his hand slippery, until at last he dropped the knife out of reach on the other side of the still-locked barrier. Gorgol’s belt knife was too long and Logan’s had been taken from him on his capture. There was no use in trying the blaster against the alien material of the portal.

Storm had gone back to the futile pounding when a sudden squeak from ground level – ground level on the opposite side of that obdurate door – startled him into sane thinking again. The squares of the grill might have kept out the rest of them, but Hing had squeezed through and was now watching him with expectancy.

Hing! Storm went down on his knees and schooled patience back into his voice as he chirruped to her. A Beast Master could only control and direct his charges when he was in full control of himself. He had forgotten the first rule of his training and the realization of that frightened him almost as much as the sight of the Xik weapon – more so because this fault lay within him, and it was the first time he had erred since his earliest days in the service.

The Terran forced himself to breathe more slowly and put aside his fear of not being able to master the alien lock. Hing was the important one now – Hing and her curiosity, her claws, the jobs she had been trained to do in the past. Storm blanked his mind, narrowed all his power of projection to one thing – and sent that thought along the path as he had called Baku out of the morning sky to help them clear the pass.

Hing sat up, her long clawed paws dangling in front of her lighter belly fur. Then she dropped to four feet once more, came to the door and climbed it agilely until she was perched on the bar itself, her pointed nose only inches away from Storm’s face. Again she waited and chirruped inquiringly.

He could not direct her, send those claws to the right places as he had in the past when she had destroyed buried installations, uncovered and rendered useless delicate machinery. Then the Terran had had models of the necessary kind to practise with, had been able to show Hing and her mate just what they must do. Now he did not even know the type of lock that baffled them. He could only use King’s own curiosity as a tool, urge the meerkat to solve the mystery. And since she did not have the quick and reaching intelligence of Surra, nor the falcon brain of Baku, implanting the proper impulse was a longer process and a doubtful one.

Storm put all his force into that one beam of will. He did not know that he showed the face of a man strained close to the limit of endurance. And that the two who watched him, without understanding how or why he fought, were held silent by the strain and effort he displayed.

Hing walked a tightrope along the bar. Now she balanced on her hind feet, patting that circle of the lock with her paws. And if Storm did not actually hear the click of her investigating claws on the substance, he sensed them throughout his tense body as he poured out his will.

She raked the disc impatiently and shrilled a protest – perhaps at the stubborn lock, perhaps at his soundless command. But she did not retreat. Bending her head she tried her teeth on the thing, hissed almost as angrily as Surra had done, and went back to picking with her claws. Whether she did puzzle out the pattern, or whether it was only lucky chance, Storm was never to know. But there was a tiny flash of light. Hing squealed and leaped from the bar just as it dropped.

The grill swung open, dragging the Terran with it into the place of growing things. He was too weak from his efforts to get to his feet and was only barely conscious of Gorgol pulling him back out of the path of the horses. Then he was lying on his back, partially supported by the Norbie’s arm, gazing up dazedly into a vast space filled with wisps of floating mist.

“What kind of a place –” Logan’s voice sounded subdued, with more than a touch of awe.

The air was fresh, not only fresh but filled with scents – spicy, perfumed, provocative odours, as if someone had emptied all the aromatic growing things of a dozen worlds into one limited space and kept them at the peak of production.

And that was just what someone or something had done, as they discovered. Storm, with Gorgol to steady him, got to his feet. He saw Surra squatting on her haunches before a round puffball of a thing studded with cups of purple blooms, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy as she sniffed the delicate but tantalizing fragrance those flowers spread. And the horses had cantered on, stopping to graze on the bank of cool, green grass that had certainly once been rooted on the planet of Storm’s birth.

He pulled loose from the Norbie’s hold and staggered to the pine, his hands fondling its bark. The scent of the needles, or the resin, was stronger in his nostrils than the more exotic odours about him. It was true this was a pine, standing at the apex of a triangle of mixed Terran vegetation. And with the bole of the tree to steady him, Storm looked ahead, to see the brilliance of roses in full boom, tassels of lilacs, familiar, unfamiliar, all aflower, all scented, in an unbelievable mixed array.

“What is it?” Logan joined the Terran, his bruised face turned toward the mass of flowers and green as if he too felt some healing quality in it.

“From Earth!” Storm used the old word, sweeping his arms wide. These are all from my world! But how did they come here?”

“And where and what is here?” Logan added. Those surely aren’t Terran too –” His hand fell on Storm’s arm and he drew the other part way around to face, across a narrow path of the alien black stuff, another mixed garden. And the Arzoran was very right. The oddly shaped – to Terran eyes – bushes with their bluish, twisted leaves, the striped flowers (if those flat plates were flowers) were not Terran – not from any world Storm knew.

Gorgol came across the open glade where the horses were. His fingers moved to express his own wonder –

“Many growing things – all different –”

Storm turned again, still putting one hand to the pine as an anchor, not only because of his tired body, but also because the wonder of its being here still made this all part of a strangely satisfying dream.

There were two more gardens or garden plots wedging out from the section directly before the gate grill, and each of them was widely different in the life it supported, save that odd and weird as the growing things appeared, they shared two attributes, none were truly ugly and all were sweet scented.

Logan rubbed his forehead with his bandaged hands and blinked.

There is something about all this –” He swung about slowly as Storm had done. A flight of brilliant patches that the Terran had thought firmly attached to a bush of ivory white stalks floated free, moved double wings, and skimmed to new perches. Birds? Insects? They could be either.

They have places on some worlds,” Logan pursued his own explanation, “where they keep wild animals – call ‘em zoos. It looks to me as if this place were meant to keep specimens of vegetation from a lot of different planets. One, two, three, four,” he counted the separate plots about them. “And these are just about as different from each other as you can get.”

He was right, Storm could agree to that. Gorgol put out a hand and touched with gentle hesitation one of the ivory stems that had supported the flying flowers. He withdrew his fingers and sniffed at them with some of the same pleasure Surra had shown when she drank in the perfume of the purple cups.

Surra? Storm glanced around, seeking the cat. But she was gone, vanished somewhere into this scented wilderness. He sat down at the foot of the pine, leaning his back against its trunk, his hands flat against the earth that felt like home earth, moist, but firm under his flesh. He could close his eyes now to the riot of those other gardens and their weird beauty, or look up into the tent of green over him and be back again –

Gorgol and Logan drifted away. Storm was glad to be alone. Slowly he slid down the length of the pine bole until he was curled on a mat of needles and he slept, dreamlessly, completely relaxed, though the semblance of day about him never changed to evening.

“– biggest mixture you ever saw.” Logan lay on his back, sharing the bed under the pine, while Gorgol dug his fingers back and forth through the same needle padding, shifting the brown harvest of years. It was still day by the light, though they must have been many hours in the cavern.

“I’d say,” the Arzoran settler continued, “that a whole mountain was hollowed out to hold this. We counted about sixty different gardens – including two which are mostly water. And then there are the fruit orchards and vines –” He gestured at the remains of their recent meal, a small collection of pits and rinds. “I tell you – this is fabulous!”

“No animal life –?”

“Birds, insects – no animals, except that cat of yours. We caught her rolling in a big patch of grey mossy stuff and acting as if she were wild. Ran away from us as if we were Xiks stalkin’ her with one of those pop guns of theirs.”

“But how could all this keep growing without any attention for years, maybe centuries?” marvelled Storm. “You are right, it is, it must have been intended as a botanical garden of specimens gathered from all over the galaxy. This’ – he pulled a curl of flame-orange rind between his fingers – “was an Astran “golden apple”. And the black and white berries were from Sirius Three. But you’d think the place would have grown into a wilderness when it was left. Something continued to control it, kept the growth right, nourished everything properly –”

“Maybe the light is part of it,” Logan suggested. “Or the atmosphere. I’ve noticed one thing.” He held out his hand. The bandages were gone and the wounds and burns Storm had tended were not only closed, they were almost healed.

“Show him your arm,” Logan signed to Gorgol and the Norbie presented his wounded forearm for inspection. The arrow tear was only a reddish mark, and the native used the limb freely with no sign of discomfort.

“How do you feel?” Logan demanded of Storm.

The Terran stretched. He had not really noticed before but, now that Logan had drawn the matter to his attention, he was aware that the weight of exhaustion that had ridden him into this Eden was gone. In fact Storm had not awakened so contented with life for a long time – for years. Like Surra he wanted to roll on the ground and purr his pleasure aloud.

“See?” Logan did not seem to expect an articulate answer.

“It’s in the air here, all around us. Growth – making us feel alive and vigorous, healed of our hurts, too. Perhaps this place was designed for other uses besides just botanical display.”

“Does it also have a door out?”

“We found three doors,” Logan returned. Two are grills, but the third looks the most promisin’.”

“Why?”

“Because it has been walled up. The legends of the Sealed Caves suggest it might be an outlet to the outside –”

Storm supposed he should get up and go to inspect that doorway. But for the first time in years a kind of languorous laziness held him in its grip. Just to lie here under the pine, to watch Rain and the other horses at their ease, Logan and Gorgol beside him as relaxed as himself, none of them driven by a need for immediate action – it was wonderful, perfect! He and the others had found a small section of Paradise, why be in a hurry to leave it?

Gorgol sat up, brushed the pine needles from the fringes of his belt. He turned his head, gazing about him with a slow measurement and within Storm a faint, very faint apprehension awoke.

The native’s yellow-red fingers moved in short sweeps, with pauses between, as if the importance of what he had to say was making the Norbie doubly careful of his choice of signs.

“This – trap – big trap.”

14

“Trap?” repeated Logan without much interest. But the languor that held Storm was pierced by a fast-growing doubt. Perhaps because he had known a variety of traps – and very ingenious ones – in the past, the Terran did not only listen but was receptive to such a warning.

“What manner of trap?” he signed.

“You like here – happy –” Gorgol was plainly groping for signs to convey a complicated idea. “No go – want to stay –”

Storm sat up. “You no want to stay?” he asked.

Gorgol looked about him again. “Good –” He touched the remains of the fruit. “Good!” He drew an exaggeratedly deep breath of the perfume-laden air. “Feel good!” He gave an all embracing twirl of his fingers. “But – not mine –” He ran those fingers through the pine needles. “Not mine –” He flicked the fingers to include the other gardens about them. “No Gorgol place here – not hold Gorgol –” Again he was trying to make limited signs explain more abstract thought. “Your place – hold you –”

The Norbie had something! That alerting signal far inside Storm was clamouring more loudly. What better bait for a trap than a slice of a man’s home planet served up just when he believed that world lost forever? Even if a trap were not intended, it was here just the same. He got to his feet, tramped determinedly away from the pine.

“Where’s that built-up door of yours?” he demanded harshly over his shoulder, refusing to look back at that wedge of temptation set in familiar green.

“You think Gorgol’s right?”

“You don’t think about things such as that,” Storm answered out of the depths of experience, “you feel! Maybe those who built this place didn’t intend it for a trap –” He slapped Rain’s flank, making the stallion move from the grass to the roadway that separated the small piece of Terra from its neighbour.

“Surraaaaa –” Storm shouted that aloud, an imperative summons that he had only had to use once or twice in their close comradeship. And his voice awoke echoes above and around the gardens, while birds flew and flower-coloured insects floated, disturbed, to settle again.

Leading Rain by the headstall, the Terran started down the path. The sooner he was away from that bit of his native earth the better. Already a new bitterness was beginning to fester in him and he turned it against the enemy outside. So the Xiks thought they had finished Terra? Perhaps – but they had not finished Terrans!

He hurried, deliberately twisting and turning from path to path, trying to muddle his own trail, so that he could not easily find his way back to that pine-roofed spot. Twice more he called the dune cat. Hing pattered along behind him, stopping now and then to sniff inquisitively or dig, but perfectly willing to move, while the other horses followed Rain. They threaded the narrow roadways between gardens – such gardens. Twice Storm saw foliage he recognized, and both times they were samples from widely separated worlds.

“Left through here” – Logan came up beside him – “around the end of this water place, then behind the one with the scarlet feather trees. I wonder what kind of a world those are from? See – now you’re facing it.”

Storm followed his directions. The scarlet plumes of the trees arched high against the duller red of the stone wall of the mountain interior. And the black path led directly to an archway that had been carefully bricked up with blocks about a foot square. The Terran could see none of the black sealing material, unless it was used as mortar to set those bricks. Under his hands the wall was immovable, and he examined it carefully, wondering what tool there was among their supplies that could best be used to attack it.

Would the points of their belt knives make any impression on those cracks? He could turn on the blaster, but he was loathe to use up the charge in the most potent weapon they had. Best try knives first.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, his hands slippery with sweat, his control over his temper hard pressed, Storm admitted that knives were not the answer. That left the blaster. It was not a disrupter, of course. But set to highest power it should act upon the blocks, if not upon the stuff that held them together.

Sending the rest of the party back, Storm lay on the path, resting the barrel of the Xik weapon on several stones so that its sights were aligned with a point in the middle of the wall, directly below the highest rise of the arch. He pressed the release button and fought the answering kick of the weapon, holding it steady as Xik-made lightning struck full on the blocks.

For seconds, perhaps a full minute, there was a flareback that beat at Storm with a wave of blast heat. Then a core of yellow showed at the centre point of the beam, the yellow spreading outward in a circle. The colour deepened. Harsh fumes spreading from that contact point made Storm cough, his eyes stream. But he held the blaster steady for another long moment before he started to depress the barrel slowly, drawing the yellow mark down in a line toward the floor.

As the light began to pulse, he knew that the charge was nearing exhaustion. What if he had guessed wrong and thrown away the blaster without achieving their freedom? Storm held the weapon tensely while those pulsations grew more ragged, until the pressure of his finger on the firing button brought no response.

To his vast disappointment the wall, save for that heat scar, looked as staunch as it had been on his first examination. He could not wait to know the truth. Reversing the blaster so its stock was a club, he ran forward in spite of the lingering heat, to thrust the butt into the scar with all the force of his weight and strength behind it.

There was a shock that made the Terran grunt as the metal stock met the blocks. But it wasn’t the blaster that gave. A whole section where the flame had licked moved outward –perhaps not very much. But he had felt it give. Heartened he struck again. The section of blocks broke apart, not along the joints where they had been mortared together, but in the middle of the stone squares themselves – proving once again that the building material of the unknown aliens was more enduring than the products of nature.

Before he attacked the second time Storm allowed the wall to cool. The fumes of the ray were gone, almost as if they had been sucked away or absorbed by some quality in the air of the garden cavern. A bush with a lacy covering quivered until its iridescent leaves shook, and Surra, her fur ruffled, her eyes glinting wild and feral, crawled from under it to the roadway and stood panting before Storm.

He rubbed behind her ears, along the line of her pointed fox jaw, talking to her in that crooning speech that soothed her best. She was excited, over stimulated, and he marvelled that she had answered his call. One could never be sure with the felines, their independence kept them from being servants – companions, yes, and war comrades, but not servants to man. Each time Surra obeyed some order or summons Storm knew that obedience was by her will and not his. And he could never be sure whether his hold on her would continue. Now, under his gentling, she softened, purred, dabbing at his hands with a claw-sheathed paw. The alien trap had not taken Surra either.

They plundered the fruit gardens for another meal, filled their canteens with purified water from a miniature waterfall in one of the lake lands and waited. Until, at last, with the three of them working, they were able to handle the cooled blocks and break their way through the barrier.

Logan had been right in his surmise. No tunnel reached before them, only the mouth of another cave, and, beyond that, the light of Arzoran day. They led the horses one by one through that break, and Gorgol, who had gone out on a short scout, returned, his hands flashing in an excited message.

This place I know! Here I slew the evil flyer when I went on my man hunt. There is a trail from this place –”

They came out in a valley so narrow that it was merely a ravine between two towering heights. And the cut was so barren of vegetation that the sun trapped within those walls made a glaring furnace of the depths, so that the contrast between this sere outer world and the delights of the cavern was even more pronounced. On impulse Storm turned back to rebuild the barrier they had broken through, piling the crumbling blocks of stone across the opening. Logan joined in, his healing lips no longer so puffed that they could not shape a smile.

“Let the sealed ones continue to keep their secrets, eh?” He laughed. This is too good a hiding hole to waste. We may have need of it again.”

But how quickly that need was to come they did not dream. Gorgol mounted one of the mares and turned her to the southern end of the valley. Logan swung up bareback on a second horse, they having packed what was left of their supplies on the yearling. Storm was just about to settle himself on Rain’s pad saddle when Surra gave her battle cry, bounding ahead of the Norbie’s horse, to face the end of the valley, the hair along her backbone roughed, her ears flattened to her skull as she hissed defiance.

Her hiss was answered twofold. Gorgol’s stun rod went up as a yellow-grey boulder detached itself from the general mass of rocks before them, produced driving feet, and charged in an insane rage before Storm understood what was happening.

The yoris, meeting the beam of the stun ray head on, gave a choked scream and landed in a skidding heap while Gorgol fought his terrorized horse. The mare Logan was riding panicked, and her rider, still suffering from his beating, with no reins or saddle as an anchor, was thrown, rolling over just as a second yoris came out of a pocket in the cliff and screeched down to join its mate.

Storm’s arrow hit a lucky mark, the soft underskin of the lizard’s throat, one of the giant reptile’s three vulnerable spots. But the thing was not killed outright. Snapping its murderous jaws, it beat against the ground, and Logan threw himself back with a cry, a red stream welling through his boot over the calf. Gorgol beamed the wounded lizard and it went limp. But the Norbie paid no heed to the yoris as he vaulted to Logan’s side.

Young Quade had both hands clasped tightly about his leg just above that wound, his face very pale. He glanced up at Storm with an odd emptiness in the brilliant blue of his eyes.

Gorgol drew his knife and cut a length of fringe from his belt. He worked the boot from Logan’s leg with a quick jerk that made the other catch his breath. With the cord of fringe he looped a tourniquet above the wound and then passed the ends to Storm to twist tight while he went to the yoris, prying open its mouth to peer within. That examination required only a second. The native stooped to slash at the middle of the lizard, ripping out a great hunk of fatty flesh. He ran back to clap it over the bloody gash on Logan’s leg.

“Male” – Logan got the word out between set teeth – “poison –”

Storm was cold inside. There was nothing in his depleted aid kit that could handle this. And he had heard tales of yoris poison, most of them grisly. But Gorgol was signing.

“Draw poison out –” He gestured to the raw gob of lizard fat. “No ride, no walk – be quiet – sick, very sick soon –”

Logan shaped a shadow of a smile. “He’s not just fanning his fingers when he says that.” His voice sounded oddly thick. “I think I’ve had it, fella –”

The pallor that crept up under his brown skin was close to grey and his hands and arms jerked in spasmodic quivers that he apparently could not control. A small trickle of blood rilled from the corner of his swollen mouth.

Gorgol went back to the yoris and cut a fresh strip of fat. He motioned to Storm to pull off the first poultice and slapped on the second. With the blood on the discarded lump there was a blue discolouration. The Norbie pointed to it.

“Poison – it comes –”

But could they hope to draw out all the venom that way, wondered Storm. Logan no longer twitched. His head had slumped forward on his chest and he was breathing in quick snorts, his ribs showing under the tight skin as the lungs beneath them laboured. His skin was clammy to the touch, with cold perspiration rising in great beads. Storm thought that he was no longer conscious.

Four more times Gorgol changed that poultice of lizard flesh. The last time it came away without a trace of the blue stain. But Logan lay inert, his breathing very quick and shallow.

“No more poison. Now he sleep –” the Norbie explained.

“Will he wake?”

Gorgol studied the unconscious rider. “Maybeso. No thing else to do. No ride, no walk, maybeso this many days –” He held up two fingers.

“Look here,” Storm began aloud and then switched to signs. “You tell me how go – I find help – come back – you wait for me in place of growing things –”

The Norbie nodded. “I keep watch – you bring help – tell also about evil ones –”

Together they carried Logan back into the cavern and then Storm proceeded to strip down for a quick journey along the trail Gorgol drew in the dust for him to memorize. He would take Rain but not Surra. Perhaps he would find Baku outside. But he intended to set and keep a pace the cat could not match.

At the last, he took only two of the canteens, a packet of iron rations, and his bow and arrows. Gorgol offered him back the stun rod and he hesitated, refusing it only because he knew the symbolic reliance the Norbie placed upon it. That, and the thought that the Xiks might just invade the valley outside and he had to leave Gorgol the best defence.

Logan was still limp and unresponding when Storm examined him before he left. But the Terran was sure that the other’s breathing was better, that his stupor was now close to normal sleep. If he did nothing in the way of exercise to send the remaining poison through his system, he had a good chance for recovery. And all settlers possessed yoris antidote, which Storm could bring back with him.

So, in the hours of the next dawn, the Terran set out, passing the scavenger-stripped bones of the yoris, heading along that trail Gorgol had committed to memory two seasons earlier.

As Storm rode he beamed a silent call for Baku. But, as there came no answering dive from the skies, no rasping scream of greeting, he began to fear that the eagle had not escaped the backlash of the Xik weapon. He missed Surra’s scouting, the aid of her keen scent and keener hearing, and he began to realize that he might have come to depend too heavily upon his team.

The path Gorgol had discovered leading out of this slice of valley was a defile that curved around southwest, and should, the Norbie had promised, bring him out of the mountains proper by sundown. Nowhere did Storm find any trace of either Nitra or Xik, though twice he crossed a fairly fresh yoris trail and once marked claw prints in a bank of soft earth that might have been the sign left by the monster of the heights Gorgol called the evil flyer.

He camped that night in a small side gully, a dry camp where he shared with Rain the contents of one of his canteens, and the stallion grazed disdainfully on some bunches of coarse grass already browning to summer death. But the morning came cool and cloudy and Storm pushed the pace, wanting to be out of these gorges if another cloudburst was brewing aloft, his lively imagination painting a vivid picture of what a sudden dash of water down these ways would mean to a trapped horse and its rider.

By midmorning the threatening clouds had not yet released their burden of water, and the Terran was cantering into the fringe of lowland that extended a tongue to the very foot of the Peaks. According to Logan, he should come across the first of the line cabins before nightfall and find within the communicator that would link him to all the range holdings of the district.

But Storm chanced upon the village first. The Staffa had cut a path across this level country and the Terran detoured to follow its west bank, sure that what he sought could not have been located too far from the necessary water. The rounded tent domes of a Norbie camp were a very welcome sight. He reined in, slung his bow so that he could show empty hands for the sentry, and waited. Only no sentry appeared to challenge him, and now, when he let Rain trot closer, Storm could sight no warriors about those tents. The continued eerie silence finally made him halt once more.

Norbie villages were never permanent affairs. You could come across the signs of old camp sites along any river in the right district. But neither was it customary for any clan to ride off and leave their curved roof poles standing, the hide and skin coverings stretched in place. Both possessions counted as part of the families’ wealth and were too hard to replace.

By the crimson strings marking the shield pole of the largest tent this was a Shosonna clan, allied to Gorgol’s people and friendly to the settlers. Had it suffered a Nitra raid? Storm kept Rain down to a walk and proceeded cautiously toward the tents. More Xik devilry?

“All right, rider! Stand where you are and keep your hands open!”

That voice came out of the blue – or rather lavender sky –as far as Storm could determine. But the bite in the tone was enough to lead the Terran to obey orders – for that moment anyway. He held up his hands, palm out, searching sky and ground for the invisible challenger.

“We’ve a far sighter on you, fella –”

So! Storm’s pride in his scout’s art revived a little. A far sighter could pick up a man a mile or more away. The unknown speaker could have cut him down before he even knew the other was in the country. But who was that unknown? Outlaws talking for the Xiks? Settlers? One guess was as good as another.

Rain snorted, stamped, and half turned his head toward his rider as if to ask what they were waiting for. Storm still watched the lodges before him, the waving grass of the plain, the banks of the stream, searching for some sign of the men he was sure were hidden there. His own impatience approached the boiling point. This was no time to play games of hide-and-seek. The sooner Logan had medical attention the better. And the knowledge of the Xik holdouts must be relayed to the authorities at once.

At last he deliberately dropped his hands. And that might have been an awaited signal, for three men stepped out of the chieftain’s tent in the village and began to walk toward him, their stun rods centred steadily on him.

“Dumaroy!” he said under his breath, “and Bister!” That was a combination he did not relish.

Coll Bister had fallen a step or so behind his companions and Storm, giving him his main attention, was sure the other had recognized him. A moment later he had oral proof of that.

“It’s that crazy Terran I told you about!” Bister must be purposely raising his voice it carried so well. “Run with the goats all the way down the trail to the Crossin’. Clean off his head, he is. And it looks like he’s teamed up with the horned boys for good.”

Dumaroy strode ponderously on, an impressive figure physically, and as dangerous in his own way as a frawn bull. Storm knew his type. If the settler had already made up his mind, nothing could change his point of view.

“Why the holdup, Dumaroy?” the Terran asked mildly, in his most gentle voice. “I’m glad to meet you. Back in the Peaks –”

Once before Storm had been a target for a stun rod and had suffered the consequences. But then he had not taken the beam dead centre. This was worse than any blow, almost as bad as the wild tumult he had ridden out in the backlash of the Xik projector. He did not realize that he had fallen from the saddle pad until he was lying dazed on the ground, the sky swirling madly over him and a faint shouting making a clamour in his ears.

He felt hands turn him over roughly, secure his wrists, taking him prisoner as he tumbled into a dark pit of unconsciousness. His last weak thought was that one of the three had shot him without warning. And Bister’s broad face was in the picture. Only there was something wrong with that face – something wrong with Bister – and it was important that Storm understand that wrongness, very important to him.

15

The torturing headache that was the result of being stun rayed provided a fierce rhythm over and under Storm’s eyes. And his eyes hurt in the bargain when he forced them open. But a feeling of urgency carried over from the past and the Terran fought for control over mind and body. His tentative struggles informed him that he had been staked out on the ground and that every pull he gave to his bonds heightened the pounding in his head.

The time was early evening, Storm judged, as he squinted at the daylight between half-closed lids, and he could hear the coming and going, the inconsequential talk of riders in camp around him. In spite of his sick dizziness the Terran concentrated on picking up what information he could from their conversations.

Piece by piece, half-heard sentences built an ugly picture indeed. Some of what Logan had feared had already come to pass. Dumaroy’s main herd had been raided and the trail of the stolen beasts led straight to the Shosonna river bank camp, which the aroused riders had attacked in retaliation. Luckily the Norbies had fled in time and there had been no killing, though when the riders pursued them, two men had been badly wounded by arrows.

Dumaroy was now awaiting reinforcements, determined to track down the Shosonna back in the hills and teach them a drastic lesson. He had sent out a call to rally all able-bodied settlers as there were signs that the retreating Shosonna band had crossed fresh Nitra trails and the original posse feared a uniting of the two native clans against the settlers’ expedition.

Let there once be a real battle between Norbie and settler and Xik plans would be well on the way to complete realization. The holdout outlaws could continue to needle both sides without loss of either secrecy or any of their own numbers. That is, it might have worked that way had not Storm reached the settlers. But surely once he had a chance to tell his story Dumaroy would have to reconsider, to wait for the Peace Officers. Bister – somehow Coll Bister had an important part. Storm was as certain, as if he had seen him do it, that Bister had rayed him before he could give his information. What sort of a tale had the other concocted while the Terran lay unconscious to explain that raying without warning, to supply a valid reason for keeping the other prisoner?

That Storm was friendly toward the natives was not strong enough. Too many of the settlers felt the same way. As a Terran he could be suspected of mental instability – had Bister played that angle? It was a hard one to refute. Everyone had heard the rumours out of the Centre and Bister had travelled with him from the Port to the Crossing – Nobody here he could appeal to –

Since the Terran could not raise his head more than an inch or so his range of vision was necessarily quite limited and those men he sighted were all strangers. Dort Lancin had a range in the Peak area, and if the settlers came in at the summons to back Dumaroy, he should arrive sooner or later. Dort Lancin was a staunch supporter of the pro-Norbie party and he could speak for Storm. But the Terran fumed inwardly over the waste of time.

Bister – that was Bister approaching now. On impulse Storm closed his eyes. A sharp tug on the rope about his ankles sent a quiver of pure agony through his head and he had difficulty in remaining still. Then followed a similar jerk at the wrists extended above his head. Scuff of boots on the ground – a grunt. Storm dared to peek. Bister was standing, his attention distracted by the sound of galloping horses.

Storm watched the settler as one fighting man measures another – an enemy – during a momentary truce. The fellow was a puzzle. He nourished hatred for Storm, had disliked the Terran from the first, for no reason Storm could fathom. If Bister were true to type, he would have been only too eager to mix it up physically. Yet Storm had mastered him without difficulty at their first embroilment and thereafter Bister had tried to get others to do his fighting for him – almost as if his impressive body, his cover of trail bully, was only the outer husk of a very different personality.

A suspicion, wild and unfounded, crossed Storm’s muzzy mind as he groggily pursued that line of reasoning. Perhaps it was well that the party of horsemen whirled by just then to distract his captor for the Terran gasped. There were those stories Storm had heard in the last weeks of the war when the desperate enemy had emptied out their full bag of tricks and weapons, stories he had heard in greater detail later during the dreary months at the Centre when men had sweated out rehabilitation. An aper!

If Bister were one of these fabulous apers – an Xik reconstructed by surgery and every available form of psycho-training to pass as a Confed man – that would explain a lot. He would in fact be the most dangerous ‘man” Storm had ever faced. For by all accounts an aper gathered under one changed skin as many – or more – varied talents as a Commando Beast Master, and was trained to use every one of his weird gifts.

But those tales had been dismissed as the wildest of barracks rumours. Storm had heard them repeatedly denied, been assured by psycho-medics and intelligence men that such a thing was virtually impossible. Of course, those authorities had hedged with the “virtually”.

As if this thought were not startling enough, Storm discovered another frightening thing. Bister had not been just inspecting the captive’s bonds a moment ago, he had been loosening them! Bister wanted the Terran free, only Storm was also sure that Bister wanted him dead. The fellow had not dared to betray himself by using any weapon more lethal than a stun rod at their encounter at the Shosonna village. But it would be very easy to knife or otherwise fatally dispose of an escaping prisoner.

So – here was one prisoner who would not escape, even when encouraged. Storm was so lost in that line of reasoning that he was not at first aware of the loud argument not too far away, not until he heard one name mentioned that drove the problem of Bister momentarily to the back of his mind.

“– Brad Quade, and he’s breathin’ out rocket fumes all the way up river! You’d better take it easy, Dumaroy – he’s got a Peace Officer with him and if you go off half set and start a Norbie dust-up you’ll have to answer to Galwadi for it! I’m not goin’ to head into those hills “till Quade gets here –”

“You can lick dust off Brad Quade’s boots if you want to, Jaffe. No man here’s goin’ to stop you. Only we aren’t goin’ to have the Basin tell us here at the Peaks not to protect our own property and go along nursin’ these thievin’ goats! Every one of you saw that trail. It led right to that village and then off again into the mountains. Me, I’ve lost my last herd to the goats! And I’ll tell that flat to any Peace Officer. As for Brad Quade – if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep his nose out of our affairs. So that kid of his is missin’? Well, I’ll lay you five credits right on the line that Logan’s been ambushed by goats and his right hand’s curin’ right now in some Nitra Thunder House! I’m sayin’ right now that we’re ridin’ on come sunup. And anybody here who don’t want to do that can clear out now –”

There was a muttering and a few raised voices. Storm, straining to listen, gathered that Dumaroy’s private army was not so keen on Norbie chasing as their leader wished.

“All right! All right!” The settler’s bull roar deadened the other’s clamour once more. “You can just get your horses, all of you, and clear out of here. You, Jaffe, an” Hyke, and Palasco – Only don’t you come whinin’ to me when you’re cleaned out, and there’re goat tracks all over your ranges. You just go and talky-talk it out with Brad Quade and let him point his fingers at the goats to give ‘em back!”

“And I’m tellin’ you back, Dumaroy, that you’ll pull the Peaks into a big mess and we’ll all be in trouble. You better wait and hear what Quade and the Peace Officer have to say. They’ll be here in the mornin’ –”

“Get out!” The roar was a red-edged bellow. “Get outta here, you soft riders! I’m not takin’ orders from Quade. He may be the big chief back at the Basin, but not here. Clear out – every last one of you!”

Storm was tempted. Should he make a break for it along with the rebel party? He tried to raise his head and was answered by such a thrust of pain as blurred his sight for an instant. There was no hope of his moving quickly enough to elude Bister until more of the ray effects had worn off. But the thought that Quade was moving up river gave him a little hope. No matter what lay between them personally, the Terran had more confidence in the settler than he wanted to admit. And he was sure that Quade, alone of the settlers he had met so far on Arzor, had the force of character and leadership to stand up to the Xik-fostered mess now brewing. Storm must make the escape Bister had set up for him, but make it a successful attempt, one which would carry him and his information into Brad Quade’s camp.

Luckily in the general confusion Dumaroy seemed to have forgotten his prisoner. At least no one came to inspect Storm for signs of life, or prepared to ask questions. That too might have been the result of planning on Bister’s part. It was odd, Storm thought, but since that first suspicion of the other’s true identity had dawned on him, he had accepted it as a fact. Though he was just as sure if he shouted aloud his belief in this camp he would only prove to the Arzorans that he was indeed one of the crazed Terrans – just another refugee who had finally been pushed over the verge of sanity.

Storm began to fight as well as he could the hang-over of the stun ray, taking care to attract no attention. It was slightly in his favour that he had been staked out on one side of a small hillock that rose between him and the centre of the camp. Save for men going to the river for water and a few others spreading out their bedrolls, he was not generally under observation.

At first it was a fight to move his head. He did not dare to draw his hands away from the stakes where they had been pinioned lest somewhere out of his line of sight Bister was waiting for just such a move. But when Storm was able to lift his head without suffering too much pain, he saw that dusk was closing in. Just let night come and he would be willing to risk Bister, though the other had all the advantages on his side.

But before dark Dumaroy at last remembered his prisoner. Storm shut his eyes, counterfeited as best he could the rigid tension of a stun-shocked man.

“He’s been under long enough –” Dumaroy was not exactly uneasy but he sounded puzzled. Bister answered and Storm listened for the slightest hint of accent in his voice that might help to unmask the aper.

“He’s a Terran. They can’t stand up to a ray – don’t use ‘em much –”

“Maybe. But Starle tells me this fella was a Commando –they’re supposed to be a tough crowd. I don’t see why you thought you had to ray him out anyway, Coll.”

“I came down the trail from the Port with him. He’s tricky –and he was half over the edge then – like all Terrans. You’ve heard the stories about how they blew up after they heard about Terra being given the big burn. This fella got it in his head that everybody was against him – plottin’ to get him. Everyone except the goats. He got chummy with them right from the start. When he disappeared so quick from the Crossin’, I nosed around a little. He’s a Beast-Master. You should have seen him gentlin’ a string for Put Larkin. Let a fella who can do what he can with animals get in as a Butcher and with the goats lettin’ him set up in their territory – and you’ve got yourself a live yoris by the hind foot! Wouldn’t surprise me none to find out he was back of this Shosonna raid. I didn’t want him to get away out there before we had a chance to ask some questions. Might be well to put him undercover or you’ll have to hand him over to the Peace Officer –”

“He can’t ride until he comes to.” Dumaroy commented. “Keep an eye on him, Coll, and let me know when he wakes up. Yes, I want to ask him a few questions –”

They moved off while Storm held his body rigid until the ache in his sorely tried muscles came close to matching the ache in his heavy head. So Coll Bister was to keep an eye on him? That would give Bister opportunity to get rid of one Hosteen Storm with as little fuss as possible. If he only had Surra waiting out there in the grass – or Baku – Then Storm took hold of himself firmly, surely he was not so lacking in resources that he had to depend only upon his animals!

The gurgle of the river made a steady sound, backing all the noises of the camp. In this country rivers were necessary. Quade and his party were undoubtedly camped on one bank or the other of this same stream. Storm did not know whether he could muster the strength to sit a horse – even Rain. Could he trust himself to the water instead?

All riders habitually strapped a canteen to their saddles or saddle pads when on the range. But a camp as large as this one, with the men planning to head into the drier mountains, would have in addition other preparations for the transportation of water. And a common one here, Storm knew, was water-toad hide bags that could be slung in pairs across the backs of pack animals.

Such bags were large oval affairs, each made from the entire skin of one of the huge amphibians found in the marshes, tanned and cured for use by the fisher-Norbies of the southern coasts. Almost transparent, the skins inflated like balloons when moistened as they were before being filled. Storm had seen Norbie children make rafts of them at Krotag’s camp. With a pair of those to buoy him up, a man’s swimming ability would be no great problem; he could float along with the current.

There remained the point of his break out of camp past Bister’s sentry-go, and the stealing of one, maybe two water bags. If the posse was going to start out on the Shosonna trail in the early morning, Dumaroy would send one of his riders down to the river to refill those bags. They had to stand through the night hours with the purifying tablets in them or their contents would not be drinkable for half the next day. It was a procedure Storm had followed himself when with the Survey party.

Weakened as he was, Storm believed he could handle one rider, especially if he took the man by surprise. But Bister – Bister remained the big threat. All depended upon chance and his own ability to seize the first possible opening.

He slowly flexed his fingers and wrists, feeling his bonds give. What was left him for a weapon? Only the fact that his enemy – though he might look human, be drilled to think and act human – was not born of the same species. How could Coll Bister, the aper, ever be sure from one moment to the next that he would not make some small slip that would damn him utterly for what he was? Perhaps his hatred for Storm was based on that fear, for Bister could recognize in the Beast Master one who had been selected for that service because of just such off-beat qualities of mind – though probably not the same ones – as those he himself possessed. So Bister might have built up his distrust of the Terran until at present he credited Storm with far higher gifts of perception and extrasensory powers than any living man could hope for. Bister, in his present state of mind, could not be sure how Storm would react to anything – even a ray beam. Now the Terran must turn that gnawing uncertainty of his enemy to his own account in the opening move of their private struggle.

Storm waited until he was rewarded by what he had hoped to see, one of Dumaroy’s men passing on the way to the river, empty water skins flapping on his shoulders. He allowed him to pass and then staged his act.

With a low moan the Terran twisted, apparently fighting his bonds. The man turned, gaped at him, and came over. Luck was on Storm’s side so far; he had not fallen afoul of a quickwitted man. Another moan, low, and as realistic as he could make it – he was a little surprised at his own artistic ability – and the man, dropping his burden, went down on one knee to inspect the captive more closely.

Storm’s arm swept up to strike at the side of the other’s neck. The blow did not land quite true, he was too weak to deliver it correctly, but it brought the rider off balance and down on top of the Terran. Then the right pressure applied and the fellow, still surprised, went limp. For a long moment of perilous waiting Storm held the flaccid body to him, waiting for the shout, the running feet, and also to gather strength for his next move.

When there was no reaction from the camp, the Terran cautiously rolled out from under the rider and stretched the man in his place. Sweeping up the water skins, he forced himself to walk at an even pace to the river bank. Three – maybe four more yards and he would make it. Then to inflate the water bags – and not to force the air out of them again. He need only secure the mouth of each skin with its dangling cord and he had his improvised raft.

However, the river was a popular place at present. A noisy party was bathing and there were horses being brought down to drink. Storm, the bags crumpled tight in one arm, took to cover, working his way through a reed bank, expecting every moment to have the cry of alarm raised behind him.

What did happen was that he caught sight of Rain among the horses being watered. The stallion was not taking kindly to this shepherding and he was plainly in an ugly mood. A black horse squealed and offered challenge and the red-spotted mount was only too ready to oblige. The rider in charge pushed his own animal forward and used his quirt freely for discipline.

But with Rain that was a very wrong move. The stallion, who had never been touched by a whip since Storm had brought him out of Larkin’s corral at the space port, went completely fighting mad. And Rain, though young, was a formidable opponent, as he let loose with both hoofs and teeth.

Storm slipped to the water’s edge. The attention of all the men along the stream was on the plunging, screaming horses. He saw Rain dash into mainstream as he himself plunged into the current, the inflated bags ready as a buoy when he needed them. The river, which appeared so lazy from the bank, was provided with a swifter core and Storm struck out into it.

He heard more shouting, saw the red and grey horse break from the water and race, at a speed the Terran was sure few if any of the mounts in the camp could match, through the riders in the general direction of the mountains and freedom. Then the river curved and Storm was carried out of sight.

The excitement of escape gave him the energy to reach the main current, but once in its grip the Terran did little except cling to the puffed skins and hope that Quade’s camp was not too far away. Night came and Storm, his head and shoulders supported above the level of the water, shivered under the touch of a mountain-born wind. There was a flick of lightning over those heights, the distant rumble of thunder as a threat. He would have to watch the water about him, be ready to make for the shore before the wash of a flood added to the current.

But it was hard to think clearly and his whole body trailed soddenly behind the bobbing skins. Storm could not judge the passing of time. The thought that he had beat Bister was for the moment a small triumph, quickly dulled.

There were no moons visible in the sky and the stars showed dim and far away between ragged patches of wind-driven clouds. Storm, his cheek pillowed on the clammy skins, was only half aware that he was still waterborne southward. He was nosed by an investigating water rat. But perhaps the scent of his off-world body made the big rodent wary, for the creature only swam beside him for a space.

However, the coming of the rat aroused Storm to make some efforts on his own for the streams of Arzor had larger and more dangerous inhabitants than water rats. And some of them might be less fastidious. He began to kick his legs, attempting not only to quicken his rate of travel, but to steer the odd raft.

Sometime in the dark hours the Terran ran into difficulty. The river made another turn and here drift had built a tongue of tangled flotsam out into the water. Before Storm was conscious of danger a snag pierced one skin and its sudden deflation into tatters plunged him under water, bringing him up with cruel force against the wall of drift.

Somehow he pulled himself up that barrier, fought his way over it at the price of scratches and gouges, until he was able to reach sand and finally meadow turf beyond. He sprawled there face down, too spent to struggle, and went to sleep.

“– bring him around now –”

“It’s that Terran, Storm! But what –?”

“Been in the river by the looks of him.”

There was light now, the warmth of fire combined with the clearer gleam of a camp atom-light. There was an arm under his shoulders, holding his head up so that he could swallow from a cup pressed against his lips. There was a strange dreamlike haze over the scene, but one face swam out of that haze, took on reality, perhaps because those features had had a place in so many of his dreams. And this time Storm was able to talk to the man he had come to Arzor to – to kill. Yes, he had come across space to kill Brad Quade! Yet that desire seemed now as remote as a year-old battle in a jungle wilderness, three solar systems away!

“Trouble –” He got that out and the word was such a limited expression of what he must say. “Xik holdouts in the Peaks –Norbies – Dumaroy – Logan –”

He was being shaken, first gently, and then with rougher insistence.

“Where is Logan?”

And Storm, caught again in the mazes of his dream, answered with some of his own longing:

“Terra – garden of Terra.”

16

When he made better sense later, Storm discovered that the party who had followed Brad Quade into the Peak Ranges did not ride with closed minds. Kelson, of the Planetary Peace Police, a big, slow-speaking man with eyes that Storm decided overlooked nothing, and with a computer bank for a mind, asked a few questions, every one directly to the point.

The Terran had been reluctant to voice his suspicions concerning Bister. Such a story might be accepted by veterans of his own corps who had good reason for knowing that agents could assume a wide variety of cover. But to ask these men who had never come up personally against the Xiks at all to accept the fact that one had been living among them undetected, and without any more proof than Storm was able to offer, was another matter.

To his vast surprise when Kelson drew from him that revelation – with the questions of a well-trained inquisitor as the Terran understood too late – none of his listeners displayed incredulity. Maybe these planet bound settlers were more open to such imaginative flights – as the existence of an aper among them – than were the service officers trained to meet the nonproven with wary disbelief.

“Bister –” Quade repeated thoughtfully. “Coll Bister. Anybody here know him?”

Dort Lancin answered first. “He rode down from the port as trail herder, “long with me and Storm. Just like the kid here tells it. Seemed just like any other drifter to me. Only I heard about apers when I was with the outfit. Seems like they captured two of them close to the end, wearing Confed uniforms and runnin’ a side show to the big muddle. Might have fouled up that whole sector if one of the messes they cooked up hadn’t been called to the attention of a section commander in time. After that mix-up a lot of the boys looked close at each other, providin’ they weren’t born and raised together in the same river valley or such! Bister didn’t come in on our ship, and he was a new light and tie with Larkin, never rode for Put before. Don’t know where he came from – except Put picked him as a hire rider along with the rest of us.”

“Guilt,” Kelson observed, “is a queer thing. Bister hated Terrans, and he was probably, as you say, afraid of you, Storm, because you were trained for a duty not unlike his own. If he hadn’t been guilty – and afraid – he wouldn’t have tipped his hand by his treatment of you. Bister is one man we are going to rope tomorrow – or rather today – and tight! If Dumaroy’s moved out, we’ll trail him. But we don’t want to tangle with the Xiks. Since they are provided with the type of weapons you report, Storm, we’ll need a Patrol ship in here to really mop up. Quade, you’ll want to collect your kid anyway – you strike in that direction, angle up with a scout party to the east. I’ll ride on with the rest of you and try to head Dumaroy off. I think we can learn a lot more by splitting –”

So they did as Kelson suggested. Quade, with Storm as a guide, and two of the settler’s riders, took the side trail after they found Dumaroy’s river bank camp deserted and indications that the Peaks settler had proceeded with his plan to trace the Norbies and his missing herd into the mountains.

Storm rode in a dreamy haze. He located his landmarks, made his calculations as to where they must avoid possible ambush. But all of that was handled mechanically by a part of him operating as a robot set to a well-defined task and keeping to the pattern of a work tape. Whether the stun ray had more lasting effects than he had supposed, the Terran could not tell. But nothing about him appeared to have much meaning. He rode beside Quade for a space and answered questions concerning his meeting with Logan, their escape from the Xiks and through the cave of the gardens, and the final disastrous attack of the yoris. Yet to the Terran the conversation was all a part of a dream. Nor was he conscious when Quade began to study him covertly as they bored farther into the wild territory of the foothills.

However much that haziness clouded his mind, it did not prevent an instant reaction to trouble when attack did come. They were in the narrow opening of that gorge leading to the valley of Gorgol’s cave entrance, riding single file as the ground demanded. Storm had perhaps five seconds of time to sound the alert. He saw that yellow-red arm move, the blue streaks of painted horns against a domed skull.

“Ahuuuuuuu!” The war cry of his people was a warning as bowstrings sang. Then the ground erupted with men about them. A numbing blow just below his shoulder almost sent Storm crashing from his saddle. His left arm hung heavy and limp as a blue-horned Norbie grabbed for his belt.

The Terran struck out with his other hand in a Commando blow but the weight of the falling native dragged him to the ground where they rolled into a pocket between two rocks. For a frenzied space of time Storm fought one-handed to keep a sword-knife from his throat. Only the fact that his first blow had practically disabled the Norbie saved his life. He brought his knee up and toppled the other off balance, rolling over again to send the Nitra senseless, sprawling out into the floor of the valley where the struggle was still in progress.

Storm struggled to his feet, only to collapse again as a stun ray clipped the side of his spinning head. He slid, bonelessly limp, behind the rocks and did not feel it when he landed full upon his wounded shoulder, driving the cruelly barbed arrowhead deeper into his flesh, snapping off its painted shaft.

Perhaps that second dose of the ray neutralized in a measure the effects of the first, for when Storm opened his eyes, he remembered clearly all that had happened just before his raying.

The bright sunlight had left the gorge and the small passage was chill, chill and very quiet. Shivering, catching his breath at the twinge in his stiff shoulder, Storm somehow dragged himself upright to lean against the small wall of rocks that had protected him. He must have been overlooked, he decided. The Nitra had not mutilated his body after their custom.

There were no bodies in the narrow way, though broken arrows, and churned earth, a splash or two of blood marked the field. Storm staggered into the open and attempted to read the trail. Bootmarks leading away – prisoners forced to walk?

Storm pressed his hand tightly over the ragged hole in his shoulder and squinted down at that mixture of hoof, boot, and Norbie tracks. With one hand out to fend him off from the walls he reeled along, heading for the garden cave.

Just how he reached the mouth of the outer doorway he could not tell. But he was there, calling softly for the two he had left behind. There was no reply out of the dark. Storm stumbled on, guided by the light seeping from the garden cavern. The doorway they had half-closed and then reopened was still unblocked. The Terran wavered in and went to his knees on the path between two flanking gardens.

“Logan!” He called weakly. “Gorgol!” He could not get to his feet again. But somewhere there was a pine tree – and green grass – and the fragrance of the hills of home. Storm wanted that as much as he wanted cool water in his throat, an end to the burning pain in his shoulder, cool green grass and the arch of pine boughs over his head.

He was crawling now, and there was an object barring his path, a yellow-red barrier. He touched the softness of flesh, saw Gorgol’s face turned up to his, the eyes closed, the mouth a little open. But the native was still alive. Storm could see the beat of a labouring pulse in a vein running beneath one of the ivory white horns. There were no visible wounds; the Norbie might have been peacefully asleep.

“Gorgol!” Storm shook him. Then raised his good hand and slapped the Norbie’s face stingingly. Until at last those eyes opened and the native stared bewildered up at him. With one hand Storm asked his question:

“Who?”

Gorgol levered himself up, both hands going to his head. He moaned softly, pressed his fingers hard over his eyes, before he used them to answer.

“I come – go find water – Head hurt – fall – sleep –”

“Rayed!” Storm looked about him. There was no Logan, Surra and Hing were missing, as were the horses.

“Nitra?” He doubted that. Would the Nitra, who could hardly be familiar with a settler’s side arm, use the ray on Gorgol?

“Nitra kill with arrows – knife –” Gorgol was signing. Then he caught sight of Storm’s wound, that inch or so of arrow shaft showing out of the ragged tear. “Nitra – that! Here?”

“Ambush – down valley –”

“Come!” Gorgol, one hand going again to his head as he arose, stooped to draw Storm up beside him. Supporting the Terran, he led him along through the maze of gardens. Until at last Storm realized that he was indeed lying on a bed of pine needles, looking up once more into the green tent of the Terran tree. Not too far away Gorgol had built a small pile of dry twigs and was now engaged in coaxing a spark from his firestone to ignite it. When a tongue of flame sent fragrant smoke curling up, the native drew his knife and passed its sharp point into the red heart of the fire.

Storm, guessing what was to come, watched those preparations grimly. They were necessary and he knew it. Logan was gone – the animals had vanished – but he must be able to carry on if they were to find either, or trace Quade’s scouts. When the Norbie came across to him, the Terran managed a stretch of the lips that curved them briefly into something still far from the smile he intended.

“Arrow stay in – bad!” Gorgol’s fingers spelled out the warning Storm did not need. “Must cut out – now.”

Storm’s good hand, moving restlessly through the carpet of needles on which he lay, closed on a small chunk of dead branch. He clenched his fingers about that in preparation.

“Go ahead!” Though Gorgol could not have understood what were to him meaningless sounds, he read the answer in Storm’s eyes. And go ahead he did.

Norbies were deft and the Terran knew that probably this was not the first time Gorgol had operated to cut out an arrowhead from some companion. But to endure the probing, skilful as it was, was hard. And Storm remembered what Logan had said about the Spartan treatment for arrow wounds and what it cost the victim. He was lucky in that three of the barbs on this head remained intact as Gorgol freed the glassy main section, and only one had to be located by deeper knife work.

Breathing hard and with a swimming head, Storm lay quiet at last while Gorgol slapped a mass of pulped wet leaves over the ragged wound and then raised his patient’s head to let him sip water in a blessed flood of coolness down his parched throat. As the native settled Storm down again, he held his hands into the line of the Terran’s vision and signed:

“Go – look for Logan – see who put Gorgol to sleep – hunt trail of evil ones –”

“Nitra –” Storm was too shaken to raise his hand in the proper movement. But again the Norbie appeared to understand.

“Not Nitra –” He wriggled his own right hand. “Still have bow hand on wrist – Nitra take for Thunder House trophy. Think maybeso Butchers. We see –”

Storm shut his eyes, even on the welcome green of the branch over him. He aroused to a soft, warm weight on his good arm, a snuffling in his ear, and opened his eyes slowly. Over his head was a rustling, and a dark shape moved on a low swinging branch, a sharp beaked head was bent so glittering eyes could regard him.

“Baku!” The eagle mantled in answer to his call, replied with her own harsh cry.

The warm lump on his arm chirruped, and Storm heard Surra’s purr rumble louder from beside him. For a moment of lazy content, not yet fully awake, the Terran lay unmoving. Then he tried to lift his left arm to caress Surra and felt the answering twinge in his shoulder, awaking him to full memory. The pain, as he experimented Cautiously, was not nearly as bad as he expected. As on his first visit, this slice of a vanished world had worked its magic on him, and he was able to move with a measure of ease. In addition, the leafy plaster the Norbie had applied had dried hard, covering the wound and dulling the pain as if it had narcotic properties.

Gorgol must have returned and left again, for a small heap of objects taken from their supplies was piled not too far away. A battered canteen and one box of rations lay on the woollen blanket that had been his legacy from his grandfather. And beyond was some fruit laid out on a leaf plate.

Storm ate, with the greediness of a thoroughly hungry man. And as the minutes passed he had less and less trouble with his wound. He was trying to find the full extent of his disability when Gorgol came running lightly down the pathway toward the grassy oasis about the pine tree.

“You have found – what?” Storm demanded eagerly.

“Logan taken by Butchers. Butchers killed by Nitra. Logan – men with you – held by Nitra in other valley. Maybeso kill. Time of big dry comes, Nitra wizard makes magic to Thunder Drummers so rain come again. Kill captives for Thunder Drummers –”

“Nitra think that makes rain again?” Storm tried to put into signs his questions. “Nitra fear rains never come unless kill prisoners?”

The Norbie nodded vigorously. Thunder Drummers live in high mountains, make rain, make growing things come. But sometimes too much rain – bad. Bad like too much dry. Storms worse in Nitra land than for Shosonna. So Nitra wizards give prisoners to Thunder Drummers – end big dry, not make bad rains if have prisoners to eat.”

“How do they give prisoners?”

Gorgol made a wide swinging sweep with one hand, ending in the gesture of one tossing an object out into empty space.

“Throw from high rock – maybeso. Not sure – Shosonna do not spy on Nitra wizards. Many, many Nitra guard around – kill those who watch if not Nitra.”

“Where?”

“Nitra camp over ridge. They wait – think they wish to kill Butchers. Also there are Shosonna in hills – maybeso fight with them.”

Refugees from the river village Dumaroy had tried to raid? These mountains were getting rather full now, Storm thought with a little smile. For some reason he felt almost absurdly confident. There was Dumaroy’s crowd, and the posse now headed by Kelson, unless either or both had run into the Xik holdouts, or Nitras, or been ambushed by the aroused and thoroughly angry Shosonna. But it was the Nitra who interested Storm most at present. Kelso had been warned, and Dumaroy was not too far ahead of the Peace Officer – they would have to take their chances.

But the Nitra were holding Logan, Quade, Lancin and perhaps Quade’s two riders. That was Storm’s concern. He had one card to play. With the Shosonna or any semi-civilised Norbie tribe it might not work. But here he would be dealing with natives who should know very little about off-world men, especially any breed different from the settlers with whom they were only on raiding terms.

He outlined his plan as well as he could for Gorgol’s benefit. And, to his pleased surprise, the native did not object, instead he answered readily enough:

“You have wizard power. Larkin say your name mean weapon of Thunder Drummers in his tongue –”

“In my tongue also.”

Gorgol nodded. “Also Nitra not see bird totem like this one, nor other animals who follow you. Horses men may ride, zamle they can trap. But a frawn eats not from a man’s hand, or rubs head against him for notice. Nitra wizard commands no animals. So you may walk into their camp without meeting arrow. But maybeso you not come out again – that is different –”

“Could Gorgol find Shosonna in the mountains to help?”

“Wide are the mountains. And before sunrise the Nitra wizards make their magic.” The Norbie’s hands sketched the killing sign. “Better Gorgol use this.” From his belt holster he whipped the ray rod. “Use such magic on them!”

“You have only one charge left –” Storm pointed out. “When that is used, all you will have is a rod without power –”

“And this!” The Norbie laid his hand on his knife hilt. “But there be much warrior honour in this deed. When the fire of men is lighted, Gorgol can stand forth and tell great deeds before the face of twenty clans, and there shall be none to say it is not so –”

Storm made his preparations carefully. Once more he turned his face into a mask with improvised paint. The folded blanket lay across his shoulder to hide Gorgol’s protecting plaster of leaves, its ends thrust through the concha belt. He surveyed himself in a greenish mirror of one of the water garden pools, tearing a rag from a supply bag to hold his untidy hair out of his eyes. And the image the water presented was a barbaric figure, one which certainly should hold attention in the Nitra assembly, even without the addition of the team.

The Terran could not bear Baku’s weight on his injured shoulder for the full trip and he had to coax her out of the cavern as he carried Hing, and Surra walked beside him. Gorgol told him the eagle had come from the sky the day before, just preceding the attack of the Butchers, and had vanished into the garden cave where Surra and Hing had chosen to prowl on their own concerns.

Storm concentrated as he came into the open upon holding the animals’ attention, preparing them to aid him in any necessary attack. Gorgol’s night sight aided them again as they climbed a twisting way up to the heights. But tonight there were moons, and when they won from the maw of the valley, they crossed a brilliantly lighted slope.

The Terran went slowly, conserving his strength, accepting the Norbie’s assistance over rough places. The wind was changing, bearing with it a low muttering of sound that aped the roll of thunder. They reached a ledge that Gorgol turned to follow, one hand ready to lead or support the Terran. And that narrow and perilous path took them around the spur of an outcrop, through an arch of stone, onto a wider platform where there was a muddle of dried sticks under an overhang.

Gorgol kicked at some of the rubbish to clear a path and signed:

“Evil flyer.”

This must have been the eyrie from which he had pursued the wounded monster on the day it led him into the valley of the Sealed Caves. But by all indications the bird had had no mate, nor had its untidy nesting place been claimed by another.

The nest ledge was above another. With Gorgol’s hand on his belt, Storm swung over by one hand and dropped to this, wondering how often he could equal that feat if called upon to do so tonight. However, this cutting led on around the side of the cliff and there was the red of fire beyond, a red that suddenly puffed vivid sparks of green into the air, along with a suffocating odour.

“Wizards!” Gorgol’s fingers wriggled.

As the green sparks cleared, Storm discovered that he was perched over a table-topped plateau, bare of any vegetation, but mounded here and there by weather-carved rocks, which assumed odd shapes in the semidarkness. Lashed to two such pillars were four men – settlers by their dress – while the space about the fire was crowded by squatting Norbies, intent upon the actions of two of their number who paced back and forth around the circle of the flames, beating on small tambours they held in their hands, so producing that deep thunder mutter.

Storm studied the scene. Either the Nitra felt secure from attack here or their sentries were very well hidden. He could detect none from his present stand. But there were men squatting beside the pillars to which the prisoners were bound, one each at the very feet of the captives.

“I am going in –” he signalled to Gorgol.

He beamed the silent summons to Baku who must be cruising overhead, felt Surra press reassuringly against him. Then the Terran made a slow descent of the drop immediately below him. As his boots struck the surface of the plateau he shouted aloud the rallying call of the team.

“Saaaaaaa –”

Out of the black sky Baku dropped, a thing that was a feathered part of the night endowed with separate life. Storm staggered a step or two as she set her claws in the blanket on his shoulder, resting her weight above the green wound. But he recovered swiftly and straightened under that necessary burden.

Then, with King wary against his breast, her eyes as bright as his necklace, and Surra, soft-footed beside him, showing her fangs in a snarl that wrinkled her lips, Storm walked confidently into the full light of the fire.

17

Comes now the Monster Slayer, wearing this one’s moccasins, Wearing the body of the storm born one. Comes now the Monster Slayer, bowstring extended, Arrow notched upon it for the flying – Comes now the Monster Slayer – ready for battle –

Storm was no Singer, but somehow the words came to his tongue, fitted themselves readily together into patterns of power so that the Terran believed he walked protected by the invisible armour of one who talked with the Faraway Gods, was akin to the Old Ones. He could feel that power rise and possess him. And with such to strengthen him what need had a man for other weapons?

The Terran did not see the Nitra rows split apart to make him a pathway to the edge of the fire. He was not truly aware of anything except the song and the power and the fact that, at this moment, Hosteen Storm was a small but well-fitting part of something much greater than any one man could aspire to be –

He stood still now, bracing himself under the weight of Baku, not noting the pain that weight brought him. Before him was a blue-horned Nitra wizard, his tambour drum raised. But the native was no longer beating it, instead he was staring at this apparition out of the night.

“Ahuuuuuu!” Storm’s voice spiralled up in the old war cry of his desert raiding people. “Ahuuuuuu!”

The Nitra wizard thumped his drum, was answered by a roll of muted thunder. However, there was a hesitation in that reply, which Storm sensed more than saw. The native made talk in his own high-pitched voice. To that the Terran did not reply with finger-talk. This was no time to betray kinship with the settlers and their ways. He turned to face the four prisoners, saw recognition leap to life in Logan’s eyes, surprise dawn in Quade’s.

Power is in this one’s arm – power is in this one, The Monster Slayer wears now this one’s body – He walks in this one –

Surra moved with Storm, matching her soft padding to his deliberate pace. He released King from his hold. The meerkat scurried, a grey shadow touched to life by the fire, to the nearest pillar. Rising on her hind legs, she attacked the prisoners’ bonds with teeth and claws. Storm gestured and Surra moved as quickly to Logan and his partner at the other post, to chew at the hide thongs about their bodies.

The Nitra priest squalled like an enraged yoris and sprang at Storm shaking his tambour. Baku mantled, her fierce eyes on the native, screaming with rage. She took off into the air and came down to do as she seldom did, attack from ground level, as she had faced the zamle in Krotag’s village. And the Nitra gave ground before her bristling fury, so that bird drove man around the fire and there was a shrilling chorus of wonder from the watching warriors.

“Power is now ours!” Storm exulted in a song perhaps only one other within hearing could understand. But if the words were unknown the meaning was clear and as he moved forward again the Nitra cowered away from him.

Quade stepped away from the pillar where he had been bound and Storm saw him shake off cut thongs. Gorgol had played his part back in the shadows. The settler jumped to catch the staggering Logan, but the younger man’s hand rested on Surra’s head for a moment – an attention the big cat had never before permitted from any save Storm – and he was once more steady on his feet.

“Let us go forth in power –” The Terran’s voice arose above the screaming rage of Baku. Surra led the retreat with Quade supporting his son, the riders crowding behind. Hing ran to Storm and climbed his leg, hooked her claws in his breeches.

“Go forth in power –” Storm put full urgency into that order. He moved between the retreating men and the restless Nitra. How long he could hold the natives Storm had no idea, but at this moment he had no doubts that he could hold them. Only a very few times in his life had the Terran experienced this inner Tightness, this being a part of a bigger pattern that was meant to work smoothly. Once when he first had his orders obeyed as team leader by the animals and Baku – twice during his service days when that team carried through a difficult assignment with perfect precision. But this in its way was again different, for the power flowed through him alone.

This one walks in power – This one carries power – This one works the will of the Old Ones, The Old Ones who walk in beauty, This one serves –

The rescued had gone beyond the rim of the firelight.

“Saaaaaa –”

Baku came to him. The Norbie wizard had a bleeding gash on his forearm and he no longer held the tambour. There was bitter hatred in his eyes and a knife ready in his hand. As Baku settled again on Storm’s shoulder the Nitra followed her in the arching spring of an attacking yoris.

He reached Storm only to go down with the stiff jerk of a man who had been rayed. And from the massed warriors there arose a wailing cry. It was then that Storm laughed. This was a night in which nothing could go wrong! Gorgol had used his rod at the right moment as he had earlier used his knife. They were all riding one of the waves of phenomenal luck that sometimes overtakes tides of action and can be used to carry a man on their crest until he is able to achieve the impossible. The Singers were right. At that moment full belief in the unseen powers of his people flooded through Storm, burning away all doubts. He was truly possessed and no Nitra – no – nor Xik – could stand successfully against him!

He withdrew stride by stride backwards to the edge of the light where he must climb to the heights.

“Over here, Storm –” came a low call just before the Nitra pack screeched their fear and anger aloud – though no warrior ventured in pursuit. A hand caught his arm, pulled him up to the cliff wall.

“Where did you come from?” Quade demanded. “We thought you were dead!”

Storm laughed again. The intoxication that filled him still bubbled.

“Far from dead,” he said. “But we had better get out of here before they recover nerve enough to come hunting –”

His exultation held as they climbed back to the ledge of the deserted nest, worked their way around to the valley of the Sealed Cave. But at the mouth of that same cave he halted.

“Listen!” His tone was so sharply commanding that the men about him were silent.

And it was not so much a noise that they heard as a vibration, which came to them through the walls of stone, from the earth under their feet.

”The Xik ship!” Storm knew that trembling of old. He had sheltered in hiding to watch the enemy take-off from hidden ports he had been sent to locate and harass. Always there had been that shaking of the earth as the alien ships had warmed to their take-off.

“What –?” Quade demanded.

The Xik ship – it is getting ready to take off. They may be leaving Arzor!”

Quade, one arm about Logan, put his other hand to the cliff surface.

“What a vibration!”

Too much so. Storm was conscious of that suddenly. The ship he had seen in the hidden valley was no intergalactic transport – it was hardly larger than a converted scout. This tearing was too much! Another Xik craft hidden somewhere near? Only now that throbbing came raggedly –

There was a roar that filled the night, a torch of light that shot miles high from the mountains. Around them the cliffs trembled, miniature landslips started, and they crouched together, men and animals, in a terrified huddle.

The tubes – they must have blown!” Storm was on his feet again, his hand pressing against his shoulder where the sharp bite of pain gnawed once more. He had been torn out of his self-hypnotism, thrown into the weariness of near exhaustion.

“What tubes?” Logan’s question came thinly as if some muffling veil hung between them.

The Xiks had their ship partly buried for concealment. They were digging her out when you escaped. But if they were pressed for time they might have tried to take her up without being sure of thoroughly clean tubes – or else” – Storm glanced down at the ball of whimpering fur he held, one sorely frightened meerkat – “or else King pulled one of her tricks. When they tried to lift the ship, the tubes blasted it wide open!”

“So they blew themselves up!” Brad Quade squared his shoulders. “But there might be something to see to over there, perhaps some of our boys were involved and need help. It might be well to check –”

“One of those other grills in the garden cave –” Logan cut in weakly. There was a north-western one pointing in the right direction. If we could find another tunnel from that it would take us straight through –”

Whatever shaking up the mountain had received, the garden cavern remained apparently untouched. Though the newcomers were awed by the bits of strange worlds divided by the black paths, they did not linger. Gorgol sped ahead, the rest trying to match his pace. A quarter of the way around the cavern they came to the grill Logan had found on his first exploration.

They mastered the latch and were fronting another tunnel which, with its curiously dead air and blackness, engulfed them wholly, for this time there was no torch to light the way. Surra pressed on with Gorgol, eyes of cat and native not so baffled by the gloom, the others strung out behind. All were driven by a gnawing desire to be through this passage and out into the normal world of Arzor once again.

It was easy to lose one’s sense of direction here in the dark and the tunnel did not run straight. Whether it followed the easy path of some natural fault in the mountain, or whether its long-ago builders had intended the turns to bewilder, Storm could not guess. But after two twists, he was at sea. For all he could determine, they might be heading back into the cavern they had just left. Baku moved restlessly on his shoulder, he lurched to one side, scraping against the unseen wall for support, hearing close by the heavy breathing of one of his companions, and then Logan’s assurance, fiercely uttered to his father, that he could keep up in spite of his injured leg.

Another twist, and a spark in the dark ahead, a light that grew to a reflected glow as if some giant fire raged beyond. They hurried on at that promise of escape.

Now the off-worlders caught up with Gorgol and the cat, to look out into a well of fire. Those flames ate along the terraces of the valley of the ship. And the heat from the conflagration beat in at them. Gorgol wriggled through a slit of door and Storm edged after him, giving Baku her flight signal. If there were any way out along the heights, she would find it for them.

Seeing that whirl of flames below, the Terran believed that nothing within that bowl of mountain walls could have survived the blowup of the overdriven ship. Sparks came up in the suck of air as they edged about the small walled space that long ago might have been a sentry point, to put a crag between them and the full force of the heat.

Even here the light approached that of day and they discovered Surra at the head of a flight of stairs. They were hardly more than niches gnawed away by the elements, down which a man could edge only at his peril. But they were a way down with the full bulk of the peak between them and the raging inferno of the blasted valley.

Surra’s species were sure-footed. The pumas of the western continent, a breed crossed with her dune cat ancestors in the experimental laboratories, were adept at climbing cliffs and crossing ridges where neither man nor hunting hound dared to follow. However, now she was examining this drop narrowly, advancing one paw as if to test the stability of that first weatherworn step.

Something in its feel must have reassured her, for she flowed down with liquid grace until she came out some hundred feet below in a shadowed space which appeared much larger than the platform on which Storm and Gorgol lingered. Storm hitched over that drop, only he crawled down those niches on his hands and knees. The heat of the opposite valley was cut off, and when he reached the ledge, he saw that from this point a roadway took the down curve, cut into the rock in the obscurity of the dark side of the mountain.

“A road –” Gorgol signed in the moonlight. “Below – a wider one – running so –” He gestured southeast.

Perhaps this was part of that other way into the valley up which the raiders had driven their stolen horses and frawns. If so, its other end should bring them out on the plains.

“Return –” Storm signed. “Bring the others here –”

Gorgol was already climbing, his tall body ascending that ladder easily. Storm went on. Surra quested ahead, scouting in advance. The Terran had a feeling that he must keep moving now – that if he rested, as his body craved, he would not be able to move on again. He started down that narrow pathway hacked in the side of the mountain, overhung in places where the builders had bored a half-tunnel to accommodate the traveller. These peaks might all be honeycombed, he thought, by caverns and tunnels, and other hidden ways of the long-ago invaders. Sorenson had been proved right and Survey must be informed.

Surra came out of the dark and pressed against his legs, making a barrier of her body in a warning of immediate danger. Storm swayed, retrieved his balance, listened. Then he caught the faintest noise – scrape of boot on rock? Metal against stone? Someone was coming up to meet him and that lurker could be anyone from a Nitra scout to an Xik who had escaped from the burning hell of the valley.

There were voices from behind too. The Quades and the riders were coming down under Gorgol’s guidance. And the Terran believed that the creeper below must have heard them also. Steadying himself against the rocks, he leaned as close to Surra as he could.

“Find –” That order was a faint whisper, underlined by mental force. She left him noiselessly to go into action – to flush out of hiding any enemy who might set up an ambush on the lower roadway.

At his belt was the only weapon Quade’s party had been able to spare him earlier – one of the long bladed hunting knives. Storm drew it, holding the weapon point up as a fencer might hold his épée. So much depended upon the identity of that hidden enemy. Against a Nitra one method of attack, but Xiks did not fight with knives – And what chance had a knife against a blaster or a slicer?

Storm’s progress became a stumbling run – with small pauses every five steps or so to listen. Surra had not yet flushed her quarry. A turn in the trail, the way jacknifed back on the level below. The Terran made that turn panting. It never occurred to him to share the struggle ahead with any of the men he had left on the upper trail. Storm was too used to fighting his own battles with only his team to back him. And this tangle with Xik forces had returned him to his service days, so that now, half-dazed with fatigue and the pain of his wound as he was, the enemy ahead was in his mind his own affair.

Another turn and the trail was widening – levelling off. To his left there was a darkened gash leading back into the side of the mountain. And it was here that the sudden beam of light flashed out, caught the last quarter of a yellow-brown tail but did not entrap the rest of Surra.

“Ahuuuuuu!” Storm shouted and cast himself to the left, bringing up with a little gasp of agony against a rock wall. That light flashed again to where he had stood only a second earlier.

His distracting tactics were successful. Surra squalled and attacked in her own way. The flash bobbed crazily and then fell to ground level, making a straight path of light across which Storm must go if he aided the cat.

Then a figure staggered out into the moonlight, with flailing arms. Settler! Or Xik in disguise? Storm moved out toward the torch hoping to turn it on that shape that was trying to ward off Surra. The big cat had not gone in to kill, but to harass, to keep her opponent moving until Storm arrived.

The ex-Commando stooped, picked up the torch awkwardly and then swung well around. There was no mistaking that whirling, dodging figure spotlighted in the beam – Bister!

“Saaaaaa –”

Surra flattened her body to the ledge, her ears back against her skull, her mouth a snarl, her tail lashing as the fur raised in a stiffly pointed ridge along her spine. Though she was between Bister and retreat she did not leap.

Storm saw that the other’s hand was going to a weapon at his belt.

“Hold it – right there!” he ordered.

The big man, his face patterning his emotions as fiercely as Surra’s did hers, leaned a little forward, his hand opening with visible reluctance, rising inch by grudging inch in the beam of light.

The Terran!” He mouthed the word as if it were obscene, making of it both an oath and a challenge. “Animal –”

“Beast Master!” Storm corrected him in his gentle voice, the one that marked him at his most dangerous.

He thrust his knife into the front of his belt and came on unhurriedly, holding the light on Bister until he was within arm’s distance. Then he moved with some of Surra’s lightning swiftness, pulling the stun rod from the other’s holster, tossing the weapon out and over the edge of the drop.

But Bister was quick, too. His hand streaked for his knife in one last bid for freedom. The fine super-steel of the off-world blade was blue fire in the torchlight as he bent in the crouch of the experienced fighter. And Storm realized that, Xik aper or not, the man facing him could use that weapon.

“Send in your cat, why don’t you – animal man!” Bister grinned, his teeth showing in the light almost as sharp and pointed as Surra’s. “I’ll mark her – just as I’ll gut you – Terran!”

Storm backed, raised his hand, and jammed the torch into a small crevice of the rock. He was a fool, he supposed, to fight Bister. But something within him compelled him to front the other – whoever or whatever he might be – with only bare steel between them. It was the old, old war of the barbarian fighting man who was willing to back his cause with the power of his own body.

“Surra –” Storm motioned to the cat. She remained where she was at the top of the down trail, her eyes bright, watching the men facing each other in the path of light. And she would not move unless he so ordered.

Storm’s knife was again in his hand. For a moment the weariness of his body was forgotten, his world had narrowed to those two bared blades. He heard and did not mark a cry from uptrail as the men there caught sight of the scene on the ledge.

But if the Terran did not mark that exclamation Bister did. And the big man rushed, wishing to make a beginning and an end all in one attack before the others could move to Storm’s assistance.

Storm dodged and knew a small bite of dismay at the slowness of his movement. But, as it had in the Nitra camp, his purpose possessed him, dampening out physical weakness. Only now his body did not obey with the speed and perfection he needed for safety.

Bister was conscious of that, and knew that Storm was not now the same man he had faced between the Port and the Crossing. He struck quickly, with expert precision.

18

Blade rang on blade as Storm met that attack. But Bister was boring in, confidence behind each move as he forced the Terran to retreat. Storm tried to weave a pattern of small feints and withdrawals that would bring him around so that full glare of the torch beam would strike in the other’s face. Bister was well aware of that danger and he did not advance as Storm gave way.

He could end this in a moment, the Terran knew, by one summons to Surra. But he must face Bister out by himself – standing on his own two feet, steel against steel – or else he could never command the team again.

Time had no meaning as their boots shuffled warily on the rock ledge. After his first leap of attack was countered, Bister, too, became careful, willing to wear down the slighter Terran. Storm felt a small wet trickle under the blanket on his shoulder and knew that his wound must have reopened under that protecting plaster of leaves. That trickle would drain his strength even more, put weights on his feet, just when he needed all the agility he could command.

It was he who was being forced into the path of the light, and once Bister had him blinded in the full glare of that beam he would be pinned helplessly. His thoughts raced, assembling all he knew of the apers. They had been given bodies to resemble his own, training that would make them react as closely as possible to the human. Yet still inside they must remain truly Xik, no matter how conditioned their cover or they would be of no use to their superiors. And the Xik – what set of circumstances would throw an Xik fighter off guard, rattle him badly? What would be his worst fears, his ultimate terror? Why had there always been war to the end between them and the human species?

Storm shuffled, danced, evaded by a finger’s small breadth a wily rush that would have pushed him into the danger zone. Why did the Xik fear and hate the Terrans? What was the deep-set base of that fear and could he play upon it now?

His thoughts were cut by the clash of steel meeting steel as the hilt of his own weapon was driven back almost to his breast and the jar of that blow numbed his arm for an instant. All the sixth sense that Storm drew upon when he worked with the team was alert behind the defences of his well-trained body.

Then – as if that flash of knowledge came from some source outside his own mind – Storm knew, knew the weakness of the Xik, because in a manner it was his own weakness by racial inheritance, a weakness peculiar in turn to the Dineh also, a weakness that could also be a kind of strength, so that men clung to it for the security they desired.

“You stand alone –” He spoke those words in Galactic, his tone level. “Your kind have blown themselves up back there, Bister. There is no ship waiting to take you from Arzor. Alone – alone – one among the many who hate you. Never shall you see your home world again! It is lost among the nameless stars.”

He knew in that same burst of understanding why the Xik had destroyed Terra – they had hoped to kill the heart of the Confederacy with that one bold stroke. But because the races bred on Terra differed, because her colonies were already mutating from their original breed, that scheme had failed.

“Alone!” He flung that single word with an upthrust of his Singer voice, trying to put into it the power he had felt when facing the Nitra wizard. Bister was alone, and so was Storm. But in this moment the agony of the old loss was dulled for the Terran. He could use that taunt as a weapon, and it carried no backlash to tear him in return.

“Alone!” He could see Bister’s eyes, dark, wide, and he saw, too, that small flame of desperation deep in them. Beneath his aper disguise the Xik was stirring. Storm must bring that alien up to the surface, set the buried self to struggling against the disciplined outer shell.

“No one to back you here, Bister. No cell brothers, no battle mates. One Xik left alone on Arzor to be hunted down –”

All the scraps of briefing the Terran had heard concerning the invaders and their customs came flaming into his mind, clear, distinct, lying ready to his use, as his feet circled in the motions of the duel.

“Who will cover your back, Bister? Who will raise the name shout for you? None of your brothers shall know where you died or mark your circle on the Hundred Tablets in the Inner Tower of your clan city. Bister shall die and it shall be as if he never lived. Nor will he have a name son to take up his Four Rights after him –”

Coll Bister’s mouth hung open a little and there was the glisten of moisture on his forehead, shiny on his cheeks and jaw. That alien spark in his eyes grew stronger.

“Bister shall die and that is all. No awakening for him by the Naming of Names –”

“Yaaaaah!”

The aper charged. But Storm had been warned by a momentary tenseness in his enemy’s body. He swerved with much of his old spontaneous grace. The other’s blade caught in the silver necklace on the Terran’s breast, scored stingingly across his chest. And the force of Bister’s body striking his drove Storm back to the very edge of the ledge.

For fear of being forced over the drop Storm grappled, knowing his danger. The aper was unwounded, strong enough to crush the Terran’s resistance. Storm could only use all the tricks of Commando fighting that he knew. One of them brought him out of that grip and reeling back to safety under the undercut.

Bister gave a shrill whine. His eyes were nonhuman now, filled only with the fear and loss Storm had hammered into his alien brain. Every belief that had bolstered his kind when they went into battle had been ripped to tatters by an enemy he hated above all others. He lived only for one thing now – to kill – not caring if his own death was the price he must pay for success.

And because he had slipped over the edge of sanity he was more dangerous and yet easier to handle. Storm backed and Bister followed, his crooked fingers grasping at the air before him.

Storm raised his own hand, flat, ready. Then he pivoted and what he had worked for happened. Bister blundered into the direct beam of the torch. For a moment his crazed eyes were blinded and Storm’s blow landed, clean and unhurried, as he might have delivered it on the drill field.

The aper gave a light cough that was half grunt and collapsed slowly forward, going to his knees, and then on to his face, to lie unmoving. Storm reeled back until his good shoulder met rock and he was supported by it. He watched Surra creep, her belly fur brushing the ledge, to sniff at Bister. She snarled and would have raised a paw with claws ready to rake, but the Terran hissed an order at her.

Brad Quade crossed the path of the light, knelt beside the aper. He turned the man over, felt for a heartbeat beneath the torn shirt.

“He is not dead.” Storm’s voice was thin and faraway even in his own ears. “And he is truly Xik –”

He saw Quade rise quickly, come toward him. Tired as he was, the Terran could not bear to have the other touch him. He drew away from the wall, to avoid Quade’s outstretched hand. But this time his will did not command his body and he crumpled, one hand falling across Bister’s inert body as he went down.

The picture had been part of Storm’s dreams. Yet now that he opened his eyes and lay without strength to move on the narrow bed, it was still there, covering one wall with a bold sweep of colours he knew and loved. There were the squared mesa of the south-western desert on his own world, above that the symmetrical rounded cloud domes first developed by Dineh painters when they worked with sand as their only material. And there was a wind blowing about that mesa. The Terran could almost feel it as he saw the hair of the painted riders whipped about their faces, the manes of their spotted ponies pulled across their eyes. The mural covered the wall beside his bed and Storm slept with his head turned toward it so that those riders in the wind were the first thing he saw when he had strength enough to raise his heavy eyelids. The artist who had created that scene had ridden in the desert winds of home, been torn by their force, had known well the scent of wool and sage, of twisted pine, and the dull, sun-heated sand. To watch that painting was like waking under the pine tree in the cavern of the gardens, and yet this was more closely Storm’s than the tree, the grass, the flowering things of his lost earth. Because this was a thing of beauty brought to life by one of his own blood. Only an artist of the Dineh could have pictured this –

The painted wall was far more real to him just then than those who came to tend his body. For Storm, the medic from the port and the silent, dark-faced woman who came and went were both shadows without substance. Nor was he able to emerge from his picture-world to answer Kelson’s questions when the Peace Officer had appeared beside his bed – the Arzoran was far less distinct to Storm than the nearest spotted pony. He did not know where he was, nor did he care. He was content to share his waking hours and his longer periods of dreaming with the riders on the wall.

But at last those periods of wakefulness grew longer. The dark woman insisted upon piling pillows to bolster his shoulders, lifting him so that he could not watch the wall in comfort. And he realized that she spoke to him shortly, even sharply, in the Dineh tongue, as one might who was impatient with a child proving stubborn. Storm tried to cling to his languid dreams – only to have them torn from him abruptly when Logan limped in. The mask of bruises had faded from the other’s face, so that Storm traced there something more than just the signature of Dineh blood, a teasing resemblance to a memory he could not quite recall.

“You like it?” The younger Quade looked beyond Storm to the mural, that section of Terran desert, untamed, but captured for all time on an Arzoran wall.

“It is home –” Storm answered truthfully and knew how revealing both words and tone were.

“That is what my father thinks –”

Brad Quade! Storm’s right hand moved across the blanket that covered him, its thin brownness crossing one familiar stripe to the next. His covering was Na-Ta-Hay’s legacy, or if not, one enough like it to be its twin. Na-Ta-Hay and the oath he had demanded of Storm – and Brad Quade’s death lay at the core of that oath.

The Terran lay hoping for the familiar spur of anger to toughen his resolution. But it did not come. It was as if he could feel only one thing now – longing for that pictured land. Yet even if there was no anger to back it, the oath still rested on him and he must do what he had come to Arzor-

Storm had half-forgotten Logan, but now the younger man rose from the chair he had chosen and moved forward to the mural, his eyes on those wind-battered riders. There was a shade of wistfulness in his face, and none could ever doubt his kinship with the men pictured there.

“What was it like?” he asked abruptly. “How did it make a man feel to ride so across that country?” Then he was conscious of the hurt that memory might deal, and a darker flood crept up his clean jawline. He turned his head to the bed, his eyes troubled.

“I left that life,” Storm picked his words with care, “when I was a child. Twice I returned – it was never the same. But it stays, deep in one’s mind it continues to live. The one who painted that – for him it lived. Even here, far across the star lanes, it lived!”

“For her –” Logan corrected softly.

Storm sat up, away from his bolstering pillows. He could not know how stone-hard his face had become. He did not have a chance to voice his question.

Another stood in the doorway, the big man with the compelling blue eyes, the man Storm had come to find and yet did not want to meet. Brad Quade walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at the Terran measuringly. And Storm knew that this was to be the last meeting of all, that in spite of his queer inner reluctance, he must force the issue and be ready to face the consequences.

With some of his old speed of action the Terran’s hand went out, caught at the knife in Logan’s belt, and jerked it free, resting the blade across his knee, its point significantly toward Brad Quade.

Those blue eyes did not change. The settler might have been expecting that very move. Or else he did not understand what it implied. But that Storm did not believe.

He was right! Quade knew – accepted the challenge – or at least recognized the reason for it for the other was speaking:

“If there is steel between us, boy, why did you bring me out of the Nitra camp?”

“A life for a life until our last accounting. You kept the blade out of my back at the Crossing. A warrior of the Dineh pays his debts. I come from Na-Ta-Hay. Upon Na-Ta-Hay and upon his family you have set the dishonour of blood spilled – and other shame –”

Brad Quade did not move, except to step closer to the foot of the bed. When Logan stirred, he signalled with his hand in an imperative order that kept his son where he was.

There is and was no blood spilled between the family of Na-Ta-Hay and me,” he replied deliberately. “And certainly no shame!”

Storm was chilled. He had never believed that Quade would deny his guilt when they at last faced each other. From his first sight of the settler he had granted him the virtue of honesty.

“What of Nahani?” he asked coldly.

“Nahani!” Quade was startled. He leaned forward, his big brown hands grasping the footrail of the bed, breathing a little faster as if he had come running to this meeting. And Storm could not mistake the genuine surprise in his tone.

“Nahani,” repeated the Terran deliberately. Then struck by a possible explanation for the other’s bewilderment, he added:

“Or did you never know the name of the man you killed at Los Gatos –?”

“Los Gatos?” Brad Quade stooped, as if striving to bring his blue eyes on a level with the dark ones Storm raised to meet them. “Who – are – you?” He spaced those words with little breaths between, as if each were forced from him by that sharp point still in Storm’s hold.

“I am Hosteen Storm – Nahani’s son – Na-Ta-Hay’s grandson –”

Brad Quade’s lips moved as if he were trying to shape words, and finally they came:

“But he told us – told Raquel – that you were dead – of fever! She – she had to remember that all the rest of her life! She went back to the mesa for you and Na-Ta-Hay showed her a walled-up cave – said you were buried in it – That nearly killed her, too!” Brad Quade whirled, his broad shoulders undefended to Storm’s attack. He balled his hands into fists, brought them down against the wall as if he were battering something else, a shadow not concrete enough to take the punishment he craved to deal out.

“Blast him! He tortured her on purpose! How could he do that to his own daughter?”

Storm watched that sudden rage die as Quade’s control snapped into place. The fist became a hand again, reached out to touch with delicate tenderness, the edge of the mural.

“How could he do it? Even if he were such a fanatic –” Quade asked again, wonderingly. “Nahani wasn’t killed – at least by me. He died of snake bite. I don’t know what you’ve been told – a twisted story apparently –” He spoke quietly and Storm slumped back against his pillows, his world unsteady. He could not fan dead anger to life. Quade’s sober voice carried too much conviction.

“Nahani was attached to the Survey Service,” Quade said tiredly. He pulled a chair to him, dropped into it, still eyeing Storm with a kind of hungry demand for belief. “I was, too, then. We worked together on several assignments – and our Amerindian background led us to close friendship. There was trouble with the Xik on some of the outer planets and Nahani was captured in one of their sneak raids. He escaped and I went to see him at the base hospital. But they had tried to “condition” him –”

Storm tensed and shivered. Quade, seeing his reaction, nodded.

“Yes, you can understand what that meant. It was bad – he was – changed. The medic thought perhaps something could be done for him on Terra. He was sent home for rehabilitation. But during the first month, he got away from the hospital – disappeared. We learned later that he made his way back to his own home. His wife and son were there, a two-year-old child.

“Outwardly he appeared normal. His wife’s father – Na-Ta-Hay – was one of the irreconcilables who refused to acknowledge any change or need for change in the native way of life. He was fanatic almost past the point of strict sanity. And he welcomed Nahani back as one rescued from the disaster of becoming Terran in place of Dineh. But Raquel, Nahani’s wife, knew that he must have expert help. She got word of his whereabouts to the authorities without her father’s knowledge. I was asked to go with the medic to pick him up because I was on leave and I was his friend – they hoped I could persuade him to come in peaceably for treatment.

“When he discovered we were coming, he went on the run again. Raquel and I followed him into the desert. When we found his hidden camp, he was already dead – of snake bite. And when Raquel returned to her father’s place for her baby, he was like a wild man – he accused her of betraying her husband, of turning traitor to her people, and drove her off with a gun.

“She came to me for help, and with guards we went to get her child – only to be shown a grave, the walled-up cave. Raquel collapsed and was ill for months. Afterwards we were married, I resigned from the service and brought her to my home here, hoping in new surroundings she could forget. I think she was happy – especially after Logan was born. But she only lived four years – And that is the true story!”

The knife lay by itself on the blanket. Storm’s hands were over his eyes, shutting out the room, allowing him to see into a place that was dark and alive with an odd danger he must face by himself, as he faced Bister back at the Peaks.

A blurred column of years stretched out behind him – separating him from that long-ago day when Na-Ta-Hay had impressed his bitter will upon a small awed boy to whom his grandfather was as tall and powerful as one of the fabled Old Ones – between now and the day just after he had landed at the Centre when Na-Ta-Hay’s spirit seemed to spread like a shadow across all his memories and dreams of Terra, his now destroyed homeland. He had clung to that shadow of a man, and to the oath he had given, making them anchors in a reeling world. Storm had fostered a hatred of Quade because he had to have some purpose in life, though even then something deep within him had tried to repudiate it. He saw it all now – so clearly.

That was why he had shrunk from pressing the dispute at his first meeting with the settler. As long as he could postpone this settlement, so could he continue to live. After it, his life would no longer have any purpose.

Na-Ta-Hay had stood in his memory as a symbol for all that was lost. To cling to the task the other had set him had, in a strange way, kept Terra alive. They had been right at the Centre in their distrust of him, he had not escaped the madness of the worldless men, only his had taken another and stranger turn.

Now he was empty, empty and waiting for the fear that lurked just beyond the broken barrier to crawl in and possess him utterly. Na-Ta-Hay had left him no anchor, only delusion. Now he stood on the same narrow edge of sanity where Bister had walked. For his kind, like Bister, had to have roots. Roots of a land – of kin –

Storm did not know he was shivering, huddling down into his pillows, seeking oblivion, which would not come. His hands dropped from his face to lie limp on the lightning patterned slashes of the blanket, but he did not open his eyes. For he felt he dared not see that mural now, nor look at the man who had told the truth and made him face his own complete loss.

Warmth ringed his wrists, fingers tightened there as if to drag him out of the encroaching darkness.

“Here, too, is the family –”

At first the words were only sounds – then the meaning came, the words repeated themselves in his empty mind. Storm opened his eyes.

“How did you know?” He begged assurance that true understanding of what he needed had prompted the choice of just those words, not chance.

“How did I know?” Brad Quade was smiling. “Are the Dineh the only wise ones, son? Is there only one tribe who seek roots in their own earth? This was your home – always waiting. Your mother helped to make it. You have merely been a little late in arriving – about – let me see now – some eighteen Terran years!”

Storm did not try to answer that. His eyes went once more to the mural. But now it was only a painted wall, nostalgic, beautiful, not meant to hold a man in spell. He heard a quiet laugh from the doorway and glanced up. Logan must have gone – now he was back. He stood there with Baku riding his shoulder as she had so often ridden Storm’s, with Surra flowing about his legs. The big cat came and put her forepaws on the bed and surveyed Storm round-eyed, while King chittered from the crook of Logan’s arm.

“Rain is in the corral. He’ll have to wait a few more days for your reunion –” Brad did not yet loose his hold on Storm’s wrists. “Here is your family – this is also the truth!”

Storm drew a single, long, shaky breath that was very close to something else. His hands lay quiet, drawing strength from that warm clasp.

“Yat-ta-hay,” he said. He was tired, so very tired, but the emptiness was filled with a vast and abiding content he was sure would never ebb again. “Very, very good!”

The End