Andre Norton - Storm Over Warlock

"My dream——" Shann said.

"Your dream." Thorvald had not echoed that; the answer had come in his brain.

Shann turned his head and surveyed the Wyvern awaiting them with a concentration which was close to the rudeness of an outright stare, a stare which held no friendship. For by her skin patterns he knew her for the one who had led that triumvir who had sent him into the cavern of the mist. And with her was the younger witch he had trapped on the night that all this baffling action had begun.

"We meet again," he said slowly. "To what purpose?"

"To our purpose ... and yours——"

"I do not doubt that it is to yours." The Terran's thoughts fell easily now into a formal pattern he would not have used with one of his own kind. "But I do not expect any good to me...."

There was no readable expression on her face; he did not expect to see any. But in their uneven mind touch he caught a fleeting suggestion of bewilderment on her part, as if she found his mental processes as hard to understand as a puzzle with few leading clues.

"We mean you no ill, star voyager. You are far more than we first thought you, for you have dreamed false and have known. Now dream true, and know it also."

"Yet," he challenged, "you would set me a task without my consent."

"We have a task for you, but already it was set in the pattern of your true dreaming. And we do not set such patterns, star man; that is done by the Greatest Power of all. Each lives within her appointed pattern from the First Awakening to the Final Dream. So we do not ask of you any more than that which is already laid for your doing."

She arose with that languid grace which was a part of their delicate jeweled bodies and came to stand beside him, a child in size, making his Terran flesh and bones awkward, clodlike in contrast. She stretched out her four-digit hand, her slender arm ringed with gemmed circles and bands, measuring it beside his own, bearing that livid scar.

"We are different, star man, yet still are we both dreamers. And dreams hold power. Your dreams brought you across the dark which lies between sun and distant sun. Our dreams carry us on even stranger roads. And yonder"—one of her fingers stiffened to a point, indicating the skull—"there is another who dreams with power, a power which will destroy us all unless the pattern is broken speedily."

"And I must go to seek this dreamer?" His vision of climbing through that nose hole was to be realized then.

"You go."

Thorvald stirred and the Wyvern turned her head to him. "Alone," she added. "For this is your dream only, as it has been from the beginning. There is for each his own dream, and another cannot walk through it to alter the pattern, even to save a life."

Shann grinned crookedly, without humor. "It seems that I'm elected," he said as much to himself as to Thorvald. "But what do I do with this other dreamer?"

"What your pattern moves you to do. Save that you do not slay him——"

"Throg!" Thorvald started forward. "You can't just walk in on a Throg barehanded and be bound by orders such as that!"

The Wyvern must have caught the sense of that vocal protest, for her communication touched them both. "We cannot deal with that one as his mind is closed to us. Yet he is an elder among his kind and his people have been searching land and sea for him since his air rider broke upon the rocks and he entered into hiding over there. Make your peace with him if you can, and also take him hence, for his dreams are not ours, and he brings confusion to the Reachers when they retire to run the Trails of Seeking."

"Must be an important Throg," Shann deduced. "They could have an officer of the beetle-heads under wraps over there. Could we use him to bargain with the rest?"

Thorvald's frown did not lighten. "We've never been able to establish any form of contact in the past, though our best qualified minds, reinforced by training, have tried...."

Shann did not take fire at that rather delicate estimate of his own lack of preparation for the carrying out of diplomatic negotiations with the enemy; he knew it was true. But there was one thing he could try—if the Wyverns permitted.

"Will you give a disk of power to this star man?" He pointed to Thorvald. "For he is my Elder One and a Reacher for Knowledge. With such a focus his dream could march with mine when I go to the Throg, and perhaps that can aid in my doing what I could not accomplish alone. For that is the secret of my people, Elder One. We link our powers together to make a shield against our enemies, a common tool for the work we must do."

"And so it is with us also, star voyager. We are not so unlike as the foolish might think. We learned much of you while you both wandered in the Place of False Dreams. But our power disks are our own and can not be given to a stranger while their owners live. However...." She turned again with an abruptness foreign to the usual Wyvern manner and faced the older Terran.

The officer might have been obeying an unvoiced order as he put out his hands and laid them palm to palm on those she held up to him, bending his head so gray eyes met golden ones. The web of communication which had held all three of them snapped. Thorvald and the Wyvern were linked in a tight circuit which excluded Shann.

Then the latter became conscious of movement beside him. The younger Wyvern had joined him to watch the clak-claks in their circling of the bare dome of the skull island.

"Why do they fly so?" Shann asked her.

"Within they nest, care for their young. Also they hunt the rock creatures that swarm in the lower darkness."

"The rock creatures?" If the skull's interior was infested by some other native fauna, he wanted to know it.

By some method of her own the young Wyvern conveyed a strong impression of revulsion, which was her personal reaction to the "rock creatures."

"Yet you imprison the Throg there——" he remarked.

"Not so!" Her denial was instantaneous and vehement. "The other worlder fled into that place in spite of our calling. There he stays in hiding. Once we drew him out to the sea, but he broke the power and fled inside again."

"Broke free—" Shann pounced upon that. "From disk control?"

"But surely." Her reply held something of wonder. "Why do you ask, star voyager? Did you not also break free from the power of the disk when I led you by the underground ways, awaking in the river? Do you then rate this other one as less than your own breed that you think him incapable of the same action?"

"Of Throgs I know as much as this...." He held up his hand, measuring off a fraction of space between thumb and forefinger.

"Yet you knew them before you came to this world."

"My people have known them for long. We have met and fought many times among the stars."

"And never have you talked mind to mind?"

"Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no communication between us, neither of mind nor of voice."

"This one you name Throg is truly not as you," she assented. "And we are not as you, being alien and female. Yet, star man, you and I have shared a dream."

Shann stared at her, startled, not so much by what she said as the human shading of those words in his mind. Or had that also been illusion?

"In the veil ...that creature which came to you on wings when you remembered that. A good dream, though it came out of the past and so was false in the present. But I have gathered it into my own store: such a fine dream, one that you have cherished."

"Trav was to be cherished," he agreed soberly. "I found her in a broken sleep cage at a spaceport when I was a child. We were both cold and hungry, alone and hurt. So I stole and was glad that I stole Trav. For a little space we both were very happy...." Forcibly he stifled memory.