Not one of the natives stirred, and their determination not to yield to that command beat back at the off-worlders in a counterblast. How long could such a standoff continue? Charis wondered. Sooner or later the Company men would be in on this.
She put down Tsstu and went back to the anteroom, to discover that while she could close the outer door, there was no way to secure that portal. The palm lock which had once fastened it was now only a blackened hole in the fabric.
“Kill the witch one! With you, we shall bargain.”
The thought was clear speech in her head as she reentered the wrecked com room.
“You are as we. Kill the witch and be free!” The males appealed to Lantee.
Tsstu hissed, her ears flattened against her round skull as she backed to a stand before Charis. Taggi growled from where he accompanied Shann, his small eyes alight with battle anger.
The spokesman for the natives glanced at both animals. Charis caught the quiver of uncertainty in his mind. Shann the Wyvern could understand; Charis he hated since he classed her with his own females who had always held the Power. But this link with animals was new and so to be feared.
“Kill the witch and those who are hers.” He made his decision, lumping the unfamiliar with Charis. “Be free again as now we are.”
“Are you?” From somewhere Charis found the words. “Away from this room or from the base where this off-world machine cannot reach—are you then free?”
Stark, hot hate glowing at her from yellow eyes, a snarl lifting scaled skin away from fangs.
“Are you?” Shann took up, and Charis readily gave way to his leadership. To the Wyvern males, she was a symbol of all they hated most. But Lantee was male and so to them not wholly an enemy.
“Not yet.” The truth was hard to admit. “But when the witch ones die, then we shall be!”
“But there may not be a need for such killing or dying.”
“What are you thinking of?” Charis asked vocally.
Lantee did not look at her. He was studying the Wyvern leader with intensity, as if he would hold the native in check by his will alone.
“A thought,” he said aloud, “just a thought which might resolve the whole problem. Otherwise, this is going to end with a real blood bath. Now that they know what this machine can do for them, do you think the males will ever be anything again but potential murderers of their own kind? And we can destroy this machine—and them, but that will be a failure.”
“Not killing?” The Wyvern’s thoughts cut in. “But if we do not kill them while they may not dream us defenseless, then they will in time break us and once more use the Power against us.”
“Upon me they used the Power and I was in the outer dark where nothing is.”
The astonishment of the Wyverns was a wave spreading out to engulf the off-worlders.
“And how came you again from that place?” That the Wyvern recognized the site of Lantee’s exile was plain.
“She sought me, and these sought me, and they brought me forth.”
“Why?” came flatly.
“Because they were my friends; they wished me well.”
“Between witch and male there can be no friendship! She is mistress—he obeys her commands in all things—or he is naught!”
“I was naught, yet here I am now.” Shann sought Charis. “Link! Prove it to them—link!”
She tossed the mental cord to Tsstu, to Taggi, and then reached for Shann. They were as one, and as one Shann thrust at the Wyvern’s consciousness. Charis saw the spokesman for the natives sway as if buffeted by a storm wind. Then the off-worlders broke apart and were four again.
“Thus it is,” Shann said.
“But you are not as we are. With you, male and female may be different. True?”
“True. But also know this: as one, we four have broken the bonds of the Power. But can you live always with a machine and those who have brought you the machine? Can they be trusted? Have you looked into their minds?”
“They use us for their purposes. But that we accept for our freedom.”
“Turn off the machine,” Shann said abruptly.
“If we do, the witches will come.”
“Not unless we will it.”
Charis was startled. Was Lantee running his claims too high? But she had begun to understand what he was fighting for. As long as the cleft between male and female existed in the Wyvern species, there would be an opening for just such trouble as the Company men had started here. Shann was going to attempt to close that gap. Centuries of tradition, generations of specialized breeding, stood against his will. And all the terrors and fears of inbred prejudice would be fighting against him, but he was going to try it.
He had not even asked for her backing or consent, and she discovered that she did not resent that. It was as if the linkage had erased all desire to counter a decision she realized as right.
“Link!”
A crackling explosion, the stench of burning plasta-fab. The Company soldiers had turned blasters on the dome! What did Lantee propose to do about that? Charis had only time for one fleeting thought before her mind fell into place beside the others.
Again it was Lantee who aimed that shaft of thought, sent it out past the melting wall of the dome, straight at the enemy minds, open and ill-prepared for such attack. Men dropped where they stood. A still-spitting blaster rolled along the ground, spraying its deadly ray in a wave pattern along a wall.
Shann had had the courage to try that first gamble and he had won. Could he do the same again in the greater gamble he proposed?
The Wyvern spokesman made a slight motion with his hand. Those who walled the machine with their bodies stood away.
“That is not the Power as we know it.”
“But it was born of that Power,” Shann caught him up. “Just as other ways of life may issue from those now known to you.”
“But you are not sure.”
“I am not sure. But I know that killing leaves only the dead, and the dead may not be summoned back by any Power ever known to living creatures. You will die and others shall die if you take the vengeance you wish. Then who will profit by your dying—except perhaps off-worlders for whom you do not fight in truth?”
“But you fight for us?”
“Can I hide the truth when we touch minds?”
That curious quiet came down as a curtain between the off-worlders and the Wyverns as the natives conferred among themselves. At last the spokesman returned to contact.
“We know you speak the truth as you see it. No one before has broken the bonds of the Power. That you have done so means that perhaps you can defend us now. We brought our spears for killing. But it is true that the dead remain dead, and if we make the killing we wish, we as a people shall die. So we shall try your path.”
“Link!” Again the command from Lantee. He made a motion with his hand and the Wyvern pressed a lever on the installation.
This time they had not fashioned a spear of the mind-force but a barrier wall, and only just in time. As a wave of determined attack struck against it, Charis swayed and felt the firm brace of Shann’s arm as he stood, his feet a little apart, his chin up—as he might have faced a physical fight, fist against fist.
Three times that wave battered at them, striving, Charis knew, to reach the Wyvern males. And each time the linkage held without yielding. Then they were there in person—Gysmay, her brilliant body-patterns seeming to flame in her terrible anger, Gidaya—and two others Charis did not know.
“What do you?” The question seared.
“What we must.” Shann Lantee made answer.
“Let us have those who are ours!” Gysmay demanded in full cry.
“They are not yours but their own!”
“They are nothing! They do not dream, they have no Power. They are nothing save what we will them to be.”
“They are part of a whole. Without them, you die; without you, they die. Can you still say they are nothing?”
“What say you?” The question Gidaya asked was aimed at Charis, not Shann.
“That he speaks the truth.”
“After the manner of your people, not ours!”
“Did I not have an answer from Those Who Have Gone Before which you could not read, Wise One? Perhaps this is the reading of that answer. Four have become one at will, and each time we so will it, that one made of four is stronger. Could you break the barrier we raised here while we were one, even though you must have sent against us the full Power? You are an old people, Wise One, and with much learning. Can it not be that some time, far and long ago, you took a turning into a road which limited your Power in truth? Peoples are strong and grow when they search for new roads. When they say, ‘There is no road but this one which we know well, and always must we travel in it,’ then they weaken themselves and dim their future.