Warlock by Andre Norton

Thorvald moved. The raft tilted and the wolverines growled. Shann sat down, one hand out to the officer’s shoulder in warning. Feeling that touch Thorvald shifted, one hand striking out blindly in a blow which Shann was just able to avoid while with the other he pinned the map case yet tighter to him.

“Take it easy!” Shann urged.

The other’s eyelids flickered. He looked up, but not as if he saw Shann at all.

“The Cavern of the Veil—” he muttered. “Utgard . . .” Then his eyes focused and he sat up, gazing around him with a frown.

“We’re in the desert,” Shann announced.

Thorvald got up, balancing on feet planted a little apart, looking to the faded expanse of the waste spreading from the river cut. He stared at the mountains before he squatted down to fumble with the lock of the map case.

The wolverines were growing restless, though they still did not try to move about too freely on the raft. They greeted Shann with vocal complaint. He and Thorvald could satisfy their hunger with a handful of concentrates from the survival kit. But those dry tablets could not serve the animals. Shann studied the terrain with more knowledge than he had possessed a week earlier. This was not hunting land, but there remained the bounty of the river.

“We’ll have to feed Taggi and Togi,” he broke the silence abruptly. “If we don’t, they’ll be into the river and off on their own.”

Thorvald glanced up from one of the tough, thin sheets of map skin, again as if he had been drawn back from some distance. His eyes moved from Shann to the unpromising shore.

“How? With what?” he wanted to know. Then the real urgency of the situation must have penetrated his mental isolation. “You have an idea—?”

“There’s those fish we found them eating back by the mountain stream,” Shann said, recalling an incident of a few days earlier. “Rocks here, too, like those the fish were hiding under. Maybe we can locate some of them here.”

He knew that Thorvald would be reluctant to work the raft inshore, to spare time for such hunting. But there would be no arguing with hungry wolverines, and he did not propose to lose the animals for the officer’s whim.

However, Thorvald did not protest. They poled the raft out of the main pull of the current, sending it in toward the southern shore in the lee of a clump of light-willows. Shann scrambled ashore, the wolverines after him, sniffing along at his heels while he overturned likely looking rocks to unroof some odd underwater dwellings. The fish with the rudimentary legs were present and not agile enough even in their native element to avoid well-clawed paws which scooped them neatly out of the river shallows. There was also a sleek furred creature with a broad flat head and paddle-equipped forepaws, rather like a miniature seal, which Taggi appropriated before Shann had a chance to examine it closely. In fact, the wolverines wrought havoc along a half-mile section of bank before the Terran could coax them back to the raft.

As they hunted, Shann got a better idea of the land about the river. It was sere, the vegetation dwindling except for some rough spikes of things pushing through the parched ground like flayed fingers, their puffed redness in contrast to the usual amethyst hues of Warlock’s growing things. Under the climbing sun that whole stretch of country was revealed in a starkness which at first repelled, and then began to interest him.

He discovered Thorvald standing on the upper bluff, looking out toward the waiting mountains. The officer turned as Shann urged the wolverines to the raft, and when he jumped down the drop to join them, Shann saw he carried a map strip unrolled in his hand.

“The situation is not as good as we hoped,” he told the younger man. “We’ll have to leave the river to cross the heights.”

“Why?”

“There’s rapids—ending in a falls.” The officer squatted down, spreading out the strip and making stabs at it with a nervous finger tip. “Here we have to leave. This is all rough ground. But lying to the south there’s a gap which may be a pass. This was made from an aerial survey.”

Shann knew enough to realize to what extent such a guide could go wrong. Main features of the landscape would be clear enough from aloft, but there might be insurmountable difficulties at ground level which were not distinguishable from the air. Yet Thorvald had planned this journey as if he had already explored their escape route and that it was as open and easy as a stroll down Tyr’s main transport way. Why was it so necessary that they try to reach the sea? However, since he had no objection to voice except a dislike for indefinite information, Shann did not question the other’s calm assumption of command, not yet, anyway.

As they embarked and worked back into the current, Shann studied his companion. Thorvald had freely listed the difficulties lying before them. Yet he did not seem in the least worried about their being able to win through to the sea—or if he was, his outer shell of unconcern remained uncracked. Before their first day together had ended, the younger Terran had learned that to Thorvald he was only another tool, to be used by the Survey officer in some project which the other believed of primary importance. And his resentment of the valuation was under control so far. He valued Thorvald’s knowledge, but the other’s attitude chilled and rebuffed his need for something more than a half partnership of work.

Why had Thorvald come back to Warlock in the first place? And why had it been necessary for him to risk his life—perhaps more than his life if their theory was correct concerning the Throgs’ wish to capture a Terran—to get that set of maps from the plundered camp? When he had first talked of that raid, his promised loot had been supplies to fill their daily needs; there had been no mention of maps. By all signs Thorvald was engaged on some mission. And what would happen if he, Shann, suddenly stopped being the other’s obedient underling and demanded a few explanations here and now?

Only Shann knew enough about men to also know that he would not get any information out of Thorvald that the latter was not ready to give, and that such a show-down, coming prematurely, would only end in his own discomfiture. He smiled wryly now, remembering his emotions when he had first seen Ragnar Thorvald months ago. As if the officer ever considered the likes, dislikes—or dreams—of one Shann Lantee. No, reality and dreams seldom approached each other. Dreams . . .

“On any of those shoreline maps,” he asked suddenly, “do they have marked a mountain shaped like a skull?”

Thorvald thrust with his pole. “Skull?” he repeated, a little absently, as he so often did in answer to Shann’s questions unless they dealt with some currently important matter.

“A peculiar sort of skull,” Shann said. Just as vividly as when he had first awakened, he could picture that skull mountain with the flying things around its eye sockets. And that, too, was odd; dream impressions usually faded with the passing of waking hours. “It has a protruding jaw and the waves wash that . . . red-and-purple rock—”

“What?”

He had Thorvald’s complete attention now.

“Where did you hear about it?” That demand followed quickly.

“I didn’t hear about it. I dreamed of it last night. I stood there right in front of it. There were birds—or things flying like birds—going in and out of the eyeholes—”

“What else?” Thorvald leaned across his pole, his eyes alive, avid, as if he would pull the reply he wanted out of Shann by force.

“That’s all I remember—the skull mountain.” He did not add his other impression, that he was meant to find that skull, that he must find it.

“Nothing . . .” Thorvald paused, and then spoke slowly, with a visible reluctance. “Nothing else? No cavern with a green veil—a wide green veil—strung across it?”

Shann shook his head. “Just the skull mountain.”

Thorvald looked as if he didn’t quite believe that, but Shann’s expression must have been convincing, for he laughed shortly.

“Well, there goes one nice neat theory up in smoke!” he commented. “No, your skull doesn’t appear on any of our maps, and so probably my cavern does not exist either. They may both be smoke screens—”

“What—?” But Shann never finished that query.

A wind was rising in the desert to blow across the slit which held the river, carrying with it a fine shifting of sand which coasted down into the water as a gray haze, coating men, animals, and raft, and sighing as snow sighs when it falls.

Only that did not drown out another cry, a thin cry, diluted by the miles of land stretching behind them, but yet carrying that long ululating howl they had heard in the Throg camp. Thorvald grinned mirthlessly.