Yazz drew back from the entrance to the burrow. Her jaws were fast set upon a thick round body, just behind the head of the creature. It was beating its forefeet against the ground in a vain effort to win free.
Its efforts merely broke loose clods which the claws showered through the hole from which it had been so unceremoniously ripped. Yazz gave a quick snap and threw her captive to the other side of the hole. It landed on its back, kicked feebly, then was still, while its killer was already heading back into the hole after more prey.
As Farree was swept against the cliff, those sparks of light which had snared him before formed a new ball, drawing back several paces. He gasped air into lungs which had been compressed, took aim at that ball.
He never fired. Instead he gave a cry as the balled lights sped at his head. A solid mass, it struck an instant later with a force which snapped his head back. The sparks wheeled endlessly before his eyes. Then, on the tail of that strike there followed pain so intense he could neither hear, nor see, nor understand anything, save that the world was a place of torture. The brilliant, eye-searing white which had followed on the stroke of the sparks darkened and then even the pain, at last, also was gone.
As he had been in his dream he was somewhere else, not in his body, though he searched frantically for awareness of flesh and bone and could not find it. Yet he was able to sense that he was not alone. Bojor—Yazz—he tried to hail them—
Nothing of the warm sense of friendship, which should follow on his thinking those names, came to him. He tried to advance the mind search. As it had been when he met the haze he could not pierce the unseen envelope which appeared to hold him.
No, he could not reach out—but he could be aware– aware that he was not alone in this nothingness. Farree drew back into himself with a rush. For a moment he wanted to cower in hiding as he had in the Limits when some drunken and sadistic inhabitant of that hell was seeking him to afford amusement, for that which was without him projected a feeling of strength and ruthless purpose. Only he was no longer Dung, the outcast of the Limits; he was Farree, winged and—free? No, not free; he was caught in a trap, held to await the pleasure of those who had set it.
"—Langrone? But none of the guards survived!"
Thoughts, not voices. Only he could not send any reply. He was mind-dumb but not deaf.
"They were found—" Farree was granted an instant or two of a picture of a green hillside and on it lay forms sprawled. The nearest lay face down and dribbling down a bare back, from twin pools of raw flesh, was blood. Wing! The wings had been cut from the dead!
"—dead—" He had been so intent upon that picture which one mind broadcast that he had missed part of the sentence.
"Langrone," repeated the first mind voice emphatically. "Doubtless poisoned like Atra—bait!" There was contempt in that. Through the darkness there came a thrust of pain but it seemed far away—accompanying the body which he could no longer feel for himself.
"Blind!" The mind voice was very sharp, cutting into him as a knife could have cut his flesh—it was undoubtedly an order delivered to him. "Prisoner with no hope!" a second contemptuously delivered.
If he had for some reason accepted the fate the first comment had laid upon him there was still resistance in him against the second. Prisoner he might be—somehow dead-alive—but that core of him which had awakened with his wings, had been nurtured by Maelen and Vorlund, remained strong enough to refuse to surrender.
"—Selrena." Again he had missed part of the thought speech.
"We cannot carry– Ha—what is that thing?"
"What? Where?"
"It moved over there!"
There came a time of quiet and then the first of his captors spoke again: "It is one with the beasts that these death givers have brought to serve them. A rock finished it off. Now—we cannot carry him. Let Selrena lift him if she wishes. Or let him lie; he will be true dead soon enough. The winged people do not take well to the dark ways. If he is Langrone he is really of no matter to us."
"Say you that to Vaspret's face?"
"Langrone!" The other repeated the word as if he were spitting it out in a gob. "Air Dancers! What does it matter that they are being hunted?"
"Remember that which the death dealer from the other ship found? Do you think that they will let go of any of this world now that they have laid hands on that? Roxcit's lying place they are going to search for. With what they have in their ways of strange knowledge they are going to find the second cache soon. That they hunt the winged people—yes, there is no real harm for us in that. But that they break the guard we are set to—"
"Well enough, well enough! Remember, if this Langrone is one with Atra he has been blinded by those others. He will be able to draw them—"
"Not so. For them perhaps he shall be bait now." There was satisfaction in that.
The darkness in which Farree was closed drew tighter about him as if to force the air from his lungs, even as the lights had earlier done. He was aware of that frightening increase of pressure even if he was no longer aware of his body. Then—there was nothing.
Farree opened his eyes. There were no longer folds of black choking him—rather what he saw was grey—like the light of very early morning or the haze which had turned him back from his first scouting on this world. He rested on his side but a small attempt at movement told him that he was still the prisoner the mind voice had claimed him to be.
However, the haze of grey seemed to sway sluggishly in an odd way which made him feel ill. He was entirely aware of his body again but the ills of that were of less importance than what the swaying of haze revealed or obscured.
There was a chair which towered above him as he lay not too far away from it on a floor covered with a pavement of alternate green and brown blocks of stone, the brown blocks veined with threads of green. The chair was white and the legs, arms, and the frame of the back were heavily and intricately carved, the arms ending in balls as clear as if they had been solidified from fresh stream water. The chair had a padded back and seat of heavily patterned stuff, green leaves, flowers of every shade and here and there a band of what appeared to be such runes as Zoror had once shown him, saying that it was believed that the People he sought once preserved knowledge by such markings.
Before the chair was a footstool and on this sat a small creature which he could not immediately determine as a sentient being or a lower animal.
The small body was covered with spotted scales, golden in shade, but its contours were humanoid. A head which was round in the back and narrowed to a point in front crowned a long and sinuous neck. It had four limbs, stick thin, the upper pair of which ended in webbed six-fingered paws; the back ones ended in broad pads. Between the forepaws it rolled back and forth a tube of white which was patterned by a series of holes. Putting one end of that to the sharp snout mouth and fingering along the length, it now produced a series of notes which sounded like trickling water. The eyes were very large and were glowing like green flames, if such could exist.
Those eyes were regarding Farree and he knew that the creature was perfectly aware of him. Cautiously he tried mind touch—but was astounded to find that he had apparently been deprived of that sense—it was like the haze he had faced before. He met a wall.
The tinkling notes of the pipe grew louder and the room haze was thinning, disappearing. He could see more of the room now—the sturdy legs and lower surface of a long table, the color of walls where ran the runic patterns of the chair cushions; but these were clear, unhidden by any other designs.