come into this place were vague;
his body was a mass of dull pain, as if he had been scorched. Scorched!
Had the Throgs used one of their energy whips to subdue him? The last
clear thing he could recall was that slow withdrawal down the cleft
inside the skull rock, the Throg not too far away--the sound from the
entrance.

A Throg prisoner! Through the pain and the sickness the horror of that
bit doubly deep. Terrans did not fall alive into Throg hands, not if
they had the means of ending their existence within reach. But his hands
and arms were caught behind him in an unbreakable lock, some gadget not
unlike the Terran force bar used to restrain criminals, he decided
groggily.

The cubby in which he lay was black-dark. But the quivering of the deck
and the bulkheads about him told Shann that the ship was in flight. And
there could be but two destinations, either the camp where the Throg
force had taken over the Terran installations or the mother ship of the
raiders. If Thorvald's earlier surmise was true and the aliens were
hunting a Terran to talk in the transport, then they were heading for
the camp.

And because a man who still lives and who is not yet broken can also
hope, Shann began to think ahead to the camp--the camp and a faint,
thin chance of escape. For on the surface of Warlock there was a thin
chance; in the mother ship of the Throgs none at all.

Thorvald--and the Wyverns! Could he hope for any help from them? Shann
closed his eyes against the thick darkness and tried to reach out to
touch, somewhere, Thorvald with his disk--or perhaps the Wyvern who had
talked of Trav and shared dreams. Shann focused his thoughts on the
young Wyvern witch, visualizing with all the detail he could summon out
of memory the brilliant patterns about her slender arms, her thin,
fragile wrists, those other designs overlaying her features. He could
see her in his mind, but she was only a puppet, without life, certainly
without power.

Thorvald.... Now Shann fought to build a mental picture of the Survey
officer, making his stand at that window, grasping his disk, with the
sun bringing gold to his hair and showing the bronze of his skin. Those
gray eyes which could be ice, that jaw with the tight set of a trap upon
occasion....

And Shann made contact! He touched something, a flickering like a badly
tuned tri-dee--far more fuzzy than the mind pictures the Wyvern had
paraded for him. But he had touched! And Thorvald, too,