at the farther edge of town the hyperspace transmitter
was nearing completion. The little smelter was waiting to receive the
lathe and other iron and steel and turn them into the castings for the
generator. Their weapons were ready, the mockers were trained, the
prowlers were waiting. And in the massive corral beyond town forty
half-tame unicorns trampled the ground and hated the world, wanting to
kill something. They had learned to be afraid of Ragnarok men but they
would not be afraid to kill Gerns....

The children with the goats reached the stockade and two of the
prowlers, Fenrir and Sigyn, turned to see him standing on the wall. He
made a little motion with his hand and they came running, to leap up
beside him on the ten-foot-high wall.

"So you've been checking up on how well the young ones guard the
children?" he asked.

Sigyn lolled out her tongue and her white teeth grinned at him in
answer. Fenrir, always the grimmer of the two, made a sound in his
throat in reply.

Prowlers developed something like a telepathic rapport with their
masters and could sense their thoughts and understand relatively complex
instructions. Their intelligence was greater, and of a far more mature
order, than that of the little mockers but their vocal cords were not
capable of making the sounds necessary for speech.

He rested his hands on their shoulders, where their ebony fur was
frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing
movement but they were getting old--they were only a few weeks short of
his own age. He could not remember when they had not been with him....

Sometimes it seemed to him he could remember those hungry days when he
and Fenrir and Sigyn shared together in his mother's lap--but it was
probably only his imagination from having heard the story told so often.
But he could remember for certain when he was learning to walk and
Fenrir and Sigyn, full grown then, walked tall and black beside him. He
could remember playing with Sigyn's pups and he could remember Sigyn
watching over them all, sometimes giving her pups a bath and his face a
washing with equal disregard for their and his protests. Above all he
could remember the times when he was almost grown; the wild, free days
when he and Fenrir and Sigyn had roamed the mountains together. With a
bow and a knife and two prowlers beside him he had felt that there was
nothing on Ragnarok that they could not conquer; that there was nothing
in the u