“What was I doing?” came a counter demand.
“You were acting like a mind-controlled.”
Thorvald stared at him incredulously, then with a growing spark of interest.
“The minute you dripped water on that thing you changed,” Shann continued.
Thorvald reholstered his stunner. “Yes,” he mused, “why did I want to drip water on it? Something prompted me …” He ran his still damp hand up the angle of his jaw, across his forehead as if to relieve some pain there. “What else did I do?”
“Faced to the sea and said ‘that way,’ ” Shann replied promptly.
“And why did you move in to stop me?”
Shann shrugged. “When I first touched that thing I felt a shock. And I’ve seen mind-controlled—” He could have bitten his tongue for betraying that. The world of the mind-controlled was very far from the life Thorvald and his kind knew.
“Very interesting,” commented the other. “For one of so few years you seem to have seen a lot, Lantee—and apparently remembered most of it. But I would agree that you are right about this little plaything; it carries a danger with it, being far less innocent than it looks.” He tore off one of the fluttering scraps of rag which now made up his sleeve. “If you’ll just remove your foot, we’ll put it out of business for now.”
He proceeded to wrap the disk well in his bit of cloth, taking care not to touch it again with his bare fingers while he stowed it away.
“I don’t know what we have in this—a key to unlock a door, a trap to catch the unwary. I can’t guess how or why it works. But we can be reasonably sure it’s not just some carefree maiden’s locket, nor the equivalent of a credit to spend in the nearest bar. So it pointed me to the sea, did it? Well, that much I am willing to allow. Maybe we’ll be able to return it to the owner, after we learn who—or what—that owner is.”
Shann gazed down at the green water, opaque, not to be pierced to the depths by human sight. Anything might lurk there. Suddenly the Throgs became normal when balanced against an unknown living in the murky depths of an aquatic world. Another attack on the Throg-held camp could be well preferred to such exploration as Thorvald had in mind. Yet Shann did not voice any protest as the Survey officer faced again in the same direction as the disk had pointed him moments before.
VIII
Utgard
A wind from the west sprang up an hour before sunset, lashing waves inland until their spray was a salt mist in the air, a mist to sodden clothing, plaster hair to the skull, leaving a brine slime across the skin. Yet Thorvald hunted no shelter, in spite of the promise in the rough shoreline at their backs. The sand in which their boots slipped and slid was coarse stuff, hardly finer than gravel, studded with nests of drift—bone-white or grayed or pale lavender—smoothed and stored by the seasons of low tides and high, seasonal storms and hurricanes. A wild shore and a forbidding one, to arouse Shann’s distrust, perhaps a fitting goal for that disk’s guiding.
Shann had tasted loneliness in the mountains, experienced the strange world of the river at night lighted by the wan radiance of glowing shrubs and plants, forced the starkness of the heights. Yet there had been through all that journeying a general resemblance to his own past on other worlds. A tree was a tree, whether it bore purple foliage or was red-veined. A rock was a rock, a river a river. They were equally hard and wet on Warlock or Tyr.
But now a veil he could not describe, even in his own thoughts, hung between him and the sand over which he walked, between him and the sea which sent spray to wet his torn clothing, between him and that wild wrack of long-ago storms. He could put out his hand and touch sand, drift, spray; yet they were a setting where something lay hidden behind that setting—something watched, calculatingly, with intelligence, and a set of emotions and values he did not, could not share.
“… storm coming.” Thorvald paused in the buffeting of wind and spray, watching the fury of the tossing sea. The sun was still a pale smear just above the horizon. And it gave light enough to make out that trickle of islands melting out to obscurity.
“Utgard—”
“Utgard?” Shann repeated, the strange word holding no meaning for him.
“Legend of my people.” Thorvald smeared spray from his face with one hand. “Utgard, those outermost islands where dwell the giants who are the mortal enemies of the old gods.”
Those dark lumps, most of them bare rock, only a few crowned with stunted vegetation, might well harbor anything, Shann decided, giants or the malignant spirits of any race. Perhaps even the Throgs had their tales of evil things in the night, beetle monsters to people wild, unknown lands. He caught at Thorvald’s arm and suggested a practical course of action.
“We’ll need shelter before the storm strikes.” To Shann’s relief the other nodded.
They trailed back across the beach, their backs now to the sea and Utgard. That harsh-sounding name did so well fit the line of islands and islets, Shann repeated it to himself. Here the beach was narrow, a strip of blue sand-gravel walled by wave-worn boulders. And from that barrier of stones piled into a breastwork by chance, interwoven with bone-bare drift, arose the first of the cliffs. Shann studied the terrain with increasing uneasiness. To be caught between a sea, whipped inland by a storm wind, and that cliff would be a risk he did not like to consider, as ignorant of field lore as he was. They must locate some break nearer than the fjord, down which they had come. And they must find it soon, before the daylight was gone and the full fury of bad weather struck.
In the end the
