nimals,
saved them from discovery. But at least the hound did not bay again on
the tangled trail they left, and they hoped that the trap and the
clak-claks had put that monster permanently out of service.

On the third day they came down to one of those fiords which tongued
inland, fringing the coast. There had been no lack of hunting in the
narrow valleys through which they had threaded, so both men and
wolverines were well fed. Though animal fur wore better than the now
tattered uniforms of the men.

"Now where?" Shann asked.

Would he now learn the purpose driving Thorvald on to this coastland?
Certainly such broken country afforded good hiding, but no better
concealment than the mountains of the interior.

The Survey officer turned slowly around on the shingle, studying the
heights behind them as well as the angle of the inlet where the wavelets
lapped almost at their battered boot tips. Opening his treasured map
case, he began a patient checking of landmarks against several of the
strips he carried. "We'll have to get on down to the true coast."

Shann leaned against the trunk of a conical branched mountain tree,
pulling absently at the shreds of wine-colored bark being shed in
seasonal change. The chill they had known in the upper valleys was
succeeded here by a humid warmth. Spring was becoming a summer such as
this northern continent knew. Even the fresh wind, blowing in from the
outer sea, had already lost some of the bite they had felt two days
before when its salt-laden mistiness had first struck them.

"Then what do we do there?" Shann persisted.

Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a route
down one of the fiords, slanting out to indicate a lace of islands
extending in a beaded line across the sea.

"We head for these."

To Shann that made no sense at all. Those islands ... why, they would
offer less chance of establishing a safe base than the broken land in
which they now stood. Even the survey scouts had given those spots of
sea-encircled earth the most cursory examination from the air.

"Why?" he asked bluntly. So far he had followed orders because they had
for the most part made sense. But he was not giving obedience to
Thorvald as a matter of rank alone.

"Because there is something out there, something which may make all the
difference now. Warlock isn't an empty world."

Shann jerked free a long thong of loose bark, rolling it between his
fingers. Had Thorvald c