Free Three Hands for Scorpio by Andre Norton Page A

breath out of me. I choked out a scream, only to suffer a second hard blow from above as a weight covered my body. Then darkness took me.
    Sabina
    WE HAD BEEN swinging—how? why? And who—who was I? At least that knowledge returned: I was Sabina. Then I was falling, to strike a surface that moved under me. I heard a choked cry, sounding as from a far distance. Once more I lay still, on my side this time. Summoning what small strength I still possessed, I mind-Sent:
    â€œTam—Cilla!”

    â€œYes—” That was Cilla, I knew, for the variations of mental “speech” can be as individual as voices.
    â€œTam!” I called silently again. She had always been the strongest, the most assured of us three. However, she had borne the brunt of Maclan’s attention at the last … .
    Before I could thought-call a third time, my body was jerked upward by my bound feet to hang, in painful movement, upside down. The pulls continued, growing ever more vicious. I realized I must have become entangled in a rope fastened to the platform we had ridden.
    A final yank, followed by further shaking; then I was free and thudding downward. My cheek scoured across a rough surface—blanket?
    â€œCilla? Tam—Tam—?” I Sent desperately.
    â€œYes.” Again Cilia answered instantly. “Tam is close beside you—I can see her! But—is that blood on her face? Tam!” Cilla’s own message entwined with mine.
    I could neither lift my head nor change position, so I could see no more than the band of darkening sky above. Then came movement against that backdrop—a square object was swinging on ropes, describing a series of irregular lifts and drops, but rising ever higher. The platform that had brought us here was returning aloft.
    After I reported the departure of the flooring-square, I strove, in fashion of an eyeless worm, to edge myself backward, hoping to meet with a rocky outcrop against which I could wriggle sufficiently upright to see something of our surroundings.
    Almost as if some power had read my purpose and was moved to answer an unvoiced plea, I bumped against a hard surface, nearly as wide as my shoulders, so that I was heartened to struggle onward—or at least upward. Perhaps if I continued rubbing against the unyielding support, I could hatch myself from the cocoon of rope-wound blanket. And there was a sloping shape to what I pushed against! I added another bruise to my tally, but I fought on. Then my head and shoulders reached high enough so that I could at last see.
    Tam lay farthest from the wall down which we had been lowered. Her eyes were closed, and a wild lock of new-cropped hair had been glued to her forehead and right cheek by blood. Still farther from me, Cilia lay flat with her head free of wrapping.
    â€œThis—”Her lips moved now, to loose a voice that was thin and
strained. “This—is—the—Dismals.” She paused between each word, as though she brought the sentence forth with immense effort.
    Dismals—what did she mean? The dark state of spirit to which we had been reduced?
    Suddenly my memory sharpened. Those reports we had researched while alone at Grosper had mentioned a country-within-a-country in which the creatures were so terrifying that it might be the place to which all the horrors that populated men’s nightmares retreated during the day. But surely that was a legend, like some imaginary monster a nurse might use to frighten an ill-behaved child: “Do such-and-so, and you will go to the Dismals.”
    A land that lay below the surface of the world known to man, an enclave only able to be entered by ropes, though no one in his—or her—proper senses would choose to do so. Cradled by the Yakin Mountains, the Dismals was rumored to have been delved by the Servants of the Dark, the monster-kin. No man knew its extent because no would-be explorer had ever returned.
    Tam sighed, and her