Free Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) by Andre Norton, Lyn McConchie Page A

luck, kid—soundsas if you’ve got yourself a good deal. Survey pays well and you can turn their write-off in for an import permit or somethin’ like.”
    Storm was disturbed. He wanted none of the information Ransford had supplied. What did Quade’s personal affairs matter to him? In that second brief encounter with his chosen enemy he felt he had lost some advantage he needed badly as a bolster for the future. He had accepted Quade, the enemy, but this other Quade was infringing more and more on his carefully built-up image. He hurried about his preparations for the trip, thankful for the occupation.
    Surra sat on his left, the meerkats snuffled, poked, and pried under and around his busy hands as Storm sorted, piled, and made up two packs of his personal belongings. One he must leave with Larkin, the other comprised the kit he would need on the trail. There remained now just one small bundle to explore.
    He had left that roll to the last, doubly reluctant to slit the waterproof covering sewed about it on another world, keeping its contents intact for two years. Now Storm sat quietly, his hands resting palm down upon the package, his eyes closed, exploring old roads of memory—roads he had managed to avoid exploring at the Center. As long as he did not cut the waxed cord, as long as he did not actually see what he was sure must be inside—just so long was he in a way free of the last acceptance of defeat—of acknowledging that there was never to be any return.
    What did these men of another race here in camp—or those in the town—or those at the Center who had watched him so narrowly for months—that Commander who had so reluctantly stamped his freedom papers—what did any of them know of the voices of the Old Ones and how they could come to a man? How could they understand a man such as his grandfather—a Singer learned in ancient ways, following paths of belief these other races had never walked, who could see things not to be seen, hear things that no others could hear?
    Between Storm and the clear beliefs of his grandfather—that grandfather who had surrendered him to schooling as a government ward only under force—there was a curtain of white man’s learning. Good and bad, he had had to accept the new in gulps, unable to pickand choose until he was old enough to realize that behind the outer façade of acceptance he could make his own selection. And by that time it was almost too late, he had strayed far from the source of his people’s inner strength. Twice after he had been taken away by the authorities, Storm had returned to his people, once as a boy, again as a youth before he left Terra on active service. But then always between him and Na-Ta-Hay’s teaching there had been the drift of new ways. Fiercely opposed to those, his grandfather had been almost hostile, grudging, when Storm had tried to recapture a little of the past for himself. Yet some of it had clung, for now there sang through his mind old words, older music, things half-remembered, which stirred him as the wind from the mountains whipped him outwardly, and his lips shaped words not to sound again on the world from which this bundle had been sent.
    Slowly, Storm sawed through the tough cord. He must face this now. The outer wrappings peeled off, and Ho and Hing crowded in with their usual curiosity, intrigued by the strange new smells clinging to the contents.
    For there were scents imprisoned here—he could not be imagining that. The tightly woven wool of the blanket rasped his fingers, he saw and yet did not want to see the stripes of its pattern, red, white, blue-black, serrated concentric designs interrupting them. And to its tightly creased folds clung the unmistakable aroma of the hogan—sheep smell, desert smell, dust and sand smell. Storm sucked it into his lungs, remembering.
    He shook out the blanket, and metal gleamed up at him as he thought it might. Necklace—blue-green of turquoise and dull sheen of silver—ketoh