This might be a torture more complex
than any which had yet greeted me. From the scarlet glint in her eyes I
felt she was playing with me, as the cat-things of the forest play with
their helpless victims. My mouth twitched in a grimace of humiliation as
I lowered myself obediently until my head rested on her fur-clad knees.
She murmured, smiling, "Is this so unbearable, then?"
I said nothing. Never, never for an instant could I forget that--all
human, all woman as she seemed--Dallisa's race was worn and old when the
Terran Empire had not left their home star. The mind of Wolf, which has
mingled with the nonhuman since before the beginnings of recorded time,
is unfathomable to an outsider. I was better equipped than most Earthmen
to keep pace with its surface acts, but I could never pretend to
understand its deeper motivations.
It works on complex and irrational logic. Mischief is an integral part
of it. Even the deadly blood-feud with Rakhal had begun with an
overelaborate practical joke--which had lost the Service, incidentally,
several thousand credits worth of spaceship.
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