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concentrated, where they worshiped Ithaqua at his totem temple. If the Texan's captors got him that far, then there would be no further hope of rescuing him.
    He returned to the now forsaken wolf-warrior campsite, passed it over without pause, and flew on, ever northward, scanning ahead and following the ruts made by the travois's runners. Flying as fast as he could, another twenty minutes saw him entering a region where the terrain began to climb. Up ahead he spied ragged-crested hills and knew that the going must now be that much rougher for the wolf-warriors.
    As the hills rose up, their sides grew steeper, filled with gullies and crevasses. Great boulders stuck up here and there on the slopes, with loose shale collected about their bases. Many of the crevasses were deep with jagged sides, their floors deep-shadowed and boulder strewn. The hills were desolate and dangerous.
    Then he saw the wolf-warriors. They were ahead of him and higher, their attention fixed upon the problem of getting the time-clock up onto the final ridge. All of them were there, engaged in the same task, and as yet they had not seen him. He alighted, crouched down behind a boulder, and took a longer, closer look at their problem.
    Normally they would find little difficulty in scaling these heights - indeed, beyond this final rise they would begin to descend, and it would be that much easier - but they had reckoned without the weight of de Marigny's clock. The thing was incredibly heavy. Once when Titus Crow was studying the weird hieroglyphs on its four-handed dial, it had taken four strong men to move it for him.
    Right now three wolves crouched at the top of the ridge. They were roped to the travois, straining to haul it up after them. Strapped to its frame in folds of hide lay the clock, refusing to budge up the rocky incline. Below, levering away at the stubborn device, five of the Indians cursed and shouted and fought to maintain their balance on the difficult surface. A sixth wolf-warrior goaded on the wolves at the top of the ridge, thumping their sides with his naked fists. The seventh and last, the leader of the party, sat on the back of the fourth wolf immediately behind Hank Silberhutte. He sat there level with the travois but on a firmer piece of ground, shouting instructions at the men who laboured to do his bidding. Silberhutte, apparently bored by the whole thing, sat silently, his hands tied behind him.
    De Marigny saw his chance: a heaven-sent opportunity to fly at the back of the leader of the party and unseat him, then to pick up Silberhutte as best he could and carry him over the ridge to safety. And perhaps if Silberhutte had known that de Marigny was close and that he had a plan in mind, then all might have gone according to that plan. He did not know, however, and the Warlord had his own ideas.
    Uppermost in Silberhutte's mind was a determination to make as much trouble for his captors as he possibly could, if only to slow them down until de Marigny could catch up. As a last resort he knew he could call on his woman, Armandra, the Priestress of the Plateau, but not until no other option remained. Armandra was not immortal — a tomahawk or spear could kill her just as easily as they could any other mortal — and quite apart from purely physical dangers, Ithaqua himself was due back on Borea at any time. Thus the Texan kept his mind locked tight, telepathically blank, and prayed that Kota'na and the others would not get back to the plateau before he had somehow managed to escape.. If they did, and if Armandra took the notion into her head that he was in trouble, then nothing on Borea would prevent her from coming out after him.
    Just as de Marigny was about to make his move, the big Texan half-turned where he sat,. drove his elbow viciously into his captor's belly, and toppled him from the wolf's back. Then, somehow, he got to his feet, balanced for a moment on the beast's shoulders, launched himself headlong at the five