He shrugged. “I know these two,” he said. “You have to be careful you don’t anthropomorphize, but offhand I’d say Spots is thoroughly depressed and worried. I don’t know if that worries me more than Bigs being so happy, or not.”
Spots folded his ears. “Must you torture that thing?” he said to Hans, as the old man blew tentatively into his harmonica. “It screams well, but the pain to my ears is greater.”
Off curled asleep around the canvass-wrapped tnuctipun module, Bigs’s ears twitched in harmony. His hands and feet were twitching as well, hunting in his sleep, and an occasional happy mreeowrr trilled from his lips.
Hans shrugged and put it away, picking up his cards. “Don’t signify,” he said mildly. “You want to bet?”
“Sniff this group of public-transit tokens,” Spots snarled, throwing down his hand. “I fold. Count me out of the game.” He stalked off into the night, tail lashing.
“Ratcats don’t have the patience for poker,” Hans observed. “Bids?”
“I fold too,” Jonah said. Tyra had dropped out a round before.
“Neither do youngsters,” Hans observed, showing his hand; three sevens. He raked in the pot happily. “Could be we’ll all be very rich, but I never turn down a krona.”
Jonah made a wordless sound of agreement and looked over at the girl. She was sleeping, curled up against her saddle with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. He smiled and drew the blanket up around her shoulders…
“Awake!” Spots shouted, rushing back into the circle of firelight on all fours.
Jonah leaped. Tyra awoke and stretched out a hand for her rifle in its saddle-scabbard; Garm growled and raised his muzzle.
The kzin kicked his brother in the ribs and danced back from the reflexive snap. “Awake. Are you injecting sthondat blood? Get ready!”
He turned to the humans. “A dozen riding beasts approached; their riders dismounted and are coming this way, a half-kilometer. They will be within leaping distance in a few minutes.”
Bigs awoke sluggishly, shaking his head and licking at his nose and whiskers. Spots efficiently stripped the beamer from a pack-saddle and tossed it to his brother before freeing his own weapon. Jonah checked his rifle; Tyra and Hans were ready.
“Careful,” he said. “These might be the bandits—but they might not. We can’t fight our way back to Neu Friborg through a hostile countryside.”
Spots snorted. “Who would be pursuing us but the ones we fought, thirsty for blood and revenge?” he said. Bigs was growling, a hand resting on the module. Still, the smaller kzin licked his nose for greater sensitivity and stood stretched upright, sniffing open-mouthed.
“The wind favors us,” he said after a moment. “And I do not recognize any individual scents. That does not mean these are not the ones we defeated—I had little time to pay close attention then.” He sounded disappointed, thwarted in his longing to lose himself in combat and forget the decisions that had been oppressing him.
“Spread out and we’ll see,” Jonah said; it made no sense to outline themselves against their campfire. “No, leave the fire. If you put it out, they’d know we’d spotted them.”
Not bandits, was his first thought, as he watched through his field glasses. The bandits had been in a mismatch of bits of military gear and outbacker clothes. These were in coarse cotton cloth and badly tanned leather, with wide-brimmed straw hats and blanket-like cloaks. Their weapons were a few ancient, beautifully-tended chemical hunting rifles, and each man carried a long curved knife, heavy enough to be useful chopping brushwood. Tough looking bunch, he thought, but not particularly menacing. They stopped a hundred or so yards out from the fire and called, a warning or hail. He could not follow their thick backcountry dialect, but Hans and Tyra evidently could. They stood and called back, and Jonah relaxed.
“Act casual,” Hans said as they all returned to the fire. “These people are deep outback. They’ve got peculiar ways.” He frowned a little. “Don’t think they’ll like we’ve got kzin with us.”
The men did stiffen and bristle when they saw the silent red-orange forms on the other side of the fire, but they removed their hats and squatted none the less, their hands away from their weapons. One peered across the embers of the fire at Tyra and smiled, nudging the others. That brought a chorus of delighted, crook-toothed grins; the kzinti controlled themselves with a visible effort.
“I passed through their village,” Tyra explained.
“What do they want?” Jonah asked.
Now that fear was gone it was a nagging ache to be delayed. They must get to Neu Friborg before Early and his cohorts could think up something else. Jonah never doubted for a moment that the bandits had had Early’s backing, doubtless through his Nipponjin friends. The ID cards proved that, the forgery was far too good for hill-thieves to have managed.
“Got to handle the formalities first,” Hans said. “Go on, light up.”
The outbackers were passing around their pouch of tobacco; Jonah clumsily rolled a cigarette and passed it to Tyra, who managed the business far more neatly, even one-handed. She poured cups of coffee and handed them around as Hans filled his pipe, lit it with a burning stick from the fire and passed that likewise; the kzinti were pointedly ignored, crouching back with their eyes shining as red as the coals. Time passed in ritual thanks, in inquires about their health and that of their horses and mules, talk of the dry weather…
Tyra leaned forward intently as the real story came out. “They had a brush with our bandits,” she said. “And—oh, Gott, no!”
Hans took up the story, listening intently; Jonah could catch no more than one word in three. “Sent some of their kids up-hill for safety. Ran into an ambush. Couple of men killed; they got the kids back, but they’d been hit with some sort of weapon they don’t understand. The kids are alive and breathing, but they won’t wake up.”
Jonah’s skin crawled. He relayed a few questions through the two Wunderlanders. “Neural disrupter,” he said, when the villagers had answered. “Didn’t know they had one—nasty thing, short-range but effective.”
“They want—they want us to do something for them, heal the children,” Tyra burst in. “What can we do?”
“Hmmm.” Hans broke off to rummage through their medical kit. “Yep. That might work.” He spoke to the headman of the strangers; they stood. “Wants us to come right away. That’d be better. Take a day or two to get to their settlement, two three days there.”
Jonah opened his mouth to object—couldn’t they call in to one of the lowland villages and get a doctor in by aircar?—and then shut his mouth again when Tyra looked at him. Damn. Shame works where guilt wouldn’t.
Bigs felt no such objection; he shot to his feet, sputtering in the Imperative Mode of the Hero’s Tongue, with his brother only half an expostulation behind. A dozen outbacker heads turned to the aliens like gun-turrets tracking, hands moving towards rifles and machetes. A sudden chill hit Jonah’s stomach as he heard Bigs:
“We will not delay.”
Even then, Jonah frowned in puzzlement. His command of the Hero’s Tongue was excellent if colloquial, and he could have sworn that that had been in Ultimate Imperative Mode—which only the Riit, the family of the Patriarch, were entitled to use. Not that there was anything on Wunderland to stop Bigs using any grammatical constructions he pleased, but it was an unnatural thing for the big kzin to do. He was a traditionalist to a fault, that much had been clear for months. Spots stopped in mid-yowl to glance aside at him, confirming Jonah’s hunch.
No matter. Both kzin were on the verge of fighting frenzy, and a very nasty little battle could break out at any second with a scream and leap. Garm backed up, bristling and barking hysterically; the kzinti ears twitched, and that was just the extra edge of hysteria that might set them off.
“Shut that damned dog up!” he barked. Tyra grabbed its collar and soothed it. “You two, you won’t get extra speed by starting a battle now.”
“What are the kittens of t
hese feral omnivores to us?” Spots said, all his teeth showing. “You pledged to cooperate in this hunt with us, Jonah-human. And you were the one who said we risk failure with every minute of delay. Is the word of Man good, or is it not?”
A weight of meaning seemed to drop on that last phrase; Spots was watching him intently, not staring at the outbackers the way Bigs did. Jonah had a sudden leaden conviction that more rested on his decision than he could estimate.
“Look…” he began. Then an idea struck. “Tyra, these people, they’re trustworthy?” An emphatic nod. “You and Hans are the ones with the medical training. You two go to the village; Spots and Bigs and I will take our…load on ahead. You can catch up—the outbackers will lend you a horse, surely, Hans.”
Bigs’ head jerked around to look at him, and his muzzle moved in the half-arcs of emphatic agreement. Spots brushed back his whiskers, as if confirming something to himself.
“That would be according to your oath,” he said softly. “I apologize.” Jonah was a little surprised; ‘sorry’ was something kzinti were reluctant to say, especially to other species.
The outbackers followed the exchange with wary eyes. Hans turned to them and spoke, then smiled at Jonah:
“As it turns out, young feller, they don’t want our kzin anywhere near their place anyway. Just me and Fra Nordbo here are fine. We’ll start right away, if that’s all right with you. Sooner begun, sooner done.”
Tyra rose. “Will you be all right?” she asked softly.
“We’ll manage,” Jonah replied.
“I do not have to account to you,” Bigs said loftily.
“Stop using that tense!” Spots snapped in a hissing whisper, glancing ahead to where Jonah walked beside the lead mule. “Who contacted the Fanged God and promoted you to royalty, Big-son of Chotrz-Shaa?”
“I am self-promoted,” Bigs replied softly, but with no particular effort to keep his voice down. “And the Fanged God fights by my side. How else would the two monkeys remove themselves? We will take the northeastern path, abandoning all but the beast necessary to carry the capsule. Alone, we will make better time. There is a kzin settlement at Arhus-on-Donau. We will seek shelter there. We will build a means to get off-planet, or buy it—these monkeys will do anything for money.”
“You are self-befuddled!” Spots said. “Fool. What will Jonah-human say to this?”
“It is what Durvash says that is important,” Bigs said, resting his hand on the module. “He becomes clearer all the time.”
Spots recoiled. “Now you, oh patriarchal warrior, take orders like a slave from that little horror?”
Bigs bristled, suddenly swelling up and hulking over his smaller sibling in dominance-display. Spots forced himself to match it, letting his claws slide free.
“At least it is a carnivore, you…you submitter-to-omnivores,” Bigs grated. “Your breath stinks of grass!”
Spots’s mouth gaped at the horrendous insult. All their lives they had sparred and tussled for dominance, insulting each other in the friendly fashion of non-serious rivals. That was a blood libel.
“Is your oath nothing to you?” he grated.
“Oh, I will allow the monkey to fight me…barehanded,” Bigs said, with a sly, horrible amusement in the twitch of his ears and brows. “That fulfills the oath.” He paused for effect “What of your blood-obligation to the Patriarchy and the Heroic Race, Spots-Son of Chotrz-Shaa?”
Abruptly, Spots collapsed into a fur-flattened, droop-eared, limp-tailed puddle of misery. “I know,” he muttered. “I am ripped in half! If you have forgotten your honor in madness, I have not. We are the last of the line of Chotrz-Shaa. Two lives and the life of our House we owe these monkeys. Your life to Jonah-human. Mine to a female! Yet we owe blood and honor to the Patriarch.”
Bigs smirked, and Spots flared into a gape-jawed scream of rage: “Stop whacking at my tail, fatherless sthondat-sucker!”
He could see Jonah turning, alarmed at the sound, and he forced calm on himself with an effort greater than he had thought was in him.
“No killing by stealth,” he finished, dropping into the Menacing Tense, “Or you die.”
Bigs smirked again, and continued in the infuriating inflections of a Patriarch: “You will conspire with a monkey against your own sibling?”
“No. But I will not allow you to kill him.”
A sneer, just showing the ends of the dagger incisor-fangs. “He is helpless as a kit at night.”
“I will be watching.”
“How long can you go without sleep, brother? I will feast on his liver yet” Bigs stalked off after the train of mules. As he came level with the last his hand rested on its pannier, and Spots could hear the edge of a whisper.
My tail is cold, he thought in panic. What can I do? What can I do?
Three nights later Spots watched desperately as Jonah prepared for sleep, tilting his broad-brimmed hat forward over his eyes; it was a bright night, alive with the shooting stars so common on Wunderland and with Beta Centauri overhead near the moon. The human gave him a puzzled look as he settled in, and then his breathing grew slow and steady, his heartbeat sounded like an ancient Conundrum Priest drum to Spots’s straining ears. A heavy drum, regular, soothing. Heavy as his eyelids, so soothing as they dropped across dry and aching eyes, so pleasant. Making the ground soft like piled cushions, like piled cushions in the palazzo when he was young, and his father was crooning:
“Brave little orange kzin
Brave little spotted kzin,
Turn to the din
And if it makes you smile,
Leap
But if it is nothing at all
Really nothing at all
You may turn-in;
And droop your eyes while
You sleep.”
Spots sighed and turned, drifting, content. Then shot half-erect, trembling, his fur laid tension-flat on the bones of face and body, tail out and rigid.
Bigs was halfway from his lair of blankets to Jonah, moving with ghost-lightness. Moonlight and Betalight glinted on the heavy blade of the wtsai in his hand. He caught his brother’s eye and shrugged with fur and tail, grinned insolence, flared his nostrils.
I scent that which you do not. Slowly, insultingly, he sauntered back to his blankets, laid himself down. Then he yawned, a pink-and-white, curl-your-tongue yawn of drowsy contentment, stretching every limb separately and grooming a little. He circled, finding exactly the right position, and curled up with tail over nose. One eye remained open for a second, glinting at Spots from beneath the tufted eyebrow.
You were lucky. But I only have to be lucky once.
Spots whimpered, tongue dangling as he panted with envy and despair.
“Are you all right?”
Spots blinked. What am I doing lying on the ground? he thought.
The mule had stopped, pulling at the brushes nearby with a dry tearing sound as leathery leaves parted. One limb at a time, the kzin pulled himself up. Heavy, heavy, more heavy than the battle-practice in the old days, when their Sire worked them to exhaustion under kzin-normal gravity in the exercise room of the palace. Something seemed to hold his hands to the dry packed soil, and pains shot up his back as he stood and squinted into the bright daylight. He ran his fingers through the tangled mass of his mane, and hanks and knots of hair came loose, the furnace wind snatched it from him and scattered the long orange hairs on the air, on the dirt, on the scrubby bushes and sparse grass. He stood, dully staring after them.
“Are you all right?” Jonah asked again. Then he recoiled hastily from the vicious snap that nearly ripped open his arm. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said, tight-lipped, and went back to the lead mule.
Bigs’s ears smirked as he came by, his hand on the capsule. He never left it, now. “Soon we will camp for the night,” he jeered. “Won’t it be good to sleep?” More seriously: “It will be for the best, brother.”
“I have no brother,” Spots rasped, and stumbled forward to take th
e reins of his mule.
Even the scream hardly woke Spots. His eyes were crusted and blurred even when he opened them. The savage discord of metal on metal jarred him to some semblance of consciousness, and the scent of hot fresh-shed blood. He stumbled erect, mumbling, and stepped forward. The raw-scraped tip of his tail fell across the white ash crust that covered the embers of the fire, and he shot half a dozen meters into the air, screeching.
When he came down, he could see. Bigs’s first leap had failed, and Jonah had gotten out of his blankets and erect. Now the two were circling; Jonah had a four-furrowed row of deep scratches across his chest, and the very tip of Bigs’s tail was missing. The wtsai gleamed in the kzin’s hand, and Jonah had his arm-long cutter-bar whistling in a figure-eight between them. Totally focused, Bigs lunged forward. Density-enhanced steel shrieked against the serrated edges of the bar and Bigs danced back, smooth and fast. There was a ragged notch in the blade of his honor knife, and his snarl grew more shrill. For a moment Spots thought desperately that his brother would walk the narrow path of honor, weapon against weapon.
“Get back,” Bigs flung over his shoulder, reaching for the strakkaker at his waist.
The world stood still for Spots. I owe my life to Jonah-human. I owe my life to the Patriarch. This is my brother. That is my—There was no more time for thought.
Spots screamed and leaped. “No!” he howled. His leap carried him onto the larger kzin’s back.
There was nothing wrong with Bigs’s reflexes. Even as Spots fastened on to him with all sixteen claws he ducked his head between his shoulders to avoid the killing bite to the back of the neck and threw himself backward, stabbing with reversed wtsai, The blade scored along Spots’s massive ribcage, but there was no soft unarmored midsection to a kzin body. He twisted to lock the arm as they rolled, accepting the savage battering and the pain as they rolled across the campfire, fangs probing deeper and deeper through fur ruff and into the huge muscles of Bigs’s neck. Groping for the vulnerable spine, to drive a spike into the nerve.
Jonah stepped forward, cutter bar raised to strike in a chop that would have cut through Bigs’s torso to the hearts. To the hormone-speeded reflexes of the battling kzinti, the movement might as well have been in slow motion. A full-armed swipe of Bigs’s free hand caught him across face and neck and shoulder, sending him spinning limp to the ground in a shower of flesh. In a tuck-and-roll that was a continuation of the same movement Bigs levered his brother off his back and sent him a dozen meters away. They screamed together and met in a flowing curve of both their leaps, mouths open in the killing gape, hands and feet ripping and tearing and stabbing. Rolling over and over in a blurred mass of orange fur, blood, distended eyes, flashing steel and gleaming inch-long fangs.