“I do not understand you,” I whispered, though I was as sure it could not understand me as I knew I could not understand it.
Lord Grendel, I knew, had superb night vision. The Kur, like the sleen, I suspected, might be at home in the night. What then, I wondered, is wrong with this terrible thing, scarcely a body’s length away? Why is it so tentative, so uncertain?
Then again, as it had from time to time, one of the moons, white and cold, the only one now visible, was discernible, if only for a moment, but the moment was enough to tell me that the thing so near, so near I could almost touch it, was blind. There were twin darknesses in that massive head, flesh, and hair, where eyes, large, bright and glistening, must once have been but no longer were.
The thing then, as grievously wounded as it might have been, had not died in the sewers, as conjectured, but somehow survived. Blind, unable to defend itself save erratically, awkwardly, it must have been struck an innumerable number of times. Trails of blood had led to a sewer, the grating of which it must have felt with its feet. None had cared to follow it into that darkness. It had been supposed it had bled to death somewhere below the streets.
Its eyeless head was facing me.
How could it be alive?
But it was alive.
It must be hard, I thought, to kill such things. It was hard to conceive how tenaciously and unsurrendering, how difficult to quench, how stubbornly, the fires of life might burn in so mighty a frame, in the dark, sheltered furnace of so awesome a physical engine.
It did not move.
Was it waiting for me to move?
It would be difficult to catch urts in the sewers, so alert and quickly moving. It would have to feed. It would come, occasionally, out of the sewers, however clumsily, to seek slower, easier game.
It was blind, but it could smell, and it could hear.
I remembered the last instruction of Lord Grendel. I was to hurry home.
I suspected that Lord Grendel would have been almost certain that the killings in the city were the results of the attack of a Kur. Indeed, he may have examined bodies. Perhaps that explained the blood on his paws, and arms, which had so dismayed me. Certainly he would, in any case, well know the work of a predatory Kur, the nature of its stalking, its strike, how it was likely to feed, and such. As the Kur from the carnival had disappeared into a sewer, that clear from the trail of blood, Lord Grendel, in his peregrinations at night, may have scouted various accesses to the sewer system of Ar, of which there are a great many. Then there had been word of the seemingly rash flight of the thieves, seemingly so inexplicable, emerging in daylight in the market of Cestias, in the vicinity of the very platform of a praetor, with guardsmen aplenty about, amongst the vendors and stalls. He must have come, then, I supposed, after dark, to the deserted market. There he may have established, to his satisfaction, by the trail of scent, that the Kur may have emerged, even frequently, perhaps habitually, from this particular opening, which, at night, would be in an area unlikely to be traversed by humans. I recalled he had said, “The killings must stop.” Too, I supposed, some relationship must exist, or be supposed to exist, amongst Kurii. Might not a human, or some humans, be disposed to aid another human, in similar straits? Perhaps he and the Kur shared a world, or a sort, a kind of being, or a blood. Were they not, despite the views of the Lady Bina, both Kur?
I knew I was to hurry home.
But might it not, if I should move, leap forward, reach out, and seize me?
I unlatched the half-gate of the stall. Surely I was not going to exit the stall where the one side had once stood, until broken away by the beast, for that opening was behind it. I would have to pass the beast. I was very quiet in unlatching the gate, but there was a tiny sound, and the ears moved alertly, slightly, forward, toward that tiny sound.
I rose to my feet, and, not taking my eyes off the large, crouching, dark shape across the stall, opened the gate, and backed through. I was then a few feet outside the stall. I heard the beast strike against the wood, and then, feeling for the opening, pull the gate from its hinges. A sweeping paw convinced it that the opening was not to its liking. Wood was torn aside, and the thing was outside the stall.
There had been noise when it had torn away the frontage of the stall, a brief, clear shattering of the market’s silence, which I trusted no one heard, and now, too, though less, when it tore away the gate and forcibly enlarged the threshold, that its bulk, paws extended before it, might exit frontally. Kurii, I would later learn, tend to avoid constricted spaces, and will seldom enter a space which has but a single opening. A narrow space is one in which it may be difficult to defend oneself, and a space with but a single opening is a space in which one might be cornered, or trapped.
The beast and I, separated by some feet, faced one another.
I heard a voice, behind me, one I recognized.
“Get behind me,” it said.
“Master!” I breathed. “You live!”
“The thing is dangerous,” he said. “Get behind me.”
“I feared you slain,” I whispered.
There was a low, growling sound from the beast. Clearly it was uncertain as to what was occurring.
I did not turn around. I did not wish to take my eyes from the beast.
“Please, leave, Master,” I whispered. “I am sure it is more dangerous to you than to me.”
“Oh!” I said, startled, for a leash loop was dropped about my head, pulled close, and snapped shut. I was leashed!
“I see, barbarian,” he said, “you must be taught to obey.”
How I would have been terrified to hear those words, under different circumstances! But I needed not be taught to obey; the former Allison Ashton-Baker, on Gor, had well learned how to obey!
“Flee, Master,” I whispered. “It may not kill you. I think myself in small danger. I think you are in great danger.”
A hand on my arm, my right arm, jerked me to the side, and back, over an extended foot, and I sprawled, twisting, to the stones of the market. It is a simple, effective, unpleasant, crude way to put a slave to her belly. The leash was now behind me, looping up to his hand. I twisted about, to my side. “Run, Master!” I said. “I have no way to communicate with it. Run, run, Master!”
But he stood between me and the beast.
He cast down the leash, back. The strap was over my legs.
“Run, Master!” I begged.
He stood between me and the beast.
He was unarmed!
There could be no mistaking then the menace in the sound which now emanated from the throat of the beast.
It did not know what was occurring. It was impatient. It was growing angry. It was displeased.
He waved his arm, angrily. “Begone!” he said. “Away! Away!”
“Run, Master!” I begged. “Please, run, Master!”
But he stood his ground, and would not abandon me.
Clearly the beast, blind as it was, must be aware that I was not in motion, and that something, with a different scent, a different voice, belligerent and obstructive, now stood between us.
I would have given much for a translator.
“Away!” he cried to the beast.
At that moment the beast hurled itself forward, with startling, incredible swiftness, and I saw him whom I had earlier sought, him whom I had earlier feared lost, dismembered, on Clive, struck to the side with a reckless, wide, sweeping, indiscriminate, mighty blow, one that might have loosened or dislodged planking or a beam. The Metal Worker was flung a dozen paces to the side, to strike amongst chests and boxes beside a stall. I saw him struggle to his feet, amongst the debris, waver, and then fall.
I had heard no snapping of a neck or spine.
I think he was then unconscious, or half unconscious.
I feared the beast might then go to the body and, while it yet lived, begin to feed, but, rather, it turned,
