The Man-Kzin Wars 02

It toppled forward and sideways, thrashing and ululating with the long pole transfixing it. He forced rubbery leg muscles into a final sprint, a leap and scream of his own. Then he was there, in among the clinging brush and it was there, too, convulsing. He darted in, swung, and the rock smashed into a hand that was lashing for his throat; the kzin wailed again, put its free hand to the spear, pulled while it kept him at bay with lunging snaps. Ingrid was on the other side with a second spear, jabbing; he danced in, heedless of the fangs, and swung two-handed. The rock landed at the juncture of thick neck and sloping shoulder, and something snapped. The shock of it ran back up his arms.

The pair moved in, stabbing, smashing, block and wiggle and jump and strike, and the broken alien crawled toward them with inhuman vitality, growling and whimpering and moving even with the dull-pink bulge of intestine showing where it had ripped the jagged wood out of its flesh. Fur, flesh, scraps of leaf, dust scattering about… Until at last too many bones were broken and too much of the bright-red blood spilled, and it lay twitching. The humans lay just out of reach, sobbing back their breaths; Jonah could hear the kzin's cries over the thunder in his ears, hear them turn to high-pitched words in the Hero's Tongue:

“It hurts…” The Sol-Belter rolled to his knees. His shadow fell across the battered, swollen eyes of his enemy. “It hurts… mother, you've come back, mother—” The shattered paw-hands made kneading motions, like a nursing kitten. “Help me, take away the noise in my head, mother…” Presently it died.

“That's one for a pall-bearer.” The end of his finger throbbed. “Goddamn it, I can't escape!” he shouted at it.

Ingrid tried to rise, fell back with a faint cry.

Jonah bent over, hands moving on the ruffled tatters that streaked down one thigh.

“How bad…” he pushed back the ruined cloth. Blood was running down the slim length of the woman's leg, not pumping but in a steady flow. “Damn, tanj, tanj, tanj!” He ripped at his shirt for a pressure-bandage, tied it on with the thin vines scattered everywhere about. “Here, here's your spear, lean on it, come on.” He darted back to the body; there was a knife at its belt, a long heavy-bladed w'tsai. Jonah ripped it free, looped the belt over one shoulder like a baldric.

“Let's move,” he said, staggering slightly. She leaned on the spear hard enough to drive the blunt end inches deep into the sandy gravel, and shook her head.

“No, I'd slow you down. You're the one that has to get away.” His finger throbbed anew to remind him. And she's Hari's girl, not mine. But— another memory returned, and he laughed.

“Something's funny?”

“Yeah, maybe it is! Maybe— hell, I bet it worked!”

“What worked?”

“Tell you on the way.”

“No, you won't, I'm not coming with you. Now get going!”

“Murphy bugger that with a diode, Lieutenant. Get moving, that's an order.”

She put an arm around his shoulder and they hobbled down the shifting footing of the ravine's bed. There was a crooked smile on her face as she spoke.

“Well, it's not as if we had anywhere to go, is it?”

The kzin governor of Wunderland paced tiredly toward the gate of his children’s quarters, grooming absently. The hunt had gone well, the intruder humans were undoubtedly beginning a short passage through some lucky Hero's digestive system, and it was time to relax.

Perhaps I should have stayed to track them myself, he mused as he passed the last guard station with an absent-minded wave. No, why bother. That prey is already caught, this was simply a re-enactment.

Chuut-Riit felt the repaired doors swing shut before him and glanced around in puzzlement, the silence penetrating through post-Hunt sluggishness. The courtyard was deserted, and it had been nearly seven days since his last visit; far too soon for another assassination attempt, but the older children should have been boiling out to greet him, questions and frolicking… He turned and keyed the terminal in the stone beside the door.

Nothing. The kzin blinked in puzzlement. Odd. There has been no record of any malfunction. In instinctive reflex he lowered himself to all fours and sniffed; the usual sand-rock-metal scents, multiple young-kzin smells. Something underneath that, and he licked his nose to moisten it and drew in a long breath with his mouth half open.

He started back, arching his spine and bristling with a growling hiss, tail rigid. Dead meat and blood. N'irling, he slapped for the exterior communicator. “Guard-Captain, respond. Guard-Captain, respond immediately.”

Nothing. He bent, tensed, leaped for the summit of the wall. A crackling discharge met him, a blue corona around the sharp twisted iron of the battlement's top that sent pain searing through the palms of his outstretched hands. The wards were set on maximum force, and he fell to the ground cradling his burned palms. Rage bit through him, stronger than pain or thought; someone had menaced his children, his future, the blood of the Riit. His snarl was soundless as he dashed on all fours across the open space of the courtyard and into the entrance of the warren.

It was dark, the glowpanels out and the ventilators silent; for the first time it even smelled like a castle on homeworld, purely of old stone, iron, and blood. Fresh blood on something near the entrance. He bent, the huge round circles of his eyes going black as the pupils expanded. A sword, a four-foot kreera with a double saw edge. The real article, heavy wave-forged steel, from the sealed training cabinets which should only have opened to his own touch. Ignoring the pain as burned tissue cracked and oozed fluids, he reached for the long hide-wound bone grip of the weapon. The edges of the blade glimmered with dark wet, set with a matt of orange-red hairs.

His arm bent, feeling the weight of the metal as he dropped into the crook-kneed defensive stance, with the lead ball of the pommel held level with his eyes. The corridor twisted off before him, the faint light of occasional skylights picking out the edges of granite blocks and the black iron doors with their central locks cast in the shape of beast-masked ancestral warriors. Chuut-Riit's ears cocked forward and his mouth opened, dropping the lower jaw toward the chest: maximum flow over the nasal passages to catch scent, and fangs ready to tear at anything that got past the weapon in his hands. He edged down the corridor one swift careful step at a time, heading for the central tower where he could do something, even if it was only lighting a signal fire.

Insane, he thought with a corner of his mind that watched his slinking progress through the dark halls. It was insane, like something from the ancient songs of homeworld. Like the Siege of Zeeroau, the Heroic Band manning the ramparts against the prophet, dwindling one by one from wounds and weariness and the hunger-frenzy that sent them down into the catacombs to hunt and then the dreadful feasting.

Chuut-Riit turned a corner and wheeled, blade up to meet a possible attack from the dropstand over the corner. Nothing — but the whirl-and-cut brought him flush against the opposite wall, and he padded on. Noise and smell; a thin mewling, and an overpowering stink of kzinmeat. A door, and the first body before it. There was little of the soft tissue left, but the face was intact. One of his older sons, the teeth frozen in an eternal snarl; blood was splashed about, far more than one body could account for. Walls, floor, ceiling; guts and splatters that dripped down in slow congealing trails toward the floor. A chugra spear lay broken by the wall, alongside a battered metal shield; the sound had been coming from behind the door the corpse guarded, but now he could hear nothing.

No, wait. His ears folded out to their maximum. Breathing. A multiple rapid panting. He tried the door; it was unlocked, but something had it jammed closed.

A mewl sounded as he leaned his weight against it and the iron creaked. “Open!” he snarled. “Open at once.”

More mewls, and a metallic tapping. The panel lurched inward, and he stooped to fill the doorway.

The infants, he thought. A heap in the far corner of the room. Squirming spotted fur and huge terrified eyes peering back at him; the younger ones, the kits just recently taken from their mothers. At the sight of him they set up the thin eeeuw-eeeuu-eeeuw that was the kzin child's cry of distress.

“Daddy!” one of them said. “We're so hungry, Daddy. We're so frightened. He said we should stay in here and not open the door and not cry but there were awful noises and it's been so long and we're