“Safe,” shouted Snark.
“Safe,” shouted Mitigan.
Then Leelson’s voice shouted the same word. Lutha breathed easier.
“Lutha!” shouted Leelson. “Jiacare!”
Oh. “Safe,” she cried breathlessly. “I think.” She heard no responsive shout from the ex-king, but then she had other things to worry about.
The plopping tentacle had fallen on a rootlet that led inward. Now it had wrapped itself around the rootlet and was pulling itself slowly into the shallow shelter where Lutha crouched. The tip explored, feeling its way, reaching out for the next thing it could get hold of. Each time it stretched thin, a bulbous thickening somewhere behind it moved up, allowing the slenderer tip to move forward again. The tip was fringed all around with cilia that moved independently, giving it an odd sort of expressiveness. As though it might be thinking.
Could it smell her? Hear her?
She held her breath. The tip quested, erect, turning this way and that, cilia up. Almost she saw it raise its eyebrows, almost she heard it say in a grumpy voice, “Now, where did the thing go!”
She could hold her breath no longer. She gasped. The questing tip turned toward her. “There she is!”
Damn it, she told herself hysterically, the thing was not talking and she could not go forever without breathing!
She picked up a pebble and tossed it away, toward the entrance.
The questing tendril turned that way.
She tossed another pebble, breathing as quietly as possible. Then another one. The tendril was moving faster, extruding blobs of itself forward, then pulling itself toward them, moving across the rocky floor like a lumpy snake.
She heard a blatting, a muffled roar.
“They burn!” cried Snark.
The Lutha-seeking tendril stopped, its end waving, as Lutha heard what the tendril evidently also heard, a high-pitched weeping noise, a whine, not quite organic sounding. The sound of a wounded one?
The questing tendril went into a fury, lashing itself against the ground in a circle. Finding nothing, it grew longer, lashed again, and grew still longer. It was in a temper, no longer willing to spend time to find Lutha. If it went on doing what it was doing, it would touch her.
Reluctantly, she took out the heat gun and pointed it. When the lashing tendril came closest, she pushed the button.
Nothing. She stared at it in disbelief. Pushed it again. Still nothing. It bore an indicator dial just above the button. A red dial, charge level minus. Nobody had bothered to check.
No. Not nobody. She. She hadn’t bothered to check!
She thrust the useless thing into her pocket to free her hands. There was something else in the pocket. Saluez’s knife. She took it out, her hands trembling so that she almost dropped it. Not a big knife. Sharp, though. Sharp enough, maybe, to cut through that questing tendril. If she could hold it down with something while she cut it.
Knife between teeth. Large rock in both hands. Person, not herself, some other idiot, making small noise. Tendril turning purposefully in her direction. Sneaking, sneaking. End up, questing. Another small noise from idiot. Tendril coming faster, extended, thinner and thinner.
Then, smash down rock. Kneel on rock. Saw at tendril, fast, bulges coming down it in this direction, quick, before bulges got there!
Put foot on rock to hold it down on severed tendril. Decapitated tentacle slithering outward, making weeping noises …
Something else screaming louder somewhere. Lutha?
Leelson saying, “You did that very nicely.”
Lutha, idiot Lutha, making stupid noises with tears all over her face, flinging herself at the man.
“What did she do?” asked Mitigan.
“Cut the tip off the thing,” said Leelson with equal parts accusation and admiration. “She forgot her heat gun.”
“Did not!” she screamed. “Damn thing hadn’t any charge.” She took it from her pocket and threw it at him.
He looked at the indicator, pressed it. It turned blue. “You have to turn it on first,” he said. “Then you press the button.”
“Snark said—” Lutha said.
“I said,” Snark said, “you turn it on then press the button.”
Maybe Lutha hadn’t been listening, Lutha thought.
Snark shook her head wonderingly, then crouched over the chopped-off tentacle tip, scraping it into a collection bag. “I got samples of the body parts along the shore, but I was wondering how we’d get a sample of a live one,” she said. “Like they used to say at the home, fools rush in.”
“You did very well,” Leelson assured Lutha. “Heat gun or no heat gun.”
“How many of them came after us,” Lutha murmured.
“One each,” Snark said. “And there’s a shaggy dying over near where I was. I want samples of that one.”
Of course they went to look, at the shaggy and for the ex-king, who seemed to be missing. This time they did not talk, they did not make noise, they did not breathe loudly. They sneaked, insofar as it was possible to do so. The dying shaggy lay behind the south end of the outcropping, its tentacles spread around the end of the stone, almost to the hole Snark had taken cover in. The tentacles quivered as they approached. Each time they moved, they quivered anew. All up and down the tentacles, ragged little holes had appeared and the same inky runnels they had seen bled away from the thing.
Mitigan reached down and picked something up from beside a tentacle. He held it out to Lutha.
A fragment of striped fabric. Her eyes refused to see it.
“This your kid’s?” he asked.
“Maybe this shaggy picked it up from outside the cavern. Leely might have lost it there.” Snark said it. She didn’t believe it, but she said it because believing anything else was insane.
Lutha took the scrap and turned it in her hands. On one side was a series of circular impressions, made up of small, individual eaten or burned dots.
Mitigan had already rolled the tentacle with his boot heel, exposing the line of circular structures beneath, made up of individual pores. He took the scrap and held it close. They matched.
“Can’t get hurt,” whispered Leelson, his eyes on Lutha.
