came.
He felt as though he would drown in cold waves of despair. A vicious priesthood had killed his friends and, even if he escaped for a time, he would be hunted down by the galaxy's most pitiless hunters. And if his own kind rescued him, they might cheerfully beat him to death trying to learn a secret he had already divulged. And even the gentle Neanderthalers hated him, now.
Why not just give up? I don't know why, he admitted to himself, and began to search for something to help him fray the thongs at his wrists. He finally chose a rough-barked post, sitting down in front of it and staring toward the Kzin male whose lower legs he could see beneath the door matting.
He rubbed until his wrists were as raw as that meat lying in the dust before him. Then he rubbed until his muscles refused to continue, his arms cramping horribly. By that time it was dark, and he kept Ming into an exhausted, fidul sleep, starting to scratch at his bonds every time a cramp woke him. The fifth time he awoke, it was to the sounds of scratching again. And a soft, distant call outside, which his guard answered just as softly. It took Locklear a moment to realize that those scratching noises were not being made by him.
The scratching became louder, filling him with a dread of the unknown in the utter blackness of the Kzersatz night. Then he heard a scrabble of clods tumbling to the earthen floor. Low, urgent, in the fitz-rowr of a female Kzin: 'Rockear, quickly! Help widen this hole!”
He wanted to shout, remembering Boots, the new mother of two who had scorned her tribe; but he whispered hoarsely: 'Boots?'
An even more familiar voice than that of Boots. 'She is entertaining your guard. Hurry!”
'Kitl I can't, my hands are tied,' he groaned. 'Kit, they said you were drowned.'
'Idiots,' said the familiar voice, panting as she worked. A very faint glow preceded the indomitable Kit, who had a modern Kzin beltpac and used its glowlamp for brief moments. Without slowing her frantic pace, she said softly, 'They built a walkway into the lake and-dropped me from it. But my mate, your friend Scarface, knew what they intended. He told me to breathe-many times just before I fell. With all the stones-weighting me down, I simply walked on the bottom, between the pilings-and untied the stones beneath the planks near shore.”
Idiots, ' she said again, grunting as her fearsome claws ripped away another chunk of Kzersatz soil. Then, 'Poor Rockear,' she said, seeing him writhe toward her.
In another minute, with the glowlamp doused, Locklear heard the growling curses of Kit's passage into the hut. She'd said females were good tunnelers, but not until now had he realized just how good. The nearest cover must be a good ten meters away… 'Jesus, don't bite my hand, Kit,' he begged, feeling her fangs and the heat of her breath against his savaged wrists. A moment later he felt a flash of white-hot pain through his shoulders as his hands came free. He'd been cramped up so long it hurt to move freely. 'Well, by God it'll just have to hurt,' he said aloud to himself, and flexed his arms, groaning.
'I suppose you must hold to my tail,' she said. He felt the long, wondrously luxuriant tail whisk across his chest and, because it was totally dark, did as she told him. Nothing short of true and abiding friendship, he knew, would provoke her into such manhandling of her glorious, her sensual, her fundamental tail.
They scrambled past mounds of soft dirt until Locklear felt cool night air on his face. 'You may quit insulting my tail now,' Kit growled. 'We must wait inside this tunnel awhile. You take this: I do not use it well.'
He felt the cold competence of the object in his hand and exulted as he recognized it as a modem Kzin sidearm. Crawling near with his face at her shoulder, he said, 'How'd you know exactly where I was?'
'Your little long-talker, of course. We could hear you moaning and panting in there, and the magic tools of my mate located you.'
But I didn't have it turned on. Ohhh-no; I didn't KNOW it was turned on! The goddamned thing is transmitting all the time… He decided to score one for Stockton's people, and dug the comm set from his ear. Still in the tunnel, it wouldn't transmit well until he moved outside. Crush it? Bury it? Instead, he snapped the magazine from the sidearm and, after removing its ammunition, found that the tiny comm set would fit inside. Completely enclosed by metal, the comm set would transmit no more until he chose. He got all but three of the rounds back in the magazine, cursing every sound he made, and then moved next to Kit again. 'They showed me what they did to Scarface. I can't tell you how sorry I am, Kit. He was my friend, and they will pay for it.'
'Oh, yes, they will pay,' she hissed softly. 'Make no mistake, he is still your friend.'
A thrill of energy raced from the base of his skull down his arms and legs. 'You're telling me he's alive?'
As if to save her the trouble of a reply, a male Kzin called softly from no more than three paces away: 'Milady; do we have him?'
'Yes,' Kit replied.
'Scarface! Thank God you're-”
'Not now,' said the one-time warship commander. 'Follow quietly.' Having slept near Kit for many weeks, Locklear recognized her steam-kettle hiss as a sufferer's sigh. 'I know your nose is hopeless at following a spoor, Rockear. But try not to pull me completely apart this time.' Again he felt that long bushy tail pass across his breast, but this time he tried to grip it more gently as they sped off into the night.
Sitting deep in a cave with rough furniture and booby-trapped tunnels, Locklear wolfed stew under the light of a Kzin glowlamp. He had slightly scandalized Kit with a hug, then did the same to Boots as the young mother entered the cave without her kittens. The guard would never be trusted to guard anything again, said the towering Scarface, but that rescue tunnel was proof that a Kzin had helped. Now them be, looking for Boots, thinking she had done more than lure a guard thirty meters away. Locklear told his tale of success, failure, and capture by human pirates as he finished eating, then asked for an update of the Kzersatz problem. Kit, it turned out, had warned Scarface against taking the priests from stasis but one of the devout and not entirely bright males they woke had done the deed anyway.
Scarface, with his small hidden cache of modern equipment, had expected to lead; had he not been Tzak- Commander, once upon a time? The priests had seemed to agree-long enough to make sure they could coerce enough followers. it seemed, said Scarface, that ancient Kzin priests hadn't the slightest compunctions about lying, unlike modern Kzinti. He had tried repeatedly to call Locklear with his all-band comm set, without success. Depending on long custom, demanding that tradition take precedence over new ways, the priests had engineered the capture of Scarface and Kit in a hook-net, the kind of cruel device that tore at the victim's flesh at the slightest movement.
Villagers had spent days in building that walkway out over a shallowly sloping lake, a labor of loathing for Kzinti who hated to soak in water. Once it was extended to the point where the water was four meters deep, the rough-hewn dock made an obvious reminder of ceremonial murder to any female who might try, as Kit and Boots had done ages before, to liberate herself from the ritual prostitution of yore.
And then, as additional mental torture, they told their bound captives what to expect, and made Scarface watch as Kit was thrown into the lake. Boots, watching in horror from afar, had then watched the torture and disposal of Scarface. She was amazed when Kit appeared at her birthing bower, having seen her disappear with great stones into deep water. The next day, Kit had killed a big ruminant, climbing that tree at night to recover her mate and placing half of her kill in the net.
'My medkit did the rest,' Scarface said, pointing to ugly scar tissue at several places on his big torso. 'These scum have never seen anyone recover from deep body punctures. Antibiotics can be magic, if you stretch a point.'
Locklear mused silently on their predicament for long minutes. Then: 'Boots, you can't afford to hang around near the village anymore. You'll have to hide your kittens and-”
'They have my kittens,' said Boots, with a glitter of pure hate in her eyes. 'They will be cared for as long as I do not disturb the villagers.'
'Who told you that?'
'The high priest,' she said, mewling pitifully as she saw the glance of doubt pass between Locklear and Scarface. The priests were accomplished liars.
'We'd best get them back soon,' Locklear suggested. 'Are you sure this cave is secure?'
Scarface took him halfway out one tunnel and, using the glowlamp, showed him a trap of horrifying simplicity. It was a grav polarizer unit from one of the biggest cages, buried just beneath the tunnel floor with a switch hidden to one side. If you reached to the side carefully and turned the switch off, that hidden grav unit wouldn't hurl you against the roof of the tunnel as you walked over it. If you didn't, it did. Simple. Terrible. I like it,' Locklear smiled. 'Any more tricks I'd better know before I plaster myself over your ceiling?'
