Vaemar, followed by Dimity, stepped out into a landscape of grey, under a swirling grey sky, punctuated by rocks, and surrounded by rock walls and pillars, wind and rain-eroded into fantastic shapes reminiscent of dragons, sthondats and other great beasts of legend and fact. There was a thunderstorm dribbling lightning on the horizon. Distant hills were speckled with snow. Hardy, spiky vegetation grew about them. This was a cool wet plain, and days like this without high winds were rare. But life seemed reasonably abundant. Vaemar's eyes and the infrared detector in Dimity's face-mask found a number of small animals watching them from concealment, or in some cases burrowing frantically.
Dimity saw what she thought at first was a man approaching them, although the motion was wrong. She activated the binoculars in her helmet and pointed to the biped. An avian, or an avianoid creature, high, with great legs, atrophied wings and a mighty striking head and beak, standing, they could see, higher than Vaemar. To Dimity it resembled a holo of a carnivorous Earth dinosaur. It was making a high-pitched scream.
'Thunderbird,' said Vaemar. 'They must have good eyes. We have evidently invaded this one's territory.' It was fast, and in Wunderland's gravity even those small wings could help it make great hops. Suddenly it was very close.
Dimity brought up her rifle, but Vaemar was quicker, and he gestured to her to leave it to him. He waited a few moments more, then fired as the thing leapt again. Its huge head shattered and its body slid towards them in a kicking ruin.
Almost on top of them, a second thunderbird erupted from concealment behind a rock wall. Vaemar's stride became a vertical leap. The thunderbird's huge hind-claws barely touched the ground, and it too leapt again, wings extended to show barbed claws, its colossal armored beak snapping and clashing at the kzin. Vaemar twisted in mid-air, avoiding the beak in a blur too fast for Dimity to follow, and landed on the creature's back. As they crashed to the ground together his jaws severed its neck in a single bite. The second thunderbird ran headless for a distance, wings flapping, before it collapsed.
'Perhaps those screams will call others,' said Vaemar. 'From what we know about them they are cooperative to some extent. However, we have no time to waste on game. Where is our real quarry?'
They surveyed the wilderness of rock.
'Caves are the best hiding-place from an aerial search,' said Dimity. 'But they have to be a certain size. There are no caves of such magnitude here.'
'Caves are also obvious hiding places,' said Vaemar. 'If you have technology there are other ways of hiding.'
'Bending light?'
'Or radar pulses. You see how much we think alike, Dimity? I do not need to explain things to you.'
'Not a technology we've mastered. Not without a lot of bulky and obvious equipment.'
'No. We haven't.'
The portable deep-radar showed a maze of granite. The radiation signature they had been following was lost.
There was a quick movement in the shadows of the rocks. Vaemar and Dimity spun to face it, weapons ready. Sight, smell and Ziirgah sense all told Vaemar of another kzin. He called a challenge/greeting in the Heroes' Tongue.
It came forward slowly. It was an adult male, with a good collection of human and kzin ears on its belt-ring. Vaemar stood rampant, staring, but with most of his fangs not yet showing. In that posture his chest was thrust forward somewhat, throwing into prominence the red splash that marked him as Riit. There was his own belt- collection as well. Both kzinti had their ears folded, and it was impossible to see their ear-tattoos in detail.
The other kzin did not challenge or bare fangs, indeed the slightly bowed attitude of its head might indicate that it conceded Vaemar's dominance, although, Vaemar thought, the gesture might have been made less ambiguous.
'Who are you?' he asked in the Neutral Tense, though as Riit he might have used a far higher one. Dimity, he knew, now understood something of the Heroes' Tongue. She had had sleep-lessons since returning to Wunderland and was a good natural linguist.
'Chorth-Captain,' replied the other kzin. 'Of the Patriarch's Navy and the Patriarch's Claws.'
The Patriarch's Armed forces had been disbanded on this planet when the kzinti accepted the human cease- fire, the day when Raargh, who had been Raargh-Sergeant, had fled with Vaemar in a stolen air-car to the backwoods country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein.
'There are no other Patriarch's Claws on Wunderland,' said Vaemar, deliberately using the human name for Ka'ashi. Let Chorth-Captain make what he would of the qualifier 'other.' He added, 'I have not met you before.'
Chorth-Captain was plainly much older than Vaemar, and he looked a great deal more experienced, strong, tough and battle-scarred. But Vaemar was Riit.
That put him in an anomalous position on Wunderland. Some humans, he knew, wished to groom him to lead the kzin who had remained on post-Liberation Wunderland to take a place as partners with humanity. The reasons had been put to him openly, and, as he had told Dimity truthfully, he had agreed with them. He had felt no-well, little-conflict of loyalties once he concluded that what he was doing was for the long-term good of the kzin species. Indeed it was a project he had firmly committed himself to. Some humans he had dismembered in battle in the great caves. Some he had eaten. Regarding some like Rykermann, Cumpston, Leonie, the abbot, Dimity, or Anne von Lufft who had been one of his companions on a hazardous biological excursion, honor and companionship alike demanded that he die protecting them if necessary, as much as if they had been his Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero or Karan.
And yet with this he was Riit. The Riit had ruled the kzinti since before the Heroic Race first leapt into the stars. A large number of the kzinti of Wunderland respected him and, when necessary, obeyed him. It was left to other, older kzintosh, including some of the few surviving professional officers like Hroth and Hroarh and the old warriors on Tiamat to link with the human authorities and guide relations between the kzin and human communities in detail, but it was he who performed many ceremonial duties like opening Veterans' Hospitals and other projects and presenting the State of the Wunderkzin Address to the human Parliament. He knew he was being groomed even in his academic courses. It did no harm that he was tall, strong and fast even by kzin standards, as one would expect of Riit, and had been trained and was backed by Raargh-Hero, one of the toughest old kzintoshi on the planet. At the moment he could afford to find out more about this Chorth-Captain and not put his dominance to the test.
'I still do not see how you got through the defenses,' he said.
'I landed here recently,' said Chorth-Captain.
Vaemar found it hard to believe him. Wunderland, and the whole Alpha Centauri system, was ceaselessly monitored by live and electronic sentinels against another kzinti raid or invasion. kzin ships had come, certainly, in the last few years-from kzin worlds that had no knowledge of the human hyperdrive or the human victory, freebooters whose livers had been maddened by old rumors, hungry for loot and glory, or regular Naval vessels returning from distant missions. Part of his duties was to help negotiate with them. Those that had not surrendered when informed of the true situation had not lasted long.
'I hid long on the Hollow Moon,' said Chorth-Captain, as though detecting his thoughts. 'Since the battle between the fleets of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the human invasion I have lain in wait. I had help. There is much traffic. I left my fighter there and came back to Ka'ashi in a gig. It was small and undetected.'
Of course, Vaemar knew, not all the kzinti on Wunderland were entirely sane. Defeat had unhinged many, especially fighting kzin to whom defeat at the hands of weed-eating apes was unthinkable. Delusions among them that they were officers of the victorious Patriarchy, generally complete with Patriarchy-bestowed Names, were not uncommon, with pathetic and tragic consequences. There were also the crazed kdaptists, already splitting into murderously-quarrelling sects. Chorth-Captain, at least in this poor light, did not look insane or deluded, but not all of them did. He smelt a little strange, but that was not surprising. Also, it was a point of honor for kzinti not to lie outright, but many had developed great ingenuity in bending the truth. Association with humans had done nothing to diminish that skill. Vaemar wondered whose side Chorth-Captain had fought on in the final civil war of kzin that had killed his own first protector, old Traat-Admiral, and which had made the human hyperdrive Armada's reconquest so much easier.
'What are you doing here? What do you want?' Vaemar asked. His mind framed the question: 'Do you know
