Third Watch (11 page)

A deep, echoing roar, which had nothing to do with the roar of the crowd, rolled down the street. Khorii knew at once it came from some great beast, though she had never heard its like before. “What is it?” she called to the people outside the tent.

“One of the flying tigers crashed into a building. He fell from the air and is injured.”

“We have to go help the poor thing,” Khorii said, twisting to tell Pebar and Sileg.

“They can carry the cat here,” Pebar said. “That’s what I told them when they came to get you before, while you were shutting the kids up. So you just go back and think healthy thoughts, and pretty soon everyone will know what you can do and where to find you.”

The bellowing roars and the excitement of the crowd increased by the second. Then suddenly there was a great downdraft that shook the entire tent itself. Four gold-and-black-striped rear paws appeared in the doorway. Then a long, clubbed, striped tail and black-furred wings attached to a sturdy but lithe feline body the size of a flitter followed, backing into the room. The massive head, fur bristling along the top and down the neck, appeared last, the mouth open in a white-fanged roar that terrified all the onlookers into a fast retreat.

“That would be the other flying tiger,” Khorii’s informant squeaked excitedly from a safer distance.

This cat stalked through the crowd, parting them easily so that the delegation bearing the injured body of the other flying feline could advance with greater speed.

“Smart cat,” Sileg remarked. “You’d expect it to maybe guard its buddy and attack all comers. This one seems to have had some crowd-control training.”

Twelve large men bore the injured animal on some sort of stage or platform, which they set down at the tent’s entrance. Khorii knelt beside the cat.
“There’s something familiar about him,”
she told Ariin.

“Isn’t there just?”
Ariin replied.
“Hmmm, I wonder, could it be because we know that shapeshifters who specialize in feline forms could be lurking nearby, spaceship or no?”

“Help me then. Shapeshifter or not, his wing really is broken,”
Khorii told her.

“Meow?”
The Grimalkin flying tiger’s thought sounded heartrendingly like little Khiindi.

“Hush, kitty, I’m here.”
She laid her horn against the most obvious fracture.
“Does that feel better?”

The great body rumbled beneath her in a rusty purr, but she still felt pain emanating from it. His right hind leg, she thought, but to her surprise he lifted his uppermost forepaw and placed it on her knee. When she saw the gleam of metal beneath the fur, she understood. The crono.

Khorii healed the damaged leg. Then, shielding the paw with her body so that neither Ariin nor their captors could see, Khorii stretched the crono’s band wide enough to pull it off over the paw, and slipped it onto her wrist, shoving it far up inside her sleeve so that Sileg and Pebar wouldn’t relieve her of it as they had Ariin.
These pesky robes are actually useful for a change,
she thought.

Feeling a gust of hot breath across the back of her neck and shoulders, she twisted her head to see the other tiger—Pircifir, no doubt, monitoring her movements. She looked around, but didn’t see Pebar and Sileg until she spotted them far from the tent, watching warily from the front of the crowd. The tigers made them nervous, it seemed.
Good.

Ariin wouldn’t touch Grimalkin, but she stood beside Pircifir as if consoling the great cat in his worry over his companion. Pebar roared, “Do something!” to his brother almost as loudly as the tigers had roared. Sileg departed and returned with a chair, with which he cautiously approached the tent, jabbing the chair legs in Pircifir’s direction. Pircifir, with a slight flutter of his wings, made a flying leap and knocked Sileg and the chair back into Pebar and the crowd, then stood over their prostrate forms, growling ferociously.

“Leave the beasts to us, Deacons,” Ariin called cheerily. “I don’t believe they like men. We will stand guard over the sick one tonight as he rests and heal the fear in the other tiger’s mind so that tomorrow, they may return to their tasks, as gentle as housecats.”

Most of the crowd dispersed, but there were no more patients for the girls that day. When the market had closed, Pebar returned with a gun, which he aimed at the tigers, who were sitting together grooming each other. Behind Pebar, Sileg came with a net. But while the two men were practiced at capturing and taming wild animals or those without awareness, they were no match for the shapeshifters. The tigers split up, took to the air, and harried the two men all the way down the street. Khorii and Ariin laughed until the tigers returned.

Ariin drew the “tent flaps” closed with gestures similar to the ones she had seen Sileg use the night before. Meanwhile, Khorii searched through the costume trunks stored behind the altar. Once they had a degree of privacy, the tigers returned to humanoid form, and Khorii presented them with her gleanings from the trunk. A multicolored garment with full sleeves, a great red ruff, and matching trousers pleased Grimalkin greatly, though he chose not to wear the oversized shoes and large, floppy hat that went with it. The spangled tights and top hat were the only items that fit Pircifir, but he was amused by them, especially the shiny fringes, which he played with in true cat fashion for a few moments before returning to the matter at hand.

“I see no reason to delay our departure any longer,” Pircifir said.

“Then you came back with the ship?” Khorii asked. “When we heard it was missing, we thought you had deserted us.”

“It is not our custom to leave crew members behind, especially when we have already declined to sell them to unscrupulous persons,” Pircifir answered with a grin.

“However, we did want to ensure that those two rascals would think we had left the planet, which is why we took off,” Grimalkin said. “Then we needed suitable disguises to enable us to locate you without being ‘seen,’ so to speak. I came up with the flying tiger persona, and here we all are.”

“Then the ship is out there?”

“By the time we get to the spot where it was, it will be,” Pircifir said. “But first we must find a way to transport the specimen. I don’t suppose you two have gained any insights into its nature and manipulation while you’ve been living and working within it?”

“Not really,” Khorii said. “But if we can wait a while, and be quiet, someone else might be able to help us.”

“We’re not waiting for that stupid snake!” Ariin said. “It’s dangerous, it’s too big to take with us, and it would only delay us when at any moment Pebar and Sileg could return with real weapons and imprison or kill all of us.”

“I don’t think so,” Grimalkin said in a growl worthy of his tiger self or Khiindi on a bad day.

“Just until after everything has gone quiet,” Khorii said. “She slithers up from the sewers. That’s the only place she can find something to eat.”

“Oh, lovely,” Pircifir said.

“Our horns can deal with the smell,” Khorii said, pleading with him. “She is not an ordinary snake, and she has lived with the alien form long enough to consider it a friend, I think. She came in last night as we slept and wound herself around the cage.” When they wavered, Khorii voiced one other intuition she had about the snake. “I believe they may have been captured together. Perhaps she is from the same place and can help us with others like this one.”

“Why would she do that?” Pircifir asked.

“Because we may be taking her home,” Khorii said. “And she communicates with me a little. I can’t quite explain it.”

“Fine. Are you going to feed her, too?” Ariin asked. “I don’t think she lives on the same things we do.”

“We could catch the two who captured you and feed them to her,” Grimalkin suggested.

Khorii smiled in spite of herself, then frowned just as quickly. “That is not humorous. She prefers large verminous rodents from the sewers, I believe.”

Grimalkin grinned. “I’m beginning to like this snake.”

“She fed last night. I don’t think she has to eat often, and she sleeps a lot. She may be quite nearby. She’s not afraid of Ariin and me, but men’s voices might frighten her.”

Grimalkin nodded and put a finger, still sporting a long, curved nail, to his lips. Pircifir nodded once also, indicating his understanding, and the two settled down to wait.

Khorii was the first to see her serpentine friend and she sent a clear image of herself and her friends leading the snake and the tent to their ship and taking off into space. “
Is this,”
she inquired, “
something you would agree to?”

She had no plans for what to do if the snake did not agree, and was chagrined when the creature rushed at her, toward the closed tent flap, tripping her in its coils, sweeping Ariin along in the same fluid movement.

“No go, eh?” Grimalkin asked.

Khorii took hold of Ariin and pulled her out of the tent. Before they were all the way out, Grimalkin and Pircifir tumbled after them.

“I thought you said this snake was a friendly, reasonable beast!” Pircifir said indignantly. He had no more than gained his feet, however, when the great iron cage and the costume trunks, even the ornamental urn concealing the stout metal box in which donations were deposited, came flying out of the tent.

“She seems to be evicting everyone and everything,” Grimalkin said, then jumped back as the snake’s head appeared in the flap opening, rapidly followed by the rest of her.

Khorii motioned the others back away from the tent. “She wants us out of the way is all,” she said. The snake whipped out of the tent and began coiling herself around it. It obligingly compressed behind her body, growing taller as she wound herself into a smaller and smaller coil around it. Then she lifted her head and adjusted her coil so that she pulled the top-heavy form down until it was a flat, compact disk.

“I’ll be ’fritted,” said Grimalkin, who had apparently picked up some of the local parlance. “The serpent was packing it up for us.”

Chapter 9

T
he snake allowed Khorii to carry the alien disk. It was a bit more than she could manage, so she balanced it on the snake’s back, right behind the head, and held it steady while the four of them walked, the snake undulating beside Khorii. Outside the market, Pircifir and Grimalkin each stuck out a hand for the girls to hold. Pircifir’s other hand was raised, the sleeve pulled back to show his crono.

“We can’t go yet,” Ariin said suddenly, snatching her hand back, and stopping abruptly.

“Why not?” Pircifir asked. “One would hardly suppose you’d developed a fondness for this place.”

“Pebar took my crono. It’s mine, and I want it back,” she explained.

“Actually, it’s mine,” Grimalkin said.

Pircifir, still believing the girls were Friends in a strange guise, asked, “Why would she have your crono?”

“She stole it.”

“When? You had it—”

“I had it before I was injured. I’d stolen it back from an earlier self, but long after that, and after this, she stole it from Akasa, who had stolen it from me.”

“You’ve been spending too much time dirtside, brother,” Pircifir said. “It’s not healthy.”

“I’m not leaving here until I get it back,” Ariin said.

“She has a point, I suppose,” Pircifir said. “Our devices should not fall into untrained hands. Other people cannot properly appreciate their usefulness and might end up somewhere they’ve no wish to be.”

Grimalkin did not betray the Linyaari to his brother as “other people.”

“I’ll turn back into a flyger and pounce it out of him,” he offered.

“No,” Ariin said. “I don’t trust you. You won’t give it back.”

“She knows you well, brother,” Pircifir said, with a resigned sigh. “We’ll all go. Join hands again.”

They did, and in a blink the darkness disappeared and the sun returned. Along with it was the ship. That was a very good thing, Khorii decided, since a throng of people spilled from the market square, carrying all sorts of implements that could be used as weapons. At the throng’s front were Pebar and Sileg, bearing tranquilizer gun and net.

Pircifir apparently made a mental adjustment to the crono, because in the next moment they were all strapping themselves down as the takeoff sequence began.

The snake coiled loosely at their feet, her tail anchoring the disk.

“You tricked me!” Ariin accused Pircifir.

“Nothing of the sort, my dear. We will return again to retrieve the misappropriated crono once we have completed our mission. Unless you have decided you do not want to be part of the crew on this historic event? If so, just say the word, and you can go back to life in the carnival until such time as we deem it convenient to return for you.”

“It’s not like the time matters,” Ariin sulked. “With the cronos, you can go back and forth and never lose a moment.”

“Up to a point that is certainly true,” Pircifir agreed. “But I find loops tiresome. I am the captain, and you are here on my sufferance, and I say that this now is the time we will leave to seek the home of the alien shapeshifter. We do have a lot of time, but other resources are more limited. Fuel for instance, and oxygen.”

“But—” Ariin began. She saw a fallacy in that statement somewhere, but before she could protest, the ship sliced through the planet’s atmosphere, and they were once more in space.

H
ad it been up to Ariin, despite her wish to take credit for solving the future alien menace, they would not have found the planet. She refused to divulge the coordinates she had picked up from Pebar and Sileg. However, Khorii had the same information, and Pircifir and Grimalkin were such seasoned travelers they had no trouble locating the homeworld of the “alien tunnel.”

The closer they got, the more intrusive the snake became. She took to coiling behind their chairs and raising her head to loom over them, dripping venom from her fangs, making small scars on the deck as she scanned the viewscreen. If ever an animal could be said to be anxious for something to happen, this one was anxious to reach her home.