Third Watch (13 page)

N
ever send a Friend or a cat to do a Linyaari’s job,” Khorii grumbled, as she and Ariin waited on the ship while Grimalkin, in Khiindi form, and Pircifir, his features and clothing modified to resemble those of the local residents, searched the market for Pebar and Sileg. “Khiindi’s probably been chased up the side of a building by a dog or another cat, and Pircifir has spent the last hour trying to rescue him.”

“You’re just jealous,” Ariin replied. “And you’re careless. I just bought your homeworld and profitably sold it to the Consortium. You are now a player without a planet on which to stand. I win.” They’d been passing the time by playing an ancient game Pircifir had stored on the ship’s computer.

Disgusted, Khorii looked out the viewport and saw the pair returning down the Market Road. They had parcels, but did they have the crono?

“They’re not there,” Pircifir said as soon as the two were back on board again. “The cage is still sitting there, housing a very suspicious-looking, undernourished dragon, and the trunks are being used as seating by the dragon’s keeper, but the lad says neither he nor anyone else have seen Pebar and Sileg since they tried to heal the flying tigers.”

“That would be us,” Grimalkin added, lest the girls had forgotten.

“Of course. But where have they gone? Did they book passage on another scout ship? Sileg said they did that sometimes to find new acts.”

Pircifir shook his head. “I inquired at the shipping office, but no one has seen them there either. We also asked if they had been peddling the crono recently, only we simply asked about jewelry. No one noticed them approaching anyone. In fact, they seem to have just—vanished.”

“So now what?” Ariin demanded of Grimalkin. “We just pack up and leave, and I take your word for it you didn’t get the crono back and decide to keep it for yourself?”

“It is mine in the first place,” Grimalkin pointed out. “But I was in cat form the whole way. I wouldn’t have any place to hide it.”

“And I don’t suppose you wish to accuse your skipper of lying, do you?” Pircifir asked, with a dangerous undergrowl.

“Er—what’s in the parcels then?” Ariin asked.

“Some pretty robes we saw in the market that we thought you might like,” Grimalkin said. “We knew you’d be disappointed about the crono, and these have lots of shiny things on them that sparkle in the light. Very attractive.”

The robes were pretty and had hoods that might be handy for disguising horns, Khorii thought. But they were chosen with a small cat’s eye for fashion—one was bright aqua and one was sapphire blue and both featured mirrored and beaded ball fringes dangling from the hems and sleeves and trimming the hoods.

“They’re really—er—shiny, Grimalkin, Pircifir,” Khorii said, inwardly groaning. “Thanks.”

“We thought they might make you easier to find if you got lost,” Grimalkin said.

“So you could find us among crowds of other single-horned people we’ve seen lately?” Ariin asked sourly.

“For Uncle Hafiz’s parties maybe, too,” Grimalkin said. “For when you go back.”

“I’m not going back without my crono,” Ariin said stubbornly. “And don’t say it’s not mine but yours, because you have one—or rather, Khorii has it. That’s yours.”

She pointed to Khorii’s wrist, where the crono peeked out from between a pair of beaded baubles bobbling over the back of her hand.

Khorii said, “The odd thing is, both of you are right. This is Grimalkin’s, but so was the other one. They are, in fact, the same crono from different times. I suppose the separation on different people must be why they didn’t merge back into a single item. But I wonder—do you suppose this one might know where its counterpart is?”

Pircifir shrugged.

Grimalkin said, “That was my next suggestion.”

Grabbing hold of her sister, Ariin said, “Don’t you dare take it anywhere without me along.”

Pircifir said, “You needn’t worry about that. The ship and all of us will go whenever she programs the crono to go. Just don’t visualize any tight places, Khorii.”

“I am counting on the crono to do the visualizing for me,” she said. Instead of a place, she imagined Pebar with the crono on his wrist and Sileg at his side.

Whereupon the ship swiftly proceeded to stay exactly where it was, but after quite a lot of blurry activity visible in the viewscreen, everything else had changed.

“Trees!” Khorii said happily, looking out at the bark-and-leaf-covered spires and umbrellas surrounding them. “And a little glade with a stream! We can graze. I was getting ever so tired of old grain and nutrient bars.”

“I could eat one of the trees!” Ariin said. “But where are we, and where are Pebar and Sileg?”

“And what’s that and who are those?” asked Pircifir, pointing up beyond the trees in the direction where the market had been. The huge city market, with its flapping banners and bunting, had been replaced by a large, smoke-blackened, and forbidding-looking stone structure. Four towers topped with large teeth guarded each corner and a central building with a peaked roof, from which flew a purple-and-gold banner.

“I can’t make out the insignia on the crest,” Grimalkin said, “but I am pretty certain it doesn’t say, ‘sale on melons through Saturday only.’ That’s a castle is what that is, and there are no doubt troublesome politicians living there who will neither understand nor tolerate our presence here.”

A half dozen men in metallic shipsuits mounted on horses also wearing some sort of protective apparel galloped into the forest. From within the trees in a direct line from the riders there rose a cloud of dust, indicating more riders ahead of the ones who were visible. Pircifir switched on the external auditory sensors, and the sound of clattering and thudding, such as one might hear at a Linyaari race or a particularly lively party, flooded the bridge.

Khorii caught all of that in a flash, but then she also saw something else, downstream from the riders in the opposite direction. The noise flushed four Ancestors from where they grazed among the bushes beside the stream. Their heads rose, horns shining in the sunlight, and they leaped and fled for the trees.

“Poachers!” someone cried, and that was when she saw Pebar and Sileg, who had been hidden by the ship’s fin when it appeared over the top of them. They apparently hadn’t noticed it, or had mistaken its bulk and shade for something more indigenous, for they ran without a backward look.

“Cloak!” Grimalkin ordered, and Pircifir stabbed a button.

The horsemen passed before the viewport, splashed into the stream, and crossed it, chasing Pebar and Sileg.

Khorii gave her former kitty a wondering look. “You knew we were going to be here, didn’t you? You remembered. This is where and when the Ancestors were rescued, and we did it.”

“We’re going to, yes,” Grimalkin agreed.

“That’s why you bought these in the market, isn’t it?”

“Pircifir did. I was out of pockets at the time,” he said modestly.

“As disguises, they’re much too flashy,” Khorii said, and began picking at them, tearing loose the thread binding the glittering ball fringe to her robe.

“But that’s the best part!” Pircifir protested.

She pulled the fringe off a sleeve and handed it to him. “Fine,” she said. “Then you wear it.”

“We have to attract their attention, Khorii,” Grimalkin told her.

“This will only frighten them. It glints like the armor the hunters are wearing. Besides, as legend has it, the Ancestors were telepathic, even on Terra, at least with us they were.”

“Us being Pircifir and me,” he said. “Your kind wasn’t made until later. Couldn’t have been.”

“But that’s where we came from—later,” Ariin pointed out.

“And the legend never said we weren’t there,” Khorii said, ripping the fringe from her other sleeve. To her annoyance, she noted that Ariin wasn’t following her example. “Just that you Friends were. Anyway, if we’re to retrieve Ariin’s crono and save our forebears, we’ll have to leave the ship.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Grimalkin said. “Did you see those long stick things they were carrying? And the long blades at their sides? They looked rather savage and distinctly hostile to me.”

“Then change into a pussycat and hide in the bushes,” Ariin snapped.

“We’ll need the element of surprise,” Pircifir told his brother thoughtfully.

“Take the creature,” Grimalkin suggested.

“It’s bulky.”

“Yes, but it can provide cover. If it can look like a house, it should be able to look like a tree, and we can hide inside it.”

A trumpet blared from within the forest, and Khorii said, “They’ve found something. We need to be very quick.”

“You girls carry the creature, and we’ll run ahead in wildcat form,” Pircifir told them.

“Just don’t forget it’s my crono,” Ariin said. “And don’t forget to wait for us before you take off this time.”

The Friends did not dignify her admonition with an answer but changed into large tawny cats with very sharp claws and very long fangs, and leaped out the hatch, their sandy tails switching as they bolted into the underbrush.

Khorii looked at the disk. “Maybe they should have turned into giant, galloping tortoises so they could carry this on their backs. We can hardly move quickly and carry it, too.”

“If we’re in the right spot, we don’t have to be quick,” Ariin said. “And maybe it will compress further.”

Between the two of them, they squeezed the disk together until it was half its former size, then Khorii tucked it under her arm before they, too, left the ship.

The shouts and cries of men were muffled by the foliage, but Khorii was sure she could hear Pebar and Sileg. “No!” one of them screamed.

Khorii started to run for the voice but Ariin tugged at her arm.
“We stop here. Let’s make a tree while nobody is around.”

“But they’re being hurt!”
Khorii cried.

“I’m weeping within,”
Ariin said nastily.
“As long as the hunters don’t take my crono, I don’t care what happens to those two. Make the tree.”

Khorii was about to tell her to do it herself when she heard more screams and some familiar roars.
“Only because Grimalkin and Pircifir are helping them,”
she said.
“You can’t just go abandoning people to their fate like that when they’re endangered, Ariin. It’s
ka
-Linyaari, is what it is.”

“Is it? I wouldn’t know. If you’ll recall, unlike those of you privileged enough to afford principles, I wasn’t brought up in Linyaari culture.”

“Your problem is that you feel so sorry for yourself, you have no sympathy left for anyone else.”

“I have begun to realize that far from its being a problem, it can be quite an advantage not to worry about the entire universe before helping myself. It has always been clear to me that if I didn’t, no one else would.”

“There you go again. Maybe that was true at one time, but now you’ve got me and our folks and Elviiz and all of our people, and Pircifir and Grimalkin…”

“Oh yes, your sweet kitty who did such a great job of looking after me when I was smaller and more helpless than an infant.”

Disgusted, Khorii turned her thoughts from her sister and to the project at hand. With hands flying, they urged the disk to grow tall, spread at the top, and grow some more.

“It’s the wrong color,”
Khorii said.
“I don’t think a mud-colored tree is going to fool anybody.”

“Pull it down, and we’ll make it a hill instead. We can hide inside a hill. Hurry!”

“I don’t like the sound of the roars,”
Khorii said. The roars were now not just angry but frightened. “
Grimalkin and Pircifir are in trouble now. I can feel it.”

“Make the hill,”
Ariin ordered tersely.
“There. It’s big enough to step inside. Hollow it out. Bigger. Bigger.”

Ariin plunged into the body of the now amorphous mound and began spreading her hands and feet, spinning in circles to take up as much room as possible.

Khorii was about to join her when she heard the trumpet again, and hoofbeats coming out of the forest. Ducking behind the new hill, she saw the huntsmen approach, dragging nets behind them. One carried two men bound up together. “Hah! Serves them right,”
Ariin said, when Khorii conveyed the sight to her.
“See how they like being netted.”
Inside the other net, tawny fur wriggled and writhed while its fierce roars reverberated up and down the stream.

Suddenly the talk stopped and the lead horses thudded to a stop. “Halt,” one of the hunters said. “Where are we? That hill wasn’t there when we came past!”

Ariin had been using Khorii’s eyes to watch. She gave the hunters a mental nudge.
“The hill has always been here. It’s as old as—as old as the hills.”

“What are you talking about?” another of the riders demanded. “Hit your head back there or what? That hill’s always been there, hasn’t it, men?”

“Sure that’s—uh—that’s—I’ll think of the name in a moment.”

“The Hill is all I can think of,” another man said. “Maybe we ought to name it.”

“Fine. King’s Hill. That’s safe enough.”

“Bit confusing since there’s quite a number of those scattered about the kingdom.”

“All the better. If it already has a name, that’s probably what it is. King’s Hill, I mean.”

“Unless it’s the queen’s.”

“True.”

While the men were debating, Pircifir and Grimalkin had stopped growling and were applying their razorlike fangs and claws to the net. It was made of some organic rope stuff, and the two cat forms used their advanced brains to destroy the net’s fibrous ropes and widen the holes.

Pebar and Sileg were not doing nearly so well. Their net was stained red. Someone was bleeding.

“We could use a diversion,”
Khorii suggested.

“Good idea,”
Ariin said.
“You run out in front of their knives and pointy sticks, and while they’re killing you, I will dash out, grab a knife from one of them who isn’t using it on you, and cut loose the two men who held us prisoner.”