CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER FIVE
We three had to pause, my mother almost falling to the ground. She had all but fainted, and was certainly too exhausted to go on any further without a rest. We looked around. We were in a kind of square, with the houses on one side, the alley we had come through facing them, and narrower roads on the other two sides; there were some trees and bushes at the side of the roads. There was a stable between the houses, from which the boy had perhaps taken his pony and set off. It was small, so there must be room in it for Mother at least, certainly it could have no other horse in it. Marthar gently picked up my mother and carried her over and laid her down on clean straw. Then Marthar turned to me.
“Peter, the telepath, that Dog of theirs, he will hunt us down surely. There is little chance of standing them off. It will take a quarter of an hour for the lad to get to the Doctor’s house and a quarter of an hour for the sheriff or the Doctor to get back; and that’s the bare minimum.”
“What can we do?”
“I must keep you and your mother safe, and that I can do. You are weaponless, but you can hide if I draw them away. And I will. I have something they want very badly.”
I saw her plan, and I also saw the flaw in it, as I am sure she did too. My friend Marthar was going down in battle, with a song on her lips or perhaps a scream of delight as she took some of K’zarr’s crew down with her. And I would have to tell her father, did I survive, and he would be proud but desolate. As would I.
We could hear the howls of the gang now, like tigripards hunting, getting closer. Marthar gave me a quick hug, and vanished. I covered Mother with straw, and hid myself as best I could, while keeping an eye through the open door on the street outside.
There was a sound of racing kzin and of howling as some nine or ten of them came into sight. The figure of the blind thing was in the middle; he was being led by some others, holding his paws, and the group was led by the telepath Dog. They paused after emerging from the alley, and waited for Dog, who looked around and seemed to sniff the air.
“Where are you, little lad?” he asked loudly. “Come, man-child, speak to me, tell me all. We are your friends, be sure of it.” The others howled even louder at this, and their ears flickered in their laughter response. He held an old-fashioned syringe in his hand, and I guessed that he was about to inject himself with the telepath drug, the sthondat-lymph extract which raised a telepath’s powers from the ability to make a good guess to a ruthless, deep-radar-like perception that nothing could hide from.
“Here is your death, Addict,” Marthar stepped out from a corner, close to the alley, speaking flatly. She had the needler drawn and held in two hands. The telepath turned and made a sound like a gasp. Then a hundred needles ripped his head off. It happened so fast there was no reaction from the others. The corpse crashed, the head rolling away from it, blood spattering. They gaped at the blood pumping out of the neck, and then looked back at Marthar. The naked skull, still warm, glared up at them.
“I think you are looking for this, scum. K’zarr’s memo pad. Recognize it?” She tossed the thing in the air and caught it again. “Well, if you want it, you’ll have to catch me.” She got off another shot and slipped around the corner just as a blaster flash sizzled at the cobbles where she stood taunting them. I remembered how inhumanly quick the Captain had been in our own fight against the lesslocks, and in that moment the memory of that fight gave me another stabbing feeling of loss for him. Marthar must be right to call me a rattle-brain.
“No blasters, ye damned fools, and get after her,” one of them, a huge kzin with orange fur, called out. The group surged after Marthar, howling as they went, save for the figure of the blind kzin and the two servants who were guiding him. They stayed, held back by the gaunt figure. His antennae quivered and his head turned until it seemed he looked straight at me.
“A diversion. We chase the kzinrett while she leads us towards the cops and away from the weaker partner. But we are not so easily fooled, are we, my Heroes, my kits? And when we have the boy, we have the kzinrett too, for she will not stand idly by while I take his eyes out. And once we have the kzinrett, then we shall have her eyes too. Oh yes, a feast we will have, a regular feast. So, my Heroes, search around and find the boy.”
“Where does we look, Dominant One?” one of them asked.
“Use what little brain ye have,” the blind kzin said and slashed at him savagely with the staff he carried. The servant cried out.
“Go on fools, search about, anywhere the kz’zeerkt and its mother would lurk. They are not far from here, I can sense them.” He lifted his cowled head, and the antennae writhed. In the days of microsurgery, merely losing a biological eye was not a serious matter; it could be replaced with a natural one grown from your own body, or by a prosthetic one which would be superior. For some reason the kzin had not done this. What exactly he could sense was a mystery; maybe he thought the degradation in vision was compensated by the awe and fear he inspired, for he undoubtedly had something like vision, and perhaps something else as well.
“Mayhap they are inside one of the houses, and have been given shelter,” one of the servants argued. The blind thing screamed and hit him again.
“Get to it, ye sthondats, knock them all up if ye must and then rout about every house until ye have them. Kill all who stand in the way, they are but apes. Ye call yourselves Heroes, so act like Heroes. I’ll have that kz’zeerkt and I’ll have his eyes; aye, ye’ll see me swallow them whole before the night’s out.”
I was frozen with a suspicion that any motion on my part would draw the attention of either the blind thing or its servants. He was beating them now, and they were fighting back in a dispirited way, trying to take his staff from him, and whining. Then he drove them away. They turned and looked about to carry out his orders as the simplest way to avoid further beatings.
Mother, who had been unconscious or perhaps asleep, began to moan softly, and although the servants heard nothing, those antennae in the head of the blind thing began to roil and turn. Then there was another sound, the returning of the crew. There were but five of them now. “The cow took down three of us with needles, then we lost her,” the big kzin with the orange fur proclaimed loudly.
“Small matter, lads, small matter. For you can be certain she is not far away, and once we have the kz’zeerkt, we have her too, be sure of it.” It struck me later that, foul as it was, the blind thing still had a kzin’s awareness of honor, though it might not share it. It knew Marthar would not leave me. “Search about, that way, and find him.” He pointed with his staff, almost straight at where Mother and I hid in straw.
A whistling sound came. The orange-furred kzin took out a phone, very like the one the Captain had used. He glanced at it and listened to a message. “Ware, all o’ ye. The deputies are coming this way, and fast. We must begone.”
“No, the kz’zeerkt, ye fools, get the kz’zeerkt!” The blind one slashed about with his staff, and the others avoided him. This enraged him further. “Didn’t I get the death claw to that damned Skel, when none of you liverless cowards had the nerve to face him? Ahh, I’ll get him m’self, ye sthondats!” he shouted and started in my direction. There was another sound, a little like horses’ hooves, but with more thud to it, a sound I recognized as running thoats. They could run twice as fast as any horse over short distances, and carry an armed kzin on their backs, sometimes two.
The crew scattered, some back into the alley, which was too narrow for thoats, some towards each of the roads out of the square; those who had taken the north side suddenly turned and bolted back. The sound of the thoats was very loud now, and my spirits lifted, even as the blind thing made his way towards me. Then he recognized his danger. “Where are ye, help me, ye scum!” But the other kzin had left him, and he stood alone in his great cape, his head turning north, the staff waving wildly. He started back to the alley, but stumbled and went to one knee. That was when seven thoats surged into the square, bearing kzin upon their backs. They tried to avoid him; I saw one try to divert his steed, but those things had the momentum of a spacecraft and they went over him. Not one, but two. I heard the snap of his spine and the start of a scream cut off, and the hiss of air leaving his crumpled body. After the thoats had drawn up, there was a black, bloodstained cloak covering a flattened corpse. I had seen yet another death, and was heartily glad of it.
The sheriff got down, and a figure appeared from the corner.
“You got here just in time, Sheriff,” Marthar spoke calmly. “How did you know to come?”
It turned out that the lad who had left on his pony had stopped at the first big house and borrowed their telephone to call the sheriff’s office and warn him that K’zarr’s crew were in town and bent on mayhem. There had been an alert posted that they were on Wunderland, so the sheriff had believed it, and had made for the Lord Templemount and then followed the noise.
I rose unsteadily and walked towards them. “They nearly had us,” I said and half-fell, but Marthar was there to hold me.
“We must get Mother to the Doctor,” I mumbled, but we didn’t have to, for minutes later, the Doctor trotted his horse down the alley, leading some men. They had also heard the noise, and the lad on his pony had met them and directed them to us, and he was following at the best pace his tired pony could manage. Mother recovered under the sting of ammonia in her nostrils, and was greatly relieved to be in the hands of humans and the deputies. She was inclined to gabble, until the Doctor gave her a sedative.
“And why were they after you?” the sheriff wanted to know.
“The gold, but it was ours, and more of it should have been,” Mother said shrilly.
“I think it was this,” Marthar held up the memo pad. “We found it among the Captain’s possessions. And if it’s what I think it is, it’s worth a lot more than any amount of gold.”
“Then I should take it and hold it,” the sheriff said firmly. “Give it to me, kzinrett child.”
Marthar looked at him speculatively. “I think that I would rather give it to my Sire, Orion-Riit. Or the Doctor here. Or maybe Judge von Thoma.”
The sheriff nodded in a very human gesture. Well, we had copied each other’s mannerisms for generations now. Some of the humans who could do it would waggle their ears instead of laughing. But her use of the name “Riit” changed everything. I knew Lord Vaemar-Riit regarded her as one of the high nobility, but even I had not quite realized just how high until she said that word and I saw its effect. Had the villains injured or insulted her, I thought, the vengeance of her Sire and Grand-Sire would not have been quickly forgotten.
“Very well, but I want to see it handed over. Give it to Doctor Lemoine if you wish, and Doctor, I want the Judge to see it. The old Judge, the first one. Him I trust to do what is best. Far better him than the government, which is where it would have to go if I took it.”
Marthar rather reluctantly handed the memo pad over to the Doctor, who looked at it thoughtfully.
“I shall take good care of it, and yes, Judge von Thoma needs to see it. And your father too, young Marthar. And I think it would be as well if we all met together and you can tell us everything you know.”
A distant humming, and a light in the sky which rose and headed west interrupted us.
“That will be the rest of the crew making off, no doubt of it,” the sheriff said. “You saw less than a dozen, you say. There would be three times that many in K’zarr’s Horde. They must have collected the few you left alive and are escaping justice. Well, there’s little can be done now. I’ll send a message to München and to the spaceports, but I doubt they landed at any regular place. They’ll be back in space within an hour or two. At least, with luck we’ll never see them again.”
“But will not the sentry-satellites detect them?” I asked.
“They are keyed to detect objects approaching Wunderland, not leaving it,” he replied. “And you know how many small moons we have. In any case, the surface of a whole planet is vast. We could not cover it all.”
We went back to the Lord Templemount, me on the back of a horse behind one of the Doctor’s men, my mother behind the Doctor, and Marthar behind the sheriff on his horse, which she greatly enjoyed. The Lord Templemount, when we got back, was the most awful mess you can imagine, and Mother and I set about cleaning it up. The sheriff took possession of the corpse of the Captain, and of his belongings that were left.
“Come and see us in the morning, Peter, at my father’s palace. We shall have a story to tell, and we must open the memo pad and find out what it has to tell us. And we’ll have the Doctor and the Judge there too. It will be such fun!” Marthar had recovered from the events of the night on the ride back. If she ever felt bad about killing the telepath and several of the pirate band, she showed not the slightest sign of it, then or later.
How on earth humans managed to defeat the kzin I cannot imagine. We were lucky nearly all the kzinretti had such stunted intelligence. If many of them had been like Marthar, we wouldn’t have had a chance.