Catseye

by Andre Norton

  When Troy thumbed for a second stunner shot, the release light did not spark. Charge exhausted! He sprang into the open, running for the blaster. Zul was down on his knees, his numbed band folded up against his chest, the other within fingertip reach of the blaster grip. Troy swung a boot toe forward, kicked the blaster away from Zul but out of his own path also.

  Zul was well-versed in rough-and-tumble. The hand that had been straining for the blaster grip struck out at Troy’s ankle, fingers raked across his boot, sending him enough off balance to stagger a step or two beyond the smaller man. Horan brought up against one of the rock pillars with force enough to awaken the pain in his old bruises, and clawed about breathlessly just in time to face death.

  Erupting from his half crouch, the blade of a knife glinting in the sun, Zul came at him. Troy knew his attack would end in the vicious up-cut that would finish the fight and him in one skilled stroke if he could not counter it. He was no knife fighter and Zul was.

  But Zul’s right hand was numbed and perhaps he was awkward with the left. There was only that one small chance. Troy swerved and struck for Zul’s head with the barrel of the stunner. The jar of that blow getting home was followed by a thud against his own ribs, so sharp and painful as to bring a yelp of agony out of him.

  Zul staggered against the rock, recoiled, and slumped to the ground. Troy, hands pressed to his side, needed the support of the pillar or he would have joined him. He looked down, expecting to see the hilt of the blade projecting from his flesh. But on the ground at his feet lay the knife snapped in two pieces, and there was a line of welling red on his arm above and below the strange wristlet he had brought out of Ruhkarv. Dazed, he watched the blood gather and drip, realizing tardily that a super-steel blade meeting that red band had been broken like a stick of dead wood and that, thanks to the bracelet, he was still alive.

  Holding his arm pressed tightly to his side to slow the flow of blood, Troy stooped over Zul. The yellow man lay limply on the ground but he was still breathing.

  “Behind you—”

  Troy tried to turn, tripped on Zul’s outflung arm, and went to his knees, so saving his life, for he cowered just beyond the searing edge of a blaster beam. He coughed in the ozone stench of the discharge. Then, obeying the instinct of self-preservation, he rolled across the ground, sick with the torment of his side and arm, gaining cover behind another rock pillar. So Zul had at least one companion. And disarmed and wounded, Troy would now be hunted down, with all the advantages on the side of the hunter.

  In his desire to hide, Troy knew of only one place—the depths of Ruhkarv. Its evil reputation might slow up pursuit, give him a breathing space. If he could only have reached the blaster he had stunned out of Zul’s hand! But there was no chance to hunt for that now—not with a sniper ready to fry him if he ventured into the open.

  “The depths,” he thought fuzzily, trying to contact the animals, sure that they had scattered into hiding when he had broken Zul’s spell-binding with the tube.

  The tube! With that in Zul’s or another’s hands the fugitives had no chance at all. Troy looked about him a little wildly. There it lay—one end projecting beyond a stone. To leave that intact meant disaster. Horan hunted for a weapon—any kind of weapon.

  He chose a stone block detached from a nearby dome, of a size to fit his hand. And he hurled it—to strike hard and true. Under its impact the tube cracked, the end shattered, past any repair, he trusted. Their luck had held—this far.

  Then, his throbbing arm tight against his chest, Troy scuttled away, expecting every moment to see the flash of another blaster beam or feel his flesh crisp under the beam he did not see.

  Somehow he made it, falling rather than running into the open mouth of the ramp up which they had come hours before with such hope. And that beam he had been anticipating struck as he fell and rolled down the inside slope. He saw the brilliant, eye-searing flash and heard the crackle as it lapped stone. Then he was beyond its reach, only aware that somehow he was still alive, if badly battered.

  Would his tracker come boldly on? Troy tried to listen. He could not see well; his eyes were still dazzled by that last shot. What he did hear was the return of the flitter, or else another flyer. And that might have provided a signal of sorts, for dark shapes flowed over the edge of the ramp above, visible only for a second or two against the circle of the daylight. The animals were on their way to join him.

  Together they retired to the first level of corridors and there paused. There was no sound from above. Had the rangers’ scout seen the activity in the ruins and landed to investigate? Troy knew that he had left Zul partially stunned but still able to join in the chase. If he only had the blaster that the other had dropped in their first encounter—

  “It is here.”

  Sahiba! Troy dared for an instant to snap on the atom torch. The gray-blue cat, her splinted leg held at an awkward angle, was half lying, half sitting, close to him, and next to her was her mate. And in front of Simba rested the weapon Troy had longed for. He caught it up, feeling the dampness of the cat’s mouth-carry on the slender barrel, checking the charge. That was less than a third expended. Now he could defend them.

  “They come.” That was Sargon.

  “How many?” Troy demanded.

  “One—there are others—still above—”

  One. Zul, or the unseen with the blaster? Troy eyed the corridors issuing from the ramp, then flashed off his torch. To venture blindly along any of those might be to lose oneself entirely. Better the dangers he knew than a new host, especially with the hunt behind, for Troy was certain that Zul was not going to give up. And he tried to plan ahead. Perhaps in that tangled jungle below he could find the means of turning tables on the other.

  There was the problem of water and food. His bag of supplies had been abandoned in the open. But there was water below, and perhaps food, if he was not dainty. He knew that the animals had found edible prey in the fungoid cavern.

  “Down!” He picked up Sahiba, unsealing the front of his tunic and settling the cat into an improvised carrying bag, which left his good arm free. The cuts on his left forearm had stopped bleeding, but he feared to use it freely lest they begin to ooze again.

  Though no sounds save his own breathing, the faint scurrying that marked the going of the animals, and the thin click of his boots reached his ears, Troy’s scouts assured him that the pursuit was still in progress as they retreated to the level of the next set of corridors and on back to the haunted wilderness cavern. He went without the torch, feeling his way, and now the pallid seep of light below marked their goal.

  When he dropped from the foot of the ramp, Troy discovered the weird daylight was again in effect. Perhaps it was true sunlight beamed through some unknown process of Ruhkarv’a builders into this hollow. There was a line of clouds discharging their burden of rain, and Troy dodged to a dry space beyond. He came against the rock wall where a filament of gray-white stuff clung, and his shoulder brushed against it—to adhere so that he had to jerk to free himself.

  That was one of the web cords—strung all the way from the opening—which had made a fatal trap for Fauklow’s man.

  With the glimmering of an idea, Troy examined the length carefully. He discovered that it was not plastered to the stone surface along its entire side, as he had first feared, but attached at intervals by thicker portions. Thrusting his blaster into his belt, he pried between two of those buttons and, either because the cord was old or because it had never been meant to grip too tightly except at those points, he freed a loop.

  Troy worked fast. There were other cords, some thinner, one or two as thick, and he moved them with caution, picking the suckers away from the wall. The outer sides were adhesive in the extreme. Sometimes the ends he loosened flopped and became irretrievably glued together before he could prevent their touching.

  But even laboring one-handed he had a net of sorts, though very crude and far from the perfect mesh he had seen set over two of the
cavern entrances. With infinite care he spread his trap at the foot of the ramp before the chopped-out trail that marked their former trip through the jungle. Why he had been allowed time enough to finish the job he did not know. But the animals posted on the ramp had not given the alarm.

  At Troy’s signal they leaped free of the tangle now lightly covered with dust and trampled leaves. To the man’s eye the net was well hidden, and he hoped his pursuers would be as blind. Then they took cover, the animals—except Sahiba—under the fringe of vegetation, Troy and Sahiba in the pocket between wall and ramp.

  They had set the trap. But was a trap any good without bait? There had been no sight or sound of the enemy for more than an hour. Had the other—or others—stopped to explore the level corridors?

  Man had only a scant portion of the patience of the four-footed hunters, as Troy was to discover. His skin itched; his side and arm throbbed. Hunger and thirst clawed at his insides. A hundred minor irritations of which he would not have ordinarily been conscious arose to the point of torment. The sinister vegetation that had repelled him earlier now beckoned with a promise of food and water—somewhere—somehow—

  And under that physical discomfort lay the malaise of spirit that had troubled him before when night had caught him in this place—the suggestion that there were unseen terrors here worse than any danger he could face body to body, weapon to weapon.

  Troy battled discomfort, vague fears, held himself taut, hoping his forlorn hope would work. But how long he could keep this watch he did not know. A trap—but a trap needed bait.

  A bush trembled. Shang sprang from its crown onto the ramp. He stood so for a moment, his prehensile tail curled up in a question mark, hindquarters up slope, his round head atilt as he looked down at Troy.

  “No.” The man protested. The kinkajou could move fast, Troy would bear witness to that, but not fast enough to escape a blaster bolt.

  But the animal did not heed him. Out of reach, the kinkajou was now out of sight as well, up the ramp. The bait had been provided.

  Sahiba shifted her weight inside his tunic, making Troy catch his breath as one of her hind paws scraped his tender ribs.

  “One comes?” he asked hopefully.

  His less able sense of contact caught again the fringe of their joint concentration, the filament that must unite them to Shang up there in the danger of the higher levels. And Troy, impatient, knew that he could not badger them with questions now.

  Time crept. Once more dusk was growing in the jungle, patch of shadow united with patch of shadow, and did not retreat but became solid.

  “One comes!” Sahiba dug the claws of her good forepaw into Troy’s flesh, jerking him out of a nod. He drew the blaster, took the cat out of his tunic, and set her in safety behind him.

  A scurry on the ramp. Shang flew through the air from the stone to the bushes. And now—louder—the click of shod feet—human feet.

  Above, a flicker of light—gone almost as instantly as Troy had sighted it. An atom torch snapped on and off again? He was sure that the newcomer must have seen the thin light of the cavern and would now proceed guided by that alone.

  “Zul?” He beamed that at Shang.

  “No.”

  If not Zul, then it must be that unknown who had sniped with the blaster. Troy readied his own weapon. Whether he could burn down another human being, even when fighting for his life, he was not sure. The struggles in the Dipple had always been man to man, fist and foot. And a knife was an accepted combat arm anywhere on Korwar, in fact across the stellar lanes. But this thing in his hand—he did not know, though he was very sure no such scruples would check the other.

  The click of boots was still. Had the other halted—or turned back?

  “No!” A reply concentrated in force from the animals.

  Then it was stealth. Troy crouched, steadied his blaster hand against the wall. Yet for all his long period of waiting he was not quite prepared for the sudden spring from the head of the ramp.

  His own slight movement might have spiked that attack and almost spoiled his plan. But Troy had planted the net well. The man fell short and his landing was not clean. He went to his hands and knees, to be enmeshed in the sticky ropes, which, as he rolled and fought, only tied the more tightly about his body.

  Troy stood away from the wall. He would not be forced to fire after all. The other was doing a good job of making himself a prisoner.

  “Another—”

  The warning startled Troy out of his absorption in the struggle. Simba advanced into the open, avoiding the flopping captive, to stand at the foot of the ramp looking up.

  Then a blaster bolt crackled—striking not for Troy, as he had expected, but at the writhing figure on the ground, close enough to singe some of the cords so that they flaked away from smoldering clothing. The bound man gave a mighty heave and rolled, as a second bolt burned the soil where he had lain and cut a blackened slash into the jungle.

  And by that flash Troy saw the hide tunic the other wore. The trapped man was not Zul but one of the rangers. Horan snapped an answering bolt recklessly up the ramp. There was a cry and a figure staggered into view, slipped, rolled to the cavern floor. When it did not stir again, Troy went to the ranger.

  “I thought I might find you here, Horan.”

  He was looking down at Rerne. And his first impulse to free the other died. Once he had almost turned to this man for help. Now all the instincts of the hunted brought back his long-seated suspicions. He might well have as good a reason to fear Rerne as he did Zul. Not that the ranger would blast him without warning, but the Clans had their own laws and those laws were obeyed in the Wild. Troy did not sheathe the blaster, but over its barrel he regarded the Hunter narrowly.

  “Do not be a fool.” Rerne had stopped struggling, but he was trying to raise his head and shoulders from the ground. “You are being hunted.”

  “I know,” Troy interrupted. “You are here—”

  Rerne frowned. “You have more after you than Clan rangers, boy. Including some who want you dead, not alive. Ha—”

  His gaze swept from Troy to a point nearer ground level. Troy followed the path of his eyes. Shang, Simba, Sargon, and Sheba had materialized in their usual noiseless fashion, were seated at their ease inspecting Rerne with that measuring stare Troy could still find disconcerting when it was turned in his direction. Sahiba came limping from the place where he had left her for safety.

  “So—” Rerne returned the steady-eyed regard of the animals, his expression eager. “These are the present most-wanted criminals on Korwar.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Most wanted, maybe,”—Troy’s voice was soft, cold, one he had never used before to any man outside the Dipple—“but not criminals, Rerne.” No more subservient “Hunter” or “Gentle Homo.” This was not Tikil but a place into which the men of Tikil feared to go, and he was no longer a weaponless city laborer but one of a company who were ready to fight for what the Dipple had never held—freedom.

  “You know how they served Kyger?” Rerne asked almost casually.

  “I know.”

  “But you could not have been a part of that—or could you?” That last portion of the question might be one Rerne was asking himself—had been asking himself—for some time. He was studying Troy with a stare almost as unblinking as that Simba could turn upon one.

  “No, I was not a part of Kyger’s schemes, whatever those were. And I did not kill him—if you have any doubts about that. But neither are we criminals.”

  “We?”

  Troy took a step backward to join the half circle of animals. They stood together now, presenting a united front to the ranger. Rerne nodded.

  “I see, it is indeed ‘we.’”

  “And what do you propose to do about it?” Troy challenged.

  “It is not what I propose to do, Horan. We shall all probably die unless we can work together to find a safe way out of here.” But he sounded calm enough. “You are being hunted by more than
just Clan rangers—in fact, the rangers could be the last of your worries. And it seems that the order is out to blast before asking questions—blast on sight.”

  “Your orders?” Troy brought up his own weapon.

  “Hardly. And when they hear about it, the Clan shall take steps. That I promise you.” There was ice in that, and Troy, noting the narrowing of the other’s eyes, the slight twist of his lips, estimated the quality of the anger this man held under rigid control. “It is easy to eliminate a fugitive and afterwards swear that his death was all an unfortunate mistake—the game our friend over there was trying to play.” He jerked his head toward the body at the foot of the ramp. “You have one chance in a thousand of escaping one or another of the packs after you now or—” He was summarily interrupted.

  “One comes.” Simba padded to the foot of the ramp again.

  Troy hesitated. He could leave Rerne where he was, neatly packaged, for either the ranger’s own men or someone else to discover—and melt back into the jungle, eventually seeking the yet lower level of the fungoid cavern, retracing their whole journey through Ruhkarv. Or he could make a stand here and fight.

  Rerne’s eyes traveled from cat to man and back again. “We are about to entertain another visitor?”

  “We?” This time it was Troy who accented the pronoun.

  “It could not be my men coming now.”

  And Troy believed him. That meant it was truly the enemy.

  “You have a choice,” Rerne pointed out. “Take to the bush over there and they will have a difficult time beating you out of it—”

  “And you?”

  “Since you can name me one of your pursuers, should that matter?” There was a grim lightness in that.

  “The other one tried to burn you.”

  “As I said, they are working on the principle that accidents will happen and a dead man one has to explain is better than a live witness who can explain for himself.”