Bobcat tried to keep his stew from going down the wrong way. This guy wasn't going to throw a fit on them, too, was he? The kit fox stayed quiet, though, his eyes on Fisher while she nodded. "Yes, you hear a lot of stories on the road."
Rag Ears settled back against his pack. "Best to keep that in mind, specially as you get closer to Meerkat Town. Things can happen to folks in the desert. If I was you, I'd go around the city to the Basharah gate and get there just before dawn. I knew a guard captain when I was down there; Tevirye was her name, the Raj Tevirye. She's about the only one I'd trust if I was a fisher, a bobcat, and a skink traveling down the road to Kazirazif. She gets off duty at dawn, and she'll take you right to the Ramon. If that's who you wanna see." His eyes seemed to sparkle in the firelight.
Fisher's did, too. "It's still the Ramon Sooli down there, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes. He's a tough old bird. Saw him speak a few times."
"Did you?"
"Oh, yes." The kit fox grinned. "I suppose you've heard about the death of the old Bison King, though?"
Fisher's grin faded. "No. No, I hadn't."
"Ah." The kit fox shook his head. "Sad, it was. One of his sons challenged him, and the old fellow didn't survive."
Bobcat blew out a breath. "Brains and eggs. That'll change things, won't it? We gonna hafta go around now?"
Skink rustled from where he sat. "Go around? Forgive me, but I'm afraid I do not see how this affects us. The road we travel does pass through the Kingdom of the Buffalo, but I am at a loss to understand how their succession to the throne would involve us."
Rag Ears raised a paw. "Ah, friend, it invloves all of us who travel the roads. For you see, when the Meerkat Road was planned, it was to have connected Kazirazif directly with Beaverpool, but the bears who inhabit the woods and hills between the two cities would have none of it. So the only other course was to the north, through the Kingdom of the Buffalo. The Bison King was quite willing and only took a small toll from each passerby.
"But when a new Bison King took over some years after the Meerkat Road had been built, well, let's just say that a somewhat unusual aspect of buffalo law came to light. It seems that it's customary for the incoming Bison King to change every single law set up by his predecessor. And it was the new Bison King's fancy to take not stones or scrip or metals from each party, but a member of each party to be held as a slave in his palace.
"The traders along the road quickly took to bringing a fish or some lesser serpent, which had been duly registered as a member of the caravan, to give to the Bison King. And he took the creatures because it was his law and he wasn't about to change it." The kit fox shrugged. "That's how it's been ever since. Every time a new Bison King takes office, new rules appear for using the Meerkat Road."
Bobcat nodded. "So what is it now? The last time I went through, I just had to sign a paper saying I wouldn't take part in any plot to overthrow the king's government."
Rag Ears smiled. "That was over ten years ago; you must be older then you look, friend. No, the new Bison King is a nut for knowledge. Anything and everything interests him as long as he hasn't seen it before. Every traveler who enters his realm must show him something new, tell him something he hasn't heard, deliver to him some strange sort of a something that he cannot explain, something he can think about and muse over during the evenings. I understand," and he looked pointedly at Fisher, "that he has quite an extensive library."
Bobcat rubbed his chin. "Something he doesn't know, huh? What happens if you tell him something he's heard before?"
"Oh, he kills you."
"What?!" All three of them sat forward.
"Oh, yes. Turns you over to his guards, they take you outside, and they trample you to death. Quite ugly, I've heard. Of course, I got through without any trouble."
Fisher narrowed her eyes. "Why? What did you do?"
"I had the sense to be born a fox." Rag Ears grinned. "One of the first groups through after this new Bison King took over was the Cayottle Acrobatic Circus, twenty of the finest vulpine aerialists you'll ever lay eyes on. And knowing their lives were on the line must've really inspired them, because when they were done, the Bison King announced that no fox need ever show him anything again; their display had given him more to think about than the last twenty books he'd read." The kit fox's grin seemed to Bobcat to sparkle even more. "It's been quite a boon to those of us of the vulpine persuasion. The transport companies are hiring right and left."
"You cannot be serious." Skink's eyes were wide in the firelight. "This Bison King will actually kill us if we have nothing new to show him?"
Fisher gave a snort. "You better believe it. Once a Bison King comes up with something, he sticks with it."
"Oh, yeah," Bobcat added, "no matter how stupid." He turned to Fisher. "So now what? Up the Tundra Road past Madison, over Comston Pass, and down on Kazirazif like that?"
"Take too long," Fisher answered, rubbing her chin. "Unless I'm mistaken, we're on something of a schedule. We'll hafta risk it--go through at night and keep to cover--but we haven't got a lotta time to burn here."
The sparkle in the old kit fox's eyes seemed almost as bright as the stars starting to show themselves overhead. Bobcat blinked against the sight; he didn't feel so tired that his eyes would be playing tricks like this.
Rag Ears nodded to Fisher. "That's your plan then? To carry on?"
Fisher shrugged. "We haven't got too much of a choice." She gave a half-grin. "Have we?"
"There's always a choice." Sudden sparks appeared in the kit fox's fur, smoothing over his scars, knitting his ears back together, changing the gray of his fur to the sheen of burnished metal. "But sometimes the alternatives just ain't all that attractive."
"You can say that again," Fisher muttered.
Bobcat stared, the kit fox sparking and glowing until he grew into a thing of white fire, half-fox and half-star and still smiling at them. "You won't forget what I said?"
Fisher gave a shrug. "Have I ever?"
The thing turned its glowing eyes on Skink, whom Bobcat could hear muttering his whispery chants to himself; then the white fire was pouring over him. And such a different fire than that of the Blood Jaguar's eyes, not dark and murderous and full of hate, but a fire of warmth and of hope, a fire as sweet and welcoming as the fires Shemka Harr had built against the winter gusts in their cave so long ago.
Then the light was away from him, and Bobcat saw the kit fox turn back to Fisher. "You're one of my best," Bobcat heard a voice say to her. "If anyone has a chance at this, it's you. Just make sure you come back, hear?"
Fisher gave a little chuckle. "Well, I'm in no position to promise anything...."
Wonderful laughter rang in Bobcat's ears. "You watch yourself, imp; you're not getting away from me that easily." The air gave a twitch then, and the kit fox shot up into the darkness, the stars seeming to dance around him.
And then they were alone, the three of them sitting by Fisher's little gas stove and staring at the sky. Bobcat thought he heard her sigh out a "good-bye," but when he turned to her, she was taking another dollop of stew from the pot.
Bobcat wanted to say something, but he didn't know what. A part of him wanted to run screaming through the night, away from kit foxes that burst into flame, away from reptiles that coiled just beyond his vision and spoke without using words, away from cats of blood and death and smoke and fire and all the weird and twisted things that had happened to him in the past two days. And another part of him just wanted to start singing, to shout with the joy the fox's white fire had set in his heart and the deep and rustling rhythms he had heard at the kiva that morning.
It took him a few minutes to settle himself enough to choke out, "Who... What... That... You... It..."
Fisher looked over at him. "Problem?"
"Yes!" Bobcat burst out. "What just happened here?"
"You mean who have we had the honor of entertaining around our cook fire this evening? Is that what you mean?"
; "No! I mean what in the bright blue above is going on in this place?"
"That," Fisher said with a shrug, "I can't say. But our visitor has been none other than the Curial Lord Kit Fox, my mentor and patron. You have heard of him, haven't you?"
Chapter Four: In the Hall of the Bison King
Fisher's bald statement surprised Bobcat, but not as much, he realized with a start, as it probably should have. Sure, he'd seen some pretty amazing tricks performed by magicians and conjurers at festivals and parties, but this...this had felt different somehow, as if the trick hadn't just happened in front of him but had happened inside him as well.
No one said anything else that night. There didn't seem to be any need. Something hung in the air, a caressing breeze that was half the soft touch of an evening in early spring and half something beyond even that. It lulled Bobcat with such a gentle stroke that the dark fire of those terrible eyes seemed to sink to embers far in the back of his mind while Fisher dismantled her stove and Skink helped Bobcat wash everything up. Then they stretched out by their packs and fell asleep.
The feeling stayed with Bobcat the whole night, and at light's first touch against his eyelids, he let himself drift awake, staying curled where he lay with his eyes closed, just lazing for a while. The stream chuckled past, the sun smooth on his fur, and he almost forgot that he was halfway between home and nowhere on a crazier mission than anything he'd ever dreamed up while under the catnip.
Catnip. He hadn't had a roll in how many days now?
A shiver iced through him, made him sigh and climb to his paws, the sun suddenly too hot, the ground too dusty and dry, the stream too loud and murky. Even the blue of the sky was wrong, a sort of haze hanging around the horizon like dead moss. He rubbed at the ache starting up in his forehead; he had no reason to be here, didn't understand any of it, and the others thought he was an idiot anyway. Why shouldn't he just creep off, let them worry about this whole plague thing? It wasn't like he could help, and it wasn't any of his business anyway.
No, wait. He shook his head. It was his business, had become his business when the Blood Jaguar had kicked him into the Brackens. She'd picked him out for this, had left her eyes in his head, and he had to find out why, get some control over them somehow, or he'd go crazy. Wasn't that it? Hadn't he already decided this? Why was it bothering him again?
The catnip urge pulsed in his gut, a new, sharper edge to it than he'd ever felt before, and he swallowed against it, trying to figure out why it was so different. And when the answer came, bursting with a sudden cold fire into the back of his head, Bobcat couldn't stop himself from gasping; it was her eyes, the Blood Jaguar's eyes, boiling at his thoughts.
Those eyes were still doing things to him, digging in, somehow connecting themselves to his catnip cravings. Bobcat caught his breath, remembered Fisher saying something about the Blood Jaguar tearing folks apart from the inside without ever lifting a claw. He could feel it, could feel those eyes trying to slip up behind his own, trying to give him their hate-filled, dirty, dusty view of things.
Bobcat shook his head again, took a breath, forced himself to look up, to see what was really there: the sky of a gorgeous spring morning, sharp as crystal and even bluer, a touch of mist dancing up from along the prairie, the breeze holding just a whiff of sage. Bobcat shivered, those eyes ebbing down to embers again, took a few more breaths, and felt as normal as he had the past few days. He had to wonder, though, what else the Blood Jaguar's eyes might be doing to him.
The clanking of pots drew his attention to the side of the stream where Fisher was once again stirring something over her gas stove. She waved a spoon at him. "Skink's already made the coffee. You want some?"
Skink's coffee was interesting, little twists and turns in it, places where it tasted almost like something, then spun off and tasted like something else. It went well with the scramble Fisher had mixed up, grains and nutmeats and all sorts of stuff stirred together like oatmeal. Bobcat had two bowls before bringing up one of the questions that was bothering him. "So, how're we gonna deal with the buffalo?"
Fisher chewed and swallowed. "Seems to me we should move down the road right about to their border. We rest there and stay out of sight till nightfall, then scoot across quick as we can. The moon's waning, but there'll be plenty of starlight out here. We shouldn't have any trouble finding our way." She shrugged and took another spoonful.
"Uh-huh." Bobcat looked at her. "It's four days across those plains at the best of times, y'know, and the way we're doing it, we're gonna need places to hole up each dawn."
"Yep."
"And just where do you have in mind?"
"Smugglers' caves; the first day, at least."
"Oh, sure. If those buffalo don't walk patrol too often. And if we can get to Council Bluffs before dawn. And if they haven't closed the caves off by now; I mean, the cliffs above the Bison King's palace never seemed that good a place for a hideout to me. A whole lotta ifs, Fisher." He rubbed his chin and shrugged. "But I guess it'll hafta do."
"I'm so glad you approve."
"Forgive me," Skink said from his perch on the lip of his bowl, "but mightn't we just call upon the Bison King and explain the situation to him? If we can get him to understand the importance of our mission--"
Bobcat waved his spoon at the lizard. "Not likely. He's prob'ly heard the story about the fisher, the bobcat and the skink; seems ev'ryone else around here has. And you remember what the Lord Kit Fox said last night: if the Bison King's heard it, you end up trampled."
He heard Fisher chuckle. "'The Lord Kit Fox'? Do my ears deceive me, or is our friend Bobcat starting to believe what we tell him?"
"Yeah, okay." Bobcat looked away, his ears heating up. "Maybe some of it. I mean, after everything that's happened, well, how many times can a guy get hit over the head before he starts believing in things like hammers?"
Skink rustled a laugh. "My goodness, Bobcat. That is almost a paraphrase of Iguana of Didris Kiva's argument in the third and fourth books of his--"
Bobcat held up a paw. "That's okay. Really. I'm sorry I brought the whole thing up." Something occurred to him then, something from Shemka Harr's stories. "Hey, but wait a minute. Isn't the Lord Kit Fox always going around messing with folk's minds? In the stories I mean? Like the one where he gets that whole falcon hunting party to sit up to their necks in a river for three days trying to catch flying fish?"
"That is true." Skink cocked his head. "Though the Lord Kit Fox is technically one of the Seasonal powers in the Curia, controlling the aspects of summer, his trickery is well reported in the literature. Perhaps we ought to verify the information he has given us, if any way of doing so can be--"
"Nah." Fisher, pulling the stove apart, waved a length of pipe toward the sky. "Sure, he can get annoying at times, but I like to think I've developed a pretty good read on him over the years." She stopped, and a kind of sideways smile pulled at her whiskers. "When he's joking around, laughing and smiling and acting all relaxed, that's usually when he's being the most serious. And last night, well, I've never seen him try so hard to be cute and charming." Her smile faded. "I'm gonna take what he said very seriously."
She started stowing the stove parts in Bobcat's pack. Bobcat watched for a moment, his mind not quite turning over, then shook himself and began gathering up the pots and pans. It didn't take long to get everything loaded up, and then they were off, across the stone bridge and away over the prairie along the Meerkat Road, heading southwest.
Through the morning they walked, the road rolling with the hills over the hard red dirt. They passed a few prairie dog villages, little clusters of red-roofed holes surrounded by wheat fields, but the folk they saw just scurried away without even waving hello. More bluffs appeared to the left and fell away behind them as the grass came back in, poking itself higher and higher into the blue of the sky.
Just before midday, Bobcat thinking they ought to be pretty close to the buffalo's border, Fisher stopped and pointed ahead to a plac
e where the road dipped down between two hillocks and was swallowed in the grass. She gestured for Bobcat to follow her off the road, then squatted down, the grass now over their heads. "We'll wait here," Fisher whispered. "The border station's just down that rise. After dark, we'll sneak around and go overland. Buffalo aren't too deft; we oughta be able to hear a patrol if it comes around. We keep our ears open and keep moving forward, we'll get to Council Bluffs just before dawn. That sound good?"
Skink was peering over her shoulder. "I know little of the arts of stealth, but we are comparatively small and should be able to stay out from underhoof of such as buffalo."
"Yeah," Bobcat said. "How much trouble could it be?"
So they lay there through the whole of the afternoon. Bobcat gnawed some trail mix, tried to ignore the way the sage scent made him think of catnip, did his best to sleep; after all, they'd have to travel all night if they wanted to make Council Bluffs by dawn. The grasses swayed around them, and slowly the light faded, shadows piling up among the stalks till it was dark. Fisher gave Bobcat a poke, and off they set, creeping around the hillock to the border.
They were caught almost immediately: Bobcat didn't even see the trip wires until he was setting a shaky paw right onto them. He tried to leap back, but cords wrapped his legs, hauled him up, twisted him back, and the next thing he knew, Fisher was flying into his face. Alarms screeched; searchlights swept the grass, Fisher cursing from somewhere over Bobcat's left shoulder. He couldn't tell if it was Fisher's fur or the strands of the net tickling his nose, so he figured not biting would be best. Skink he could hear chattering below him, so at least they were still together.
Something came crashing through the brush--several very large somethings in fact. The alarms switched off, and the searchlight slowed to a stop, its beam shining right into Bobcat's eyes. "So, ho!" a voice boomed from behind the light. "Intruders, is it? His Majesty will be most pleased!"
The Blood Jaguar Page 7