by Larry Niven
She was in her room, resting, and I stammered it out. She was very little distressed at first, then I told her of the manner of it, and Marthar told her she suspected poison, and I went on to tell of the blind kzin with the antennae for eyes, and his scorched, horrible body, and of Dog, which Marthar confirmed. “He was a telepath, not a proper kzin, and a coward. But he is evil, I can tell,” she said vehemently.
“And it looks as though they will be coming at midnight. Which is six hours from now. And it is getting dark,” I pointed out.
“Why, that wicked creature owes me, he has not paid his keep for five months now, and I too afeared to approach him,” my mother said indignantly. “Where’s the money to come from now, I want to know?”
“In his dillybag, his bindle, that pack he slung across his back, maybe,” I suggested. “It is fair to take what he owed us.”
“I have no spare room key, the monster had the only one,” Mother said, more concerned with her loss of income than any fear of those who would be coming in a few hours. I felt very differently.
“He must have the key on him,” Marthar pointed out practically. “Let’s go and get it and take what is owing, for we’ll never get it from those pirates, that’s for sure.”
So we trooped downstairs, and Mother shuddered as she saw the stark, cold body of the kzin. Marthar was unfazed, and with me squatting beside her, she searched through the pockets in the many wallets strung about his body. We found some small coins, his big phone, two knives but no key. Marthar tried the phone. “Dead. Keyed to his body. Pity, we could have called the cops.”
“We haven’t even a landline,” I said ruefully. Only rich people had phones.
“We’ll have to turn him over,” Marthar announced, so we did, and a hard job it was, too. This revealed more wallets and the holstered gun. Marthar calmly took the needler from the holster on his thigh. It was big for her, but she slipped it into a waistband she wore. Then she pointed to a string about his neck with a key on it.
“Is that it?” Marthar asked calmly, and Mother, who had avoided watching us, looked at it quickly and nodded. We cut the cord with one of his knives and retrieved the key, then we went back upstairs and stood outside the door, but not until after I had bolted the doors of the inn, both front and back.
The three of us looked at the door of the Captain’s room. It was strange how much fear it induced in me, and also in my mother, but Marthar quite prosaically put the key in the lock and turned it, pushing open the door without any concern for ghosts or hob-goblins.
The room was the awful mess it had been the last time we were inside it. The bindle, a huge backpack, lay upon the footch, open. Marthar started to spread it apart. It was divided into many compartments; one contained a framed picture of a kzinrett, almost a child. Another a wooden box of some size. Marthar looked inside, and passed it to my mother.
Mother looked inside too. “There are coins in here, gold ones,” she said. “Funny foreign-looking things most of them, but enough to pay for his keep. The mean old thing could have paid with no trouble at all, he just preferred to frighten everyone.” Marthar kept checking the pouches, and sighed with satisfaction as she found some ammunition for the needler. She took the whole pouch, and hung it around her neck.
There was one odd small pouch, and in it something like a phone, but smaller than the one the Captain had with him downstairs. It had a screen that was dark, and one button on the outside, which presumably switched it on, but although I held it in my hand, I didn’t do more.
Mother started counting out coins and doing arithmetic in her head. “I won’t be cheated,” she explained, “but I will not take a penny more than is my due. Though it is hard to know what some of these are worth.”
“Hurry, Mother,” I said impatiently. “I want to get away from this place before we get K’zarr’s crew about our ears.” As I said it, the unpleasant double-meaning of the words struck me.
A faint whistling came from outside. I had heard it before when the blind kzin came. Then from below, I heard someone try the barred door. There was a curse. Then the faint whistling again, and the patter of feet, retreating this time.
“He will be back with the others before long, Mother,” I begged her. “For heaven’s sake, hurry!”
She was panicking, but stubborn. “I can recognize these, they are München marks, and these are gold stars, there are crowns from old Neue Dresden, but he owes me at least ten and there aren’t that many here, and I won’t take these foreign things, for I know not their value.”
There was a sound outside that might have been kzin marching, or maybe the wind, but it was enough.
“Well, this will cover much of it at least,” Mother said, and put the coins in her purse. “Now let us be away, and get to the Doctor, or to the sheriff’s offices.”
I slipped the phone, or book, or whatever it was into my own pocket, thinking to make up the weight of missing gold. Marthar was by the window, peering out. “Now, out the back door, fast,” she whispered. “There is a lantern out there, coming this way.”
We ran down the stairs, my mother gripping her handbag, Marthar holding the gun in her right paw. We unbarred the back door, and looked out, cautiously. This part of the town had no electric lights still, and mist hung around the inn, although it had cleared further out. Alpha B was still low on the horizon but lit the night like a great jewel. At midnight it would be at the zenith, and one could easily read by it, but now it was fainter, though a clear, small, bright disc. I closed the door behind us gently, letting the bar fall into place which would mean some skill in getting back in again once the coast was clear, and we ventured out. The Doctor’s house was closer, and away from the inn in the opposite direction of the hill down which Dog and the blind creature had come. The north gate was a fair distance, and the sheriff’s offices, with the protective deputies, was not far from that. So we made for the Doctor’s, the three of us hurrying through the chill of winter.
We had got away just in time, for the sound of many footsteps came from the other side of the inn as we scurried away. The inn, at the bottom of the dell, was isolated, and the rest of the town at some distance. The town was almost a collection of villages, and the inn between three of them, so we made for the nearest as fast as we could go. Marthar could easily have outrun me in a minute, and I could have outrun Mother even faster, but with Marthar on one side of Mother and me on the other, supporting her, we made reasonable time.
We came to a group of four or five houses with lights showing, and I banged at the door of the closest. A stout lady opened it, her husband craned over her shoulder.
“Let us in and hide us,” I begged them. “We are running from pirates. K’zarr’s crew are after us, or will be soon.”
I don’t know if that was true or not, but I feared it might be.
“K’zarr!” the man exclaimed. “We’ll have naught to do with those teufel.” And he slammed the door in our faces. The next two houses did much the same. Some of them wanted to be kind, but some of the men had been in the Lord Templemount and met the Captain, and although a little harmless terror in a few stories was agreeable, the reality of it, and perhaps reawakened memories of the Occupation, had them terrified. Marthar didn’t help much by flexing her claws and telling them bluntly that they were gutless sthondats and bereft of honor. I asked if they would at least take my mother in, leaving Marthar and I to make a run for it, but they’d have none of it. The best we could get was a lad of about my age, who promised he would ride his pony to Doctor Lemoine’s house and leave a message were he not at home, and from the Doctor’s house summon the sheriff by using the Doctor’s telephone, the landline.
“We must go on and hope for the best,” Marthar said grimly. “If they try to capture us, some will die before I do, count on it.” She touched the needler in her belt, and, fleetingly, her ear-tattoos.
We had slowed to a walk now, Mother puffing and finding it hard to go on.
“We must have some ti
me, still,” I argued. “They will have to break into the inn, and the doors are stout. Then they’ll have to find the Captain’s room, and decide some of the gold is missing. And they may decide it isn’t important enough, for we took only what we were owed.”
“A blaster will open the doors fast enough,” Marthar pointed out. “If they find the map to the treasure world, that will keep them happy. We have to hope that Skel didn’t hide it somewhere, as he might well have done. I would.”
“You think they’ll come after us if they can’t find it? I didn’t see anything that could have been it, so he must have hidden it.” I wasn’t too happy.
“Again, I would,” Marthar told us in the same flat voice she had used on the telepath.
I had an inspiration. “Maybe this is it,” I took out the book, phone or whatever it was that I had slipped into my pocket.
Marthar’s eyes flashed green. “Oh, Peter, you are a rattle-brained Kz’zeerkt, and I says it as loves you. It’s a memo pad. It might hold the key to a treasure world.”
“Then I have to take it back and leave it with the body,” I said, and I jumped up from where we had been resting. I started back the way we had come. I don’t know what I planned, my non-verbal hemisphere hadn’t bothered to tell me, but I knew that if I were to return to the inn, I had best do it fast before my courage gave out.
I had gone three paces before Marthar caught me and swept me up.
“No, Peter dear. I can hear them already at the inn. You can’t, I know, being deaf as well as dumb as they come. But we don’t have long before they start hunting us down. And there aren’t too many hard choices for them, are there?”
I thought of handing it over to them, but one look at Marthar and the words died in my throat. Such tame surrender was not part of her mental universe.
We set off again, me carrying Mother’s handbag with the gold in it. It was quite heavy. And Marthar carrying the memo pad, which she had confiscated. And both of us supporting Mother who was now very frightened and about to faint.
We turned at an angle to our original path, so we were heading east. The wall was quite close now, and cut off a chunk of the sky to the south. Generally speaking, the north of the town was where the shops and businesses were; the east was where the rich people lived, including the Doctor. Marthar’s home was in that direction too; her parents lived in a big place that looked pretty palatial to my eyes. South and west were where the poor people lived, which meant me and my family. The school was in the center of the town, on which the phone tower rose—making it the tallest building in town. The town had grown bigger over the years, we could still see the post-holes of the original walls, which had been made of wood, as Marthar and I walked south after school. I wondered sometimes why her parents let her play with me, but Marthar seemed to be the apple of her father’s eye, and if I was good enough for Marthar, I was good enough for anyone in his view. I had met him when he visited the school, when my father was alive, and man and kzin had talked politely, and he had looked down at me placidly. He could see I cared for his daughter, and he was so proud of her that, to his mind, that showed I was a person of sound judgment.
An explosion came from the direction of the inn, and a flare of light.
“They are in now, so we don’t have long. I think we must find somewhere to hide, but we have to worry about the telepath. If he’s with them, and I expect he is, he will be hard to evade,” Marthar said quietly. Mother sobbed. She couldn’t go much further.
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’zee
rkt 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.