Man-Kzin Wars XI by Hal Colbatch (ereader manga txt) 📗

Or was it a kzin at all? There was the kzin's gingery smell, unmistakable (or was it—that idea that had first crossed my mind when I entered this place!— a counterfeit of kzin smell? I remembered that I had heard no kzin voice in this house). The thing was big like a kzin, bigger than a man. I could sense that unmistakably.

But its breathing was a shrill whistle, nothing like that of a kzin, with a bubbling like nothing I knew, and the strange sucking noise it also made was not the noise of a kzin eating. No kzin sucked its food!

The lightning flared.

The head I saw in dim, momentary silhouette was not like a kzin's head. Was that a trumpet-shaped protuberance? The lightning flared again, longer and brighter.

The thing I saw was not a kzin.

I gave a roar of panic and terror from the bottom of my diaphragm, worse, more tearing, than a scream. Not a very courageous reaction from a decorated brigadier, but I tell myself now that my brain still had some zeitunger-poison in it. I leapt backwards in horror, knocking over the fire-screen, hitting the wall. The firelight flared brighter and the hideous thing seemed to leap at me. The walls were thick, as in any kzin-built structure, and the small window deeply recessed. I jumped onto the window sill, gibbering like a monkey. Then Gale turned on the light.

The ghoul, the thing, the obscenity, stared back at me.

I saw I was wrong. It was a kzin. Or it had been one, once.

Both ears were completely gone—not merely ears but hair and skin and flesh. Much of the head was naked bone, veins led across it by some makeshift, ghastly amateur medical procedure. One eye was an empty, bony socket, the other partly occluded by a projecting keloid-scar. The nose and muzzle were gone, leaving only a red cavity. So too was the whole lower jaw gone, and the fangs of the upper jaw. There was only a wobbling fragment of tongue dripping blood and slaver and the hole of a gullet. I saw it had been feeding by sucking bloody liquid through a tube. There were stained lumps of cotton-wool lying near.

The kzin raised its paws as if to hide its mutilated head. Paws, I saw, not hands. The fingers and claws were gone as well, and its fore-limbs were asymmetrical, the right one withered and twisted. Burns. Attached to the left one was a metal rod. I guessed it communicated by using this on a keyboard.

I had been aware of Gale's muscles when I saw her handle the rifle and then when we held each other in the night. Wunderlander or not, she had lived a strenuous life. She went to the kzin now and helped it stand. I saw that for a kzin it was a small one, the smallest male I had seen except for a telepath. It gazed at me from between its mutilated paws with its single half-eye. She said something to it I could not follow, then led it away. Again it took a long time, for it shuffled very slowly. There was something wrong with its legs and feet as well, and it was hunched and bent as if its spine was damaged.

I was left alone on the window ledge. I climbed down and returned to the table, breathing hard and trying to control myself and to retain my food. I was still sitting there when she returned

"He was in the ramscoop raid," she said. "He had run into a burning building and it collapsed while he was inside it. Now I keep him alive. He is ashamed to be seen. But after last night he wished to see you."

"You seek to torture him?" I understood very well how many on Wunderland hated the kzinti. Well, who could understand that better than I? But still I disliked torture for its own sake. And the state of this creature could inspire horror and revulsion but not, in a sane being, hatred.

"No, no!" There were tears on her cheeks. "But he wanted to feel if you were . . . if you were . . ." More tears, almost uncontrollable, like a dam breaking. After a time she calmed down.

"Then, if you wish to be kind, is it kind to let him live?" I asked. "I would have thought most kzinti would prefer to die and go their God rather than drag out life so reduced."

"He fears death because he is no Hero," she replied. "He believes that if he meets the Fanged God he will meet him as a coward and the God will regurgitate his soul into nothingness. For he did not get his wounds in battle. He was not a warrior kzintosh, you see. He never saw battle. His rank-title was Groom/Assistant-To-Healers. A medical orderly, a corpsman, a stretcher-bearer. Despised by other kzinti always. A humble, lowly semi-civilian. No Fighter's Privileges. If he had died in that burning building, or died of his injuries afterwards, he would not have died acceptably, in battle, on the attack. He had his injuries in a shameful manner. He fears to die now. I help him live."

"And for the same reason, I suppose, he hides away?" I asked.

"Yes. And so he did not want me to tell you. He wanted you to think he was a fearsome warrior . . . a Hero. It left him a little . . . pride. A little less shame. He is . . . often confused. I tried to tell him . . . that . . . that even as his own kind count such things, he would be . . ." She made a sound of helplessness.

I made some gesture, some sound, of non-understanding. "I have not heard of a kzin who was ashamed of scars before," I said. "Quite the reverse."

She gave a peculiar, tearful smile. "No Hero," she said. "But there was