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

her eyes narrowed. Vaemar knew that she was seeing his ear-tattoos. A kzinrret of upper-normal female intelligence might dimly know them as betokening Quality.

"Riit!" she said. Swirl-Stripes, he saw, jumped a little at the word. Even the humans, whose childhood had been under the kzin Occupation, knew it. He picked up the glandular responses. But there was no awe or reverence in her voice. She spoke, and all his senses reinforced this impression, like one recognizing and challenging an enemy.

"My name is Vaemar," he said. It was "name," not "Name." Some odd scrap of memory recalled to him a sentence from a literature course: "His sensitive ear detected the capitals." Then he added: "I am a student." He realized as he said it that such a word could have no meaning to her. Or could it? She had recognized the ear-tattoos.

"I also hunt killers of kzinti," he told her, still in the soft, simple syllables of the Female Tongue. "Who has killed Heroes and kzinrretti here?"

"You do not know? You are bold to stick your nose into a cave where you know nothing."

Clear, grammatical sentences. Imagery. Abstract conceptualization.

A kzinrret telling a Hero he knew nothing! Vaemar felt bewilderment and rage in almost equal proportions. He fought both down. Living with Raargh and among humans had taught him self-control. It had also instilled in him a determination that, however he died, it would not be of culture-shock. But this was something he felt he must handle alone as far as he could. He ordered Swirl-Stripes and the humans to guard the entrances to the corridors. Then he turned back to her.

"No," he said, and not in the Female Tongue this time. "I do not know. But that is why we are here in arms."

"'We' . . ." she repeated. She looked the kzinti and the backs of humans up and down. She seemed, whatever else, to take this in without surprise.

"We are no longer at war with humans on this world," he told her, slipping into a more complicated vocabulary before he realized it. "And they are no longer our slaves. We work together."

"I worked with humans before you were born," she replied. Then she added, "I am small enough to hide in the ducting. You kzintosh are not. If you do not wish to be like those"—she gestured in the direction of the flayed corpses—"by the time the sun goes down, I suggest we are far away. You will take me with you."

How exactly we are going to get away is another matter, he thought. Aloud he said: "You tell me nothing. Who are the enemies we have come to destroy?"

"Enemies you kzintosh have destroyed already. The Jotok."

"I do not understand. Say on!"

"There were adult Jotok in this ship when it came down, serving as slave-mechanics. Most died. But enough survived to breed. The whole ship here in the swamp could have been designed as a giant nursery for Jotok—full of sheltered, water-filled compartments and with unlimited food that could be fetched from close by."

"But adult Jotok were decorous slaves!"

"Only to their trainers, and those to whom they bonded when young."

Vaemar had read and been told of the Jotok but, except perhaps in those barely-remembered days as a kitten at the palace, he had never seen a live one. Many kzinti had had Jotok slaves, but those that survived the fighting on Wunderland had been killed by their masters at the time of the Liberation as part of the general destruction of military assets. Kzin Heroes going out to die would not leave their slaves for victorious humans. He knew, however, that wild Jotok could be savage. Hunting them was a favorite sport on kzin worlds—they were generally a far better challenge than unarmed humans and other monkeys—and even relatively small artificial habitats had boasted Jotok-runs.

"These Jotoks' masters had died or abandoned them," Karan went on, "and the new generation had known no masters. They had no teachers but their own masterless adults, who had no loyalties to any living kzintosh. Kzinti had eaten their kind, without a thought. Now they eat kzinti. And humans, and any other prey, large or small."

"Then why are you alive?" asked Vaemar. The question of how she, with her female mind, could understand these things and speak of them clearly and fluently was another matter.

"I have burrows here. Compartments with no openings for a large Jotok to enter, save doors I can close and guard. I keep ahead of them and so far I have survived."

"How did you get here?"

"Does it matter now?"

"Yes. I am dealing with the unknown, and if possible I must see the background of events before I move. I take it we are in no immediate danger."

"Not for a short time. Most of the big Jotok swim far when hunting. The smaller ones are hiding from us now, apart from the guards they have to keep us in. But when the others return . . ."

"There is another thing I do not understand," said Vaemar.

"I know."

"Yes, you know. You are not an ordinary kzinrret."

"I told you my name is Karan," she replied.

"Yes."

"Were we on a world of the Patriarch, young Riit, I would die under torture before I said more. And I will say no more of that now."

"You are a sapient female. That is plain."

She glared at him silently, teeth bared and claws extended. But all the kzinti had claws extended here. "For some, a few, who bear that name . . ." She stopped. "I have said too much," she hissed at length.

"Or not enough."

"My mother taught me a little of our secrets before she died in fighting. I ran from my Sire's house. I was a feral kitten. I met feral human kittens. There were caves."

I am remembering, thought Vaemar. Raargh's story of how he got his Name.

"We lived in the great caves, until the night-stalkers killed most of us and captured me. They killed the human who was with me, and they broke my legs and