RK was the calmest of the cats. As Becker's longtime ship's cat, he'd seen worse. Still, he crouched low on the flitter's deck at Acorna's feet, casting a baleful eye at the hatch, now opaque from the sand. His contribution to the decibel level alternated between a menacing growl and a gradually increasing scream.
None of this had a salubrious effect on Acorna's nerves.
"Shis up!" Becker screamed at last, outshouting cats, sand, wind, and all. "Everybody just shut up and stay calm and I'll drive us through this."
Becker's hands were tight on the controls, his muscles trembling with the effort to keep the flitter in the air. Acorna could see Becker's sweating face highlighted in the soft lighting that had automatically activated inside the flitter's cabin once the suns had set. The captain's jaw was tense, and his back rigid as he bent low to survey the instrument panel.
Miw-Sher looked startled, and Tagoth grinned. All of the adult cats except for RK looked a bit shocked and highly offended. They seemed to feel that it was their right to protest such an unseemly display on the part of the environment, or perhaps they felt it was their duty to join in the noise. But after Becker's shout, they left the screeching to the storm.
Acorna wasn't sure it would be useful, but she began broadcasting calm and soothing thoughts to one and all. She also edged over and laid her head on Becker's shoulder so that her horn touched the base of his neck. He seemed surprised by the touch at first, but it had the desired effect. His shoulders relaxed, and his hands eased a bit on the controls, while the little craft continued plowing through the sandstorm.
"I keep feeling like I have to drive this thing, and actually, it does a real good job by itself," he told her, with a sheepish grin.
Almost more startling than the sudden storm was the sight that met them when they burst through it. The night beyond the sandstorm was still clear and bright with the striped light of the planet's two moons. They had risen during the flitter's flight through the storm, and now hung heavy in the night sky, full and round save for a stripe of shadow in the center of each.
"Ho-oh-leee cats," Becker said. "If we hadn't just come from that sky just a couple of days ago, Acorna, I'd swear there was a big old pussycat out there looking down on us like we were inside a mouse hole."
Tagoth and Miw-Sher began talking to each other so rapidly, while pointing through the sand-scoured hatch at the sky, that even Acorna couldn't make out what they were saying.
Tagoth finally stopped and explained. "When our moons align themselves thusly, it is a sign of a great crisis in our world."
"So that's a bad thing?" Becker asked.
"Not necessarily," Miw-Sher answered the question Acorna relayed. "While the Star Cat's eyes watch the crisis unfold, his vigilant benevolence may also serve to spare us from it, if he so wills."
"Gee, that's nice," Becker said when Acorna told him this. "We'll hope the big guy is in a good mood, then."
Tagoth tapped him on the shoulder and said, for Acorna to translate, "Steer toward the star that appears in the center below the eyes of the Star Cat."
Becker did so.
A range of low mountains, white as bones under the catty glare of the moons, rose before them. As the flitter flew over the ridge, its occupants could see that the white knuckle hills were not set in a line, but circled a great deep crater.
"Descend into the crater," Tagoth instructed. "But do not land. I will show you where to fly."
Becker obeyed. Suddenly Tagoth said, "Now turn back toward the desert… sharply, yes… and fly into that shadow between the inner wall of the ridge and the crater."
This, too, Becker did. They found themselves flying right into a fissure in the side of the crater.
It looked as though hundreds of fireflies floated in the dark in front of them, their lights tiny pinpricks that were hardly enough to illuminate the darkness of the passage.
Then Tagoth said, "Descend and land."
Becker, who had no idea what lay beneath them, began doing so. The pinpricks of light grew larger, and flickered and drew nearer, until they were clearly visible as the flames of torches carried by a parade of people converging on the flitter. Behind them, rising almost to the ceiling of the ridge, were torches set into the face of the rock.
Tagoth said, "Behold the Aridimi Stronghold."
The people under the torches were armed with a glittering assortment of knives, spears, and swords. Light glinted off the coin-bright eyes of still more guardian cats. None of these cats hopped onto the hatch in curious greeting as they had back in the forest Temple. The Hissimi guardians, tired and shaken from their journey through the sandstorm, waited warily to see what would happen next.
"Have you friends here?" Acorna asked Tagoth.
"A few know me. But my journey here was long ago, and probably those young enough to defend the Temple will not remember me. Besides, there is something you should know. The highest-ranking priests speak a special secret language and I was never privileged to learn it. I was not especially trusted in my time here."
"In that case, I'll go first," Acorna said. Becker started to protest, but she smiled and put her hand on his shoulder. "There should be some advantage to being the one whose coming is prophesied, after all."
The hatch opened and immediately the torches, guardian cats, and men drew close until she could count the whiskers on the cats' faces and the hairs on the arms of the men. She stood, holding her horned head erect on a neck nearly as long as and far more slender than one of her Ancestors'.
"Hello," she said pleasantly in the Makahomian dialect she had learned from Nadhari. "My name is Acorna. I am the Linyaari ambassador. I believe you have met one of my race before-the one you call the Star Cat's Companion. I'm told my arrival is expected." Becker and RK stepped outside the flitter as well and stood at attention on either side of her, ready to take on anyone who raised a hand to hurt their friend.
"Greetings, Khornya, and welcome." The speaker-a small, shriveled figure-emerged in front of the torchbearers. "Your arrival is indeed a cause for celebration. We are so pleased that you bring with you Joh and Riidkiiyi." His utterances were in somewhat broken and laboriously pronounced but nonetheless unmistakable Linyaari.
Nadhari Kando was no coward, and many of the entries in her extensive resume proved her fearlessness and offered evidence of her superb fighting prowess.
It wasn't exactly fear that gripped her now as she sat bound hand and foot in the back of the flitter while Dsu Macostut drove. No, what she felt was more like revulsion for Edu, and even more for herself. Both she and Edu recognized the possibilities of this scenario, one that she thought she had long ago put behind her as she had gained in strength and fighting skill.
When he turned and grinned at her speculatively, possessively, she knew she should dismiss him as an incestuous ass and disregard his stare while she considered how to escape. But to her amazement, there was a very angry and frightened younger Nadhari inside her that wanted to hide, wanted to run away, and was something her older self hadn't been for some time - ashamed. Not ashamed for some great wrong she had committed, as she had when, under the influence of drugs, she'd been used by General Ikwaskwan and his friend Count Edacki Ganoosh as a torture machine to harm the Linyaari. No, it was the way Edu looked at her that shamed her, the way he assumed some complicity on her part had put her at his mercy this way. Probably several hundred men had made overtures to her in her life by now. More of them than she cared to admit had even been successful, but none of them had made her feel as dirty as Edu could just by looking at her.