"You can't do it!"
"I can't duck it either. No. Sure that earless bastard is going to try us. One way or the other. And I think I'm starting to think in kifish; I think I read him. I'm perfectly safe to walk in there—if I can keep him wondering. I'm going to need company out there. Want to take a walk?"
"Oh, sure," Haral said with a despairing shrug. "Gods, why not?"
XII
The air of Kefk hit like an ammonia-tainted wall. Haral coughed even on the ramp; Pyanfar sneezed and felt the sting of her eyes in spite of the antiallergents. Haral had put on her portside finery, dark spacer blue with a collection of gold earrings, a set of bracelets, an anklet with a bangle, a belt with silver and gold chains that rattled right along with a monstrous black AP gun and a belt-knife. Pyanfar wore the red silk trousers, gold bracelets and belt and gold-earrings aplenty; a knife and a pocket-gun besides the AP slung low on her hip.
"We look a right set of pirates," Haral had said before the lock sealed them out. "It's the pirates outside worry me," Tirun had retorted to them both, there in the lock.
And Khym had said other things, while Geran and Hilfy fretted and gnawed their mustaches sparse—"Huh," Geran had said, with exhaustion and worry in her eyes. "I'll go with you—"
Haraclass="underline" "My job."
And Tully later: "Where she go—where go, Py-anfar?"
She avoided answers with Tully. "Out," she had told him in that unwanted encounter in the downside corridor. "I got business, Tully. I'm in a hurry."
"Careful," he had said, anxious-looking. Frightened, doubtless from the time he heard that inner lock open, preparing to expose The Pride to the kifish docks. She reckoned the crew would tell him where they had gone after she was well on her way. Or better yet, when she and Haral got back.
When.
They walked the dockside, she and Haral, in a sodium-light hell of clinging smokes and ammonia-reek and a moist chill like a swamp at sundown. Kif moved, black wisps in the dimmer shadow along the far wall of this section of warehouses and factory fronts. There was no color anywhere about Kefk docks but the sickly sodium-glow, no brightness but the stark white of some argon spotlight on a round steel doorway.
"Kkkkt. Kkkkt," the sound came to them, as they walked past kifish ships. Kif, doubtless some of their erstwhile companions—had seen them walk outside and gathered in clusters to whisper—and perhaps, Pyanfar thought, to wonder whether the two hani walking down the docks of Kefk had lost their collective minds.
("Look at you," Khym had cried in dismay while she dressed for this foray. "Wear that into a den of thieves? Py, for godssakes!")
Crazy to wear that much gold into a kifish den if one had not the sfik to hold onto it. "So we look like trouble," Pyanfar had said to Haral when they laid their plan. "A lot of trouble, by kifish lights. That's the idea."
Advertise their presence and hold it under kifish noses till they smelled it and looked at the gold and the weapons and remembered that The Pride's crew had no general reputation for being fools.
Therefore they must be the other kind. Dangerous.
They were also the hakkikt’s invited guests. At least on the way to the meeting.
"Marvelous thing about kif," Pyanfar muttered in a moment when she and Haral were well out of earshot of kif, between one gloomy ship-berth and another. "It occurs to me that these types out here on the dock aren't any more secure than we are. We're high on the wave and so are they and kif sail a rotted choppy sea. Always wondering when the wind's going to shift."
"They're different, that's a fact," Haral muttered in her turn. "No lasting grudges—and, gods be feathered, nothing they won't trade. Flighty folk. I don't think hani ever have got the right of them. Maybe we should have brought our friend Skkukuk on this trip, huh?"
"I did think about it. But I've got an uneasy feeling that one's a little crazy even for a kif. I don't want him near guns and knives."
"Huh. Me either, now I think on it."
A waft of something reached them down the dock. Blood. Even through the ammonia. Pyanfar hissed and cleared her throat. "Good gods," Haral swore in disgust. "That's enough to kill your appetite."
"We're nearly—"—there, Pyanfar started to say and suddenly lost the thread of her thought as she caught sight of the kifish numerals for 28: Harukk's berth. Kif traffic was thick hereabouts and the blood-smell grew stronger.
It worsened rapidly, the closer they walked. The steel rampway rail had a series of metal poles chained to its stanchions, and a dark object sat atop each.
"Gods and thunders," Pyanfar muttered, "Haral, don't flinch."
The heads were kif. Kif came and went on that number 28 ramp, past the awful watchers; she and Haral headed that way among the rest, waiting for challenge from some guard or other.
None came. They passed the first stanchion up and Pyanfar gave the gory object atop it a cold and curious glance.
"So much for the opposition," Haral said.
"Sure ought to keep the new converts in line," Pyanfar muttered. Every kif that came into Harukk had to see it, victory for some, grim warning for the others.
At least, she thought in profoundest relief, none of the heads was hani.
Kif turned and stared at them as they passed, upward-bound like all the rest who had business aboard Harukk. A knot of kif who stood at the accessway clicked and hissed as they passed but made no offer to delay them.
There were, finally, guards inside the large airlock.
"Hakktan," one said in kifish. Captain?
"Ukt," Haral answered with a nod at Pyanfar. Yes. Pyanfar stood by with her arms folded, arrogant to the slant of her ears, and let Haral do the talking. Two of the three kif kept their hands tucked within their sleeves , doubtless concealing weapons besides the guns they wore openly. They stood blocking other traffic into the lock from either direction, while the third reported their presence to the monitor above.
The answer came, orders for their admittance. The guard at the inner hatch stepped aside; and the third guard bowed with that hands-empty gesture: "Inside," that one said.
"Huh," said Pyanfar; bowed and slanted her ears back when she did it. Haral stayed close as they passed the hatch to Harukk's ammonia-smelling interior.
More kif waited in the inside corridor—one who turned out to be merely delayed traffic, who stalked on; and four tall kif rattling with weapons.
"Follow," one said, and stalked off in the lead without looking back. Three walked behind, while two stayed. And not a word of objection about the array of weapons their visitors brought aboard. Not a word of any kind. They passed kif in these dim corridors that stank of ammonia and machinery and blood and other, unidentifiable things, and no one gave them a second glance.
Kifish manners, Pyanfar thought. Don't notice the hakkikt's odd guests, don't stare, don't give offense. The aura of fear and fierceness throughout the place was infectious. It bristled the back, set the pulse beating faster, sent fight-flight impulses coursing the nerves.
Hilfy knows this place, Pyanfar thought at sight after sight, with an involuntary tightening of her gut. Hilfy was in this awful place.
Hilfy had stood silent by Khym's side when she had broken the news to them where she and Haral proposed to go. Khym had had his opinion of it all. Like Geran. But Hilfy's ears just went flat and her nostrils drew taut; and: "Huh," Hilfy had said. "Why?" With a darkness of memory in her eyes; and an estimation, and nothing else readable. 'You know it's a trap."