Spots’s mouth gaped at the horrendous insult. All their lives they had sparred and tussled for dominance, insulting each other in the friendly fashion of non-serious rivals. That was a blood libel.
“Is your oath nothing to you?” he grated.
“Oh, I will allow the monkey to fight me… barehanded,” Bigs said, with a sly, horrible amusement in the twitch of his ears and brows. “That fulfills the oath.” He paused for effect “What of your blood-obligation to the Patriarchy and the Heroic Race, Spots-Son of Chotrz-Shaa?”
Abruptly, Spots collapsed into a fur-flattened, droop-eared, limp-tailed puddle of misery. “I know,” he muttered. “I am ripped in half! If you have forgotten your honor in madness, I have not We are the last of the line of Chotrz-Shaa. Two lives and the life of our House we owe these monkeys. Your life to Jonah-human. Mine to a female! Yet we owe blood and honor to the Patriarch.”
Bigs smirked, and Spots flared into a gape-jawed scream of rage: “Stop whacking at my tail, fatherless sthondat-sucker”
He could see Jonah turning, alarmed at the sound, and he forced calm on himself with an effort greater than he had thought was in him.
“No killing by stealth,” he finished, dropping into the Menacing Tense, “Or you die.”
Bigs smirked again, and continued in the infuriating inflections of a Patriarch: “You will conspire with a monkey against your own sibling?”
“No. But I will not allow you to kill him.”
A sneer, just showing the ends of the dagger incisor-fangs. “He is helpless as a kit at night.”
“I will be watching.”
“How long can you go without sleep, brother? I will feast on his liver yet” Bigs stalked off after the train of mules. As he came level with the last his hand rested on its pannier, and Spots could hear the edge of a whisper.
My tail is cold, he thought in panic. What can I do? What can I do?
Three nights later Spots watched desperately as Jonah prepared for sleep, tilting his broad-brimmed hat forward over his eyes; it was a bright night, alive with the shooting stars so common on Wunderland and with Beta Centauri overhead near the moon. The human gave him a puzzled look as he settled in, and then his breathing grew slow and steady, his heartbeat sounded like an ancient Conundrum Priest drum to Spots’s straining ears. A heavy drum, regular, soothing. Heavy as his eyelids, so soothing as they dropped across dry and aching eyes, so pleasant. Making the ground soft like piled cushions, like piled cushions in the palazzo when he was young, and his father was crooning:
“Brave little orange kzin
Brave little spotted kzin,
Turn to the din
And if it makes you smile,
Leap
But if it is nothing at all
Really nothing at all
You may turn-in;
And droop your eyes while
You sleep.”
Spots sighed and turned, drifting, content. Then shot half-erect, trembling, his fur laid tension-flat on the bones of face and body, tail out and rigid.
Bigs was halfway from his lair of blankets to Jonah, moving with ghost-lightness. Moonlight and Betalight glinted on the heavy blade of the w'tsai in his hand. He caught his brother’s eye and shrugged with fur and tail, grinned insolence, flared his nostrils.
I scent that which you do not. Slowly, insultingly, he sauntered back to his blankets, laid himself down. Then he yawned, a pink-and-white, curl-your-tongue yawn of drowsy contentment, stretching every limb separately and grooming a little. He circled, finding exactly the right position, and curled up with tail over nose. One eye remained open for a second, glinting at Spots from beneath the tufted eyebrow.
You were lucky. But I only have to be lucky once.
Spots whimpered, tongue dangling as he panted with envy and despair. “Are you all right?”
Spots blinked. What am I doing lying on the ground? he thought.
The mule had stopped, pulling at the brushes nearby with a dry tearing sound as leathery leaves parted. One limb at a time, the kzin pulled himself up. Heavy, heavy, more heavy than the battle-practice in the old days, when their Sire worked them to exhaustion under kzin-normal gravity in the exercise room of the palace. Something seemed to hold his hands to the dry packed soil, and pains shot up his back as he stood and squinted into the bright daylight. He ran his fingers through the tangled mass of his mane, and hanks and knots of hair came loose, the furnace wind snatched it from him and scattered the long orange hairs on the air, on the dirt, on the scrubby bushes and sparse grass. He stood, dully staring after them.
“Are you all right?” Jonah asked again. Then he recoiled hastily from the vicious snap that nearly ripped open his arm. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said, tight-lipped, and went back to the lead mule.
Bigs’s ears smirked as he came by, his hand on the capsule. He never left it, now. “Soon we will camp for the night,” he jeered. “Won’t it be good to sleep?” More seriously: “It will be for the best, brother.”
“I have no brother,” Spots rasped, and stumbled forward to take the reins of his mule.
Even the scream hardly woke Spots. His eyes were crusted and blurred even when he opened them. The savage discord of metal on metal jarred him to some semblance of consciousness, and the scent of hot fresh-shed blood. He stumbled erect, mumbling, and stepped forward. The raw-scraped tip of his tail fell across the white ash crust that covered the embers of the fire, and he shot half a dozen meters into the air, screeching.
When he came down, he could see. Bigs’s first leap had failed, and Jonah had gotten out of his blankets and erect. Now the two were circling; Jonah had a four-furrowed row of deep scratches across his chest, and the very tip of Bigs’s tail was missing. The w'tsai gleamed in the kzin’s hand, and Jonah had his arm-long cutter-bar whistling in a figure-eight between them. Totally focused, Bigs lunged forward. Density-enhanced steel shrieked against the serrated edges of the bar and Rigs danced back, smooth and fast. There was a ragged notch in the blade of his honor knife, and his snarl grew more shrill. For a moment Spots thought desperately that his brother would walk the narrow path of honor, weapon against weapon.
“Get back,” Bigs flung over his shoulder, reaching for the strakkaker at his waist.
The world stood still for Spots. I owe my life to Jonah-human. I owe my life to the Patriarch. This is my brother That is my- There was no more time for thought.
Spots screamed and leaped. “No!” he howled. His leap carried him onto the larger kzin’s back.
There was nothing wrong with Bigs’s reflexes. Even as Spots fastened on to him with all sixteen claws he ducked his head between his shoulders to avoid the killing bite to the back of the neck and threw himself backward, stabbing with reversed w'tsai, The blade scored along Spots’s massive ribcage, but there was no soft unarmored midsection to a kzin body. He twisted to lock the arm as they rolled, accepting the savage battering and the pain as they rolled across the campfire, fangs probing deeper and deeper through fur ruff and into the huge muscles of Bigs’s neck. Groping for the vulnerable spine, to drive a spike into the nerve.
Jonah stepped forward, cutter bar raised to strike in a chop that would have cut through Bigs’s torso to the hearts. To the hormone-speeded reflexes of the battling kzinti, the movement might as well have been in slow motion. A full-armed swipe of Bigs’s free hand caught him across face and neck and shoulder, sending him spinning limp to the ground in a shower of flesh. In a tuck-and-roll that was a continuation of the same movement Bigs levered his brother off his back and sent him a dozen meters away. They screamed together and met in a flowing curve of both their leaps, mouths open in the killing gape, hands and feet ripping and tearing and stabbing. Rolling over and over in a blurred mass of orange fur, blood, distended eyes, flashing steel and gleaming inch-long fangs.
Spots’s grip on his brother’s knife-wrist weakened, the daw-grip on his throat choking him until his eyes bulged almost out of their deep-set sockets. Stronger and fresher, the muscles of the short thick arm straining against his were as irresistible as a machine. Pain shot through his hand as his thumb popped out of its socket, and then something cold and very hot at the same time lanced into his body. Gray swam before his eyes as vision narrowed down to the killgrin of his brother’s face, then winked out.