The kzin’s scream rose an octave in pitch.
The warrior came back on attack with a feint. Gambiel ignored the stroke but still countered with a twisting punch. It found only air and a whisk of fur.
In two more exchanges, the kzin absorbed one painful blow, and Gambiel took a raking that opened his right arm and shoulder to the bone. As he was trying to press back the flap of flayed skin, he felt a jet of arterial blood. The fourth claw had struck higher on his neck than he though!
The kzin, sensing imminent victory, prepared its last charge.
Gambiel then made the decision that had loomed over his entire life for so long. He would not step aside again. He met the charge full on-with a stop-kick whose perfect focus on the center of the kzin’s skull was one-half centimeter longer than the warcat’s reach. His blow cracked that skull a half-second before the eight claws swung across his torso in converging slices.
Disemboweled, the Jinxian’s body flew sideways and caught against a tree limb. He saw it arrest his flight but could feel nothing down there. Then his eyes darkened, a red mist creeping across his field of vision. But before the mist could raise the night, he saw the orange body stagger curl up, and disappear through a gap in the shrubbery.
The kzin did not even scream as it fell.
Hanging in her harness with just a toe-perch among the slender branches, Sally Krater listened carefully to the thrashing below her in the canopy. The fight that Gambiel was waging proceeded without cries or curses, just that one scream of challenge. If it was followed by heavy breathing and grunts of pain, she could not hear them.
The dog Fellah huddled in her arms, shivering against her chest. But occasionally it lifted its head and looked down. Then, by the tilting of its ears, she sensed the animal was following the action and weighing their chances of survival.
When the thrashing ceased, Krater released her winder and unclenched her toes, dropping down into the open vaults beneath the canopy layer and above the forest floor far below. Off to her right, about forty meters away, she saw an orange body drop through the leaves and tumble three times head over heels before it hit the hard ground. It lay there in a bundle of matted fur. Krater thought it was dead, until it twitched and moved a paw, raised itself and began to crawl.
Sally lifted herself into the cover of the leafs’ layer and watched. The kzin rose on its hind legs with painful, ungraceful jags of motion and started to walk away. Krater withdrew fully into the canopy. She consulted her sense of direction and moved back toward the place of the fight.
At first, all she could see were torn branches and a ruck of leaves, turned over to show their lighter undersides among splashes of blood. At the side of the clearing, however, she quickly spotted the Jinxian’s uniform. She set the dog down on a firm branch and moved quickly over the vines toward Gambiel.
His coverall was curiously flat, deflated. She touched his shoulder, to rouse him and turn him over, and the torn remains slumped apart, ripping the uniform fabric across the back.
Krater found his head, his eyes open and staring. She dosed them with the edge of her hand.
Then there was nothing more she could do, no words to say, and no way to bury him. She gathered up the dog and continued moving toward the noon rendezvous.
“Fellah” they had called him, these beings that lived and moved separately, apart from the Discipline. “Fellah” was the word shape that came up in their blue-green minds and arrowed at him like yellow fire. “Fellah.” And they did not mean it unkindly.
As he lurched through the rushing trees, under the arm of the “Sally,” the Pruntaquilun Balladeer dosed his eyes to the flying wind and the green leaves, and tightened his stomach against the surgings of sensation. He called up his latent powers of intellect and considered all that he had experienced since being packed into Guerdoth’s traveling case.
When the Master had prepared for a month’s stay at the hunting estates of his uncle, the Magistrate Alcuin, he had taken along his favorite Balladeer. And his baton, of course. Fellah knew what the device did and how it worked. As a Pruntaquilun, with his limited insight into other minds and his facility with courtly language, he was instrumental in the Master’s charades.
None other than Guerdoth’s favorite Balladeer could be trusted to help the Master conceal the shame of his Powerloss and so to survive. Thus, Fellah would observe and make stealthy inquiries with the edges of his mind, accumulating bits and shadings of thought from other Thrintun and from Slaves. Then he would sing of them to Guerdoth in an ancient tongue that only the Master understood. With Fellah’s espionage, and with the Baton, they cemented the impression among all who cared that Guerdoth still retained the Power and wielded it as a true Thrint.
But when the time-standing case had been opened, Fellah was arrived not at Alcuin’s estates but in a green world of wild, waving plants and among wild, unDisciplined beings. Except that the “Daff” had wielded Guerdoth’s Baton. Although he had used it inexpertly, still he made the commands to love and respect, to attend and obey. And he made them on Fellah himself.
Yet even as he made the commands, the Daff had not thought of himself as a Master. The word-image he used was “human.” Strange it was, however, that the shape of this thought in the Daff’s mind was not much different from the shape of “Thrint” in Guerdoth’s. It contained the same overtones of capability, of mastery of the expectation to control and order the world and time as one saw fit.
Similar thought-shapes had also been in the Sally’s mind-although not so strongly, not since that Other had come and destroyed the Daff. Fellah himself had known the Daff was dead in the instant his mind sparked and went black.
Fellah wished the Sally would use more and simpler words in her thinking about the death, so that he might absorb them and add to his picture of these new masters, the humans. He was putting together a sense of the pattern of their minds and their language with every thought he intercepted. But it was harder this way, starting without a grammar or even a coherent picture of the world into which he had emerged from the traveling case.
The Other who had killed the Daff had used still another word-image, “kzin.” It was brighter, more jaggedly lit with reddish-orange colors and blood scents, than the “human” in Daff’s and Sally’s minds. Yet “kzin” meant controller and shaper of destinies, too.
And nowhere, not along any of the dimensions among which Fellah cast his mind, did he find any echo now of “Thrint.” The glinting hard edges of their Power was gone from the universe, creating a black and peaceful vacuum, as if it had never been.
Fellah contemplated a universe without Discipline, without the ever-present puppet strings. He tried to decide if this emptiness was a good thing in itself.
He began to suspect it might be.
Nyawk-Captain found Weaponsmaster’s discarded armor through the emergency distress tone it was generating. From its position on the forest floor, with the helmet bent back and the visor digging a Furrow in the dirt, he concluded that it had fallen out of the trees.
He studied the pattern of burn marks on the ablative surface. No blood or carbonized flesh on either, although the one at the throat smelled of burned hair. Clearly, Weaponsmaster had not been injured significantly while wearing the armor. Nor had he been wearing it when it fell.
Nyawk-Captain tilted his head back to study the underside of the roof layer. Nothing in its leaf pattern told him anything.
“My Captain!”
The voice was faint and coming from his left. Nyawk-Captain rose in a crouch and his armor prepared itself for violence.
Weaponsmaster limped forward from one of the rare patches of jungle growth on the forest floor. His gait reflected broken bones. He tended to circle to the right as he moved.