Purposefully Troy moved to the right of the seated man. He could see no wound, no indication of any violence. Yet Kyger had not died naturally—his position, this room, argued that. And what of the thing or things that he had seen precede him through the downstairs door?
Leaving the panel open for light, Troy went back into the hall, pushed open both other doors. One gave on a bedchamber, the other on a small lounge-diner, both empty.
He went back to Kyger’s room. And now, fronting him out of nowhere, were those shadows—the black cat and its blue-gray mate, the kinkajou, no longer an indifferent ball but very much alert, the two foxes he could have sworn were safe in their cage in the other building. It looked as if the full roll of Terran imports to Korwar was before him now. And their lips were drawn back from their teeth, the hair of the cats was roughened on their arched backs, their united menace could be felt as a blow.
“No!” Oddly enough he answered that unvoiced rage and fear with word and gesture, dropping the belt, holding his hands up and palm out to them as if he faced another of his own species.
The black cat relaxed first, pacing forward a paw’s length or so, and Troy dropped on one knee. “No,” he repeated as firmly but in a lower tone. Then he held out his hand as he had seen Kyger do on the morning they had first uncrated the cats in the courtyard.
A delicate sniff or two, and then sharp teeth closed on the back of his wrist, not to hurt, he knew, but as if to seal some agreement. Troy did not have a chance to learn more, for there was a sound from below. Someone who had no reason to disguise his coming was climbing the stairs.
Troy strode to the panel of the hall door. Then he knew that his silhouette could be seen from below, and he ducked to one side. It was the action of only a few seconds, but when he glanced at the animals, they were gone. Where they had vanished to he could not guess, but that they had their suspicions concerning the newcomer he could deduce from that disappearance.
There was no such escape for him. Troy stepped back a little, picked up his belt, and, with it ready in his hand, stood waiting.
Zul came into the path of the light. He gave Troy a wide-eyed stare, looked beyond to the motionless Kyger. Then, his lips pulled tight against his teeth, just as the animals had snarled, he launched himself at Troy, his knife out, a vicious streak of fire in his hand.
Ten
Troy dodged and licked out with his belt lash for the wrist of Zul’s knife hand. The buckle-loaded tip found its mark, and the smaller man yelped and swung around so that his outflung, balancing arm brushed against the tube Kyger’s dead fingers steadied. The cylinder fell and the body of the merchant followed it, wilting bonelessly to the floor. Zul screeched, a cry as high and unhuman as any the animals or birds could have uttered.
At the same time Troy felt a cessation of that thrumming throb. The tube rolled toward him, and Zul, seeming to forget his rage of only seconds earlier, made a grab for it.
Troy kicked, sending the tube spinning. Then he brought the edge of his hand down across Zul’s neck, dropping the little man to lie on the floor gasping. Troy had leisure to collect both knife and cylinder before Zul sat up, still breathing in hoarse rasps.
With the knife and tube laid on top of a cabinet, Troy advanced on Zul. It was like trying to master by force a frenzied animal, one that scratched and bit. In spite of his repugnance, Troy was forced to knock the smaller man out in order to fasten his hands behind him with his own belt.
Troy was rebuckling his riders broad cincture when he saw Zul’s eyes open and take in the limp body of Kyger. The small man’s face twisted in a grimace Troy could not read. Then he strained to raise his head from the floor, looked about eagerly, as if he wanted something more important for the moment than Troy. His attention centered on the tube where it lay with one end projecting over the edge of the cabinet, and he actually began to wriggle his body across the floor toward it.
Troy stepped between. Zul’s grimace was now an open snarl. He spat, struggled to lever himself from the floor.
Troy picked up the tube and took it with him as he moved to the red alarm button on the wall. The quicker he summoned the authorities, the less trouble he would have in telling his own tale.
“No!” For the first time Zul spoke intelligibly. “Not the patrollers!”
“Why not? I have nothing to hide. Have you?”
Zul’s frantic squirming across the room had brought him to the row of cabinets. Now he wriggled his shoulders up against that support so that he was sitting, not lying.
“No patrollers!” he repeated, and his words now held the tone of an order rather than a plea. “Not yet—“
“Why?”
Zul’s dark eyes were again focused on the tube Troy held. He was plainly a man torn between the need for secrecy and the necessity of having help.
Troy pressed. “Because of the animals—the Terran animals?”
Zul froze, his small body suddenly rigid, his face the personified mask of surprise—and perhaps some other emotions Troy could not read.
“What do you know?” His words were harsh, rasping, as if he had to fight for the breath to expel them.
“Enough.” Troy hoped that ambiguity would force some revelation out of his captive.
Zul’s tongue tip wet his lips. He hitched his shoulders along the cabinets as if to reach Troy.
“They must be killed—quickly—before the patrollers are called.”
Troy was startled. Death for those who had met him in this room was the last thing he would have expected from Zul. And certainly he had no intention of yielding to that. “Why?”
Zul’s eyes changed, became sly and suspicious once again. “If you do not know, Dippleman, then you know nothing. They are a danger—to all of us under this roof they are a great danger, now that their master is dead. You will kill, or you will wish that you had died also.”
Troy covered the space between them in one long- legged stride. He stooped, caught Zul by the collar of his tunic, and pulled him to his feet, holding him pinned against a cabinet.
“You will tell me why these animals are a danger,” he said softly, trying to put into that speech all the force and menace he could muster.
“Because”—Zul’s eyes were lifted to Troy’s; apparently he was making a last throw, which might or might not contain the truth—“they are more than animals. They think, they take orders, they report—“
“What orders do they take, and to whom do they report?”
Zul swallowed visibly. There were small beads of oily moisture forming on his forehead just below the tight knots of his hair. Yet Troy sensed that he was not afraid of his captor, but of something else. “They take their orders from him who summons them.” Zul’s eyes flicked to the tube and back again to Troy’s face. “And they report to him—“
“What?”
“Information.”
Puzzle pieces clicked together in Troy’s mind. Pets— with the ability to understand their masters’ or mistresses’ actions, to collect information—planted in households where information worth a high price could be gathered!
“And Kyger did this?” That was a statement as well as a question.
“Yes. Now the animals must be summoned and killed before the patrollers arrive. Give me the caller.”
“I think not.” So Zul did not know that the animals had already arrived to answer the call of a dead or dying man. And as Troy made a decision of his own, he was answered by a thrust of emotion from the seemingly empty spaces of the room—fear, such as had moved the kinkajou to his arms in the garden, a determination to fight, perhaps, too, a vague plea. And he knew that he was again tuned in on the hidden five. If the animals had been used by Kyger in some scheme, certainly they had only been tools.
“Let the patrollers get them,” Zul continued, “and they will have them under probes to learn what they can—and kill them afterwards. Is it not better to kill them cleanly before that is done?”
Troy stiffened, felt his own reaction intensified as the others picked it up. What Zul said made such good sense it presented a new form of danger, and a very big one. But his own thoughts were racing ahead.
So far only those in this room knew that Kyger was dead, with the exception of his killer—which gave Troy a small measure of time. He knew that he could not let Zul kill the animals, and he would fight to keep them from falling into the hands of those who would wring secrets out of them via the probes.