“I will not fail you, Dom—Elder Brother,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.
“Besides, the enemy humans here on Wunderland”—it was a long standing joke that the kzinti name for the planet meant lovely hunting ground—”have been disposed of. Go, and hunt well.”
Perhaps I should have stayed to track them myself, he mused as he passed the last guard station with an absentminded wave. No, why bother. That prey is already caught; this was simply a re-enactment.
Chuut-Riit felt the repaired doors swing shut before him and glanced around in puzzlement, the silence penetrating through post-Hunt sluggishness. The courtyard was deserted, and it had been nearly seven days since his last visit; far too soon for another assassination attempt, but the older children should have been boiling out to greet him, questioning and frolicking . . . He turned and keyed the terminal in the stone beside the door.
Nothing. The kzin blinked in puzzlement. Odd. There has been no record of any malfunction. In instinctive reflex he lowered himself to all fours and sniffed; the usual sand-rock-metal scents, multiple young-kzin male smells, always slightly nerve-wracking. Something underneath that, and he licked his nose to moisten it and drew in a long breath with his mouth half open.
He started back, arching his spine and bristling with a growling hiss, tail rigid. Dead meat and blood. Whirling, he slapped for the exterior communicator. “Guard-Captain, respond. Guard-Captain, respond immediately.”
Nothing. He bent, tensed, leaped for the summit of the wall. A crackling discharge met him, a blue corona around the sharp twisted iron of the battlement’s top that sent pain searing through the palms of his outstretched hands. The wards were set on maximum force, and he fell to the ground cradling his burned palms. Rage bit through him, stronger than pain or thought; someone had menaced his children, his future, the blood of the Riit. His snarl was soundless as he dashed on all fours across the open space of the courtyard and into the entrance of the warren.
It was dark, the glowpanels out and the ventilators silent; for the first time it even smelled like a castle on homeworld, purely of old stone, iron, and blood. Fresh blood on something near the entrance. He bent, the huge round circles of his eyes going black as the pupils expanded. A sword, a four-foot kreera with a double saw edge. The real article, heavy wave-forged steel, from the sealed training cabinets which should only have opened to his own touch. Ignoring the pain as burned tissue cracked and oozed fluids, he reached for the long hide-wound bone grip of the weapon. The edges of the blade glimmered with dark wet, set with a mat of orange-red hairs.
His arm bent, feeling the weight of the metal as he dropped into the crook-kneed defensive stance, with the lead ball of the pommel held level with his eyes. The corridor twisted off before him, the faint light of occasional skylights picking out the edges of granite blocks and the black iron doors with their central locks cast in the shape of beast-masked ancestral warriors. Chuut-Riit’s ears cocked forward and his mouth opened, dropping the lower jaw toward the chest: maximum flow over the nasal passages to catch scent, and fangs ready to tear at anything that got past the weapon in his hands. He edged down the corridor one swift careful step at a time, heading for the central tower where he could do something, even if it was only lighting a signal fire.
Insane, he thought with a corner of his mind that watched his slinking progress through the dark halls. It was insane, like something from the ancient songs of homeworld. Like the Siege of Zeeroau, the Heroic Band manning the ramparts against the prophet, dwindling one by one from wounds and weariness and the hunger-frenzy that sent them down into the catacombs to hunt and then the dreadful feasting.
Chuut-Riit turned a corner and wheeled, blade up to meet a possible attack from the dropstand over the corner. Nothing, but the whirl-and-cut brought him flush against the opposite wall, and he padded on. Noise and smell; a thin mewling, and an overpowering stink of kzinmeat. A door, and the first body before it. There was little of the soft tissue left, but the face was intact. One of his older sons, the teeth frozen in an eternal snarl; blood was splashed about, far more than one body could account for. Walls, floor, ceiling, gouts and spattered trails that dripped down in slow congealing trails toward the floor. A chugra spear lay broken by the wall, alongside a battered metal shield; the sound had been coming from behind the door the corpse guarded, but now he could hear nothing.
No, wait. His ears folded out to their maximum. Breathing. A multiple rapid panting. He tried the door; it was unlocked, but something had it jammed closed.
A mewl sounded as he leaned his weight against it and the iron creaked. “Open!” he snarled. “Open at once.”
More mewls, and a metallic tapping. The panel lurched inward, and he stooped to fill the doorway.
The infants, he thought. A heap in the far corner of the room, squirming spotted fur and huge terrified eyes peering back at him. The younger ones, the kits just recently taken from their mothers; at the sight of him they set up the thin eeeuw-eeeuw-eeeuw that was the kzin child’s cry of distress.
“Daddy!” one of them said. “We’re so hungry, Daddy. We’re so frightened. He said we should stay in here and not open the door and not cry but there were awful noises and its been so long and we’re hungry, Daddy, Daddy—”
Chuut-Riit uttered a grating sound deep in his chest and looked down. His son’s wtsai had been wedged to hold the door from the inside; the kits must have done it at his instruction, while he went outside to face the hunters. Hunger-frenzy eroded what little patience an adolescent kzin possessed, as well as intellect; they would not spend long hammering at a closed door, not with fresh meat to hand and the smell of blood in their nostrils.
“Silence,” he said, and they shrank back into a heap. Chuut-Riit forced gentleness into his voice. “Something very bad has happened,” he said. “Your brother was right, you must stay here and make no noise. Soon I . . . soon I or another adult will come and feed you. Do you understand?” Uncertain nods. “Put the knife back in the door when I go out. Then wait. Understand?”
He swung the door shut and looked down into his son’s face while the kits hammered the knifeblade under it from the inside.
“You did not die in vain, my brave one,” he whispered, very low, settling into a crouch with the sword ready. “Kdari-Riit,” he added, giving the dead a full Name. Now I must wait. Wait to be sure none of the gone-mad ones had heard him, then do his best. There would be an alert, eventually. The infants did not have the hormone-driven manic energy of adolescents. They would survive.
* * *
“Zroght-Guard-Captain,” the human said. “Oh, thank God!”
The head of the viceregal household troopers rose blinking from his sleeping-box, scratching vigorously behind one ear. “Yes, Henrietta?” he said.
“It’s Chuut-Riit,” she said. “Zroght-Guard-Captain, it wasn’t him who refused to answer—I knew it and now we’ve found tampering; the technicians say they missed something the first time. We still can’t get through to him in the children’s quarters. And the records say the armory’s open and they haven’t been fed for a week!”
The guard-captain wasted no time in speech with the sobbing human; it would take enough time to physically breach the defenses of the children’s quarters.
* * *
“Hrrnnngg-ha,” Chuut-Riit gasped, panting with lolling tongue. The corner of the exercise room had given him a little protection, the desks and machinery a little more. Now a dozen lanky bodies interlaced through the equipment about his feet, and the survivors had drawn back to the other end of the room. There was little sentience left in the eyes that peered at him out of the starved faces, not enough to use missile-weapons. Dim sunlight glinted on their teeth and the red gape of their mouths, on bellies fallen in below barrel-hoop ribs.
That last rush almost had me, he thought. An odd detachment had settled over him; with a sad pride he noticed the coordination of their movements even now, spreading out in a semicircle to bar the way to the doors. He was bleeding from a dozen superficial cuts, and the long sword felt like a bar of neutronium in his hands. The blade shone liquid-wet along its whole length now, and the hilt was slimy in his numb grip, slick with blood and the lymph from his burned hands; he twisted it in a whistling circle that flung droplets as far as the closing pack. Chuut-Riit threw back his head and shrieked, an eerie keening sound that filled the vaulted chamber. They checked for a moment; shrinking back. If he could keep them . . .