“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-”
Haral: “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.”