If RK was ahead of her, Acorna saw no sign of him. The cat didn't respond when she sought his thoughts. Perhaps he was still put out with her over the blood drawing.
Approaching the knot of people, Acorna looked up and asked Nadhari, "What happened here?"
The warrior priests turned on her. "Who are you?"
"Look at it!" one of them said, pointing at her. "It has a horrible horn in the middle of its head. It's a demon! It must have been what killed Bulaybub."
Nadhari leaped to the ground as lightly as RK might, managing to land between Acorna and the armed men. "Steady, Brothers. This lady is not a demon or a killer. She is the ambassador from a world of wonderful peaceful beings called the Linyaari and a guest of my cousin, Edu, your high priest. She is also the doctor who healed your sacred Temple cats."
The poor woman whose house they clustered around seemed to Acorna to be in great distress. She smelled of illness, but that didn't explain the bloody trail leading from her home.
The woman shrank from Acorna. Before Acorna could try to gain her trust and form a mental bond with her, she heard RK's thought-speech, (This blood belongs to the one I saw last night.
He is not a ritual dancer. He is one of us, and yet not one of us. He is injured, and he has the sickness.)
"There is a murderer loose, Ambassador," the head warrior priest told Acorna. "Someone or something murdered Brother Bulaybub. We believe that the same person or thing has left this trail behind."
"I see," Acorna said. "That makes sense, but why do you say thing?"
"Because what was done to our brother wasn't done by any human hand. He was clawed to death, gutted -"
Nadhari interrupted, sparing the woman householder the details. "Were you acquainted with Brother Bulaybub?" she asked the house's inhabitant.
The woman shook her head wildly.
Acorna mentally reached out for RK, but he shrugged off her mental touch. He was moving away rapidly.
(I am on the case, Acorna. I go now to chase the sick one down. I would bring him back to you, but he is very big.)
(He is also dangerous. He killed a man.)
(Oh, yessss,) RK hissed, and she could see his tail lashing. (But I too can be dangerouss.)
She knew that. She had seen him attack the Wats when they had tried to kill Thariinye and her. But while RK was much larger than a domestic cat, he was much smaller than a tiger or a lion.
(I must take the vaccine to the Temple. Please, if you find him, hide and tell me. I will get help.)
(The first pounce is mine,) RK said fiercely.
(You've been aboard ship too long, Roadkill. Just see that you don't live up to your name. Becker would be heartbroken.)
But the intrepid animal wasn't listening. He was on the scent and stalking his prey.
Nine
The tasty tang of fresh blood, the deeply torn tracks of claws, the warmth of fresh footprints, these were a few of RK's favorite things, even if he hadn't realized it until presented with them.
He felt that his years of being first mate on the salvage vessel had all been leading up to this, his true calling, stalker in the dark of things even darker. Yes, he was in his element now. He had found his calling. Seeker after hidden truths, defender of that which was good, righteous, his. Destroyer of that which he didn't like.
He alone could rise to this occasion. The other felines, the Temple residents whose job this might otherwise have been, were still too weak from their long illness. Frankly, they were a bit over the hill, anyway. Becker had no liking for damaged organic things, which were not useful as salvage. Nadhari had other rats to catch. Acorna was… was… well, she might be useful, once RK was able to lay out the facts for her like a neatly assembled row of cleanly killed rodents, but for this kind of tracking she was not suitable. She was too conspicuous, too alien, too white and silvery and glistening, and she smelled too good. And she was too tall. She might come in handy as an assistant operative later on in the game. But this kind of job called for someone closer to the ground, someone whose heart beat with the planet's underlying rhythm.
Someone like him.
It helped too that he had actually seen what he considered to be the chief murder suspect-that roof-hopping cat impersonator. For all his poetic thoughts about being close to the ground, he soon took to the roofs instead, following the scent of his prey. This was better sport than tracking Khleevi, who were so stinking obvious even Becker could track them.
As the suns rose, more people came out of their lairs and started walking around in the streets below. RK smelled smoke, though it didn't issue from any of the roofs. He realized that he had actually been smelling it ever since he arrived on this world, but that the smoke was old and no longer had flame behind it. It hung in the air like the red dust and made his nose itch and sting. It carried an unpleasant odor made more unpleasant by the fact that what could have been the lingering scent of a cook fire was overlain with that of singed hair and the stench of rotting meat. RK wouldn't have turned his nose up at that sort of thing if he was hungry enough, but never once since Becker rescued him from a derelict ship had he ever been that hungry.
The trail had started with spurts of blood on the ground, but that smell disappeared and the scent changed, as RK followed it over the rooftops. The traces of the killer's passing were soon augmented by another type of sign-hairs. The cat impersonator was shedding his fur. That seemed a strange thing for a cat wannabe to do, especially since the killer was shedding it a tuft here, a hair there, instead of ditching an entire hide-and RK did not even want to think how the suspect had come to possess that. The early discarded tufts were black, which jibed with RK's shadowy memory of the felonious feline or felinious felon -he wasn't sure which applied.
The suns rose higher until the roof tiles under RK's feet were hot enough that, had his particular paw pads not been blessed with extra fur between the toes, they might have been toast. About this time he caught other, fainter scents and found a tuft of golden fur caught between two tiles, and later three striped hairs similar to his own.
He looked around, sniffing, curling his outer lips to try to pick up a keener scent that way. Other cats had been here within the last day or two. He had received the impression that the only others of his kind in this city were the four remaining Temple cats, but that idea appeared to be wrong.
He sat and considered the roof-scape around him. Although all of the roof surfaces were flat, they were not all the same height. Second floors, little spare rooms, and other irregularities threw sharp shadows onto the broader baked-red roofs.
RK assumed his best thinking position, which was spread out to absorb the maximum warmth through his furry parts. He was now at the city's outer wall, and beyond it was the countryside, such as it was. He saw huge charred circles in the red dirt where big bonfires had been, and, being driven toward them, herds of various sorts of beasts, some of them familiar, some more distinctly alien.
Some of the beasts were already being herded into pens, and into long lines of troughs. On both sides of the troughs, men with big knives and bloody clothing stood waiting. RK felt a certain fang-thrilling fascination with all this gory slaughter, but it wasn't the particular kind of murder he had set out to investigate. He saw a small cloud of black and white hair bounce across a roof just north of the one he occupied, also abutting the city wall.