He was alive, all right. Locklear knew it in his guts when a stone trickled its way down near the pool. He knew it for certain when he felt soft footfalls, the almost silent track of a big hunting cat, vibrate the damp grassy embankment against his back. He eased forward in water that was no deeper than his armpits, still hidden, but when the towering kzin warrior sprang to the verge of the water he made no sound at all. He carried only his sidearm and knife, and Locklear fired at a distance of only ten paces, actually a trifling space.
But a tremendous trifle, for Brickshitter was well trained and did not pause after his leap before hopping aside in a squat. He was looking straight at Locklear and the horizontal spray of slugs ceased before it reached him. Brickshitter’s arm was a blur. Foliage shredded where Locklear had hidden as the little man dropped below the surface, feeling two hot slugs trickle down his back after their velocity was spent underwater.
Locklear could not see clearly, but propelled himself forward as he broke the surface in a desperate attempt to reach the other side. He knew his sidearm was empty. He did not know that his opponent’s was, until the kzin navigator threw the weapon at him, screamed, and leaped.
Locklear pulled himself to the bank with fronds as the big kzin strode toward him in water up to his belly. Too late to run, and Brickshitter had a look of cool confidence about him. I like him better when he’s not so cool. “Come on, you kshat, you vatach’s ass,” he chanted, backing toward the only place where he might have safety at his back—the stone shelf before Boots’s bower, where great height was a disadvantage. “Come on, you fur-licking, brickshitting hairball, do it! Leaping and screaming, screaming and leaping; you stupid no-name,” he finished, wondering if the last was an insult.
Evidently it was. With a howling scream of savagery, the big kzin tried to leap clear of the water, falling headlong as Locklear reached the stone shelf. Dagger now in hand, Brickshitter floundered to the bank spitting, emitting a string of words that doubled Locklear’s command of kzinti curses. Then, almost as if reading Locklear’s mind, the navigator paused a few paces away and held up his knife. And his voice, though quivering, was exceedingly mild. “Do you know what I am going to do with this, monkey?”
To break through this facade, Locklear made it off-handed. “Cut your ch’rowling throat by accident, most likely,” he said.
The effect was startling. Stiffening, then baring his fangs in a howl of frustration, the warrior sprang for the shelf, seeing in mid-leap that Locklear was waiting for exactly that with his w’tsai thrust forward, its tip made needle-sharp by the same female who had once dulled it. But a kzin warrior’s training went deep. Pivoting as he landed, rolling to one side, the navigator avoided Locklear’s thrust, his long tail lashing to catch the little man’s legs.
Locklear had seen that one before. His blade cut deeply into the kzin’s tail and Brickshitter vented a yelp, whirling to spring. He feinted as if to hurl the knife and Locklear threw both arms before his face, seeing too late the beginning of the kzin’s squatting leap in close quarters, like a swordsman’s balestra. Locklear slammed his back painfully against the side of the cave, his own blade slashing blindly, and felt a horrendous fiery trail of pain down the length of his knife arm before the graceful kzin moved out of range. He switched hands with the w’tsai. “I am going to carve off your maleness while you watch, monkey,” said Brickshitter, seeing the blood begin to course from the open gash on Locklear’s arm.
“One word before you do,” Locklear said, and pulled out all the stops. “Ch’rowl your grandmother. Ch’rowl your patriarch, and ch’rowl yourself.”
With each repetition, Brickshitter seemed to coil into himself a bit farther, his eyes not slitted but saucer-round, and with his last phrase Locklear saw something from the edge of his vision that the big kzin saw clearly. Ropelike, temptingly bushy, it was the flick of Boots’s tail at the mouth of her bower.
Like most feline hunters from the creche onward, the kzin warrior reacted to this stimulus with rapt fascination, at least for an instant, already goaded to insane heights of frustration by the sexual triggerword. His eyes rolled upward for a flicker of time, and in that flicker Locklear acted. His headlong rush carried him in a full body slam against the navigator’s injured shoulder, the w’tsai going in just below the ribcage, torn from Locklear’s grasp as his opponent flipped backward in agony to the water. Locklear cartwheeled into the pool, weaponless, choosing to swim because it was the fastest way out of reach.
He flailed up the embankment searching wildly for a loose stone, then tossed a glance over his shoulder. The navigator lay on his side, half out of the water, blood pumping from his belly, and in his good arm he held Locklear’s w’tsai by its handle. As if his arm were the only part of him still alive, he flipped the knife, caught it by the tip, forced himself erect.
Locklear did the first thing he could remember from dealing with vicious animals: reached down, grasped a handful of thin air, and mimicked hurling a stone. It did not deter the navigator’s convulsive move in the slightest, the w’tsai a silvery whirr before it thunked into a tree one pace from Locklear’s breast. The kzin’s motion carried him forward into water, face down. He did not entirely submerge, but slid forward inert, arms at his sides. Locklear wrestled his blade from the tree and waited, his chest heaving. The navigator did not move again.
Locklear held the knife aloft, eyes shut, for long moments, tears of exultation and vengeance coursing down his cheeks, mixing with dirty water from his hair and clean blood from his cheek. His eyes snapped open at the voice.
“May I name my son after you, Rockear?” Boots, just inside the overhang, held two tiny spotted kittens protectively where they could suckle. It was, he felt, meant to be an honor merely for him to see them.
“I would be honored, Boots. But the modern kzin custom is to make sons earn their names, I think.”
“What do I care what they do? We are starting over here.”
Locklear stuffed the blade into his belt, wiping wet stuff from his face again. “Not unless I can put away that scarfaced commander. He’s got Kit at the manor unless she has him. I’m going to try and bias the results,” he said grimly, and scanned the heights above the ravine.
To his back, Boots said, “It is not traditional, but—if you come for us, we would return to the manor’s protection.”
He turned, glancing up the ravine. “An honor. But right now, you’d better come out and wait for the waterfall to resume. When it does, it might flood your bower for a few minutes.” He waved, and she waved back. When next he glanced downslope, from the upper lip of the ravine, he could see the brushfire dwindling at the jungle’s edge, and water just beginning to carve its way through a jumble of debris in the throat of the ravine, and a small lithe orangeyellow figure holding two tiny spotted dots, patiently waiting in the sunlight for everything he said to come true. “Lady,” he said softly to the waiting Boots, “I sure hope you picked a winner.”
He could have disappeared into the wilds of Kzersatz for months but Scarface, with vast advantages, might call for more searchers. Besides, running would be reactive, the act of mindless prey. Locklear opted to be proactive—a hunter’s mindset.
Recalling the violence of that exploding rifle, he almost ignored the area because nothing useful could remain in the crater. But curiosity made him pause, squinting down from the heights, and excellent vision gave him an edge when he saw the dull gleam of Brickshitter’s beam rifle across the ravine. It was probably fully discharged, else the navigator would not have abandoned it. But Scarface wouldn’t know that.