Papa Sumpfrunner had risen to his feet again; about half a dozen of his followers drifted into the bushes rather than lining up on the trail. They wielded machetes, wore heavy gloves, carried hide sacks that they started to fill with cuttings. If there was a rhyme or reason to their action, Hilda could not discern it.
Smith nodded in the direction of the harvesters. “That’s Burn Bramble they’re harvesting.”
“Burn Bramble?”
“Yeah, the smaller branches and leaf-stems have tiny pockets of nitric acid stored in them: really discourages grazing by the local fauna.”
“And the ’Runners harvest it because-?”
“’Cause nitric acid be the main ingredient in smokeless powder, ’chen,” muttered Papa Sumpfrunner as he drifted past, seeing to the assignment of their rearguard and the laying of a few choice traps. “Can’t live without it. Easier to blow things up than cut them down here in the Sumpf. And even before the kzinti come, we stuck with old-style cartridge guns. Reload our own brass, make the powder from the Bramble.”
“And the bullets?”
He smiled at her quick understanding of their real challenge. “Ja, well, we make bullets from whatever metal works and is handy. Thayz not always so gut as we’d like, but they get the job done.” He waggled his heavy-barreled rifle.
That was the first time Hilda noticed the desiccated kzin ear attached like a tribal fetish to the trigger guard.
Papa saw her staring and nodded. “Ja, ’chen-they get the job done.”
Hilda did not doubt him in the least.
Early the next day, they arrived at the closest thing to a town that the Susser Tal could boast: about three dozen families, whose huts were perched on stilts sunk into rock pilings. Hilda stared at the spindly structures. “Spring floods come down from both sides,” Smith commented at her elbow. “And the rest of the time, the problem is the rain, which has nowhere to go but down. Slowly.”
She nodded. “How many people are-?” She stopped: again, how would Smith know, after having been asleep for half a century? Handily, wiry Papa Sumpfrunner was about to pass them, moving at a good clip.
“Bitte-” she started.
He turned, apparently agitated. “Schnell or nothing, ’chen: I got a message to dig up.” He glanced at Smith.
“Uh-how many of you are there?”
“You talking here, or the whole Tal?”
“The whole valley.”
He shrugged. “Seven hundred, maybe seven hundred twenty. Why?”
Hilda was going to confess idle curiosity, but Smith jumped in before she could. “Because that’s how many people will need to be informed that the kzinti are coming. And that’s how many may have to leave this valley as a result.”
The spokesman glared at him. “I guess we’ll see about that, hey?”
Smith shrugged. “I suppose we will.”
“And if I don’t agree, then what? You gonna make us go, you an’ your army of four?”
Smith shook his head. “They sure aren’t my army: hell, they don’t even like me. But that’s not who’s going to convince you to leave the Susser Tal.”
“No? Who then?”
Smith pointed to the dried kzin ear hanging from the trigger guard of Papa Sumpfrunner’s rifle. “They will. Believe me.”
“Well, we’ll see whether you can be believed at all, first.” He waved the plasticode strip Smith had given him and stalked away.
He stopped directly under the center of what appeared to be his own house, given the questions that were being shouted down at him, and which he momentarily ignored. He started prying up rocks, rather than digging. When he saw Smith’s look, he spat, grumbled: “I thought my PeePaw was verruck, insisting we keep this pile clean and the plastic sheeting over it.” He paused, glared more fiercely. “Well, come on, you soft-skinned drylander; you ain’t as tough as me, but you got decent-sized muscles. Help me move these damned rocks.”
Smith joined him in his labors; four other ’Runners drifted over to pitch in, as well. In less than twenty minutes, they had moved the rocks, thrown back an all-weather tarp and heaved up an old vacuum-rated shipping crate. They opened it and found a plastic-wrapped footlocker inside. Within that was a box. And in that box was a single plasticode strip. Papa Sumpfrunner stared at it as if he were holding a live viper. Then he studied the characters scored into its impervious surface, folded it up, and jammed it in his grime-lined pocket. He turned to Captain Smith. “What’s the code, drylander?”
Smith looked him straight in the eye. “The word on the plasticode is ‘distemper.’”
The spokesman blinked, looked down in the hole, looked away. “Well, shit,” he said.
Mads looked from Papa Sumpfrunner to Smith. “So? What does it mean?”
The senior ’Runner looked at Mads with eyes that were prematurely rheumy. “It means that your friend is exackly who he says he is.” He sighed, his shoulders sloped. “Well, come on in with you all. We might as well have supper while we talk about the end.”
Hilda blinked. “The end? What end?”
Papa Sumpfrunner looked around himself sadly, and then at her. “The end of this, ’chen: the end of our world.”
Shraokh-Lieutenant heard the splashing slither again, this time closer behind him. He froze in place as quickly and completely as only a Hero could.
But the sound was gone, and the other incessant buzzings and whirrings and sloshings and ploppings of the accursed swamp reasserted in his ears.
In his ears. His ears. No longer distracted by the demands of his hunt-mission, Shraokh-Lieutenant felt the sudden, torturing itch in his middle ear return. He dug at it with claws half-extended, gouging and scratching in his urgency to get relief.
Which was impossible to obtain. On the third day of his vengeance-hunt as a lone-tracker, the mud-mites had swarmed and found a warm, moist nesting place next to Shraokh-Lieutenant’s eardrum. Two days later, the senior battalion doctor, Nriss’sh-Healer, had fiddled with the afflicted audial canal for the better part of an hour, spraying one noxious potion after another into what felt like the center of his head. All to no avaiclass="underline" the mud-mites proved impervious to the anti-bacterials and insecticides the kzinti had ready to hand, and were now busily laying eggs in the cavity. Which, according to the Healer, meant he would lose hearing in that ear sometime within the next four days. So he had to find his prey before then, because his nose was of almost no use in this midden-heap of a valley, and with his hearing diminished-
More noise, this time in the bushes to the left, moving steadily from his front flank to his rear.
Shraokh-Lieutenant swung his beamer-a carbine-sized model-off his shoulder and snarled, squeezing the trigger as he spun to put his aim point in front of the target, sweeping back toward where he had heard the sound.
The welding-bright beam sliced into the jungle like a blinding scythe, decapitating ferns and bushes, toppling a pair of trees, torching a few patches of (rare) dry grass, and eliciting a single, abruptly silenced scream. Matching that sound with his own high-pitched screech of triumph, Shraokh-Lieutenant sprang forward: an eight-meter leap from a standing start. He landed at the source of the death-sound.
At his feet lay a feral boar, bisected lengthwise, half a meter beneath the spine. The smell of the seared meat made him retch through his fury and frustration. He turned his back upon the creature and sprinted further down the trail, in search of his real prey: humans. Leaf-eating, urine-gulping, cub-slaughtering humans. He felt the emotional upsurge toward the Unknowing Rage, and fought back hard. Distracted, he consequently forgot the caution which he had rigidly imposed upon himself since setting forth to avenge his cub as a hseeraa aoshef, a solo rogue-killer. He forgot to move carefully rather than swiftly.