“Some of them,” Pyanfar said, “are stranger than you. But you don’t know the names, do you? This whole region of space is strange to you.”
“Far from my world,” he said.
“Is it?”
That got a misgiving look from him. He pulled away from her hand, looked at her and at the others.
“Wherever it is,” Pyanfar said in nonchalance. She looked back at Haral and Hilfy. “I think that’s about enough. Our passenger’s tired. He can go back to his quarters.”
“I want talk you,” Tully said. He took hold of the cushion nearest, resisting any attempt to move him. “I want talk.”
“Do you?” Pyanfar asked. He reached toward her. She stood still with difficulty — but he did not touch. He drew the hand back. “What is it you want to talk about?”
He leaned, standing, against the cushion with both hands. His pale eyes were intent and wild, and whatever the precise emotion his face registered, it was distraught. “You #### me. Work, understand. I stay this ship and I work same crew. All you want. Where you go. # give me ####.”
“Ah,” she said. “You’re offering to work for your passage.”
“Work on this ship, yes.”
“Huh.” She thrust her hands within her waistband and would have looked down her nose at him, but it was a matter of looking up. “You make a deal, do you? You work for me, Outsider? You do what I say? All right. You rest now. You go back to your cabin and you learn your words and you think how to tell me what the kif want with you — because the kif still want this ship, you understand. They want you, and they’ll come after this ship.”
He thought about that a moment. Almost he looked as if he might speak. His lips shaped a word and took it back again, and clamped shut. And something sealed in behind his eyes when he did that, a bleakness worse than had ever been there.
It sent a prickle down her spine. This creature is thinking of dying, she thought. It was the look from against the wall, from the corner in the washroom, but colder still. “Hai,” she said, in her best dockside manner, and set her hand on his bowed shoulder, roughly but careful with the claws. Shook at him. “Tully. You aren’t strong enough yet to work. Enough that you rest. You’re safe. You understand me? Hani don’t trade with kif.”
There was a glimmering then, a sudden break in that seal. He reached out quite unexpectedly and seized her other hand, his blunt fingers both holding and exploring it, the furred web he lacked, the pads of the tips. Pressure hit the center of her hand and the claws came out, only slightly: she was careful, though her ears flattened in warning. To her further distress he set his other hand on her shoulder, then let go both holds and looked about at Haral and Hilfy, then back at her again. Crazy, she judged him; and then she thought about kif, and reckoned that he had license for a little strangeness. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “for free. Kif followed you across the Meetpoint dock to my ship; they followed my ship here to Urtur, and right now we’re sitting here, just trying to be quiet so the kif don’t find us. Trying to decide how best to get out of here. There’s one kif in particular, in command of a ship named Hinukka. Akukkakk…”
“Akukkakk,” he echoed, suddenly rigid. The sound came as names must, from the other ear, his own voice. His eyes were dilated.
“Ah. You do know.”
“He want take me his ship. Big one. Authority.” “Very big. They have a word for his kind, do you know it? Hakkikt. That means he hunts and others pick up the scraps he leaves. I lost something at Meetpoint: a hani ship and my cargo. So did this great hakkikt, this great, this powerful kif. You escaped him. You ran from him. So it’s more than profit that he wants out of this. He wants you, Tully, to settle accounts. It’s his pride at stake, his reputation. For a kif, that’s life itself. He’s not going to give up. Do you know, he I tried to buy you from me. He offered me gold, a lot of gold. He might even have kept the deal straight and not delayed for piracy afterward. He’s that desperate.” Tully’s eyes drifted from her to the others and back again. You deal with him?”
“No. I want something for dead hani and lost cargo. I want this great hakkikt. You hear me, Tully?”
“Yes,” Tully said suddenly, “/want same.”
“Aunt,” Hilfy protested in a faint voice.
“You want to work,” Pyanfar said, ignoring her niece’s disquiet. “There’ll be the chance for that. But you wait, Tully. You rest. At shift change, I’ll call you again. You come eat with us. Meal, understand? But you get some rest first, hear? You work on my ship, you take orders first. Follow instructions. Right?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Go, then. Haral and Hilfy will take you back down. Go.”
He nodded, delivered himself over to Haral and Hilfy together: not a backward look from either of them as they took him out. Or from him. She watched them go, found herself rubbing the hand that he had touched.
The knnn song wailed out again. Neighbors to the kif, the knnn. That bore remembering. That one was uncommonly talkative. No one was ever sure what knnn senses were, or what motivated their migrations from star to star.
She turned to the com bank, pushed Record, and sent the song again to the translator. It gave her no more information than the last time. The song ceased, and there remained only the whisper of the dust. Urtur system everywhere had grown very still.
The translator still carried white sound, Haral’s voice or Hilfy’s. The Outsider was saying nothing in being taken back to his quarters. She was marginally uneasy about having him out of sight. Perhaps he was mad after all. Perhaps he would suicide and leave them with nothing to show for the encounter but a feud with the kif. Up to a point she could not prevent him killing himself, except by taking measures which would not encourage his good will.
But revenge was something of purpose, something to make life worthwhile. She had offered him that.
She thought of his face close at hand, lively, crazed eyes, a hand as cold as something an hour dead — a creature, she reminded herself, who had been fighting alone an enemy which would have turned a stsho to jelly.
She grinned somewhat, a drawing back of the lips and wrinkling of the nose, and stared thoughtfully toward the telescope image.
No disengagement possible. Not with this kif prince, this hakkikt Akukkakk, whose personal survival rode on this Outsider business. His own sycophants would turn on him if he lost face in this matter. He had lost this Outsider personally… likely by some small carelessness, the old kif game of tormenting victims with promises and threats and shreddings of the will. An old game… one which hani understood; irresistible to a kif who thrived on fear in his victims.
Akukkakk had to make up that embarrassment at Meet-point. He would have been obliged to revenge if it were so much as a bauble stolen from him at dockside. But this Outsider Tully was far more than that. A communicative, spacefaring species, hitherto unknown, in a position to have come into kif hands without passing through more civilized regions. The kif had new neighbors.
Possible danger to them.
Possible expansion of kif hunting grounds… in directions which had nothing to do with hani and mahendo’sat. Those were high stakes, impossibly high stakes to be riding on one poor fugitive.
Urtur would swarm with kif, before all was said and done.
She delved into the com storage and started hunting components for a transmitter of some power, roused out Chur and sent her hunting through the darker areas of The Pride’s circumference for other supplies.