The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 16

(2438 A.D.)

Hwass-Hwasschoaw was a celebrity when he was first delivered to the W’kkai’s singularity boundary by UNSN treaty warship and fetched home by a kzin patrol. For a while he gave long blunt talks on the Battle of Wunderland to whomever of the military cared to listen. When he learned what he most wanted to know, he disappeared as a wandering Truth-Preacher.

Hwass found the W’kkai coterie of the Patriarch’s Eye in the form of an ancient kzin of his father’s acquaintance who was still part of the old network. The Eye was in disarray, saved only by its inbred loyalty and ability to tolerate long delays. It had always needed a steady trickle of funds and talent from Kzin to keep it purposeful. And it had always needed fire-eaters like his father, who should never have left the organization to underlings while he took off on a wild adventure with the dashing Chuut-Riit.

Hwass could barely contain his claws when learning that the Eye was unaware of any hyperships sneaking through the blockade. A blind Eye? An outrage! Then doubt possessed him. He had found Trainer-of-Slaves’s navigation notes (without revealing them to Clandeboye) proving that this yellow devil had planned to take his captured UNSN ship to W’kkai! But had he ever arrived?

A little more sniffing was in order. He traveled to pastoral places as Truth-Preacher, his intent to “dig a few watering holes” that might prove useful in a Kdapt reformation. Hustling never hurt. A better class of kzinti stayed away from the cities and, being less crowded, were more open of mind and favors. Preaching brought in the little money he needed and provided ample opportunity for gossip. Two things he learned (1) for a defeated power, W’kkai was too confident and (2) a new schism was dividing the navy.

The overconfidence could be attributed to the arrogance of the haughty Patriarch’s Voice who wouldn’t know defeat if his severed head was floating in a wine barrel. Overconfidence is contagious and no one was untouched by the taste of the Voice. But what of Admiral Si-Kish? He was quietly building a navy-and it smelled like a navy more powerful than anything W’kkai had ever fielded But why such a navy unless there was a hypershunt motor to power it? Why such secrecy? Why weren’t the old naval warriors being brought into this new hunting ground? Odd smells for a humbled regime.

The buildup was being hidden from the Eye. Si-Kish shouldn’t even know that the Eye existed.

One thing at a time. After lecturing with great tact to some country squires about the nature of the God of the True Form, and passing a pleasant day hunting with his hosts, he spent time by himself with a cup of fermented milk and the local slavery poop sheets. Truth-Preacher wasn’t interested in buying slaves, and had no need for a personal slave-but he was looking for the spoor of Trainer-of-Slaves.

That yellow devil would have abandoned his trade for a more lucrative life, perhaps hidden behind some self important title of his own devising-but he would leave traces. Greed. How could he wholly abandon that sideline about which he knew so much?

…and there it was. A tiny advertisement for a tribe of handsome, hardworking, truly unique human slaves to be sacrificed by their despondent owner at auction for any reasonable price. Five members of the Eye as well as Hwass were at that auction. Among the beasts for sale was one furred female man and a host of bewildered youngsters.

The fine fur on her body left him certain. He had owned human slaves and knew that human females were not furred, even if the auctioneer did not. Trainer-of-Slaves had experimented on his females and one of his favorite experiments had been a technique for activating the latent fur genes of the man-beasts. This was Lieutenant Nora Argamentine, had to be, mind-wiped, late of the United Nations Space Navy. A very valuable prize indeed.

Hwass encouraged one of his associates to examine the firmness of her musculature and the condition of her teeth. He was instructed to be subtly indelicate. She bit his finger while it was still in her mouth. (Any high quality kzinrett, breeder of warriors, would have done the same.) It was a slave-buying trick Hwass knew-it served the purpose of lowering her price.

The auctioneer and Hwass’s ringer had an altercation. The auctioneer, in a reckless rage, swore by the sharpness of the teeth of his merchandise while the ringer stalked away with his bloody finger in the air, complaining loudly about the quality of the slaves to all the buyers who would listen. Hwass and his cohorts bought the entire lot of humans for a price that the impoverished Eye could afford.

Now he had a weapon he could use against Clandeboye. The God of the True Form had favored him mightily. All his supplications and prayers and sacrifice had born fresh meat. The treasure would be complete once his slaves led him to the hypershunt. Where was Trainer-of-Slaves? Trainer would not have let these slaves go so cheaply.

The female was a useless source of information, but her eldest male probably knew something. It was the boy who was most afraid of him, the boy who watched him, the boy who stood ready to protect his mother and siblings. A mind he could use. Perhaps he could even make a Kdaptist of him, to plead the kzin case before God.

Along journey by gravity car took them along the coast. He tried a few words of English on the terrified boy, but the little monkey clearly did not understand. He tried a kzin’s version of that odd mixture of Danish and Plattdeutsch that had passed for a language among his Wunderland slaves. Still nothing. Hard to find the right language for a slave muted by terror.

He watched the sea go by beyond a rocky shoreline of wet boulders, glancing sometimes into the dark interior of the car where his slaves cowered bravery. There was always a way to work fear. In the meantime, soothe your prey before its taste went bad. He noticed that the Nora-beast was thirsty. An opportunity. He held out water to the boy and spoke the kzin word for water and then gestured at the boy’s mother. Thirst and hunger could reach through terror. Politely, in the dominated tense, the boy asked for water for his mother. His accent and grammar were atrocious; he seemed to speak some form of the Jotoki slave patois, but he could be understood. Progress.

They reached their isolated retreat of massive stone, once the fortress of some mighty kzin, now a safe house for the Eye. He took the boy to the newly designated slave rooms and put him in charge of the settling of his family. He gave the boy control over the food. In that way he seduced Monkeyshine to his cause.

Hwass chose mealtime to talk to his slave, just before the boy was ready to feed his family. He didn’t make a big issue of it, but a slave doesn’t deny his master a few civil words if that’s what it takes to get the food on the table. The conversations grew longer. Monkeyshine grew less afraid.

One day Monkeyshine told him all about Hssin, and Hwass reminded him about special places among the rubble that he knew about too. Monkeyshine remembered the rug in the palazzo. Hwass described the scenes of the hunt woven all through the rug. It wasn’t long before Monkeyshine was avidly telling about his adventures in hyperspace with Mellow Yellow while Hwass listened with ardent attention.

“And where is your Mellow Yellow? He seems to be missing.”

Monkeyshine went white at his mistake. He hadn’t realized that he had used the Jotoki name for the master. “I’m so sorry, sire. My abject apologies. I will not forget henceforth to use the title Grraf-Nig.”

“Ah, yes. Hshumph. His title. Of course. But since he is not here we can call him what we please. On Wunderland we called him Grass-Eater behind his back”

“Oh, no, sire!” said a shocked Monkeyshine.

“What happened to him? Did he forget his waistcoat at the Palace? Pick his nose?”

Monkeyshine was now very wary of a kzin who would use a name like Grass-Eater for his Mellow Yellow. “Do you want him in prison?”

“So that’s where he is! No, I don’t want him in prison! He’s the only hyperspace pilot I know. What prison? Have you heard?”

“In the Rival’s Range. The Conundrum Priests have him.”

“Who told you?”

“My master.”

“I’m your master!”

“The kzin who sold us,” Monkeyshine amended quickly. “If the Conundrum Priests have him, I’ll probably have to look elsewhere for a pilot,” grumbled Hwass in irritation.

“You won’t help him escape? I promised myself I’d be a warrior and cut off the heads of the Conundrum Priests one by one until they let him go.”

Hwass threw up his hands in a very frightening way. “If you use the word ‘warrior’ one more time in the wrong tense, I’ll have you for lunch, Walking-Meal.”

“Yes, sire!” Monkeyshine came to attention.

“On the other claw, our yellow devil is probably the only hyperspace pilot on all of W’kkai. Do you know what happened to his ship?”

Monkeyshine shook his head warily.

The Patriarch’s Eye had infiltrated the Conundrum Priests many Patriarchs ago. The Eye had in its secret archives a complete simulation of the Conundrum Prisons with one flaw-the pieces were only shown in their closed configuration. One of the Eye’s planted acolytes, now a feeble old priest who carved wood, was still there. He was able to tell them in which puzzle Conundrum-Prisoner was bound, but had neither the way nor the puzzler’s skill to liberate him.

In the basement of the reclusive fortress, by the glow of a giant tri-D screen, the best minds of the local Patriarch’s Eye pondered the innards of the prison. They could slice right into Grraf-Nig’s cell and see its workings, which was more than Grraf-Nig could do, but that did not help-it was still a conundrum. The Conundrum Priests devoted their lives to puzzle making. There were simple ones for the education of kits. There were puzzles to expand the mind and tame the emotions. There were puzzles that were works of art, and puzzles to hold valuables. All ranges of difficulty. But the Priest’s masterpieces were their prisons. Each cell had a solution that would free its prisoner. The solution was always too difficult to find.

The cell could be opened from the inside onto the plateau. No guard was stationed there to stop an escapee. Any prisoner who could so escape was deemed to have used his intellect in a way that erased all sin. That didn’t help conspirators who wanted to break into the cell to free a friend.

The cell could be opened from the outside by the warden-into an armed camp of fierce warriors who considered that cheating at puzzles was the most heinous of capital crimes.

Hwass-Hwasschoaw was considering brute-force entry. The model showed crawl spaces between the moving parts, all too small for a kzin but not too small for a half-grown human slave. Monkeyshine was even at the screen showing them bravery how he could squiggle in here and scrunch around that. In principle they could just melt a hole down to Grraf-Nig, lift him out, and run like a thrintun was after them.

In practice the cell was built around multiple potential energy wells of various depth, each holding its puzzle pieces. The shallow wells, the easiest ones to trigger with a shove or a pull or a kick, had the bad habit of triggering the collapse of the cell. Avalanche as art form. The prisoner would be squashed by tons of rock. Brute force would never be “clever” enough to trigger the sequence of events that would open the cell.

Back they went to trying to solve the conundrum. Hwass’s mates were from W’kkai. They had been solving Conundrum Puzzles all their lives. It was an addiction. It worked off rage. It whiled away the time as the evening snow melted in the dawn light. And though brute force entrance was the only rational solution to their problem, they couldn’t figure out how to make brute force work without killing their kzin, so every time they tried-and failed-they were seduced by the thought that, somehow, if they were clever enough they could solve the conundrum together. Just one more try and they’d have it.

Monkeyshine brought refreshments to his bleary-eyed masters. Just out of curiosity, because he had been pretending for so long to be the great warrior who saved Mellow Yellow, he said, “Why don’t we glue it all together?” He knew the difference between being and pretending and knew that pretending was safe because pretending didn’t kill you. But he had already saved Mellow Yellow a thousand times in sixty-four different ways by pretending and Mellow Yellow was still inside a puzzle and Monkeyshine still didn’t know what flaws might lurk in his pretend-plans. He wanted someone to tell him-and there were no Jotoki to ask.

Hwass-Hwasschoaw came awake. One of the Eyes began to explain to Monkeyshine why you couldn’t glue together the pieces of a Conundrum Prison. “Of course you can glue the pieces!” Hwass shouted.

At sunset, before the night of their covert strike, Monkeyshine was taken to a chapel. Hwass had already told him how to give homage to the God of the True Shape. It was better that he prayed, and not Hwass, because man-beasts possessed the True Shape. While candles flickered over the three crosses, he prayed to the Grandfather and the Father and the Son for the Revival of the Patriarchy, for a kzin victory; he prayed for them to find the lost hypershunt motor of the Shark. Fervently he prayed for the salvation of Mellow Yellow. And just in case, though not aloud, he prayed to the Fanged God, who looked like a kzin, that he might become a great warrior and do honor to the Patriarch on this evening’s adventure.

It was night, before the coming of the snow. Six kzinti and one slave dropped down onto the plateau silently in black uniforms, elegantly styled in the W’kkai fashion. An ominous machine floated out of their truck on its gravity lifters, moving into position like a giant carnivorous leech.

The leech whirred, flickers of light where its teeth gripped the ground. Bubbling lava frothed and snapped behind the guard rims. With an animal cry the machine leech rose into the air-a flash of heat-and aside to discard a basaltic core gripped in its claws. It leaped back to the attack. It cut, rose, burped, and attacked, again and again to cutout its cylindrical nest. A spinning arm lining the hole with insulation.

Then almost gently, it took Monkeyshine and inserted him in the nest, food for whatever was down there. It was warm. Even the insulation was hot. A tank came after him, with hose. He had goggles that showed him every shape he would meet and where he should crawl. He lugged the tank behind him, took out the spray-wand and filled up cracks. He was scared. He got stuck Warriors had to do silly things. It was better being a slave. He sprayed and sprayed and found more cracks and went back for another tank and got lost and sprayed and wiggled and cried and crawled out into the night air where he shivered.

The Heroes ate lunch. The cement, his kzin friends told him, had to set.

Under an overcast sky, they rebuilt the eating mouth, positioning it to bore an even larger plug-kzin-sized. They cut straight into the prison. An insulated elevator went down, waited, rose again with a puff of vapor-and out came Mellow Yellow. Monkeyshine’s friends didn’t seem scared-their ears were wiggling. Quickly they returned most of the cores to the hole, covering it roughly with turf and a few of the kzin-high bushes that clung to the wind-swept plateau. They piled into the truck, pulling Monkeyshine inside with a jerk, and just dropped over the cliffs edge and skedaddled.

The boy watched Mellow Yellow, his face pressed hardly more than a hand’s breadth apart from the fangs of his old master. Whiskers twitched, fan ears were wilted. He seemed dazed. The boy wanted to touch this only warrior who had ever sparred 4th him. He didn’t dare. “It was my idea to glue the pieces of the puzzle so they wouldn’t crush you,” he said shyly.

Mellow Yellow didn’t come out of his daze. He just licked the dirt off Monkeyshine’s face.

Hwass sat on some hard machinery and teased his newfound interstellar pilot “You’ve got a racket. You don’t have to be a warrior. You just sit around in your hotel and wait for your well-trained slaves to come around and curry the knots out of your fur.” He nudged the shining-faced Monkeyshine.

The boy was proud. It was good to be a warrior. Of course, it was no fun being a human warrior. He was having such a hard time keeping a grin off his face.