Catseye (19 page)

The click of boots was still. Had the other halted—or turned back?

“No!” A reply concentrated in force from the animals.

Then it was stealth. Troy crouched, steadied his blaster hand against the wall. Yet for all his long period of waiting he was not quite prepared for the sudden spring from the head of the ramp.

His own slight movement might have spiked that attack and almost spoiled his plan. But Troy had planted the net well. The man fell short and his landing was not clean. He went to his hands and knees, to be enmeshed in the sticky ropes, which, as he rolled and fought, only tied the more tightly about his body.

Troy stood away from the wall. He would not be forced to fire after all. The other was doing a good job of making himself a prisoner.

“Another—”

The warning startled Troy out of his absorption in the struggle. Simba advanced into the open, avoiding the flopping captive, to stand at the foot of the ramp looking up.

Then a blaster bolt crackled—striking not for Troy, as he had expected, but at the writhing figure on the ground, close enough to singe some of the cords so that they flaked away from smoldering clothing. The bound man gave a mighty heave and rolled, as a second bolt burned the soil where he had lain and cut a blackened slash into the jungle.

And by that flash Troy saw the hide tunic the other wore. The trapped man was not Zul but one of the rangers. Horan snapped an answering bolt recklessly up the ramp. There was a cry and a figure staggered into view, slipped, rolled to the cavern floor. When it did not stir again, Troy went to the ranger.

“I thought I might find you here, Horan.”

He was looking down at Rerne. And his first impulse to free the other died. Once he had almost turned to this man for help. Now all the instincts of the hunted brought back his long-seated suspicions. He might well have as good a reason to fear Rerne as he did Zul. Not that the ranger would blast him without warning, but the Clans had their own laws and those laws were obeyed in the Wild. Troy did not sheathe the blaster, but over its barrel he regarded the Hunter narrowly.

“Do not be a fool.” Rerne had stopped struggling, but he was trying to raise his head and shoulders from the ground. “You are being hunted.”

“I know,” Troy interrupted. “You are here—”

Rerne frowned. “You have more after you than Clan rangers, boy. Including some who want you dead, not alive. Ha—”

His gaze swept from Troy to a point nearer ground level. Troy followed the path of his eyes. Shang, Simba, Sargon, and Sheba had materialized in their usual noiseless fashion, were seated at their ease inspecting Rerne with that measuring stare Troy could still find disconcerting when it was turned in his direction. Sahiba came limping from the place where he had left her for safety.

“So—” Rerne returned the steady-eyed regard of the animals, his expression eager. “These are the present most-wanted criminals on Korwar.”

FIFTEEN

“Most wanted, maybe,”—Troy's voice was soft, cold, one he had never used before to any man outside the Dipple—“but not criminals, Rerne.” No more subservient “Hunter” or “Gentle Homo.” This was not Tikil but a place into which the men of Tikil feared to go, and he was no longer a weaponless city laborer but one of a company who were ready to fight for what the Dipple had never held—freedom.

“You know how they served Kyger?” Rerne asked almost casually.

“I know.”

“But you could not have been a part of that—or could you?” That last portion of the question might be one Rerne was asking himself—had been asking himself—for some time. He was studying Troy with a stare almost as unblinking as that Simba could turn upon one.

“No, I was not a part of Kyger's schemes, whatever those were. And I did not kill him—if you have any doubts about that. But neither are we criminals.”

“We?”

Troy took a step backward to join the half circle of animals. They stood together now, presenting a united front to the ranger. Rerne nodded.

“I see, it is indeed ‘we.'”

“And what do you propose to do about it?” Troy challenged.

“It is not what I propose to do, Horan. We shall all probably die unless we can work together to find a safe way out of here.” But he sounded calm enough. “You are being hunted by more than just Clan rangers—in fact, the rangers could be the last of your worries. And it seems that the order is out to blast before asking questions—blast on sight.”

“Your orders?” Troy brought up his own weapon.

“Hardly. And when they hear about it, the Clan shall take steps. That I promise you.” There was ice in that, and Troy, noting the narrowing of the other's eyes, the slight twist of his lips, estimated the quality of the anger this man held under rigid control. “It is easy to eliminate a fugitive and afterwards swear that his death was all an unfortunate mistake—the game our friend over there was trying to play.” He jerked his head toward the body at the foot of the ramp. “You have one chance in a thousand of escaping one or another of the packs after you now or—” He was summarily interrupted.

“One comes.” Simba padded to the foot of the ramp again.

Troy hesitated. He could leave Rerne where he was, neatly packaged, for either the ranger's own men or someone else to discover—and melt back into the jungle, eventually seeking the yet lower level of the fungoid cavern, retracing their whole journey through Ruhkarv. Or he could make a stand here and fight.

Rerne's eyes traveled from cat to man and back again. “We are about to entertain another visitor?”

“We?”
This time it was Troy who accented the pronoun.

“It could not be my men coming now.”

And Troy believed him. That meant it was truly the enemy.

“You have a choice,” Rerne pointed out. “Take to the bush over there and they will have a difficult time beating you out of it—”

“And you?”

“Since you can name me one of your pursuers, should that matter?” There was a grim lightness in that.

“The other one tried to burn you.”

“As I said, they are working on the principle that accidents will happen and a dead man one has to explain is better than a live witness who can explain for himself.”

Troy made the only possible choice. Hooking his fingers in the nearest loop of the cords about the ranger, he jerked the man under the overhang of the ramp. There was no time now to try to free Rerne, even if he were yet sure he wanted to. But he knew he could not leave the other helpless to take a blasting from Zul or one of Zul's crowd.

“Zul?” he asked Simba.

“Zul,” the cat replied with sure authority.

There was no time either in which to rig another trap, and Troy was sure the other came armed. Nor could he count on another shot as lucky as the one that had brought down the earlier assailant. Now he squatted beside Rerne, hoping for a workable ambush.

“Get me loose!” The ranger's shoulders heaved as he worked his muscles against the cords of the webbing.

“Nothing will cut those except heat,” Troy told him absently, most of his attention on what might be happening up ramp.

“What is this stuff?” Rerne demanded, his voice a whisper.

“Part of a web—taken from the wall over there.” Troy nodded to the stretch of rock where strips of cord and thread still hung in tatters. Rerne gave a small gasp and was silent.

The light was fading steadily into a dark that had none of the quality of the upper-surface night. Troy remembered his first stay in this place, his belief that the jungle had its own brand of very dangerous life. There was one place free of that growth—the section of pavement where the recaller stood. And as long as that machine was deadened—

If Zul did not come soon, should they try to reach that? Troy seesawed between one plan and the other. Wait here for Zul and try to shoot as soon as he appeared on the ramp, when he could not be too sure of his aim in the failing light? Or free Rerne's legs and bundle the ranger along to that haunted spot beside the recaller with the warning of that shriveled, long-dead thing set up to stare at them through the night hours?

“Zul?” Again he asked that of those who were quicker than he to know whether danger ran or crept toward them now.

Simba again answered, but this time with a puzzled shading to his mind speech. “Zul begins to fear—”

“Us?” Troy could hardly believe that. He knew well that Zul had had no fear when they had fought above, that Zul looked upon the animals as creatures he could control, could entice helpless to their deaths. What and why did he fear now? Or was it the presence of Rerne that was a restraining factor? Could Troy somehow use the Hunter to bargain with?

“Zul fears what he cannot see,” Simba reported, still that puzzlement coloring his reply.

For a moment Simba's report fed Troy's own latent uneasiness. With the dusk closing in about them and the only too clearly remembered picture of the captive in the web at the back of his mind, he thought he knew what could plague a man, eating at his nerves until he had to get out of this hidden pocket within Ruhkarv. But Zul had not been here; he could not know of the web, or the recaller, or guess at what might have been summoned and now, according to the animals, still hovered just beyond the bonds of living consciousness. Why did Zul fear?

“He does not see,” Sahiba cut in, “not with his eyes—only with his far thoughts. But he is a kind who feels trouble before him.”

“He is able to speak to you then?”

“No.” That was Sargon. “Not without the aid of the thing-which-calls. But Zul sees many shadows now and each holds an enemy.” The fox trotted out of hiding, made a detour about the body of the dead man, and advanced a foot or so up the ramp, surveying the gloom above. “He wishes to come, yet his fears hold him back.”

And did Zul have a right to fear? Troy watched the now night-disguised splotch of the jungle. And he knew that he could no longer plan to pass through even a fringe of it, much less intrude upon that open space about the recaller. It was as if that thing, which lurked—not alive, yet not wholly in the dead past either—sucked vitality from the dark, made itself substance that could not be seen with the eyes, but which could be sensed by that other thing inside one, the thing that allowed him to communicate with the animals.

“What is it?” Rerne, too, his shoulders braced against the rock wall, was staring into that mass of vegetation. “What walks there?”

“Nothing alive—I hope.” Troy went down on one knee, sparked his blaster on low power, and touched lightly the coils of webbing still encircling the other's legs. The strands shriveled and were gone.

“Nothing alive?” Rerne repeated questioningly.

“The recaller Fauklow brought is out there. Your machine muted it, but the power is still on—blanketed. They tell me that what it summoned is still partly in this dimension.”

“What! And I take it that our friend above is reluctant to descend into what may prove to be a dragon's jaws?”

Troy sat back on his heels. Had Rerne been able to tune in on that conversation between Troy and the animals? But he was certain that the animals would have known of such eavesdropping and would have warned him.

“You communicate with the animals somehow,” Rerne continued. “And now you suspect that I can also.”

Troy nodded.

“Mental contact.” That was a stated fact, not a question. “No, I have been guessing only. And this I do know, Zul is of unusual stock. Most of us now are a mingling of many races, the result of centuries of stellar colonization. He is a primitive out of Terra—pure Bushman—a race of hunters and desert dwellers with an inborn instinct for the Wild such as few others have today. And such primitives keep senses we have lost. If he sniffs your demon, then I do not think that mere duty will drive him down. Rather he will comfort his conscience with the belief that the demon will account for us—if he sits over the exit and so locks us in. And at that, I can almost find myself agreeing with such reasoning.”

Rerne moved his shoulders again, straining at the remaining cords. “This is not a place in which I would choose to spend the night,” he confessed, and there was no light touch to those words.

“You were here when Fauklow was found?”

“Not here. We did not know this particular beauty spot existed. After what we saw aloft there was no nonsense about exploring below ground. We thought we had accounted for the recaller, though. That must be seen to. That is, if I ever get out of here to report it.”

“He can wait up there a long time—pick us off easily if we try to pass.” Troy wondered if now was the time to reveal the alternate route to the surface. Without food and water—no, he was not sure they could make it back the longer way around.

“Yes, any one of those level corridors would make him a good cover for ambush. But if we cannot get up, we can bring help from the surface to take him in the rear.” Again Rerne tried to flex his upper arms. “If you will just loose me the rest of the way, Horan, I can bring in reinforcements.”

“No,” Troy's dissent was flat and quick.

“Why?” Rerne did not sound angry, merely interested.

“We are criminals—remember?”

“Where there is a common enemy there can be a truce. In the Wild I do have some small authority.”

Troy considered that. Trust was a rare commodity in the Dipple. If he gave his now to this man, as he was so greatly tempted to do, he would be putting a weapon in Rerne's hands just as surely as if he were to hand over the blaster. And again his suspicion warred with his desire to believe in the other.

“A truce, until we are out of here,” Rerne suggested. “I am willing to swear knife oath if you wish.”

Troy shook his head. “Your word, no oaths—if I accept.” He paid that much tribute openly to the ranger. “Truce and a head start for me, with them.”