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  FIVE

  The fact that there was no corresponding uproar from the cage rooms confirmed Troy’s belief that a sleeper had been set within the shop walls. He turned up the light power to full strength and began a careful search of the room. This was where the intruder had been occupied; what he had sought must lie here.

  In the cages the occupants were balled, or sprawled, in deep, beam-induced slumber, save for that corner cage where the kinkajou had been put. Bright beads of eyes peered out at Troy, small paws rested against the netting. Troy gained an impression of excitement rather than fear. The signal of danger had been meant as a warning to him, not a cry for assistance such as the animal had made in the villa garden.

  Troy ran his finger down the netting, looked into those round eyes. “If you could just tell me what is behind all this,” he half whispered.

  “Someone comes—”

  The kinkajou retreated. Before Troy’s eyes it rolled quickly into its chosen ball-in-the-corner position once again. Troy’s boot struck against some object on the floor, sent it to rebound from the wall with a metallic “ping.” He wriggled halfway under the rack of cages and picked up a dull-green cube—the sleeper.

  He glanced once more at the kinkajou. To all appearances that animal was now as deeply under the influence of the gadget he held as all the other beasts in the room.

  But if the stock of Kyger’s establishment had been so subdued, the human inhabitants of the building were not. Two yardmen, stunners in fist, came through into the corridor. And Kyger ran in their wake, his chosen weapon a far more deadly hand blaster, which must be a relic of his service days.

  Troy held out the sleeper cube, told his story of the assailant who had appeared so totally immune to the direct fire of a stunner.

  “Wearing a person-protect, probably,” Kyger snapped impatiently. “Anything gone here—or disturbed—?”

  He passed down the line of cages, but as he reached the end one, he paused and gave a searching glance at the ball of sleeping kinkajou. Troy made no mention of the fact that the animal had been able to defy the wave of the sleeper, had saved his own life by its warning. In spite of Kyger’s treatment of him, some deep-buried and undefinable emotion kept him from warming to the merchant as he had to Rerne. He had no idea what could lie behind the invasion of the shop, but he wanted to know more of what was going on here.

  “I could not see anything wrong,” he reported.

  Kyger had turned, was walking back along the cages, and his fingers rasped across the netting of the one that held the kinkajou. The ball of fur remained unstirring. As the merchant joined Troy once more, he caught the younger man’s chin, turning his head directly to the light.

  “You have a flash burn there.” His tone was almost accusing.

  “He was armed with a blaster,” Troy explained.

  “What is going on here?”

  The yardmen in the doorway were elbowed aside; a patroller came in, blaster ready. Kyger answered with a bite in his voice.

  “We had a visitor, who brought this—” He nodded to the sleeper cube on the top of a cage. The patroller scooped it up, his eyes cold.

  “What is the damage?”

  Kyger’s hand fell from Troy’s chin to his shoulder. He held that grip, propelling the younger man before him down the corridor.

  “So far none, except a flash burn—too close for comfort. Mangy! Tansvel!” The yardmen snapped to attention. “Check out the rest of the rooms; report to me in the office. This officer”—Kyger nodded to the patroller—“will help you.”

  Troy stood quietly as his employer patted cov-aid dressing along the line of the burn. “Just grazed you.” Kyger retopped the container. “You were lucky.”

  “It was dark and he was off orbit.”

  But Kyger was watching him with an intent stare as if he could see straight into Troy’s memory and pick out the events as they had really happened—the incredible fact that a wanting had struck from an animal’s mind to his.

  “He must have been badly jigged,” Kyger commented. “So much so that I wonder. A sleeper makes this a Guild job—and I have one or two unfriends around here who might just employ such means to make trouble for me.” He was frowning a little. “Only Guild men do not get jigged—”

  “A novice might.”

  Kyger spread both hands on the top of his desk. “A novice? What do you know about this, Horan?”

  “I noticed a new buy-in man at the warehouse before they tried to lift us on the street.” Troy trusted now to Kyger’s own background. To a merchant-born he would not have made such an admission, unless the matter had proved far more serious than it was. But to a spacer who had himself lived by a more flexible code of ethics—or rather, a different code of ethics—he could confess that much.

  “A proving job for a novice.” Kyger considered that. “Might fit this flight pattern, at that. This buy-in man knows you?”

  “He saw me at the warehouse—just as I saw him.”

  “Any challenge between you two?”

  “If you mean was this personal—no. He was Dipple and I knew him by name, but we never messed together.”

  “Silly jig, hitting here. Unless it was just for nuisance value. There is nothing he could pick up to trot to the pass-boys.”

  Troy wondered about that himself. Portable property was to be had for the ingenious lifts of the Guild anywhere in Tikil, where theft had become both a business and a fine art. Why would anyone try to lift living creatures, most of which required special food and attention? There was only one possibility.

  “Some one-of-a-kind already promised?” he hazarded, knowing Kyger’s promises to his elite customers. A unique pet, certified to be the only one of its kind on Korwar, might be an inducement.

  “No profit in that. It would have to be kept under cover.” Kyger put his finger on the weakness in that. Yes, the value of such a pet to the vain owner would be largely in its display before the envious.

  “To keep someone else from having it?”

  Again that disconcerting stare from Kyger. Troy thought he had found another small piece in this match puzzle. That had hit, if not straight to the heart of the target, reasonably near.

  “Might be. That makes a spot more sense. You can bunk in. I will cover the rest of the night watch.”

  That was straight dismissal. Troy went back to his bunk, this time easing out of his clothes. The dressing had taken most of the smart out of his burn. But his mind was active and he did not feel in the least inclined to sleep. He closed his eyes, trying to will relaxation.

  Instead, as if some tenuous circle of thought had coiled out into the air—as Lang Horan’s tupan rope had done so accurately years before to catch and hold a twisting, bucking quarry—Troy’s heightened sensitivity touched and held something never intended to join more than one pair of minds under that roof this night.

  “He died quick. No time to see the report before put away—”

  “Must return!” That was an order, final and harsh.

  “Not so. No good. Man saw Shang look for report. Was suspicious!”

  “There must be no suspicion!” Again the harshness.

  And now there was no more protest in words, rather a thread of fear, a thread that grew into a choking rope. Troy’s eyes opened. He sat up on the bunk, alive and vibrating to that fear as if its force raged in him also.

  But if there was fear in that band of communication, there was also something else he recognized—a determination to fight. And to that his sympathy responded.

  “If there is suspicion, there will be questions.”

  Silence from the harsh one. Was that marking thoughtful consideration of the argument? Or rejection of its validity? Troy’s hands were sweat-wet and now his fingers clenched into fists. If what he suspected was true—The kinkajou and Kyger? But why? How? Terran animals able to communicate being used for a set purpose? Yet Kyger was no Terran—or was he? Troy himself was too ignorant of other worlds, except for the pe
ople of the Dipple, to make a positive identification. He remembered Kyger’s own questions about his past on the day he had been hired.

  Terra was the center of the Confederation—or had been before the war. But she had not come out well at the end of that conflict; too many of her allies had gone down to defeat. From the dominant voice she had sunk to a second-rate, even third-rate, power at the conference tables. The Council and the Octed of the Rim maneuvered for first power, while the old Confederation had fractured into at least three collections of smaller rulerships. His thoughts were broken once more by that unidentifiable thought stream—again the master voice: “Who came tonight?”

  “One who knew nothing. He was an enemy outside the scheme. There was no touch.”

  “Yet he could have been hired by another. Traps need bait.”

  Troy read the thought behind that last. So—if he were right and it was the kinkajou and Kyger who were talking so—then such an animal might well be stolen to serve as bait for its master.

  But why had not the animal reported Troy’s ability to receive the mind touch, if not with the ease and clarity of this exchange, then after a fashion? Or did the kinkajou, fearing its master, hold Troy in reserve as a possible escape, as he had been for it at the Di villa?

  “An enemy outside the scheme!” The master voice picked that up now. “Against me?”

  “Against you,” the kinkajou (if it was that) agreed. “He was paid to cause trouble, bring you into the shop that he might kill—”

  “Kill.” That word throbbed in Troy’s head. He strained to catch an answer. But there was no more that night. At last he slept fitfully, awaking now and then to lie silent, listening not only with his ears but with the portion of his brain that had tapped the exchange. But save for the sound of the birds and animals coming out of the daze of the sleeper to their normal nocturnal restlessness, he heard nothing on either plane of the senses.

  In the morning, after the general round of cage tending and feeding was over, Kyger summoned Troy to the fussel hawk. The big bird was definitely emerging from its sullenness of the landing. It held its crested head high, turned it alertly from side to side. Still young enough to have some of its adolescent tail plumage, it was yet a strikingly beautiful bird with its brilliant, iridescent-black rakish crest above its bright golden head, back-patched by warrior scarlet. The golden glow of breast and the scarlet of back were blended on the strongly pinioned wings to a warm orange beneath which the darker tail and black legs again made contrast. But it was not for beauty alone that the fussel was esteemed.

  On countless worlds—human, humanoid, and even nonhuman—intelligences had trained birds of falcon and hawklike strains to be hunter-companions. And now when the highly civilized were returning to more primitive skills and amusements for pleasure, hunting—not with high-power kill weapons, but with hawk or other trained birds and animals—was well established. The fussel—with its intelligence, its ability to be easily trained through the right handling, and its power to capture rather than kill a quarry upon demand—was a highly valued item of sale for any trainer.

  Now, seeing the stance of the bird, Troy drew his fingers slowly, enticingly, across the front of the cage. Unlike its attitude of only two days earlier, it made no lightning stab to punish such impudence. Instead, deep in its throat, the bird gave a sound of interested inquiry and moved along the perch toward the door opening of the cage as if awaiting release.

  “Shall I man him?” Troy asked.

  Kyger snapped his fingers at the opposite side of the cage. That act, which had brought the fussel into raging battle before, now only led it to turn its head. Then it looked back again expectantly at the cage door.

  “Here.” Kyger tossed a hawker’s glove to Troy. As the latter drew it on, the fussel uttered its soft cry, this time with a half-coaxing note.

  Horan loosened the door, extended protected hand and wrist into the cage. The fussel ducked its head, not to stab, but to draw its curved beak along the tough fabric of the glove. Then sedately it moved from perch to wrist, and Troy carefully lifted the bird out into the open of the corridor into which they had moved the cage for this experiment.

  “Olllahuuu!”

  Both men turned quickly at the Hunter’s call of appreciation. Rerne stood there, smiling a little.

  “Your friend here looks eager for a casting,” he remarked.

  The fussel mantled, raising wings wide in display, shaking them a little as if glad to be free of the cage. The claw-hold on Troy’s wrist was firm, and the bird gave no sign of wanting to quit that post.

  “Truly a beauty,” Rerne complimented Kyger. “If he performs as well as he looks, you have already made a sale, Merchant.”

  “He is yours to try, Gentle Homo.”

  “When better than now? It seems that there is an earlier demand for my services in the Wild than I had thought. I am come one day ahead of time to claim this man of yours and the bird.”

  Kyger made no protest. In fact the speed with which he equipped Troy with the loan of a camp kit and the affability with which he saw them both away from the shop made Horan uneasy. He had had no chance to visit the kinkajou alone. And when he had been engaged in cage cleaning earlier that day, Kyger or one of the yardmen had been in and out of the room and the animal had remained in its tight ball. He wished that he could have taken it with him, but there was no possible way of explaining such a request. And he had to leave with a small doubt—of what he could not honestly have said—still worrying him.

  Rerne’s flitter was strictly utilitarian, though with compact storage space and the built-in necessities for a flyer that might also provide a temporary camp shelter in the wilderness. Oddly enough he had no pilot, and when Troy, with the fussel again in the transport cage, climbed into the passenger compartment, he found no other but the Hunter awaiting him there. Nor did Rerne prove talkative. His city finery was gone with his city manners. Now he wore soft hide breeches, made of some dappled skin, pale fawn and white, and tanned to suppleness of fabric. His jerkin was of the same, sleeveless and cut low on the chest so his own golden-tanned skin showed in a wide V close to the same shade as the garment. The rings of precious metal that had held his hair had been traded for thongs confining the locks as tightly but far more inconspicuously. And about his waist was a belt, plain of any jeweled ornament, but supporting stunner, bush knife, and an array of small tools and gadgets, each in its own loop.

  Under his expert control the flitter spiraled well up above the conventional traffic lanes between villas and city and headed northeast. Beneath them carefully tended gardens or as carefully nurtured “wild” gardens grew farther and farther apart. And as they topped a mountain range, they put behind them all the year-around residences of Tikil. There was a scattering of holiday houses and hunting lodges in the stretch before they came to the Mountains of Larsh—and the territory below, as uninhabited as it looked, was still under the dominion of man.

  But beyond the Larsh, into the real Wild, then man’s hand lay far lighter. The Hunting Clans had deliberately kept it so and profited thereby. Through the years they had made a mystery of the Wild, and now no one ventured without their guidance past the Larsh.

  In the cabin of the flitter the quiet was suddenly broken by a call from the fussel—a cry that held a demand. As Troy tried to sooth the captive, Rerne spoke for the first time since they had taken off: “Try him out of the cage.”

  Troy was doubtful. If the hawk would refuse the wrist, take to wing, or try to, in this confined space, that action would make for trouble. On the other hand, if the bird was to be of any use in the future, it must learn to accept such transportation free of the cage. A fussel caged too much lost spirit. He pulled on his glove, offered his wrist through the half-open door, and felt the firm grip of the talons through the fabric. Carefully he brought his arm across his knees, the fussel resting quietly, though its crested head turned from side to side as it eyed the cabin and the open skies beyond the bubble of their
covering. As it showed no disquiet, Troy relaxed a little, enough to glance himself at that rising wall of saw-toothed peaks which was the Larsh, gnawing at the afternoon sky.

  They did not fly directly across that barrier range. Instead Rerne turned more to the north so that they followed along its broken wall. And they had covered at least an hour’s flying time on that course before they took a gateway of a pass between two grim peaks and saw before them a hazy murk hiding the other world Tikil knew little about.

  Rerne sent the flitter spiraling down, now that they were across the heights. There was a raveling of lesser peaks and foothills, bright-green streaks marking at least two rivers of some size. Troy leaned against the bubble, trying to see more of the spread beneath. There appeared to be a fog rising with the coming of evening, a thick scum of stuff closing between the flitter and the ground.

  With a mutter of impatience, the Hunter again altered course northward. And they had not gone very far before a light flashed red on his control board. When they continued on their path without any deviation, those flashes grew closer together so that the light seemed hardly to blink at all.

  “Warn off!” The words were clipped, with a patroller’s snap—though the law of Tikil did not operate east of the Larsh.

  Rerne spoke into his own mike. “Acknowledge warn off. This is Rerne’s Donerabon.”

  “Correct. Warn off withdrawn,” replied the com.

  Troy longed to ask a question. And then Rerne spoke, not to the mike, but to his seatmate. “To your right—watch now as we make the crossover.”

  The flitter dipped, sideslipped down a long descent. There were no streamers of mist to hide the ground here. No vegetation either. In curdled expanse of rock and sand was a huddle of structures, unmistakably, even from this distance, not the work of nature.

  Troy studied them avidly. “What is that?”

  “Ruhkarv—the ‘accursed place.’”

  SIX

  They did not pass directly over that outcropping of alien handiwork, older than the first human landing on Korwar, but headed north once more. Troy knew from reports that what he saw now as lumpy protuberances aboveground were only a fraction of the ruins themselves, as they extended in corridors and chambers layers deep and perhaps miles wide under the surface, for Ruhkarv had never been fully explored.