The Sea Peoples(82)
Deor ducked, and the cat sailed by him with its claws outstretched. Deor moved then, quick and certain, but his slash with the glyph-graven knife was directed above the shabby black feline. It screamed, and so did Wilde. Toa’s shovel came down like a giant cleaver, and the little man swayed aside and leapt to the floor as it crushed the custom-made chair into splinters.
“Call on your protectors!” Deor said sharply.
Pip shrieked and raised her kukris. “Well, if you’re going to protect me, get on with it!”
. . . and suddenly her paw lashed out at the cat.
Paws? some part of her thought. Now I have paws. Four paws. And I’m walking on them. It’s like being on springs! I could jump a hundred feet! I can smell everything and it’s bright as day in here! I can move like lightning!
Most of her was just thinking that the little beast smelled wrong, as if it had been dead too long to eat without actually being dead, something that you definitely would not eat unless you were very, very hungry. It was a Bad Thing, bad enough to make her ignore the fascinating meadowlark flittering around the room, and even the great shaggy she-bear. They were busy with the other Bad Thing, anyway, the one that smelled like an ape . . . as much as the cat smelled like a cat, at least.
And though it was ridiculous she knew they were members of her pride. The bird was her brother and the bear was her sister—they were even bearing to the same male, and there was nothing more sisterly than that. Even the giant ratty thing was a relative; in fact, he smelled rather like a sire. Not her sire, but definitely A sire. They were all hunting together, though it was also like a standoff between two different prides over territory where you snarled and leapt and showed your claws and teeth.
No, more serious, more like fighting a pack of hyenas to protect the cubs, she decided.
The plate-sized claw-edged disk on the end of her forelimb flashed through the air and slapped down with a force that might have broken a buffalo’s neck, the claws gouging into the dried wood in a shower of splinters. Her awareness was tightly focused yet broad at the same time; she could see the bear’s paw-swipe at the ape-thing, almost as fast as hers and even more powerful, and the way something bright flashed with the meadowlark’s beak, and the bush rat’s chittering menace from the door, blocking the way out.
The Bad-Thing-cat tried to scuttle between her forelegs, hissing. Pip-lioness sprang straight up, her arched back nearly reaching the ceiling, twisting lithely in midair to come down with all four paws aimed at the cat. Space itself seemed to twist in turn, and somehow the cat was not where she landed, her three-hundred-odd pounds of healthy young lioness making an audible but padded thump. Her hind paws instantly fastened into the floorboards by weight and claw-lock and torqueing against them she struck in a boxing motion, slap-slap-slap-slap fast enough to make the air hiss. The tip of one claw just touched one haunch of the frantically dodging cat, and a little tuft of black fur arced through the air with a curve of red dots.
Blood smells bad too, Pip-lioness’ nose told her.
The cat screeched. The lioness’ teeth were barred like twin curved saws of ivory and a racking snarl sounded through the room, under the basso growl of the she-bear. The meadowlark sang a song of magic and battle that Pip understood even though there were no words in her mind, and the words were in another tongue than the one her ape-self knew:
“—lord of the host of heroes
Who undaunted fight on Vigrid plain
All-seeing saw his own death
At the end of Time
On Earth’s last day
And whispered this
To his bright blade—”
Everything slowed. Pip-lioness’ breath smoked in the sudden cold. Things flashed before her eyes—raven-wings circling a single blue eye that saw everything that ever was or would be, ash-leaves fluttering from a cloak lined with blue, a gray beard and the thrust of a spear that cut like the rushing passage of time. She could smell a wolf, and smell goats—but overpowering, goats bigger than buffalo—and the haft of a hammer clanged against the iron gloves of a redbearded giant as chariot-wheels rumbled like thunder. By the door a tattooed brown giant laughed with a sound of volcanoes and earthquakes and the tsunamis that crush all before them, in his hand a massive fishhook-shaped weapon that sank into the fabric of the universe and pulled with world-shaking might.
The redbeard’s Hammer reached out and touched it, and the figures shared a fighting grin. A winged circle turned over all, and a single piercing trumpet-note sounded.
The ape-thing turned and scuttled for the door. Even Pip’s lioness soul had been daunted by the half-seen, half-sensed figures about her, but from them flowed power that made the one true path to strike part of bone and sinew. Her claws flashed out—
And she was kneeling on the floor, panting, wheezing, while Wilde lay bleeding at her feet. The blood-dripping kukri in her right paw—
“Hand,” she muttered to herself. “God, but that was a vivid hallucination—”
—was outstretched towards the dying man. She must have hacked across his throat . . .
Thora grinned at her. “Look at the wound, Pip,” she said.
Pip did. That jagged tear was not what the honed steel in her hand would produce.
“He’s dying anyway,” Pip said, wiping the steel on the hem of her skirt.
It wasn’t as if these were really her clothes, though she did step back from the spreading pool that was near-black in the dim light.