Spar heard Crown whisper to her, “Ask Keeper to show you the talking cat.” The whisper was very low and Spar wouldn’t have heard it except that Crown’s voice had a strange excited vibrancy Spar had never known in it before.
“But won’t they fight then?—I mean Hellhound,” she answered in a voice that sent silvery tendrils around Spar’s heart. He yearned to see her face through Doc’s tube. She would look like Virgo, only more beautiful. Yet, Crown’s girl, she could be no virgin. It was a strange and horrible world. Her eyes were violet. But he was sick of blurs. Almodie sounded very frightened, yet she continued, “Please don’t, Crown.” Spar’s heart was captured.
“But that’s the whole idea, baby. And nobody dont’s us. We thought we’d schooled you to that. We’d teach you another lesson here, except tonight we smell high fuzz—lots of it, Keeper!—our new lady wishes to hear your cat talk. Bring it over.”
“I really don’t…” Almodie began and went no further.
Kim came floating across the torus while Keeper was shouting in the opposite direction. The cat checked himself against a slender shroud and looked straight at Crown. “Yesss?”
“Keeper, shut that junk off.” The music died abruptly. Voices rose, then died abruptly too. “Well, cat, talk.”
“Shshall ssing insstead,” Kim announced and began an eerie caterwauling that had a pattern but was not Spar’s idea of music.
“It’s an abstraction,” Almodie breathed delightedly. “Listen, Crown, that was a diminished seventh.”
“A demented third, I’d say,” Phanette commented from the other side.
Crown signed them to be quiet.
Kim finished with a high trill. He slowly looked around at his baffled audience and then began to groom his shoulder.
Crown gripped a ridge of the torus with his left hand and said evenly, “Since you will not talk to us, will you talk to our dog?”
Kim stared at Hellhound sucking his Bloody Mary. His eyes widened, their pupils slitted, his lips writhed back from needle-like fangs.
He hissed, “Schschweinhund!”
Hellhound launched himself, hind paws against the palm of Crown’s left hand, which threw him forward toward the left, where Kim was dodging. But the cat switched directions, rebounding hindwards from the next shroud. The dog’s white-jagged jaws snapped sideways a foot from their mark as his great-chested black body hurtled past.
Hellhound landed with four paws in the middle of a fat drunk, who puffed out his wind barely before his swallow, but the dog took off instantly on reverse course. Kim bounced back and forth between shrouds. This time hair flew when jaws snapped, but also a rigidly spread paw slashed.
Crown grabbed Hellhound by his studded collar, restraining him from another dive. He touched the dog below the eye and smelled his fingers. “That’ll be enough, boy,” he said. “Can’t go around killing musical geniuses.” His hand dropped from his nose to below the torus and came up loosely fisted. “Well, cat, you’ve talked with our dog. Have you a word for us?”
“Yesss!” Kim drifted to the shroud nearest Crown’s face. Spar pushed off to grab him back, while Almodie gazed at Crown’s fist and edged a hand toward it.
Kim loudly hissed, “Hellzzz ssspawn! Fffiend!”
Both Spar and Almodie were too late. From between two of Crown’s fisted fingers a needle-stream jetted and struck Kim in the open mouth.
After what seemed to Spar a long time, his hand interrupted the stream. Its back burned acutely.
Kim seemed to collapse into himself, then launched himself away from Crown, toward the dark, open-jawed.
Crown said, “That’s mace, an antique weapon like Greek fire, but well-known to our folk. The perfect answer to a witch cat.”
Spar sprang at Crown, grappled his chest, tried to butt his jaw. They moved away from the torus at half the speed with which Spar had sprung.
Crown got his head aside. Spar closed his gums on Crown’s throat. There was a snick. Spar felt wind on his bare back. Then a cold triangle pressed his flesh over his kidneys. Spar opened his jaws and floated limp. Crown chuckled.
A blue fuzz-glare, held by a brewo, made everyone in the Bat Rack look more corpse-like than larboard light. A voice commanded, “Okay, folks, break it up. Go home. We’re closing the place.”
Sleepday dawned, drowning the fuzz-glare. The cold triangle left Spar’s back. There was another snick. Saying, “Bye-bye, baby,” Crown pushed off through the white glare toward four women’s faces and one dog’s. Phanette’s and Doucette’s faintly red-mottled ones were close beside Hellhound’s, as if they might be holding his collar.
Spar sobbed and began to hunt for Kim. After a while Suzy came to help him. The Bat Rack emptied. Spar and Suzy cornered Kim. Spar grasped the cat around the chest. Kim’s forelegs embraced his wrist, claws pricking. Spar got out the pouch Doc had given him and shoved its mouth between Kim’s jaws. The claws dug deep. Taking no note of that, Spar gently sprayed. Gradually the claws came out and Kim relaxed. Spar hugged him gently. Suzy bound up Spar’s wounded wrist.
Keeper came up followed by two brewos, one of them Ensign Drake, who said, “My partner and I will watch today by the aft and starboard hatches.” Beyond them the Bat Rack was empty.
Spar said, “Crown has a knife.” Drake nodded.
Suzy touched Spar’s hand and said, “Keeper, I want to stay here tonight. I’m scared.”
Keeper said, “I can offer you a shroud.”
Drake and his mate dove slowly toward their posts.
Suzy squeezed Spar’s hand. He said, rather heavily, “I can offer you my shroud, Suzy.”
Keeper laughed and after looking toward the Bridge men, whispered, “I can offer you mine, which, unlike Spar, I own. And moonmist. Otherwise, the passageways.”
Suzy sighed, paused, then went off with him.
Spar miserably made his way to the fore corner. Had Suzy expected him to fight Keeper? The sad thing was that he no longer wanted her, except as a friend. He loved Crown’s new girl. Which was sad too.
He was very tired. Even the thought of new eyes tomorrow didn’t interest him. He clipped his ankle to a shroud and tied a rag over his eyes. He gently clasped Kim, who had not spoken. He was asleep at once.
He dreamed of Almodie. She looked like Virgo, even to the white dress. She held Kim, who looked sleek as polished black leather. She was coming toward him smiling. She kept coming without getting closer.
Much later—he thought—he woke in the grip of withdrawal. He sweated and shook, but those were minor. His nerves were jumping. Any moment, he was sure, they would twitch all his muscles into a stabbing spasm of sinew-snapping agony. His thoughts were moving so fast he could hardly begin to understand one in ten. It was like speeding through a curving, ill-lit passageway ten times faster than the main drag. If he touched a wall, he would forget even what little Spar knew, forget he was Spar. All around him black shrouds whipped in perpetual sine curves.
Kim was no longer by him. He tore the rag from his eyes. It was dark as before. Sleepday night. But his body stopped speeding and his thoughts slowed. His nerves still crackled, and he still saw the black snakes whipping, but he knew them for illusion. He even made out the dim glows of three running lights.
Then he saw two figures floating toward him. He could barely make out their eye-blurs, green in the smaller, violet in the other, whose face was spreadingly haloed by silvery glints. She was pale and whiteness floated around her. And instead of a smile, he could see the white horizontal blur of bared teeth. Kim’s teeth too were bared.
Suddenly he remembered the golden-haired girl who he’d thought was playing bartender in Crown’s Hole. She was Suzy’s one-time friend Sweetheart, snatched last Sleepday by vamps.
He screamed, which in Spar was a hoarse, retching bellow, and scrabbled at his clipped ankle.
The figures vanished. Below, he thought.
Lights came on. Someone dove and shook Spar’s shoulder. “What happened, gramps?”
Spar gibbered while he thought what to tell Drake. He loved Almodie and Kim. He said, “Had a nightmare. Vamps attacked me.”
“Description?”
“An old lady and a… a… little dog.”