“Born without ’em,” he said, with a pugnacious jut of his chin. “Leave me alone. I’m missing prime time and Blind Orange Anderson has been eyeing my corner.”

  “How can he do that if he’s blind?” Ariin asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Pebar said. “He’s next. Heal this one, and I’ll go get the other one.”

  “I’ll have to see your stumps, sir. I’m not sure I can do anything for you if you were born without legs but…”

  “Just mind your own business,” he replied, jerking back from her. Khorii sat back on her heels, puzzled.

  Sileg grabbed the man and twisted his arm up behind him. “Go ahead and horn him, girlie. Now shut your mouth, Stumpy. You’re getting a freebie as it is.”

  Khorii shook her head, perplexed by the man’s behavior, but Ariin, with a bored yawn got down from her altar, brushed past her sister, and laid her hands on the man’s shoulder and her horn against his forehead. “Calm down and let’s have a look,” she said. “I don’t know what you are so upset about. I’m the one who has to touch you.”

  “Nobody asked you to,” he said. “Let me out of here!”

  Gritting her teeth, Ariin yanked on the bottom of his robe. She was, like most Linyaari, quite strong in proportion to her size, and the man found himself flipped over backward. He fell off the cart, onto his rear, his perfectly good legs trapped halfway out of the depression in the cart where he knelt while begging.

  “You had legs all along!” Khorii said.

  “No, no, you cured me,” he said, pulling them back under him and covering him with the robe to escape possible stares from the passersby. “Now leave me the ’frit alone and let me get back to my business.”

  “We can cure illnesses and injuries, but we don’t clothe them with a horn touch,” Khorii said.

  “Pebar should have known. Stumpy’s a phony.”

  Stumpy pulled his legs off the cart and stood, a bit unsteadily. Looking down at his hands, he said, “Aw, damn. Will you look at this?” The bruises and calluses were healed and the bleeding cleaned up. He wiped his face on the hem of his shirt, and his skin came away crust-and scab-free. “I’m going to have to grow them calluses back again,” he complained. “It’s going to hurt.”

  “We can—“Khorii started to offer, but he glared at her.

  “You two have done quite enough. Ruined the whole day for me.” He gave an indignant sniff, then sniffed again, experimentally. “Well, I’ll be! You did cure me after all.” Blowing his nose on his sleeve, he said in a clear voice, “Had a terrible cold, pneumonia probably, and it’s all gone now. That’s worth something.”

  “Hallelujah, it’s a miracle,” Sileg said in a flat voice. “Go forth and take word to the multitudes, brother.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Stumpy asked.

  “You already got a free healing,” Sileg told him.

  “That don’t pay for shill work and lost time at my place of employment,” the man haggled.

  “Half a copper for each referral then,” Sileg said. “But don’t try to scam a scammer. We’ll check with the marks.”

  “Done,” Stumpy said, and knelt back into his cart. In an obsequious whine he said to Khorii, “Give a poor callusless fellow a tow back to his corner, pretty missy?”

  “I’ll kick your worthless arse around the rings of Octavia Prime if you don’t crawl on out of here right now,” Pebar said, hauling in another man, this one tall and thin with rust-colored skin and sparse white hair. He wore dark glasses and clung to a white cane.

  He was no more blind than the other man was legless but had better manners. When Khorii cured the arthritis that made it hard for him to sit on his street corner for very long, he gratefully promised to move to another corner, minus the glasses, and shill for the girls until the act caught on.

  This produced enough business to bring in a woman with female complaints, a man with indigestion, and a sick infant. The parents of the sick infant were well-off and donated enough that Pebar agreed that the girls could each have not only a piece of fruit, but all of the wilted flowers the florist cart had to offer.

  Once they had eaten, the girls cured several more cases before the market closed, by which time Pebar had made plans. “We’ll drag the snake’s cage inside the tent,” he told Sileg. “They’ll be safe enough in there. Kind of poetic justice in a way that they replace the snake, isn’t it?”

  Sileg rolled his eyes.

  Khorii thought that he was beginning to like them and feel sympathy for them that he wouldn’t reveal in front of his harder-hearted brother. Still, it did not keep him from closing the front of the “tent” and snapping the lock on the cage, however. Apparently it would take some more time to work on him.

  “Maybe tomorrow night you could nudge him into forgetting to lock the lock,” Khorii suggested.

  “Perhaps I will. My evil persuasive nudges that you so despise have done us so much good so far,” Ariin replied sarcastically. “Let’s get some rest. I’m sure my horn is clear as glass after all that healing we were forced to do.”

  Chapter 8

  Khorii was tired enough to sleep despite captivity, the cage, and the fact that she was slumbering inside an alien life-form. However, her dreams changed sometime during the night. They became full of doorsteps and trash in the streets, and dark, ugly passages full of slimy, rotting refuse where, for some reason, she was looking for food.

  Then, joy of joys, she found it—large, juicy, filling and of no use to anyone except its fellow scum dwellers. Giving it no time to turn on her, she struck. It shrieked once before she bit it, then swallowed it and began digesting. But she did not wish to digest down here, nor to sleep the long sleep she needed while she did it. Although she had been released, cast out, she returned to the only nest she knew in this place.

  Khorii’s mane ruffled with a breeze and she heard a rustling, sliding sound. What an odd dream. She’d never dreamed of killing a live creature before. She wondered why she felt no disgust or repugnance.

  The rustling was closer and louder now. When Khorii sat up, she saw nothing at first, but as her eyes adjusted to the light, she spotted a long, low mound where none had been. Then the front end of the mound rose and fanned out into a scalloped hood the size of a land lorry’s wheel. Large golden eyes glinted in the dark, and Khorii briefly smelled the acrid scent of venom that she had smelled once before. Then she sensed movement and something soft and wet touched her hand. She recoiled with a start, but realized that it had only been the snake’s tongue extended in greeting rather than attack. While that registered, the hood closed, the snake’s head returned to the floor, and it wound its length around the cage.

  Khorii had no idea how Ariin would react if she woke to find the snake wrapped around them, or how Pebar and Sileg would react. She entertained a brief fantasy in which the snake attacked the two men when they came in the morning and forced them to release the girls, but she realized the flaws in that dream even as she conceived it. The snake’s thought processes did not extend to opening locks or relationships between two-legged people. She—the snake—was simply looking for a safe place to rest and digest her meal before hunting again.

  Whatever reaction her sister or the others might have when they found the snake in the morning, Khorii found the creature’s presence oddly comforting. She was sure the snake remembered her, at least, and far from fearing the creature, she felt, however unrealistically, protected by its presence.

  When she awoke, however, it was to the lock snapping open and Sileg’s voice saying, “Brought you girls some grain to break your fast.”

  “Clever of you,” Ariin said ingratiatingly. “You may notice that our horns haven’t the color they did before your brother began hauling in the gimps yesterday. We can only do our healing if we’re well rested and nourished ourselves.”

  “So I figured. You perked right up after you ate that first bouquet of posies last night. I told Pebar that as business picks up, we need you in top form. By today word will have got ’round, and you’ll be drawing a larger crowd.”

  “Oh, joy unending,” Ariin said.

  The snake was long gone, and Khorii wondered briefly if she had only dreamed the encounter. Then she saw the round hole in the side of the tent enclosure and how the sides bowed out at the bottom in the approximate diameter of the snake’s girth.

  As Sileg predicted, there were more people, a steady stream of them at first, then a large crowd gathered outside the entrance to the tent. Many carried crying children, and that became tiresome as the day wore on. Khorii wished their horns could abolish the noise permeating the air the same way they could cleanse it of bad smells. A lot of the children were just tired or overexcited, and a very gentle horn touch was all that was required to calm them. A few were frightened by the horns or the girls’ appearance and required extra time. For the most part, though, the injuries were slight and the healing not too draining. The donations were not draining the pockets of the marks either, however, and this did not please Pebar and Sileg.

  They worked steadily into the late afternoon. The child Khorii had been about to calm with a horn touch suddenly bellowed and leaped down from her mother’s knee, running to the front of the tent. Khorii followed. A huge crowd clumped from just outside the tent all the way up the market street, where it parted to let another group of people pass through the center.

  A deep, echoing roar, which had nothing to do with the roar of the crowd, rolled down the street. Khorii knew at once it came from some great beast, though she had never heard its like before. “What is it?” she called to the people outside the tent.

  “One of the flying tigers crashed into a building. He fell from the air and is injured.”

  “We have to go help the poor thing,” Khorii said, twisting to tell Pebar and Sileg.

  “They can carry the cat here,” Pebar said. “That’s what I told them when they came to get you before, while you were shutting the kids up. So you just go back and think healthy thoughts, and pretty soon everyone will know what you can do and where to find you.”

  The bellowing roars and the excitement of the crowd increased by the second. Then suddenly there was a great downdraft that shook the entire tent itself. Four gold-and-black-striped rear paws appeared in the doorway. Then a long, clubbed, striped tail and black-furred wings attached to a sturdy but lithe feline body the size of a flitter followed, backing into the room. The massive head, fur bristling along the top and down the neck, appeared last, the mouth open in a white-fanged roar that terrified all the onlookers into a fast retreat.

  “That would be the other flying tiger,” Khorii’s informant squeaked excitedly from a safer distance.

  This cat stalked through the crowd, parting them easily so that the delegation bearing the injured body of the other flying feline could advance with greater speed.

  “Smart cat,” Sileg remarked. “You’d expect it to maybe guard its buddy and attack all comers. This one seems to have had some crowd-control training.”

  Twelve large men bore the injured animal on some sort of stage or platform, which they set down at the tent’s entrance. Khorii knelt beside the cat. “There’s something familiar about him,” she told Ariin.

  “Isn’t there just?” Ariin replied. “Hmmm, I wonder, could it be because we know that shapeshifters who specialize in feline forms could be lurking nearby, spaceship or no?”

  “Help me then. Shapeshifter or not, his wing really is broken,” Khorii told her.

  “Meow?” The Grimalkin flying tiger’s thought sounded heartrendingly like little Khiindi.

  “Hush, kitty, I’m here.” She laid her horn against the most obvious fracture. “Does that feel better?”

  The great body rumbled beneath her in a rusty purr, but she still felt pain emanating from it. His right hind leg, she thought, but to her surprise he lifted his uppermost forepaw and placed it on her knee. When she saw the gleam of metal beneath the fur, she understood. The crono.

  Khorii healed the damaged leg. Then, shielding the paw with her body so that neither Ariin nor their captors could see, Khorii stretched the crono’s band wide enough to pull it off over the paw, and slipped it onto her wrist, shoving it far up inside her sleeve so that Sileg and Pebar wouldn’t relieve her of it as they had Ariin. These pesky robes are actually useful for a change, she thought.

  Feeling a gust of hot breath across the back of her neck and shoulders, she twisted her head to see the other tiger—Pircifir, no doubt, monitoring her movements. She looked around, but didn’t see Pebar and Sileg until she spotted them far from the tent, watching warily from the front of the crowd. The tigers made them nervous, it seemed. Good.

  Ariin wouldn’t touch Grimalkin, but she stood beside Pircifir as if consoling the great cat in his worry over his companion. Pebar roared, “Do something!” to his brother almost as loudly as the tigers had roared. Sileg departed and returned with a chair, with which he cautiously approached the tent, jabbing the chair legs in Pircifir’s direction. Pircifir, with a slight flutter of his wings, made a flying leap and knocked Sileg and the chair back into Pebar and the crowd, then stood over their prostrate forms, growling ferociously.

  “Leave the beasts to us, Deacons,” Ariin called cheerily. “I don’t believe they like men. We will stand guard over the sick one tonight as he rests and heal the fear in the other tiger’s mind so that tomorrow, they may return to their tasks, as gentle as housecats.”

  Most of the crowd dispersed, but there were no more patients for the girls that day. When the market had closed, Pebar returned with a gun, which he aimed at the tigers, who were sitting together grooming each other. Behind Pebar, Sileg came with a net. But while the two men were practiced at capturing and taming wild animals or those without awareness, they were no match for the shapeshifters. The tigers split up, took to the air, and harried the two men all the way down the street. Khorii and Ariin laughed until the tigers returned.

  Ariin drew the “tent flaps” closed with gestures similar to the ones she had seen Sileg use the night before. Meanwhile, Khorii searched through the costume trunks stored behind the altar. Once they had a degree of privacy, the tigers returned to humanoid form, and Khorii presented them with her gleanings from the trunk. A multicolored garment with full sleeves, a great red ruff, and matching trousers pleased Grimalkin greatly, though he chose not to wear the oversized shoes and large, floppy hat that went with it. The spangled tights and top hat were the only items that fit Pircifir, but he was amused by them, especially the shiny fringes, which he played with in true cat fashion for a few moments before returning to the matter at hand.

  “I see no reason to delay our departure any longer,” Pircifir said.

  “Then you came back with the ship?” Khorii asked. “When we heard it was missing, we thought you had deserted us.”

  “It is not our custom to leave crew members behind, especially when we have already declined to sell them to unscrupulous persons,” Pircifir answered with a grin.

  “However, we did want to ensure that those two rascals would think we had left the planet, which is why we took off,” Grimalkin said. “Then we needed suitable disguises to enable us to locate you without being ‘seen,’ so to speak. I came up with the flying tiger persona, and here we all are.”

  “Then the ship is out there?”

  “By the time we get to the spot where it was, it will be,” Pircifir said. “But first we must find a way to transport the specimen. I don’t suppose you two have gained any insights into its nature and manipulation while you’ve been living and working within it?”

  “Not really,” Khorii said. “But if we can wait a while, and be quiet, someone else might be able to help us.”

  “We’re not waiting for that stupid snake!” Ariin said. “It’s dangerous, it’s too big to take with us, and it would only delay us when at any moment Pebar and Sileg could return with real weapons and imprison or kill all of us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Grimalkin said in a growl worthy of his tiger self or Khiindi on a bad day.

  “Just until after everything has gone quiet,” Khorii said. “She slithers up from the sewers. That’s the only place she can find something to eat.”

  “Oh, lovely,” Pircifir said.

  “Our horns can deal with the smell,” Khorii said, pleading with him. “She is not an ordinary snake, and she has lived with the alien form long enough to consider it a friend, I think. She came in last night as we slept and wound herself around the cage.” When they wavered, Khorii voiced one other intuition she had about the snake. “I believe they may have been captured together. Perhaps she is from the same place and can help us with others like this one.”

  “Why would she do that?” Pircifir asked.

  “Because we may be taking her home,” Khorii said. “And she communicates with me a little. I can’t quite explain it.”

  “Fine. Are you going to feed her, too?” Ariin asked. “I don’t think she lives on the same things we do.”

  “We could catch the two who captured you and feed them to her,” Grimalkin suggested.

  Khorii smiled in spite of herself, then frowned just as quickly. “That is not humorous. She prefers large verminous rodents from the sewers, I believe.”

  Grimalkin grinned. “I’m beginning to like this snake.”

  “She fed last night. I don’t think she has to eat often, and she sleeps a lot. She may be quite nearby. She’s not afraid of Ariin and me, but men’s voices might frighten her.”

  Grimalkin nodded and put a finger, still sporting a long, curved nail, to his lips. Pircifir nodded once also, indicating his understanding, and the two settled down to wait.

  Khorii was the first to see her serpentine friend and she sent a clear image of herself and her friends leading the snake and the tent to their ship and taking off into space. “Is this,” she inquired, “something you would agree to?”

  She had no plans for what to do if the snake did not agree, and was chagrined when the creature rushed at her, toward the closed tent flap, tripping her in its coils, sweeping Ariin along in the same fluid movement.