Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII Larry Niven (fantasy novels to read txt) 📖

he couldn’t afford the tradeballs, and he needed all his kills just to keep himself fed. A Namequest was a test, he knew, and if it were easy there would be no honor attached to it.

On the eighth day he’d left the savannah and with it danger of attack, but simply traveling the desert was dangerous. He never ventured more than a day from a waterhole and it often took many exploratory probings to locate the next one to westward. Game was vanishingly scarce, and he was reduced to digging grashi from their burrows. They were tasty morsels, but not much nourishment for the time involved; eight were barely a mouthful. Thus he spent his days just getting enough to eat. Moreover, the digging filled his nose and pelt with sand. No matter how much he groomed he was never entirely free of the grit. He’d lost his skinning knife in a sandstorm. Four or eight times a day he needed that knife. Four or eight times a day he used his claws instead. They were quickly becoming ragged and torn from the abuse. Claws were for killing, not cutting roots in pursuit of burrowers.

It was not at all his idea of what a warrior did. True, the sagas often told of long and arduous treks, but when curled up by a crackling fire in the warm den, a journey even twice around the seasons was over in a few words so the tale-teller could get on to the exciting parts. Swift-Son was beginning to realize that it was not just courage but tenacity that made a Hero. Even both qualities might not be enough. Perhaps his role as krwisatz was simply to walk until he died—perhaps the portents were meant for the pride—to keep a rash youngster from bringing the wrath of the Mage-Kzin down upon them all.

As he left his watch-rock, Swift-Son had been sure he was fated to become a legend. But now, alone in the vast, uncaring desert, it seemed a faint hope at best. Normally he preferred only the Hunter’s Moon for company. Now he yearned for a pridemate. Somehow the verse to his honor in the pride-ballad now seemed a poor return for a slow, lonely death.

Thus he pondered gloomily as he trudged through the shifting sand on the night of the thirty-second day. Already the sun was starting to peep over the horizon behind him. Soon he would have to stop and take cover from its burning glare and he had yet to find a waterhole. If he didn’t find one soon he had nothing to look forward to but a day of fitful rest beneath his tuskvor skin with a few mouthfuls of grashi and not enough water. Then the next night he would trudge back to the last waterhole and spend the morning digging the last grashi out of their holes there. He estimated that there were enough burrowers left for one more journey westward and then if he didn’t find anything, he’d have to go back to yet another waterhole for food. He desperately needed a genuine kill to provision himself properly, but he hadn’t seen so much as a ztigor since his third day in the desert.

Suddenly he realized that something had been tugging at the edge of his awareness. Instantly Swift-Son crouched behind a nearby bramblebush, ears swiveling up, nostrils flaring, lips twitching over his fangs as he scanned the crest of the dune ahead. Awareness grew in him that the texture of the sand was wrong. The desert floor had become loose and crumbly, as though it had become the spoil mound of some gigantic grashi burrow. The smell of hot dust and bramblebush ahead was not quite right.

There was no prey-scent, but there was sound, faint but clear. Something was moving on the other side of the strange dune ahead. His ears strained forward as he strove to identify it. It was unlike anything he’d heard before—a semirhythmic pattern of dry clicking. Swift-Son tried to imagine what could cause such a sound.

He began to stalk slowly, moving parallel to the dune’s crest without coming closer. Cover was scarce, but he took maximum advantage of it, slipping quickly and silently from bush to stone to sandhill, exposing himself as little as possible. As he moved he instinctively triangulated the sound source. He carefully positioned himself downwind and up-sun of his target. Only then did he start his approach.

As he drew closer the depth of the disturbed sand grew. Something had moved an immense amount of sand to build the dune. There was no more cover, but a couple of bramblebushes that had been uprooted in the digging process and lay partially buried in the sand uphill. With nothing to hide behind, he moved up the dune on his belly, using a slight depression in the slope for what little concealment it provided. He shifted barely a paw-span at a time, listening at every pause, his tail unconsciously twitching hunt commands to nonexistent pridemates. His goal was an uprooted bush at the crest that would give him cover as he surveyed the other side of the dune. He moved with the sounds, stopping when they stopped. A prey animal pausing to listen for danger would hear nothing.

Here was the bush. With infinite patience he lifted his head until he could see over the dune’s crest.

Nothing he had experienced before prepared him for what he saw. It was wrong. The dune was the rim of an immense bowl-shaped concavity and all of it was freshly-dug sand. Swift-Son didn’t want to contemplate the size of the creature that had dug it. Arcane artifacts lined the bowl, set in concentric circles a rock-throw apart from each other. They looked vaguely like the tall cache-signs a trail scout would build from sticks to mark a kill or a route change during a trek, but they weren’t. These had a symmetry of construction that he’d never seen before, and where cache signs were