Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

That was when he heard the rustling noise.

Suddenly, here by himself, alone in the dark, Kit remembered what Ronan had been saying about apex predators. Now why haven’t I looked into that? he thought, reaching behind him for the antenna-wand, as much as a security blanket-equivalent as anything else. This wand and its near-identical predecessors were more than mere channels for the power Kit funneled into his spells: they were noon-forged steel, with their own potency—formidable weapons in their own right. For the moment, though, Kit stood up and concentrated on staying still while he waited to discover which way he was likely to wind up using the wand in the next few minutes.

His breathing sped up, but he held still and waited. And slowly, in a rustle of slithery motion under the dim golden-red light that lay over the plain, glinting with eyes and curling with tentacles, the sibik came crawling along from between two of the standing stones and crouched down against the ground, staring at Kit with every eye it had on the back of its big baggy body.

This was a different one from the sibik he’d laughingly pulled off Ronan’s leg: much bigger, more like the size of a large dog than a rabbit, and darker in color—a vague soft patchwork of cobalt and jade. Kit found himself thinking about the sibik that Djam had told him about, the one that bit him before starting to try to pull his fur out. He knew perfectly well that he could keep this one from hurting him… even kill it, if necessary. He’d killed much more dangerous things in his time, when he’d had to. But in his mind’s eye Kit kept seeing the smaller sibik from earlier, the stubborn, hungry, near-comical one, and the idea of doing anything terminal to any of them felt very unpleasant.

So there Kit stood for a few seconds, and there the sibik sat, or crouched, or lay, its tentacles twitching a bit as it looked at him.

It made a surprisingly small hissing grunt at him, for something of its size. At least that was what the sound was like, when it came out: but Kit’s understanding of the Speech rendered this as words.

“Hello help?”

Well, that’s unusual, Kit thought. “Dai stihó, cousin,” he said to the sibik. “How can I help?”

The sibik lay there looking at him with all those eyes, and then said, “Want?”

Does it mean it didn’t understand me, or does it think I know what it wants? Kit couldn’t be sure. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “tell me what you need.”

It just looked at him.

Maybe I didn’t phrase that right. Or something. “What can I do for you?” Kit said.

The sibik rustled. “Salt flat,” it said.

What? Kit said. His second thought was, Wait. First things first. “What should I call you, cousin?”

“Sibik.”

“Yeah, I know that’s what you’re all called, but what should I call you?”

“Sibik.”

“So it’s a personal name as well as a species one?” Kit said. “Okay.” Kit had discovered over time that that approach wasn’t so uncommon among animals. “I’m Kit.”

“Kt,” the sibik said, turning it into a sound like someone snapping a pencil in two.

“Fine. Now what did you want again?”

“Salt flat.”

Kit scratched his head and thought about that. I haven’t really looked into the local terrain that much, he thought. This is all grassland, as far as I can tell, for miles. At least if there were any salt flats in the neighborhood, they struck Kit as very well concealed. “I’m, uh, I’m not sure what you’re asking me for.”

The sibik edged just slightly closer, watching Kit carefully, holding its abdomen up so that all the eyes on it were positioned to see Kit clearly. When it spoke again, it did so quite slowly, as if speaking to someone it considered somewhat simple. “Salt,” it said, “flat.”

Kit stood there a moment with his hands on his hips. “Okay,” he said, “I really have no idea what you—” And then his eye fell on something near to where he was standing: a bit of cellophane, a scrap of the wrapping from his saltines that he’d missed when he was tidying up.

“I get it,” Kit said, and laughed. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. You want a cracker.”

“Cracker!” the big sibik said, and rustled closer still, a few of its tentacles waving in the air.

“Sorry, I took longer than I thought,” Djam said from behind Kit, “but after I was finished I had to—” He paused, his glance going from Kit to what was watching him from a yard or so away.

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “Word seems to have got around that the food here is good.”

“Well,” Djam said, coming around slowly to sit on the Stone Throne, “we did give them a fair amount of stuff the other night.”

“No, he’s after my saltines,” Kit muttered, and stood there rubbing his forehead for a moment. “Because I promised, didn’t I…”

The sibik simply looked up at him and said, quite distinctly, “Cracker.”

“Djam, would you do me a favor?” Kit said. “Go in my puptent and off on the right hand side you’ll see a bunch of strange-shaped containers off by themselves. On top of those there’s a clear-wrapped package with a few of those crackers left in it…”

“One moment,” Djam said, and went off.

“How did you find out about the ‘salt flats?’” Kit said to the sibik.

It tilted its abdomen slightly so that it was regarding him from a slightly different angle. “Knew,” the sibik said.

That told Kit nothing of any real use. “Did you meet the sibik who was here before?”

The big sibik tilted its belly even further forward, angling more eyes toward Kit. “Smelled,” it said after a moment. “Smelled it.”

So maybe somehow that information was encoded in the scent trail the other one left? Kit thought. How would that even work? Yet it wouldn’t surprise him. Over the past few years he’d run into a lot of impossible-seeming situations and events that nonetheless turned out to be completely possible. Sometimes fatally so… sometimes marvelously.

“Here,” Djam said, returning with the almost-finished cracker package. Kit took it from him and took one out of the package, showed it to the sibik.

“Cracker,” it said in the pleased but still impatient tone of voice of someone seeing the dinner they’d ordered finally being brought to the table after an annoying delay.

“Right,” Kit said. He got down on one knee and held out the saltine. The sibik started making grabby tentacles at it, though it was also holding back from Kit as if it thought he might do something sudden.

“It’s all right, cousin,” Kit said. “Come on, take it. I won’t bite.”

One tentacle more daring than the rest reached out to Kit’s hand and very slowly and carefully wound itself around the saltine: then yanked it away. The sibik’s tentacles parted a bit in the front, and Kit saw where there was a sort of stoma behind them, with a rosette of little hard-looking dark brown plates, each one shaped more or less like the business end of a flat-head screwdriver. The tentacle guided the saltine toward the rosette of plate-teeth, which very delicately nipped at the corner of the saltine. Then, apparently satisfied that the flavor matched what it had somehow or other been expecting, the rest of it vanished straight inside. Much munching and crunching ensued, without a single crumb escaping.

Then the sibik looked pointedly at Kit, wiggling its abdomen. “More?”

“Well, I know this drill,” Kit said under his breath, and pulled out another saltine. “I wonder if I could teach you tricks?”

“More,” said the sibik, sounding unimpressed and grabbing with its longest tentacle at the cracker Kit was holding.

“Yeah, more, right,” Kit said, letting the sibik take the saltine from him and dispose of it the same way the first one had gone.