The Blood of Ten Chiefs by Robert Asprin

Author:Robert Asprin [Asprin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
Published: 2011-06-01T20:00:00+00:00

**Stormlight!**

Her easy, swinging gait through the maze of lower branches slowed. Reluctantly she answered the sending.**I am here.**

**I know you are! What are you doing?**

**Watching the human camp for you, my chief, since the others are too stupid to care.**

He felt amused agreement, which he did not dare to share with her. Instead, he tried to sound stern.**Turn around. You know you should not be here. Go back to your family at once.**

**I have none.**

He had forgotten that she was an orphan, raised by the tribe, her parents killed in a hunting mishap years before. Childless and mateless as he was, and preoccupied with his leathermaking, Tanner had taken small part in the rearing of such cubs. He felt a jab of guilt, not only that he had forgotten, but that she could remind him so starkly, as if she should expect nothing more than forgetfulness from him.

**Turn around, then,** he sent more gently yet more firmly,**and go back to the place where you spend your days. I, your chief, command it.**

She went like a flash of birdflight, like a leaf on the wind, like cloud wisp, gone. From his higher, safer, more hidden vantage, Tanner looked on uneasily. For there was a human hunter standing on the ground beneath where she had been, staring upward with a puzzled scowl.

Tanner watched the humans. He did not come so recklessly near to them as Stormlight had done, for it was not in his nature to take unnecessary risks, but nevertheless, he lost rest and watched, and found ways to the nearer trees, day after day. At times the slow-witted human women, grubbing roots, would have needed only to look up from their toil to have seen him. Once a small child did see him leaping from oak to ash, but the women paid no heed to the child's babbling. Tanner spent the rest of that day in hiding and in compunction, for if he had been discovered so also would the tribe have been, and he felt it his duty as chief to protect them. Yet there was that in him which would have died, were it necessary, to fulfill his private quest.

That season there was unwonted silence and lack of merriment at the nightly howls. But one night when both moons were nearly at the full, as he sat alone afterward, Stormlight came to him and seated herself as abruptly as before, and said to him darkly, "I know where you spend your days."

He met her gaze, smiling. "It seems to me that you know everything about me."

She ignored that and went on. "You are watching the human village. I know it because I am watching, too, and watching you."

He was aghast. "Stormlight!"

"And you are going to get yourself caught if you are not more careful," she said to him sternly.

"You have disobeyed me!" Yet for some reason he found

that he could not be angry with her or impose a punishment on her, as a chief should do.

"You gave me no order but for the one day," she retorted with a defiant lift of her head.

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