The Long War

hunt.’
    Jansson returned her gaze. ‘On all fours? You hunt down criminals, on all fours?’
    The adviser, Brian, spoke up for the first time. ‘We have many pups. Big litte-hhrs. Life cheap. Like to hunt . . .’
    Petra seemed to smile. Jansson smelled meat on her breath. ‘Like to hunt. Good for wolf-ff within.’
    Sally snapped, ‘So you despise humans for how we domesticated your cousins on our world. Fine. But we’ve done nothing to harm you, any of you. We didn’t even know you existed before Snowy there showed up on Rectangles.’
    ‘You offen-nnd me. Stinking elves gone w-hhrong. You, no hrr-ights here. Why should I not th-hhrrow you out for the hunt?’
    Sally glanced at Jansson, and said desperately, ‘Because we can get you more ray guns.’ She pointed to the nearest guard. ‘Like those.’
    Jansson, astonished by this claim, turned and stared at her.
    Sally wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Those weapons look old to me. Run down, are they? We haven’t seen one fired . . . I know they’re dead. We can get you more .’
    Petra looked over at the kobold, who in turn looked – angry? Alarmed? If he had been supplying the weapons, he was being cut out of the deal, Jansson reflected. But she couldn’t read his expression, if he had one.
    Petra leaned forward, her great head thrust at Sally’s face. Her nose wrinkled, wet, probing. ‘You l-lie.’
    ‘That’s for you to decide.’
    The moment of judgement hung in the air. Jansson sat still, feeling every ache of her treacherous body. Sally did not yield before Petra’s glare.
    At last Petra withdrew with a frustrated growl, and loped from the chamber, her sex-slave dog at her heels.
    Sally delivered a noisy mock sigh. ‘We live to fight another day . . .’
    As the guards milled around, talking among themselves in growls and yaps, Jansson leaned over to Sally. ‘What are you playing at?’ But even as she asked she was thinking it through. She was a cop; there were clues here; connections formed in her mind. ‘Has this got something to do with that pendant she wore, that was the spitting image of Joshua’s Rectangles ring—’
    Sally pressed a forefinger to her lips, but she smiled.
    They were taken to a kind of suite at one end of the palace, with a communal area and a central hearth, and small rooms that could be shut off behind flaps of leather.
    Finn McCool was put in here with the women. Sally brusquely pushed him inside one of the rooms and told him to stay put. The kobold cringingly deferred, as he tended to when close up and personal with a human. But Jansson wondered what resentment burned in that strange soul, resentment at the treatment he received from these superior creatures that evidently fascinated and repelled him at the same time.
    Jansson picked a room at random. A pallet of straw had been set out on the floor, with blankets laid over it. There was no lavatory or wash basin, but a kind of well in the floor contained water that seemed clean. Jansson dumped her travel pack and fingered the blankets curiously. They seemed to be of woven bark. How were they made? She imagined beagles stripping and weaving bark with hands and teeth.
    She went back out to the communal area, where beagles were laying out bowls of food on the ground around the hearth.
    Sally sat on the floor, comfortably enough, studying the food. She glanced up at Jansson. ‘How’s your en suite?’
    ‘I’ve been in worse flophouses. Right now I feel like I could sleep on concrete.’
    Sally leaned closer and spoke more softly. ‘Listen, Jansson, while we have a minute alone. We need a plan. To get ourselves out of this.’
    ‘We could always just step away. As you said you could carry me out—’
    ‘Of course. They’ve been casual about that, haven’t they? They did take your Stepper box. Maybe they think we’re like trolls, who won’t step away if they leave a cub behind. But I suspect they’re imposing their different way of thinking on us. They don’t use prisons ; that’s not in their mind-set. They spoke about this tradition of the hunt. They’re happy for wrong-doers to escape, right? To run for their lives, rather than be confined. That’s the way they think. So their instinct isn’t to lock us up. I guess they think that even if we do step, they’ll come and hunt us down anyhow, carried on the back of kobolds. We’ll see, if they try.
    ‘But we’re not going anywhere. Our business isn’t done here. We need to normalize