FSE

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Learning curve

By Strega

"You need me to do what?", Yellowstripe growled.

After a probationary period learning the ins and outs of the Ziggurat and how to deal with customers he had been working as a bouncer at one of the Ziggurat bar for nearly a month now, but his training was far from done. There were classes he attended before or after his shift and his favorite was hand to hand combat training.

He'd been an hour into that, taught today by the heavily scarred gladiator Brannos he had first seen in combat with, and then swallowed whole by Charl-Captain, when a thin man in a red leather harness came in. He pulled Brannos aside as Yellowstripe took a moment to rest and stretch. Brannos was less than half his weight but he had come to respect the man's uncanny fighting ability. Thirty years as a near-immortal gladiator taught you to fight, it seemed, if you didn't want to die over and over, and Yellowstripe was learning not to underestimate people smaller than he was. Reida had taught him that lesson and others had reinforced it.

His parasol-like ears unfurled and Brannos hadn't worked out yet just how good his hearing was.

Two of the other trainees, a short horned creature of a species he didn't know and a muscular dark-skinned human began to chatter among themselves. Yellowstripe ignored them. The conversation he was listening in on was much more interesting.

"How is he on all fours," the red-harnessed man said, and Brannos made a "so-so" gesture. "Can he fight like an animal?", which got a nod. "...people whole?" Yellowstripe lost part of the rest as his fellow trainees tried to drag him into their conversation. He showed his fangs and glared at them but by the time they shut up the two men were making their way over to him. With a wave the other trainees were dismissed.

"How would you like to fight a match in the arena?", the red-harnessed man said.

That made Yellowstripe's ears go up in interest, and half an hour later he was in the catacombs under the smaller of the second floor's two arenas. It seemed that the beast scheduled for the next match had come down sick, and they needed something roughly tiger-shaped as a stand-in. A kzinti on all fours could pass for a tiger, with a few alterations.

They had thought of that. When he entered the readying room there were several attendants waiting. One politely asked him to remain still as he made a brief but complicated gesture, and Yellowstripe watched with interest as his fur turned coal-black. Magic, he supposed, though the line between magic and technology was blurry around here. Another had a shaggy mane rather larger than his own, with several horns protruding to the sides. It fit him like a coat, with ties down the front where the audience would not see.

Another had a long furry sleeve that ended in a lion-like plume. It fit perfectly over his naked pink tail and when Yellowstripe gave the man a quizzical look he shrugged and said "You aren't the first kzin we've had here."

"We don't have any paws that would fit your hands and feet, so try to keep them in the sand," the chief trainer said. "Failing that, keep your claws unsheathed." Yellowstripe nodded.

"This will be a short match, you against three men with spears. They are playing at being primitives - they will stab you but they won't kill you if they can help it. Remember, you're an animal! Claw and swipe and bite but try not to maul them too badly. We can fix them up if they are only mostly dead."

The chief trainer looked him up and down. "You can swallow people whole, right?" Yellowstripe nodded. "So can Blackfur. If you swallow one or more of them, do it only at the very end of the match, then come right back in here. No victory lap! Cough them up into this." He pointed at a vat of milky fluid. "Acid neutralizer and some healing salve. I need these guys for a big melee tomorrow, I can't wait for the Ziggurat to put them back together after you shit them out."

"Yes, sir," Yellowstripe growled, already on all fours and flexing his claws in and out in preparation for the fight. There was a refreshing candor to be had around here; people didn't walk on eggshells around a 500-pound kzin when there was a chess match with living twelve-foot-tall pieces going on two sporting rooms over.

As he waited he glanced at the floor to ceiling mirror of polished metal. The horns sticking out of his new mane looked more like quills now and he looked rather like a large, predatory porcupine. He grinned.

"Your fangs are wrong too but the audience will be too far away to see," the trainer said offhandedly, and then the gate opened.

With a snarl Yellowstripe leapt out into the fake sunlight of the arena, his leathery hands and feet sinking into the sand. The mane concealed his pink frilly ears, splayed out to their maximum to pick up every sound, but he already saw his prey.

Three dirty men in furs went alert as they saw him, and each had a wooden spear with a flint point. The announcer was saying something but it was lost in the roar of the crowd and the long snarl that bubbled up out of Yellowstripe. Drool dripped in strings from his jaws as he paced toward the men and one of them drew back in fear at the horrible grin of the thing coming to eat him.

But Yellowstripe was in control. Much as he disliked humans - less now than before he came to the Ziggurat, but the animus lingered - and much as he would like to devour them where they stood, he was here to play a role. He paced to the side as they formed a little knot for mutual protection and then the frightened one threw his spear.

A woman in the crowd screamed as blood erupted from the chest of the man. Almost too fast to follow Yellowstripe/Blackfur came in low, one swipe sending the man flying with his chest ripped open. The gravity of Kzin is stronger than Earth's and a full force blow would have killed him, claws or not, but Yellowstripe sensed the theatrics at work here and hit the man only hard enough to accelerate his exaggerated backward tumble. The blood was real but he pulled his claws in to less than half of their three-inch lengths in the instant before the hit.

The pain from the spear stuck in his back was slight. Under the shaggy false mane were overlapping plates of boiled leather as tough as bronze. Yellowstripe feigned a limp and the arena went silent as he turned on the remaining two men with a wide-eyed snarl of rage.

If they had stuck together they might have fended him off but in the face of a bloodied and enraged near-tiger one turned to run. The other stood his ground but Yellowstripe slapped the spear aside with a forepaw and the man's scream mixed with the roar of the crowd as fangs sank into the man's shoulder. With a single shake his prey went limp and was tossed aside, for the big cat had eyes only for the one who ran.

At the last possible instant the runner heard the pawfalls coming from behind and turned to fight. He cringed beneath the shadow of the reared-up cat and in a last desperate act braced his spear.

There was no armor on his black-furred underside and Yellowstripe realized he had made a mistake, but the man turned the point aside at the last instant so it went through his shoulder instead of his chest. Their eyes met for a moment and the man nodded even as he let out a high-pitched scream.

Already other gates were opening and attendants dragged the bodies of his other victims from the bloody sand. More men with long spears approached Yellowstripe and prodded him toward the gate by which he had arrived. He might have fought, but his mouth was full.

When he looked up from his pounce the crowd let out a cry, for dangling from his jaws was the still squirming body of the man who had run. With a toss of his head he swallowed up the shoulders and as his victim pulled desperately at his mane to try to save himself Yellowstripe/Blackfur growled his own defiance and backed away from the animal keepers. Each time he took a step back he stopped and swallowed another few inches of human and it was with the greatest reluctance that he took his attention from his meal to move at all.

Everyone in the crowd knew that if the keepers had not arrived all three of the primitives would have wound up in his stomach but he was not giving up this one meal no matter how provoked. Were it not for the bloody, broken off spear through his right shoulder he might have tried for a meal of animal handler as well.

By the time they forced the defiant cat-beast out of the arena there was nothing but a kicking pair of feet hanging from his jaws but the moment he was back in the readying room he turned and presented them to the men who had dressed him in the Blackfur costume. One of them grabbed the ankles and though in other circumstances that would have led to him following the primitive down Yellowstripe's throat the kzin stepped back and disgorged the man. Wet and gasping his meal was helped to his feet as Yellowstripe's costume was stripped off.

In moments a healer had extracted the flint spearhead from his back and was working on the more serious wound in his shoulder. Now that his blood had cooled he felt the pain, but kzin do not experience shock as do humans and all he did was snarl as the spear was pulled free and the wound dressed with magic and bandages.

"Not bad," the chief trainer said with a nod of approval. "Not bad at all. Nice and bloody, a good spectacle. You broke a couple of Reinhart's ribs and Jornell's shoulder is mangled but we can fix that. Beris of course," and he looked over at the man the other attendants were bandaging up; Yellowstripe's many fangs had cut and punctured him as he was swallowed, "Was one gulp away from being kzin food."

"I've never had to cough someone up before," Yellowstripe growled. "Something might have gone wrong." He shrugged, ignoring the healer who cursed at him as he staunched the bleeding of the wound. "And he turned his spear aside or he would have hurt me much worse than this."

From across the room the man nodded respectfully and Yellowstripe returned the gesture. If you had left him alone in the room with Beris and promised him no consequences, there was even a chance that it would not have ended with him belching, and this despite the fact he was quite hungry after his arena adventure. Yellowstripe's respect for humans in general had gone up another notch today.

*****

"I watched your arena match," Reida said as they sparred the next day. He had come to the Ziggurat thinking he knew how to fight, and was swiftly taught that size and strength and savagery would not always win the day. There was footwork, and tactics, and a bewildering variety of weapons he had barely touched so far. He had learned quite a lot in a month, though, and if he rarely laid a hand on her when they fought, it took her a lot longer to wear him down.

"I enjoyed it," he growled, and swiped at her head more to see how she would avoid it than with any expectation it would connect. Quick as a flash she gripped his wrist. She was almost two feet shorter than he was but compact and powerful. A week ago she would have forced him to his knees by bending his hand back but this time he just managed to slip free due more than anything else to his sheer mass and strength but also due to a new consciousness of his own center of gravity.

Though the wolverine-woman was deadly and skilful he had a reach and size advantage and if he ever got good enough, he thought he might even beat her. She would be faced with the difficult choice of staying inside against a bigger, stronger foe or outside against someone with more reach. Charl-Captain had beaten Brannos, after all, and if the gladiator wasn't as strong as Reina he was just as skilled.

But then there was her were-form. One day a week he practiced against people bigger than he was, for a bouncer had to able to handle anything. One thing he had learned is could not handle her weretigress form. She retained her skills but was taller even than him and much, much stronger than her wolverine form. She had been in that form when she swallowed him whole, and he'd been tied up, but he knew now that that tied up or free he would still have ended up in her stomach.

"Hold," she said, and he backed up and rose from his fighting crouch. He was panting and she wasn't, which was par for the course.

"I thought your match went well," she said. "Quite a spectacle." That's what the trainer had said, too. "I would have finished swallowing that man. The crowd likes a good belch."

He stood straight up and rotated his arm until his shoulder popped. It still hurt occasionally. "I've never coughed someone up and they needed him for a match the next day. If I had swallowed him he might have died."

She watched him carefully out of her dark eyes. Her irises rarely showed in either form, and in wolverine shape her eyes were dark as ink. "You would have had a meal."

"I wanted that," he growled. "But they needed him alive."

She absently adjusted a quarterstaff leaning out of the barrel of weapons so that it no longer hung out into the fighting square. "Yellowstripe, I am nominating you for arena training. You're inexperienced and junior, but when you finish your other courses, I want you to learn the basics of gladiatorial work." She did not say "When you complete your hand to hand training", because you never did.

When she finished beating him senseless, again, he returned to his chambers and curled up on the big round bed that had replaced the narrow human one. He had a late shift tomorrow and was looking forward to visiting the baths first.

*****

"Gladiatorial school? Oh, good! Already!" chirped Hazel, and hopped up and down. Yellowstripe had to smile at the little raccoon woman.

He was in a hot pool to his armpits when Hazel appeared. She had a variety of duties here, he'd learned. One day she was a waitress in a bar, another she taught comparitive physiology (she was a trained healer, too, though mostly in physical surgery as her healing magics were not well developed) and sometimes she was a bath attendant. She had also, though you would never know it to look at her cute fuzzy innocence, eaten far more people than he had to date. Smaller people, naturally, for she weighed only a tenth as much as he did.

"Next week I finish two courses, then I get two whole days of training to start - I'll go there instead of the bar for those shifts. They want me to get the very basics down so if they need me to fill in for someone again I don't trip over my own feet." He didn't tell her about filling for Blackfur; only the arena staff and his trainers knew about that. "When there is a slot in the regular gladiatorial school I will start going there one day a week, but they aren't sure when that will happen."

"I'm happy for you, big scary," she chirped, and hugged his neck. He had a sudden pang as he remembered the last person who called him that. Like most women he had met before coming here she now existed only as kzinti digestive byproducts, or whatever the ship's recycling system had made of that.

Hazel was a bath attendant sometimes, and sometimes other things. He didn't object to her soaping him up and brushing him in the bath, or when the brush and her talented hands made their way down his abdomen. He climbed out of the water so she wouldn't have to hold her breath any more than she was, and a little later quite a bit of pent-up stress made its way from his body and down her gullet. That was how he'd figured out she ate people. The pop of her jaws unhinging as she swallowed a kzinti cock as thick as her knee had been a dead giveaway to someone who had been on both sides of that sound.

*****

"You will die in the arena," the master trainer said as he looked at the handful of trainees there for the abbreviated introductory course. "It is inevitable. You all work here at the Ziggurat, unlike the guests and monsters who sometimes fight here, so you will come back. But you will die, and very painfully."

Yellowstripe shrugged, and the man saw. "Does that seem funny to you, stripes?"

"I've died once here already, and painfully," Yellowstripe growled, and thought about the box of fur in his room. "I know I will come back. It is worth it to get to fight."

"The pay will be better," chimed in the man to his left. His fellow trainee was another sort of cat-man, perhaps six and a half feet tall and leonine in aspect. "Than working as a bouncer."

"None of you will be gladiators for a long while," the trainer put in. "If at all. Some fighters train just enough to work in the arena once a month, once a week perhaps. Only a few work full time. What you are getting today and tomorrow is the bare minimum. Just enough to fill in if we need someone without being an embarrassment to the arena."

And that was that from the training master. For the remaining eight hours of that day and ten hours of the next, lesser trainers went over types of matches, costumes - there were a finite number of gladiators and variety could be increased by a quick change of costume - weapons, which Yellowstripe mostly studied to defend himself since he didn't need them to fight, and roles. Sometimes, they were told, they would be assigned to lose a match. For now, with their very limited experience, they would fill only the simplest roles available. They might be called up for sporting events if dumb muscle or weak players were needed, but more likely, they would be called to fight.

It was an exciting two days that saw him returning to the bar a bit more educated and eager to be called. His bouncer training continued with classes on the various species that visited the Ziggurat, hand to hand practice and a few blessedly short seminars on the structure of the place itself. There wasn't much to teach about that: the mysterious structure had seven known floors and rumors of more, each of which had a theme. Bars, restaurants and meeting rooms on the first floor, arenas and sporting fields on the second, and so on. He looked forward to eventually visiting the fourth, where Bloodfeather the griffon and Reiga and Hazel had most of their thinking meals.

His job as a bouncer was principally to look large and threatening, to tamp down nervous situations before they got out of hand. To gently remind people that that waitress or waiter or cook or general attendant didn't want a hand up their bottom and that five hundred pounds of alien tigerman would find if very convenient if he didn't have to pull any limbs off anyone today. Not that he'd mind, because frankly he'd worked up an appetite and you are made of meat, but all that blood was murder for the cleaning staff.

Not infrequently bar fights broke out and someone had to wade in and thump some heads together. Someone too drunk to think straight would draw a sword and he'd catch it on the wrist to elbow armored bracer that was part of his bouncer's uniform and gently break a collarbone or two with the edge of his other hand. Only very rarely did his claws come out and he couldn't remember the last time he got his fangs into someone's spine and bit down until the vertebrae separated. His job was not to kill people, though he would if it came to that.

Real troublemakers were to be ejected from the Ziggurat never to return or, occasionally, they might end up on someone's plate. Hazel told him that when a person was considered too untrustworthy to even let leave they were fed either to a resident predator, like her, or to a visiting one. Troublemakers became much less of an issue after a trip through someone's digestive tract. If they were also a Ziggurat employee they were generally banished, since they always reformed if in the place, and provisions might be made for them to be eaten or otherwise killed at their destination.

In his spare time he became a semi-frequent visitor to the arenas not as a gladiator but as an audience member. Arena tickets were expensive, especially to the big group fights or performances that required alterations to the arenas - turning one into a maze, flooding one so fights on mock ships could be conducted, joining several into one big arena, and so on. He'd been given half a dozen tickets as a reward for his short-notice performance and we went through those in a week and a half.

Now that he'd had at least a little training he could sometimes pick out the real fights - honor duels, grudge matches and so on - from what were little more than elaborate and bloody stage plays. He could also spot the amateurs, often guests who volunteered for a match or were thrown into the arena as a punishment. There were many match formats, some deadlier than the others, and many different costumes for what was becoming a somewhat familiar cast of actors.

He saw Blackfur once in that time, and another time after he began to buy his own tickets. The big cat-thing was a popular monster and sure enough he saw Blackfur swallow a man whole in one match and entertain the crowd - which had gone silent as the prey slipped down his gullet - with a lengthy and somehow smug-sounding belch. Blackfur usually left bloody but always reappeared a few days later, presumably patched up behind the scenes. From the chatter among the other audience members he learned that the cat-creature even raped his prey before eating it from time to time.

There were many monsters that fought in the arena and a whole section of the floor devoted to housing and training them that was separate from the section used to train gladiators. Monsters were imported from various worlds and some were so popular they had become part of the Ziggurat staff. Bloodfeather was the obvious example - Yellowstripe had seen the large and deadly griffon fight a few times now - and Blackfur was another one, having fought here for over twenty years. Staff monsters benefited from the immortality effect the Ziggurat provided and that allowed them, and humanoid gladiators like Brannos, to fight and die over and over.

Three weeks after his gladiatorial training started he got his second match in an arena. He listened to the chief trainer as they once again dressed him in black fur and mane.

"There was a sudden opening in the schedule," Raedic the trainer said. "And we are filling it with a surprise monster fight; Blackfur versus three adventurers."

As they slipped the furry tail-sleeve onto his naked tail Yellowstripe got a look into the storage closet from which it came. Several similar sleeves of different shapes for different types of tails, a much smaller false mane than the one he wore along with a larger one, and a whole stack of clawed false feet like the ones he was being fitted with now. It confirmed his suspicions that at least several predators played the role of Blackfur. The first time he had seen the cat fight in person he had instantly noted the similarily to Reida's lanky wereform, and the second time a far bulkier, almost bear-like Blackfur had fought. Was there even truly such a creature, or just a series of actors wearing the costume?

"I've called all four of you for this," Raedic said. Besides Yellowstripe the lion-man was shrugging into a scale-mail hauberk and hefting a long-handled greatsword like ones he'd seen Reida handle in practice. The short, thick, horned trainee had a set of curved blades like exaggerated brass knuckles. That left the tall, thin but muscular furry creature of a species Yellowstripe barely knew - a hyena-like race called the Gnoll, from worlds similar to Reida's old home. That one had a long blade on a stick, something like a spear but edged on one side.

"Listen carefully," Raedic said. The Ziggurat will reform you if you die, but that can take several days, during which you will not get paid. Make this a good show, but don't go out of your way to kill Yellowstripe. He in turn won't go out of his way to kill you. He's had a little more practice than you have, but not much. His mane has armor under it, so if you get a chance to hit him really hard, hit him there. And don't be surprised if he eats you. He'll cough you up before you suffocate or get too digested, but if he starts to swallow you, put up a good struggle. Remember, blood is good, broken bones are good, death is not profitable. Play dead if you're badly hurt, the healers will patch you up after the match."

The other three trainees left to enter the area via a separate gate and Yellowstripe/Blackfur fell onto all fours, pawing the floor and practicing his best hungry grin. He really was hungry, and considered which of the three he would most like to eat. The horns might stick in his throat and he was debating the merits of coughing up lion-mane versus shaggy hyena fur as when the gate snapped open.

With his best angry snarl he sprang out onto the sand and like the last time there were three to meet him. None of these were human and one was even a fellow feline but at the sight of the quilled cat-beast the short one shouted an alarm and on either side of him a lion and a hyena readied their long weapons.

Yellowstripe paced to the left, snarling and lashing his tail, and inwardly he wasn't quite sure how to tackle this. The two long weapons would hit hard and the muscular thug between them stayed right where he was. It presented a very prickly porcupine for a kzin to tackle. He could rush in and overpower one in seconds but the other two would have time to hurt him. If he tackled the short one the long weapons would cut him and if he got one of the tall ones the horned man was ideally armed to slash at him from behind.

After a few seconds the roar of the crowd ebbed and he realized he didn't have all day to reason this out. They were to be a short, violent feature and with a snarl he charged the three. If he got killed, at least the crowd would get his show.

But there was a method to his madness. In his long feline skull lay a thinking brain and though he rarely used weapons himself, preferring his claws, he had watched them used in practice enough to guess where a weakness might lie. Just shy of the blade-armed horned man he skidded to a halt and dodged to the right. There was no help for it, the gnoll's glaive slammed into his back and hurt even through the false mane and armor, but the horned man hesitated to step forward into Yellowstripe's fangs and the long-handled greatsword just skimmed past to the left as the lion-man swung too hastily.

There was a pain in his back but for an instant there was an opening and he snapped to the left. A paw lashed out and the lion went flying, not tumbling on purpose but hit hard. The gnoll hastily stepped behind the horned man but Yellowstripe leapt up and over the short blade-wielder and got only a cut to his hindpaw as punishment. Suddenly he was between the gnoll and the horned man and a seven-foot polearm is not well suited to close combat. His first swipe was blocked but the force of it slammed the pole against the spotty chestfur and right behind that were his jaws. The gnoll let out a cry of terror as sharp kzinti fangs sank in but a pain in his flank told Yellowstripe the horned man had pounced and instead of swallowing the gnoll he bit down until bones gave way and sent this one too flying with a flip of his muzzle.

He saw the blood on his flanks as he spun around but the horned man had hit him half on the mane, letting the armored plates beneath it blunt the blows. With only one opponent Yellowstripe attacked with craft, swiping at the man's head and correctly predicting that the bladed knuckles would come up to slice his paw. And so they did, but before they could retract his other forepaw came around with blurring speed and one set of hand-blades went flying. Here was a weapon he well understood and though he was bleeding from half a dozen cuts it only took a few more seconds to bait out another block and slam the horned man to the ground with a brutal swipe. Carefully he swung with just enough force to stun and just enough claw to draw plenty of blood without killing.

It was a novice's blunder, Brannos would tell him later. He had hurt the gnoll so badly the spotty warrior played dead, and so did the lion, but in the confusion of the fight he had not noted that the lion still held on to his greatsword. The fight caused him to step over and past the lion-man and as he decided whether to swallow the horned man, feetfirst perhaps to avoid pointy entanglements, the lion lurched suddenly to his knees. In the roar of the crowd he didn't hear it and his first indication that something was terribly wrong was an awful pain in his flank and the clang of steel against his pelvis.

The lion-man was tall and strong. Had he known his weapon better - long handled greatswords behave differently than the more common ones - the blow might have been lethal. As it was only adrenalin kept Yellowstripe on his feet as he whirled around. The sword came around at the same instant as his paw but the head portion of the mane was doubly armored and though the impact brought the taste of blood into his mouth it was the lion who went down.

There was blood running into Yellowstripe's eyes and the roar of the crowd seemed muted. What he did hear quite clearly was the lack of movement from the gnoll and horned man and the growl from the lion as it tried to stand back up. With an unsteady step forward he found the cat-man between his paws and heard the rustle of mane against his fur.

A human would have collapsed in shock but his alien physiology kept Yellowstripe on his paws as he dragged the lion's head upward with one forefoot. The audience needed their show and this was the last adversary still moving. He got the lion's head in his jaws and swallowed and was gratified, in a muzzy wounded way, at how the smaller cat-man began to kick and struggle as he realized what was happening.

Later he would hear the story from a dozen mouths, how the bloody, battered cat-beast got his jaws around the shoulders of the lion and swallowed down the mane in three heaving gulps. Unsteady on his feet but hungry, angry, yet still just professional enough to not kill the smaller cat with one quick swipe or crushing bite he worked his jaws over his meal. The lion's claws came out but this was not a sword; Yellowstripe's tough hide suffered only a few scratches before the cat's arms were pinned to his sides. He was just aware enough to react as the keepers came into the arena, and again he was prodded toward the entrance gate, but he did not see the head trainer frantically waving him in from the shadows of the readying room. He moved stubbornly slowly, and bit by bit he swallowed the lion down. This time he didn't stop at the knees; the crowd let out a roar as he got the desperate lion's padded feet into his jaws. Blackfur's bloody muzzle went up and a bulge moved through his mane as he swallowed, and the roar from above died as the tufted lion-tail slipped into the corner of his mouth and disappeared. Yellowstripe/Blackfur stumbled, paused, and belched, opening his jaws to amplify it as much as he could before finally being prodded through the gate by the spearmen. He left a trail of blood on the sand.

As he staggered into the cool dim room he was suddenly gripped by a dozen hands and had someone shouting in his ear. The head trainer's voice was so familiar that he heeded it even he at first didn't understand the words.

"Don't move! Damn, just stand still. No! Lie down, belly down!" The hands were pulling the mane and false paws off, and someone cut the elastic straps that held the mane in place rather than unlace them. That seemed wrong; they had spent minutes carefully putting that mane on, placing the straps that both held on the mane and allowed his neck to expand for swallowing prey. He followed orders, slumping down tiredly atop the twitching bulge in his middle.

As the blood was wiped from his eyes he suddenly realized he had swallowed the lion completely, rather than leaving the feet outside so someone could pull him free. With a grunt of effort he struggled back to his feet only to have the trainer shouting at him again.

"Damn! What did I tell you. Lie back down!"

"He is still alive," Yellowstripe growled, and tried to step toward the vat of acid-neutralizer. There was a kick from his belly and a brief internal pain as a claw scraped along his stomach wall, but it was lost in the many greater pains. His right leg didn't work right any more, for one thing. Even his tail hurt.

"Yellowstripe, look!" muzzily he followed the keeper's pointing finger, bending around, and for the first time he saw the wound the greatsword had make. Half a dozen healers were laboring to seal the inches-deep slash that had cut through the muscles of his thigh and flank. They were covered in blood and so was he. No wonder I am so weak, he thought.

"My fault," he growled, but he let the many weak hands hold him still. "Shouldn't have lost track of him."

"No, you shouldn't have. And he shouldn't have aimed below your mane. You didn't see it: he could have hit you and hurt you and made a good show of it, but he tried to kill you. He tried to miss your mane when he swung at your face too, but the sword just caught the armor under your mane or you would be dead."

The struggle in his belly was weakening, but so was he. Shock or no shock he had lost so much blood he was shivering.

"Someone is going to be punished, Yellowstripe, but not you. You made a few mistakes but the crowd loved you. If you weren't so hurt I'd be sending you back out! But Gareth, he needs a lesson. He'll be back, but for now, let your stomach do the teaching."

Yellowstripe belched, tasting lion, and at last lay still as the healers worked on his wounds. It had been a long time since someone kicked helplessly in his belly and though it was a fellow gladiator, and angry at the lion and himself, he let himself enjoy it. No one noticed, or perhaps no one cared, when he sucked in a mouthful of air and swallowed it. When he burped that up he swallowed another. With a little work he could keep the trapped lion alive for five, perhaps six minutes, long enough for the acid to really start to sting.

His belly gurgled as it began its work. If nothing else, he was going to need a lot of food to recover from his wounds, and conveniently, the lion provided it.

The healers of the Ziggurat and especially the ones that worked at the arena were remarkable. Only a few hours later he limped home, too proud to use the staff they offered as a walking stick but pausing when he thought no one was looking to lean against the wall. He had firm orders to go straight home and not stir until a healer checked up on him; he didn't expect that healer would be Hazel.

"Oh, dear, what have they done to you?" She wasn't fooled for a moment by the little illusions they'd layered over him; they dissipated at her touch to reveal both his lumpy lion-filled belly and the many shaved spots in his pelt. One almost three feet long ran from his rump up over his hip to nearly his armpit. That one would certainly leave a scar, they told him. There had been too much damage for even magic to entirely repair. That was all right; scars meant respect to a kzin.

Fifty pounds of four-foot-tall raccoon shouldn't be able to force him onto his bed but she wouldn't take no for an answer and soon she was running her fingers over his many wounds. Eventually she sighed and turned her attention to his obvious internal passenger.

"Who's this?" After several hours of digestion much of the lion's soft tissues were softer still. Even her little hands could push enough to make it squelch and slosh about. The bones would take longer, but he hadn't forgotten them when he had his jaws and stomach modified a few years back. Well over two hundred and fifty pounds of lion would soon enough be dispatched into the Ziggurat's sewer system, which he understood only enough to say "You put things in, they go away." Quite a lot of the calories from the cat would go into healing his wounds, and after a meal this heavy he'd even put on some weight for a time.

Fur, on the other hand, he could not digest, any more than Reida could. He was going to take a page from her book and send the lion a package when he reformed; all that mane fur should make for a spectacular hairball, especially mixed in with steel scales and other undigested bits of armor. It brought a smile to his face just thinking about it.

"Someone they don't need for a match tomorrow," he growled, "Unlike the last person I nearly ate."

Standing on the bed she could just hug his thick neck, and they shared a smile. "Well, at least you got a meal out of it," she chirped.

"And two days off," he growled. "They said to spend most of it sleeping." She nodded, gave his wounds a last looking over, and after tickling his belly to see if he was interested - he was just too tired to be - she left. He curled up on the blanketless bed, wrapped himself around the half digested lion, and slept.

But it did not last. He awoke from a disturbed dream sore and horny, and thought about women.

He wanted very badly to fuck Reida's wereform, to get his fangs into her scruff and mount her. He'd take her normal form, too, but the were-tigress form was the closest thing to a kzinrette he'd met. There was an animal lust in him when he saw her like that; it didn't help his concentration when they sparred. She was not interested. Maybe someday, but not yet.

There were women in the bar nearly every night who wondered aloud what the burly eight-foot-tall tigerman was doing after his shift ended. Some of them were big, strong, tall, occasionally even furry. There was a female like an upright bear who'd made eyes at him three nights running last week.

They were interested, and he'd fuck some of them, sooner or later. He was young and healthy and horny and something needed to be done about that last. But he didn't especially care about them, or trust them. It was just sex he wanted, and it was just sex those bar women wanted, and that was fine.

He visited the bathroom and relieved himself of some lion, then returned to bed and thought about women some more. In the middle of that Hazel knocked on the door once again, a bottle of blood for him to drink and healing salves for the worst of his still-aching wounds in hand.

He had female friends, and females he would fuck if he got the chance. And then there was Hazel. She was too small to fuck, for all she had swallowed his seed a dozen times. When she climbed up on the bed she smelled his lust, and with a little smile she began to knead the salves into his wounds. He knew she would work her way to his groin. He was horny, and she was going to do something about it, because that was what she did for her friends. Sometimes he slid her a coin in payment, so she could buy herself something nice, but she'd do it for free.

For the first time he could remember he cared about a female beyond simply spending his seed in her or eating her. Or both. As she leaned forward to tickle his belly his muzzle dipped beneath her skirt, and her eyes went wide at the rasp of feline tongue.

He liked the little raccoon lady. Not just because she was his most ready form of stress relief, either. Soon enough there would be others; he had restrained himself so far only to prove his reliability to the staff. Soon enough he would find one of those interested customers and bring her to his room.

But just to fuck. Yellowstripe tasted Hazel's little raccoon pussy, and the taste was good. He followed her down as she crawled down his belly, and soon enough there was the familiar pop as her jaws unhinged around more kzinti cock than would ever fit where his tongue was now.

For the first time he cared whether the female half of the tryst enjoyed herself. Inexperienced but enthusiastic he licked, and she made little raccoon noises through her nostrils as her throat massaged his shaft. He was going to fill her belly with seed, again, but this time he was going to make sure she enjoyed herself as well.

There were many potential women to fuck here, and sooner or later he would fuck some of them. There was only one woman he would ask to move into his room with him, though, and that woman happened to be a four foot tall, fifty pound raccoon.