DUNCAN WAS SPENT, a. burden, a hazard. Niun set hands on him and pushed him downslope, to shelter under an overhang by a boiling pool, forcing him farther under as he wedged his own body after.
It was scantly in time. A near burst of fire hissed across the water and crumbled rock near them: blind fire, not aimed. The searching beams continued, lacing the area. Niun saw the face of Duncan in the reflected light, haggard and swollen-eyed—unprotected by the membrane that hazed Niun’s own vision when the smoke grew thick. Duncan’s upper lip showed a black trail that was blood in the dim light. It poured steadily, a nuisance that had become more than nuisance. The human heaved with a bubbling cough and tried to stifle it. The reek in the air from the firing and from the natural steam and sulphur was thick and choking. Niun twisted in the narrow confines, fastidious about touching the bleeding and sweating human, and at last, exhausted, abandoned niceties in such close quarters. They lay in a space likely to become their tomb should another shot crumble the ledge over them; mri and human bones commingled for future possessors of Kesrith to wonder at.
This was delirium. The mind could not function under such pounding shocks as bracketed them constantly. Niun found the regul amazing in their ineptness. They two should have been dead over and over, had the regul had any knowledge of the land; but the regul had not, were firing blind at a landscape as unknown and alien to them as the bottom of the sea. The world was lit in constant flares of white and red, swirled in mists and steam and smokes and clouds of dust, like the Hell that humans swore by—that of mri was an unending Dark.
The water splashed, singing and bubbling; Niun lowered the visor of the zaidhe, he the outermost, shielding the human with his own body: ironic arrangement, chance-chosen, one he would have reversed at the moment if it were possible.
An explosion heaved the earth, numbed the senses, drove their numbed bodies into a fresh convulsion of terror.
And hard upon that a white light lit the rocks, grew, ate them, devoured all the world; and a pressure unbearable; and Niun knew that they were hit, and tried to move to roll out into the open before the ledge came down. The pressure burst over him, and it was red...
...wind, wind in great force, skirling away the smoke and mist, making the red swirl before his membraned, visored eyes. Niun moved, became aware that he moved, and that he lived.
And all about them was light, sullen and ugly red.
He gathered himself up, the light at his back, and turned to the light, and saw the port.
There was nothing.
He stood—legs shuddering under him. He thought that he cried out, so great was his pain, and shut his eyes, and opened them, trying to see through the flame, until the tears poured down his face. But of Ahanal, of Hazan, there was nothing to be seen. Within the city itself, fires blazed, sending smoke boiling aloft.
And even while he watched, an aircraft lifted from near the horizon, circled for a distance out to sea, and came back again, lights blinking lazily.
He followed it with his eyes, the aircraft circling, rounding over the city, through ‘the smoke—beginning to come about toward the hills.
Toward the edun.
He wished to turn his face from it, knowing, knowing already the end. He turned with it, watched, a great knot swelling in his throat, and his body cold and numb, and the center of him utterly alive to what began to happen.
The first tower of the edun, that of the Kel, flared in light and went, slowly tumbling. The sound reached him, a numbing shock, and after that the wind, as the towers fell, as the whole structure of the edun hung suspended and crumbled down into ruin.
And the ship circled, light and free, lazily winking in the dark as it rose above the smoke and came, insolently, over their heads.
His pistol was in his hands: he turned and lifted it, and fired one futile burst at those retreating lights, none others in the sky. The lights blurred in his eyes, the betraying membrane, or tears: it flashed and cleared, and he fired again.
And the lights continued on a moment, and a red light blossomed and fragments went spuming in various trajectories, ruin upon ruin, pistol shot or the turbulence that must surround the port.
It healed nothing. He turned, looked again at the edun where not even flames remained, and his stomach spasmed, a wrench that weakened his joints and made him dizzy. In that moment he would have wished to be without senses, to be weak, to fall, to sink down, to do anything but continue to stand, helplessly.
Dead. Dead, all of them.
He stood, not knowing whether to return to the ruin at the port, to go on as he was going, or whether there was reason to go, or to do anything but sit where he was until morning, when the regul would come to finish matters. He found no limit to what senses could absorb. He felt. He was not numb. He only wished to be, battered by the wind that stole the sound from the night, whipping at his robes, a steady snap of cloth that was, here, louder than the silence that had fallen over everything.
The People were dead.
He remained. For survivors there were duties, respects, rites that wanted doing. He was not of Medai’s temperament.
He slipped pistol into its holster, and clenched his icy hands under his arms, and began to reckon with the living.
The Hand of the People, a kel’en; and there were his kin to bury, if the regul had not done it in killing them, and after that there was a war the regul perhaps did not look to fight.
And then he looked toward the ledge, and looked on his human prisoner, and met his eyes. Here also was a man that waited to die, that also knew, in small measure, what desolation was.
He could kill, and be alone thereafter, a vast, vast silence; a tiny act of violence after the forces that had stormed across the skies of Kesrith and ruined the world.
A tiny and miserable act. Vengeance for a world deserved something of equal stature.
“Get up,” he said quietly, and Duncan gathered himself up, shoulder to the rock, staring back at him.
“We will go up to the hill,” he told Duncan.”The house of my peoplevI do not think there will be more aircraft.”
Duncan turned and looked, and without demur, without question, started walking ahead of him.
The world was changed about them. Landmarks that had been on the Dus plain for eons were gone. The ground was pocked with scars that filled with boiling water. Duncan, leading the way, blind, bound, misstepped and went in up to the knee, with nothing more than a hoarse sob of shock; and Niun seized him and pulled him back, steadying him, while the human stood and gasped for air.
He kept a hand on Duncan’s arm thereafter, and guided him, knowing the way; and preserved the human against another time.
The light came, the red light of Arain, foul and murky. Niun looked back toward the port, and saw in the first light the full truth of what he had already known: that nothing survived.
Neither Ahanal nor Hazan.
And when he looked on the hill where the Edun of the People had stood, it was one with the sand and the rocks—as if nothing built by hands had ever stood there.
He saw also in the light what prize he had taken, an exhausted creature that struggled for every upward step, whose face and mouth and chest were spattered with blood that poured afresh from the nose, injury or atmosphere, it was uncertain. The eyes were almost shut, streaming tears not of seeming emotion but of outraged tissuesva face naked in the sun, and indecent, and more bewildered than evil: he did not know why the human kept walking at such cost, toward such little reward—easier by far the death of the land’s violence than what mri and human had exchanged for forty years.
But there was a point past which there was no thinking, only the fact that one lived; and that continued whether one wanted or wished otherwise.
He understood such a mind, that deep shock which admitted no decisions. He had never thought that he would freeze in crisis; yet he had frozen, and the cold of that moment when the People died was still locked round his mind and his heart and seemed never apt to go away, not though he had revenge, not though he killed every regul that breathed and heaped humanity on the desolation as well.
It was a shock in which their two lives were of like value, which was nothing at all.
He pushed the human ahead, neither hating now nor pitying, finding no reason for sparing a human when he had the ruin of the edun to face for himself. He thought perhaps that Duncan sorrowed for his own failed duty, which lay lost in burning Kesrith; that Duncan also mourned failure, as miserable as he.
But Duncan had all the human worlds for kinsmen, knowing that they survived; and it was possible to hate the human when he let himself think on this. He would not return this one to his kind: while he lived, Duncan would live. While he had to face what had become of Kesrith, the man Duncan would do the like.
They came to the edun by full daylight, untroubled by ships or any sign of life from the skies. Down in the city there might be. It did not extend to them. When Niun thought of it, he thought of going down and destroying them—methodically, joylessly: regul, who had no capacity for war.
Who had finally, in one cowardly act, destroyed the People.
There was irony there that was worth bitter laughter. He looked on the mound of rubble that had been the edun and felt moved to that or to tears; and Duncan, no longer forced to walk, simply slumped to his knees and leaned against the shoulder of the causeway. Niun heard his hollow cough and kicked him gently, reached down when that was not enough to rouse him, and caught his arm, pulling him up again.
There was work to be done, at least so far as they could try; and he was loath to have the ruin touched at all by tsi’mri hands, but he had not the strength alone. He drew the av-tlen and pried loose the knots at Duncan’s wrists with its point, carefully unwound the thongs that were embedded in Duncan’s swollen flesh and looped the recovered leather through its ring on his own belts.
Ducan, trying to work his hands to life, looked at the edun, and looked at him, a question. Niun jerked his head in response and Duncan comprehended and began to walk. They waded through rubble, stepped carefully among chunks of the walls that were cast down and shattered. Here had been simple fire, not the radiation that doubtless bathed the city and made the place uninhabitable. Niun pushed at a heap of rubble that blocked their way, and saw that beneath that pile of heavy stone and fine dust lay at least one of the Kel.
There was no use to move that mass, no hope of moving it entirely. Instead Niun took stones and began to heap them round the visible body like a cairn, and Duncan, seeing what he was about, began to gather up rocks of the proper size and pass them to him.
This offended him bitterly, that the human offered rather than suffered compulsion; but it was needed, and he would not suffer the human to touch the grave itself. And it occurred to him at the same moment that Duncan might well smash his skull with one of those self-same stones the moment he turned his back entirely, and that this might be what the human was preparing, so he kept from turning his head while he worked.
They finished, and from this place they went deeper into the ruin and into places dark and difficult, where heaps of rubble towered overhead and sifted dust and pebbles down-slope at them. And the core of all the deepest ruin was the Shrine that he had sought.
It was all too deeply buried.
If it had been possible, he would have sought out whatever relics he could carry and taken them away into the sanctity of Sil’athen, where his kinsmen also would have been buried; but perhaps humans would never be curious enough to desecrate this place with their machines, to sift out the debris and leavings of a species which no longer mattered in the universe.
And here the destruction reached that central citadel of himself that had yet to feel it; and he trembled and his senses almost left him. He reached out and sought support, and touched the wrong stone, bringing a slide that buried the place at their feet and brought a sift of powder down on them. The only thing he saw clearly was Duncan’s face, terror in his eyes as for an instant they seemed likely to go under the weight of rubble and earth; and then the sifting stopped and the place grew still.
A stone shifted somewhere, and another; there was another slide, and silence, the fall of a few pebbles.
And in that silence came a thin and distant cry.
Duncan heard it: if not for that confirming glance sideward, Niun would have thought it illusion. But it came from the direction that had been Kath, where the deepest storerooms were.
He turned and began to pick his way through the ruin, careful, careful with his life now, and that of her who had cried aloud, down in the dark.
“Melein!” he cried, and paused and listened, and that same thin sound returned to him.
He reached the place, estimating where it lay, and a wall had fallen there, and finer rubble atop it; but the steel regul-made doors had held.
Too well. They were barred by a weight that could not be moved, that they lacked tools to chip away and machines to lift. Niun tore his hands on it, and his muscles cracked, and Duncan added his force, but it would not slide; and at last they both sat down, gasping for air, coughing. Duncan’s nose started pouring blood again. He wiped it in a bloody smear and his hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Is it,” Duncan asked, “ventilated down there?”
It was not. It added a fear atop the others. “Melein,” Niun called out. “Melein, do you hear?”
He heard some manner of answer, and it was a woman’s voice and a young voice, high and thin and clear: it was Melein. He reckoned it below them, and tried to figure the exact location of it, and marked with a heel a spot on the floor.
Then he wrenched a reinforcing rod from the ruin and began with careful chips to dig—no firing down into that sanctuary, no such recklessness. He dug with that and with his fingers, and Duncan saw what he was doing and helped him, alternating strokes that pounded deeper into the cubit-thick flooring, and now and again they paused to paw away the dust they had made. The sun grew hot, and the only sound now was the steady chink of steel on the cemented earth, and he had heard no word from Melein in a very long time. He was tormented with fear, knowing how small the space below was, how scant the air must be; and fear lest the gap they were making miss the small space where she was sheltered; and fear lest the whole floor give way.
They broke through. Air flooded out of that blackness, stale and depleted and cold.
“Melein,” he shouted down, and had no answer.
He began to work yet harder, ramming chips from the edges of the hole, widening it, admitting more and more air, sending a shaft of sunlight down into that place. They exposed steel rods, and worked in the other direction, where they could make a wider hole, and from time to time he would call down to her, and hear nothing.
It was at last a size to admit a body; and he considered it, and the human who would remain above, and how they were to get up again, and thought desperately of killing Duncan; but he could not come up with Melein in his arms, not so easily; and he was not sure whether the cloth of his robes could bear his weight, or what else might avail.
“I will go down,” said Duncan, and opened a pocket and took out a length of cord, and from another a small light. He offered these precious things with a naive forthrightness that for a moment disarmed Niun.
“The drop,” Niun said, inwardly shuddering at the thought of him near Melein, “is my height and half again.” He did not add what revenge he would take if Duncan were careless, if he harmed Melein, if he could not recover her alive: these things were useless. He sat helpless and watched as Duncan worked his body—a little heavier than his—into that gap and dropped, with a heavy sound, into the dark.
Niun listened as he searched below, through things that rattled and moved, through the shifting of rock. He leaned close and tried to see the tiny glow of the light he held.
“I have found her,” Duncan’s voice floated up out of that cold. And then: “She’s alive.”
Niun wept, safe, where the human could not see him; and wiped his eyes and sat still, fists clenched on his knees. He knew that the human could claim her for hostage, could harm her, could exact revenge or some terrible oath of him; he had not thought through these things clearly, a measure of his exhaustion and his desperation to reach her in time; but now he thought, and poised himself on the edge of the pit, to go down.
“Mri! Niun!” Duncan stood in the light with a pale burden in his arms, a gold bundle of robes that lay still against him. “Let down the cord. I will try to guide her up.”
Even while he watched, Melein stirred, and moved, and her eyes opened on the light in which he above could be only a shadow.
“Melein,” he called down. “Melein, we will pull you up. This is a human, Melein, but do not fear him.”
She struggled when she heard that, and Duncan set her feet on the floor. Niun saw her look at his face in the dim light and draw back in horror.
But she suffered him then to put his hands on her waist, and to lift her up, by far the easiest and least hurtful way for her: but she could not lift her hands to reach Niun’s, and protested pain—she once kel’e’en. “Wait,” Niun objected, and with a turn of cord and a knot fashioned a sling and cast it down. He wrapped it about hand and arm and took the weight carefully as she settled in the sling he had made: Duncan helped lift, but for a time the thin, cutting cord and an upward pull bit into Niun’s hands. He tried not to rake her against the jagged opening, pulled ever so carefully, and braced his feet and ignored the pain of his hands. She came through and levered herself out onto the sunlit dust, tried to rise: he had her, he had her safe; and he hugged her to her feet and held to her as he had held to no living being since childhood, they both entangled in the cord. He brushed dust and tears from her face, she still gasping in the outside air.
“The ship is destroyed,” he said, to have all the cruelty done with while wounds were still numb. “Everyone else is dead, unless there is someone else alive down there.”
“No. None. They had no time. They were too old to run—they would not—they sat still, with the she’pan. Then the House—”
She began to shake as if in the grip of a great cold; but she was once of the Kel, and she did not break. She controlled herself, and after a moment began to disentangle them both from the cord.
“None,” he said, to be sure she understood it all, “could have possibly survived on the ship.”
She sat down on the edge of the section of wall that blocked the doors, and smoothed back her mane with one hand, her head bowed. She found her torn scarf at her shoulder and smoothed it and carefully covered her head with that light, gauze veil. She was quiet for a time, her head still turned from him.
At last she straightened her shoulders, and pointed over to the hole in the rubble, where Duncan waited. “And what is he?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No matter to us. A human. A regul guest. They tried to kill him when we met; then—” The surmise that it was this, partly his own action, which had killed the People and left them orphan, was too terrible to speak. His voice trailed off, and Melein arose and walked from him, to look at the ruin, her back to him, her hands limp at her sides. The sight of her despair was like a wound to him.
“Melein,” he said to her. “Melein, what am I to do?”
She turned to him, gave a tiny, helpless gesture. “I am nothing.”
“What am I to do?” he insisted.
Sen and Kel: Sen must lead; but she had become more than Sen, and that was the heaviness on her, which he saw she did not want, which she had to bear. He stood waiting. At last she shut her eyes and opened them again.
“Enemies will come here,” she said, beginning clearly to function as she had been prepared for years to function, to command and to plan: she assumed what she must assume, she’pan of the People, who had no people. “Find us what we need for the hills; and we will camp there tonight. Give me tonight, truebrother—I must not call you that; but tonight, that only, and I will think what is best for us to do.”
“Rest,” he urged her. “I will do that.” And when he had seen her seated and out of the direct sun, he bent down over the hole and cast the cord down. “Duncan.”
The human’s white face appeared in the center of the light, anxious and frightened. “Lift me up,” he said, laying hand on the cord, which Niun refused to give solidity. “Mri, I have helped you. Now lift me out of here.”
“Search for the things I name and I will draw them up by the cord. And after that I will draw you up.”
Duncan hesitated there, as if he thought that, like humans, a mri would lie. But he agreed then, and sought with his tiny light until he had found all the things that Niun then requested of him. He tied each small bundle on the cord for Niun to draw up: food, and water flasks, and cording and four bolts of unsewn black cloth, for they could not reach better without delaying to pierce a new opening, and Duncan avowed he did not think it safe. A last time the cord came up, with a bolt of cloth; and a last tune he cast it down, this time for Duncan, and braced it about his body and his arm.
It was not so hard as with Melein’s uncooperating weight: he leaned and braced his feet, and Duncan hauled himself up—gained the lip of the hole and heaved himself to safety, panting, bent double, coughing and trying to stop the bleeding. The coughing went on and on, and Melein came from her place of rest to look down on the human in mingled disgust and pity.
“It is the air,” Niun said. “He has been running, and he is not acclimated to Kesrith.”
“Is he a manner of kel’en?” asked Melein.
“Yes,” Niun said. “But he does not offer any threat. The regul hunted him; likely now they would cease to care— unless this man’s superior is alive. What shall we do with him?”
Duncan seemed to know they spoke of him; perhaps he knew a few words of the language of the People, but they spoke the High Language, and surely he could not follow that.
Melein shrugged, turned her head from him. “As you please. We will go now.”
And she began, slowly, to walk through the ruin, picking her way with care,
“Duncan,” said Niun, “pick up the supplies and come.”
The human looked outrage at him, as if minded to dispute this as a matter of dignity; and Niun expected it, waited for it. But then Duncan knelt down and made a bundle of the goods with the cord, heaving it to his shoulder as he arose.
Ninun indicated that he should go, and the human carried the burden where Niun aimed him, his footsteps weaving and uncertain in the wake of Melein.
No firing had touched the hills. They came into a sheltered place that was as it had been before the attack, before the discords of regul or mri or humans—a shelter safe from airships, withdrawn as it was beneath a sandstone ledge.
With a great sigh Melein sank down on the sand in that cold shadow, and bent, her head against her knees, as if this had been all that she could do, the last step that she could take. She was hurt. Niun had watched her walk and knew that she was in great pain, that he thought was in her side and not her limbs. When she was content to stop, he took the supplies from Duncan, and made haste to spread a cloth for a groundsheet and a cover for Melein. He gave her drink and a bit of dried meat; and watched, sitting on his heels, as she drank and ate, and leaned against the bare rock to rest
“May I drink?”
The human’s quiet request reminded him he had another charge on him; and he measured out a capful of water and passed it to Duncan’s shaking hands.
“Tomorrow maybe,” said Niun, “we will tap a luin and have water enough to drink.” He considered the human, who drank at the water drop by drop, a haggard and filthy creature who by appearances ought not to have survived so far. It was not likely that he could survive much farther as he was. He stank, sweat and sulphur compounded with human. Niun found himself hardly cleaner.
“Can you?” he said to Melein, almost having fogotten that her personal name was not for him to speak freely now. He offered her his pistol. “Can you stay awake long enough to watch this human a time?”
“I am well enough,” she said, and drew up one knee and rested wrist and pistol on it in an attitude more kel’e’en than she’pan. By caste, she should not touch weapons; but many things ought to be different, and could not be.
He left them so, and went out of sight of the ledge, and stripped and bathed, as mri on dry worlds did, in the dry sand, even to his mane, which when he shook the sand out recovered its glossy feel quickly enough. He felt better when he had done this, and he dressed again, and began to retrace his steps toward the cave.
A heavy body moved behind him, an explosive breath and plaintive sound: dus. He turned carefully, for he had left his gun with Melein, and nothing else could give a ha-dus pause.
It was the miuk’ko, gaunt, forlorn, scab-hided. But the face was dry and it shambled forward with careless abandon.
His heart beat rapidly, for the situation was a bad one in potential, for all the dusei were unpredictable. But the dus came to him, and lifted its head, thrusting it against his chest, uttering that dus-master sound that begged food, shelter, whatever things mri and dus shared.
He knelt down there, for the moment demanded it, and embraced the scrofulous neck and relaxed against the beast, letting it touch and be touched. A sense of warmth came over him, a feeling deep and almost sensual, the lower beast functions of the dus mind, that could be content with very little.
- This it lent him. He looked up, aware of presence, saw two stranger-dusei on the sandstone ridge above; he was not afraid. This dus knew them, and they knew him, and this, like the warmth, came at a level too low for reason. It was fact. It was dependable as the rock on which they stood, mri and dus. It absorbed his pain, and melted it, and fed him back strength as slow and powerful as its own.
And when he came back to the cave, the great beast lumbered after him, a docile companion, a comical and friendly fellow that—beholding the human—was suddenly neither comic nor friendly.
Distrust: that reached Niun’s mind through the impulses of the dus; but that subsided as the dus felt the human’s outright terror. This one feared. Therefore he was safe. The dus put thought of the human aside and settled down athwart the entrance, radiating impulses of ward and protection.
“He came,” said Niun, gathering his pistol from Melein’s hand. “There are more out there, but none even vaguely familiar.”
“The old pact,” she said, “is still valid with us and them.”
And he knew that they might have no better guardian; and that he could sleep this night, sure that nothing would pass the dus to harm Melein. He was overwhelmingly grateful for this. The exhaustion he had held back came down like a flood. The dus lifted his head and gave that pleasure moan, a gap-mouthed smile, tongue lolling. It flicked and disappeared into a dusine smugness.
Niun spoke to it, the small nonsense words the dusei loved, and touched its massive head, pleasing it; and then he took its paw and turned it, the size of it more than a man could easily hold in his hands. The claws curled inward, drawing his wrist against the dew-claw: reflex. It broke the skin, admitting the venom. He had sought this. It would not harm him in such small doses; by such degrees he would become immune to this particular dus, and need never fear it. He took his hand back and caressed the flat skull, bringing a rumbling sound of contentment from the beast.
Then, because he could not bear the thought of bedding down with the human’s filth, he took up an armload of cloth and bade the human come with him, and took him out beyond the ledge.
“Bathe,” he told Duncan, and, casting down the cloth when Duncan seemed dismayed, he bent and with a handful of sand on his own arm, demonstrated how; he sat with arms folded, eyes generally averted somewhat, while the human cleansed himself, and the curious ha-dusei watched from the heights, grouping and circling in alarm at the strange pale-skinned creature.
Duncan looked somewhat more pleasant when he had scrubbed the blood from his face and the tear streaks had been evened out to a dusty sameness. He shook the dust from his hair and picked up his discarded clothing and started to dress; but Niun tore a length from the cloth and tore it in such a way that it could be worn. He thrust it at the human, who doubtfully put it on, as if this were some intended shame to him. Then he thought to search the clothing that the human had taken off, and found pockets full of things of which the human had not spoken.
He opened his hand, demonstrating the knife that he had found. Duncan shrugged.
Niun gave him credit at least that he had not attempted any rashness, but bided his time. The human had played the round well, though he had lost it.
Niun thrust a second wad of black cloth at him.”Veil yourself,” he said.”Your nakedness offends the she’pan and me.”
Duncan settled the veil over his head, ineptly attempting to make it stay, for he had not the art. Niun showed him how to twist it to make a band of it, and how to arrange the veil; and Duncan looked the better for it, decently covered. He was not robed as kel’en, which would have been improper; but he was in kel-black and modestly clothed as a man and not as an animal. Niun looked on him with a nod of approval.
“This is better for you,” he said. “It will protect your skin. Bury your clothing. You will find when we travel in the day that our way is best.”
“Are we moving?”
Niun shrugged.”The she’pan makes that decision. I am kel’en. I take her orders.”
Duncan dropped to his knees and dug a hole, animal fashion, and put his discarded clothing in it. He paused when he had smoothed it over, and looked up. “And if I could offer you a safe way off this world?”
“Can you?”
Duncan rose to his feet. He had a new dignity, veiled. Niun had never noticed the color of his eyes. They were light brown. Niun had never seen the like. “I could find a way,” Duncan said, “to contact my people and get a ship down here for you. I think you have something to lose by not taking that offer. I think you would like very much to get her out of this.”
Niun moved his hand to his weapons, warning. “Tsi’mri, you do assume too much. And if you make plans, present them to her, not to me. I told you: I am only kel’en. If something pleases her, I do it. If something annoys her, I remove it.”
Duncan did not move. Presumably he reconsidered his disrespect. “I do not understand,” he said finally. “Evidently I don’t understand how things are with you. Is this your wife?”
The obscenity was so naively put, in so puzzled a tone, that .Niun almost laughed in surprise. “No,” he said, and to further confound him: “She is my Mother.”
And he motioned the human to cease delaying him, for he grew anxious for Melein, and there were the ha-dusei about them, that snuffed the air and called soft cries from their higher perch. One came down as they left, the area. Doubtless the clothes would not stay buried, but neither would there be much left of them to catch the eye of searchers.
The dus at the entry of their refuge lifted his head and pricked his tiny ears forward at their approach, radiating feelings of welcome; and Niun, already feeling the flush of the poison in him, and knowing he would feel it more in the hours of the night, offered his fingers to its nose and brushed past, putting his body between it and Duncan.
Melein took note of the human and nodded in approval of the change; but no further interest in him did she show this night. She settled down to rest in peace now that they had returned. And Niun drank a very small ration of water and lay down and watched as the human likewise stretched himself out as far from them and the beast as he might in the little space.
In time Niun let his eyes close, his mind full, so overburdened that at last there was nothing to do but abandon all thought and let go. The dus-fever was in him. He drifted toward low-mind dreams, that were the murky, sometimes frightening impulses of the dus; but he feared no harm from the impulses because it was in the lore of the Kel that no kel’en had ever been harmed by his own dus, it being sane.
And he was owned by this beast, and the beast by him; and he compassed his present world by this and by Melein. He had been utterly desolate in the morning, and at this evening he rested, kel-ignorant, with a dus to guard his sleep and touch his mind, and with once more a she’pan to take up the burden of planning. His heart was pained for Melein’s burden, but he did not try to bear it. She would have her honor. He had his, and it was vastly simpler.
To obey the she’pan. To avenge the People.
He stared at the human during his waking intervals and once, in the dark, he knew that the human was awake and looking at him. They did not speak.
THE DAY came quietly, with only the sounds of the wind and the dus’s breathing. Niun looked and found Melein already awake, sitting cross-legged in the doorway, outlined by the dawn. She was composed as if she had sat so for a long time, arranging her thoughts in private in the last hours of the night.
He rose, while Duncan still lay insensible; and came to her and settled on the cold sand, near the fever-warmth of the drowsing dus. His legs were weak with the poison and his arm was stiff and hot to the shoulder, but it would pass. His mind was still calm, with the muddled thoughts of the dus still brushing it; and he was not afraid, even considering their situation. He knew this for dus courage, that would melt when crisis came and a man needed to think; but it was rest, and he was glad of it. He thought perhaps Melein had enjoyed something of the same, for her face was calm, as if she had been meditating on some private dream,
“Did you rest long?” he asked of her.
“So long as I needed. I was shaken yesterday. I think I shall still find a long walk difficult. But we will walk today.”
He heard this, and knew that she had come to some ultimate decision, but it would not be respectful to ask, to go on assuming that he was her kinsman, which he could not be any longer.
“We are ready,” he said.
“We are going by the way of Sil’athen, “ she said, “and further into the hills; and we will find a shrine of which the Kel has known nothing in our generation. Before we two were born it was ordered forgotten by the Kel. The Pana, Niun, never rested in the Edun. It was a time of war. The she’pan did not think it good that the Pana be in the edun, and she was right.”
He touched his brow in reverence, his skin chilled even to hear the things that she said; but his spirit rose at what she said. It changed nothing, had no bearing on their own bleak chances; but the Holy existed, and even if they went to destroy it with their own hands, it would not have perished by enemies.
The gods’ mission, then. That was something worth doing, something he could well comprehend.
“Know this,” she said further. “We will recover the Pana for ourselves, and we two will bear it to a place where we can be safe. And we will wait. We will wait, until we can find a way off Kesrith or until we know that there can be none. Does the Kel have an opinion?”
He considered, thought of Duncan’s offer, of bringing it to her, and put it away in his thoughts. There would be a moment for that, if they lived to do the one thing. “I think,” he judged carefully, “that we will end by killing humans and then by being hunted to our end. But for my part I had as lief go to the human authorities and contract with them against regul. I am this bitter.”
She listened to him attentively, her head tilted to one side, and she frowned. “But,” she said, “there is peace between regul and humans.”
“I do not think it will last. Not forever.”
“But would humans not laugh—to consider one kel’en alone, trying to take service against all regul?”
“The regul would not laugh,” said Niun grimly, and she nodded, appreciative of that truth.
“But I will not have this,” she said. “No. I know what Intel planned: to take us into the Dark again, to take the long voyage and renew the People during that Dark. And I will not sell you into hire for any promises of safety. No. We two go our own way.”
“We have neither Kath nor kel’e’ein,” he cried, and dropped his voice at once to half-whisper, for he did not want Duncan waking. “For us there are no more generations, no renewing. We will never come out of that Dark.”
She looked up tranquilly at the dawning. “If we are the last, then a quiet end; and if we are not the last, then the way to surest extinction for the People is to waste our lives in pursuit of tsi’mri wars and tsi’mri honors and all the things that have occupied the People in this unhappy age.”
“What is there else?” he asked; which was a forbidden question, and he knew it when he had spoken it, and cancelled it with a gestured refusal. “No, do as you will.” .
“We are free,” she said. “We are free, Niun. And I will commit us to nothing but to find the Pana and to find whether others of our kind survive.”
He looked up and met her eyes, and acknowledged her bravery with a nod of his head. “It is not possible that we do this,” he said. “The Kel tells you this, she’pan.”
“The Kel of the Darks,” she said softly, “is not wholly ignorant; and therefore it is a harder service. No, perhaps it is not possible. But I cannot accept any other thing. Do you not believe that the gods still favor the People?”
He shrugged, self-conscious in his ignorance, helpless as a kel’en always was in games of words. He did not know whether she played ironies or not.
“I cast us both,” she said then.”Shon’ai.”
This he understood, a mystery the Kel easily fathomed: he made a fist, a pantomime of the catch of shonai, and his heart lightened.
“Shon’ai,” he echoed.”It is good enough.”
“Then we should be moving,” she said.
“We are ready,” he said. He gathered himself up and went to Duncan and shook at him. “Come,” he told Duncan, and while Duncan began to stir about he made a pack of their remaining belongings. The water he meant to carry himself, and a small light flask also he meant for Melein, for it was not wise to make Duncan independent in that regard or to make her dependent, should it come to trouble—though neither he nor she, whole of limb and untroubled by enemies, needed a flask in a land where they knew every plant and stone.
He threw the bundle of supplies at Duncan’s feet.
“Where are we going?” Duncan asked, without moving to pick it up. It was a civil question. Niun shrugged, giving him all the answer he meant to give, with the same civility.
“I am not your beast of burden,” Duncan said, a thin, un-der-the-breath piece of rebellion. He kicked at the bundle, spurning it. Niun looked at it, and looked at him, without haste. “The she’pan does not work with the hands. Being kel’en, I do not bear burdens, while there are others to bear them. If you were dead, I would carry it. Since you are not, you will carry it.”
Duncan seemed to consider how seriously that was meant, and reached the correct conclusion. He picked it up, and slid his arms into the ropes of the pack.
Then Niun did find some pity for him, for the man was a manner of kel’en, and avowed he was not of a lower caste, but he would not fight for it. It was a matter of the yin’ein, a’ani, honorable combat; and he reckoned that with mri weapons the human was as helpless as a kath’en.
Perhaps, he thought, he had been wrong to insist upon this point, and to have taken some small part of the weight for himself would not have overburdened his pride. It was one thing to war against the tsi’mri kel’en’s species; it was another to break him under the weight of labor in Kesrith’s harsh environment.
He said nothing, all the same. It troubled him, the while they started out together, the three of them, and the dus lumbering along by his side. It was a difficult question, how it was honorable to deal at close quarters with a human.
It had been the death of the People, that humans refused a’ani and preferred mass warfare; and he began to realize now that humans simply could not fight.
Tsi’mri.
He felt fouled, deeply distressed by what he had discovered. He wished to change what he had said, and could not, for his pride’s sake. And he began to think over and over again how bitter the war had been, that so many had perished without knowing the nature of the enemy.
But it was not his to change this, even now. He was not a caste that made ultimate decisions. He reminded himself of this, wondering how much Intel had known.
By the Deog’hal slash they ascended into the high hills, not following the usual track to Sil’athen, lest some survivor down in the city find them the more easily and finish what they had begun at the edun. It was a hard climb, and one which took a great deal from Melein, and from Duncan, laboring as he was under his burden.
“I was too long sitting in the she’pan’s tower,” Melein breathed when they had come to the crest. She coughed and tried to smother it, while Duncan sank down in a heap, disengaged himself from the ropes and lay upon the pack. Niun poured a little water to ease Melein’s throat, and deep in his heart he was afraid for her, for Melein was not wont to be so easily tired; and he marked how she limped, and sometimes held her arm to her side.
“I think that you are hurt,” he said softly.
She made a deprecating gesture.”I fell, closing the door to the storeroom. It is nothing.”
He hoped that she was right in that. He gave her to drink again, spendthrift with the water, but it was likely that they would come on more soon enough. He drank enough himself to moisten his mouth, and saw the human looking at him with an intent gaze, unwilling to plead.
“For moisture only,” he said, giving him half a measure. “Be slow with it.”
The human drank as he had drunk, beneath the veil, keeping his face covered, and handed back the cap with a nod that achieved some grace.
“Where are we going?” Duncan asked again, his voice gone hoarse.
“Human,” said Melein, startling them both. “Why does it matter to you to know?”
Duncan drew a breath to answer at once: Niun reached out and caught his arm in a hard grip.
“Before you speak,” Niun said to him, “understand that she is a she’pan. The Kel deals with outsiders; the she’pan does not. You are honored that she even looks at you. If you speak a word that offends her, I will surely kill you out of hand. So perhaps you will be more comfortable to direct your words to me, so that you will not offend against her.”
Duncan looked from one to the other of them, as if he thought they were making mock of him, or threatening him in some way he could not comprehend.
“I am very serious,” said Niun. “Direct your answer to me.”
“Tell her,” said Duncan then, “that I’m more interested in returning to my own people alive. Tell her what I told you last night. That offer still stands. I may be able to get you offworld.”
“Duncan,” said Melein,”I already know what you would like to ask, and I will not answer yet. But you may tell us when your people will come. You know that, surely.”
Duncan hesitated in evident distress, surely weighing their purposes. “A matter of days,” he said in a low voice. “A very few days—maybe sooner than I would figure. And they’re going to find ruins at the city; and the regul will be left to tell them whatever story they like about what happened night before last.”
“Tsi’mri,” said Melein deprecatingly, which Duncan did not understand.
“The she’pan means,” Niun answered that look, “that what outsiders do is not our concern. We have no brothers and no masters. We do not serve regul any longer. Perhaps you do not understand, Duncan, that we are the last mri. The ship Ahanal contained all the survivors of the war and the edun contained the rest; and the regul know us, that if they do not finish what they began at the port, then we are likely to deal them hurt. Being regul, they will not wish to meet us face to face to do this, and they will probably try to convince your species to do the work for them. You see how it is. You do better not to press us with questions. There are things to be thought of in their time, if this happens or if that happens— but you do well not to ask so that we will not have to think of it.”
Duncan absorbed all that answer in silence, and sat with his arms wrapped about his knees, hands clenched until the knuckles went white.
“Duncan,” Melein said then, “it is a saying among us that Said is done. So we do not say, so that we are not obligated to do. We do not trap with words, like the regul do. Ask no more questions.”
And she held out her left hand to Niun, gesturing that she wanted help to rise. It hurt her, though he was very careful.
“There are clouds,” she observed, looking toward the east. “May it descend to the regul.”
By afternoon the sky was entirely overcast, sparing them the heat of the direct sun, bringing a chill to the air; and it became clear that the clouds were doing as Melein had wished they would do: that upon the ruin of the city and the port would come storm.
Once, that she gazed over her shoulder toward the plain and looked upon the lightning that flashed in that shadowed quarter, she held some impulse that made the dus moan in startlement and shy off from her: it was Melein that had done it, for Niun knew himself innocent, and the dus sought his side afterward.
But the clouds shed no water on them, and their flasks were only a quarter full when they came to the end of the long upland rise and entered the flat highland. By late afternoon Duncan was staggering with weariness and would gladly have stopped at any time, but Niun considered the possibility of aircraft seeking them and was not willing to stop in the open, not for Duncan’s sake.
He looked often at Melein, anxious for her, but she walked without appearing to suffer overmuch.
And toward sunset there was a luin-cluster on the horizon, twisted trunks like a mirage against the red sun, bare limbs tufted with small leaves only at the ends.
“There is water,” Niun told Duncan. “Tonight will be an easy camp and you will have enough to drink.”
And Duncan, who had begun to lag, expended a last effort, and kept the pace they, unburdened, set toward the trees.
And walked among them, careless.
“Ware!” Melein cried, seeing it, even as Niun did, the glassy strands spread in the evening light.
Niun whipped up his pistol and fired before Duncan had time to know what had befallen him: and the windflower died, a stench, glassy tendrils blackened. But where it touched Duncan’s flesh, on hands and forehead, the red sprang up at once, and Duncan, his clothing covered with the tendrils, fell and writhed on the sand in agony.
“Ch’au!” Niun cursed his stupidity. “Still! Lie still!” And Duncan lay quietly then, shuddering as with the av-tlen’s point he lifted the tendrils from Duncan’s flesh. He pulled them from the cloth too, and urged Duncan to his feet, there to stand while he inspected the black cloth for any transparent remnant.
Then Duncan went a few feet away and was dryly sick for some few moments.
Niun cleansed the av-tlen in the sand and with it cut the trunk of a luin that had not been poisoned by the windflower. He took from his belt a small steel tube and drove it easily into the soft wood, and the sweet liquid began to flow, pure and clean of Kesrith’s dust.
He filled the first flask and gave it to Melein, so that she might indulge her thirst to the full, for there were many luin. He drank the second, rapidly filled from a second tree; and the third he filled he took to Duncan, who had not succeeded in being as sick as he doubtless wished to be after his shock. The human simply lay on the ground and shuddered.
“It is a point worth remembering,” Niun echoed Eddan’s words to him on a less painful encounter, “that where there is water on Kesrith, there are enemies and predators. The pain is all, and you are lucky. It will pass. If you had been alone, you would have been wholly ensnared and the windflower would have been the end of you.”
“I saw nothing,” Duncan said, and swallowed a sip of the water, fighting the pain.
“When you walk among luin, walk with the light in your face, so that the strands of windflowers cast across the sun and shine; and mind where you step.” He indicated where a little burrower had his lair, a place marked by a flat and a tiny depression. He flung a pebble. The sand erupted, and there was a flash of a pale back, gone again as the little burrower dived and fluttered his mantle, settling sand over himself again.
“They are venomed,” said Niun, “and even a little one can make a man very sick. But since they grow large enough to engulf a dus whole, the venom does not matter much to us. Burrowers lair among the luin, and in shadowed places and among rocks where there is sand to cover them. There are not many large ones. The ha-dusei eat them, if they do not eat the dusei, before they grow to great size. There is a very large old one by the way we will pass tomorrow. I think he has been there all my lifetime. Burrowers are like regul: when they grow so big, they do not move much.”
The little one, disturbed and angry, fluttered off under the sand, a moving ripple, to settle again deeper among the luin.
There was a general shifting about of others of his kind, and a jo, harmless, detached itself from its successful bark-imitation on a luin and fluttered away through the twilight.
“Drink your fill,” Niun said to the distressed human, feeling pity for him, and Duncan slowly did so, while Niun made them a supper of the supplies they had brought. They would make many a meal off the borrowers themselves, meat unpalatable and tough as rubber; but this night Melein was suffering, and they had starved the night before and most of the day. He was extravagant, and gave to Duncan an equal share with them, considering that he had confiscated what of Duncan’s gear was useful, including his rations.
Across the sky toward the lowlands there was continued lightning, ill luck for the regul.
And they rested with the dus for warmth, and with its ward impulse to keep the ha-dusei at bay, so that they slept secure in the luin grove.
In the morning they gathered up their gear once more; and Niun considered the matter with a gnawing of his lip and a frown, and finally, brusquely, snatched several rolls of cloth and the food from the human’s burden and did them up himself.
“In the case that you do not watch where you walk,” Niun said in a harsh tone, “the burrower that gets you will not have our shelter and our food.”
The human looked at him, marked across the brow by a bloody stripe of his encounter with the windflower; and Niun did not think that the human would have forgotten his words of the day previous, that he would carry no burden. He glowered at Duncan, discouraging any reminder of this.
“I learn quickly,” Duncan said, and Niun reckoned that among the things Duncan had learned was the art of answering a kel’en civilly.
THE AIR was unimaginably foul, tainted by so many frightened regul. It was dark, save for the lights on the two sled consoles and the four life-battery lamps the shelter provided. Power elsewhere was out. The water plants were down. There was talk of seeking water Kesrithi style, from the land, but none of the younglings were sure that they could accomplish this; and they were not anxious to go out into the contaminated exterior, or across the seething flats.
Hulagh had not yet ordered them. He would do so, Stavros did not doubt, when he himself began to thirst.
The sleds were on battery. To this also there was a limit; but Stavros and Hulagh, elders, consumed vital power as they consumed food and water unrationed, because it was unquestioned that elders must be supported by the young. Stavros found it in him to pity the harried secretary, Hada, who dispensed food and water that remained to 300 other younglings, and likewise ministered to Hulagh and himself. They were jammed into the shelter so tightly that the youngest and least could not lie down to sleep; but the sleds were accorded their maneuvering room. The younglings gave back from them with deference that was next to worship; indeed their whole hope for survival centered on the presence of elders among them. They talked little. They all faced Hulagh, row on row of bone-shielded faces and blunt heads, and eyes glittered in the almost-dark and nostril-slits worked in a slow rhythm that seemed to Stavros, in a moment of bizarre humor, to be tending toward unison.
And in the long hours he noted something else, that there were not a few who fell asleep and did not waken.
Bai, favor, he signalled, spelling slowly in regul symbols on the screen. I think some of the younglings are ill.
Hulagh’s great body heaved as he looked, and heaved again with a hiss of mirth. “No, reverence-human, they are asleep. They are to sleep until your assistance comes. They consume less in that state.”
And in increasing numbers the young, beginning with the youngest, slipped into that state, until almost all were dormant.
And bai Hulagh himself began to drowse. He recovered from this with a jerk and a rumbled curse, and called to Hada. “Food,” he ordered. “Be quick, witless.”
The thick, sour-smelling soup was offered likewise to Stavros, but he declined it, almost retching. This troubled Hada, but it gave the portion to Hulagh, between whose thin lips the paste disappeared rapidly.
“You do not eat,” Hulagh observed.
I do not need to eat, Stavros replied, and in honesty: Your food does not agree with me. But I would have soi.
Hada scrambled to accommodate this wish, feverish, almost maniac in its desire to please. It offered the hot liquid to Stavros’ good hand, with a straw for his ease, and hovered near him.
Hulagh laughed, a rumbling, a series of hisses. “Go, egg-stealer, and sit with the other younglings.” And Hada visibly cringed, and slunk aside, on small tottering steps.
“Hada knows,” Hulagh explained, waxed almost affable under the pressure of their long wait, under the need to be pleasant with humans and human ways, “that if we are here much longer, there will be shorter rations; and Hada is greedy. I indulge this youngling. I shall keep it if it continues to please. I may keep all. I have lost,” he added sadly, “my own.”
With the ship, Stavros understood. My sorrow, reverence.
“And mine for the loss of your own youngling.” The great gossamer-clad monster sighed and lapsed into a long reverie.
And Stavros, his sled nose-to-nose with that of Hulagh, hurled his temper at the weak fingers of his left hand. They gave only slightly. The right hand clenched. He had ceased to fear that the paralysis would spread or that it would affect his mind, but he was ceasing to hope that it would ever ease completely. He remained grateful for regul technology, if not for regul.
Hulagh’s condolences were honest, doubtless, but it did not mean that the regul’s hands were clean in the matter. Stavros regarded the drowsing regul with narrowed eyes. Now, shut in a shelter with the regul, was an inopportune moment to state the obvious, that Hulagh had had somewhat to do with the disappearance of Duncan, and that Stavros, conversely, was innocent in the loss of the bai’s ship and the younglings aboard it.
In regul morality, disposing of a youngling was a serious matter, but only in terms of the affront offered its elder and its doch. A regul would as soon face an elder’s wrath over the loss of a youngling as that same elder’s wrath over some matter of shady dealing discovered in trade; and Stavros reckoned that the same ruthless logic just might apply to eliminating a lone elder whose doch could prove hostile, given the information which that elder possessed.
Regul did not lie, he still believed, but they were fully capable of murder, whereby lies could be rendered unnecessary. And they feared him on the one hand and hoped for his help on the other, and he fostered that hope in them as he cherished his own life.
He began to reckon the mind of bai Hulagh of doch Alagn, that here was a desperate fellow, who had suffered a very dangerous loss in the eyes of his kind. And therefore, while it seemed profitable, Hulagh, like a good merchant prince, was dealing for compromise.
It was a compromise out of which humankind could win a great deal.
But part of that settlement, Stavros was determined, would be an accounting for a certain lost SurTac, on whom Stavros had settled rather more affection than he had admitted to himself. He had not loved his own children, of whom he had seen little, locked as be was in the reclusive life of a scholar of Kiluwa, or later, while he was busy in government and at the university. He had found many other things more important than to trouble himself with the issue of several of his young passions, that had given him first an assortment of sons and thereafter grandchildren and great-grandchildren—who sought him out mostly because a Kiluwan connection was prestigious. Some of them, he knew, hated him with the same dedicated zeal with which they sought promotions based on his influence.
But he missed Duncan. Duncan had come, like others who had ridden Stavros’ reputation to reach for wealth, with the motives of the others; and yet Duncan had given him a constant and earnest duty, earnest in his attempts to penetrate Kiluwan formality, simply because it was Duncan’s nature to do so.
Stavros had never learned how to answer that. Nor, for the regul, did he admit to grief which they would not have understood. But in addition to an accounting which the regul owed for Kiluwa, there was that for an inconsequential SurTac.
He did not, all the same, regret having sent Duncan, even at such cost. Events had damaged the regul and exacted satisfaction of them, and placed them at human mercy; and this was very much to Stavros’ satisfaction. This was partial payment for Kiluwa.
It would be full payment, when he seized the reins of control from bai Hulagh, and began to bend doch Alagn into agreement with humans. This was revenge of a sort that both Hulagh and Kiluwa could appreciate—the more so when he ascertained who among regul was directly responsible for Kiluwa and found the means to deal with them. Being Kiluwan, Stavros entertained a hatred specific and logical: there was a species called regul; but the species called regul had not destroyed Kiluwa. It was one doch; and its name was Holn, and it was not represented here.
There had been a decimation of Holn at their landing. This did not satisfy Stavros, who was not interested in bloodshed. It was the decline of Holn he wanted, its elimination from power among regul.
And Hulagh, controlled, an ally of humans, could become the instrument of this policy.
“Elder,” Hulagh rumbled at last, “it is certain that you have authority over your people?”
Unless mri intervened and started something wider, Stavros replied. I have authority over the force that is coming to Kesrith.
“Favor,” said Hulagh. “The mri will no longer be a factor in relations between us. They are gone. There are no more mri.”
This was news. Stavros flashed a question sign, unadorned by words.
“The ship,” said Hulagh, “contained all the survivors of mri-kind. We have disposed of this plague that kept our two species at war.”
Hulagh had waited to divulge that piece of news. Stavros heard it, at first appalled at such a concept, the destruction of a sapient species; and then suspicious—but the regul did not lie. He began to contemplate the possibilities of a universe without the mri, and found the possibilities for human profit enormous.
“It is clear,” said Hulagh, “that total rearrangement of human-regul relations is in order. Doch Alagn might find interest in helping this come about.”
Stavros was shocked a second time, and recognized that dismay for a human reaction, based on a morality to which Hulagh could not possibly subscribe. There was no particular reason that doch Alagn should refrain from an offer that, in a human state, would amount to treason. Doch Alagn was in financial and political difficulty. Hulagh was seeking alignment with the powers that had control of the resources he desired.
Humanity’s grudge, Stavros answered after due thought, is with doch Holn. It would be possible to arrive at new accommodations with advantage to both our interests.
Hulagh’s lips parted in a regul smile. A slow hiss betokened his pleasure. “We shall explore this,” he said. “We shall, most excellent Stavros.”
And he wakened Hada and ordered soi, and remembered this time to order it sweetened, to Stavros’ personal preference.
But before it was prepared, Hada came puffing back, waving his hands in agitation. “The ship,” he breathed. “Be gracious, elders, the human ship, early—communications report—”
Hulagh’s gesture cut the youngling off abruptly. The bai’s lips continued parted, his nostrils dilated in what Stavros had learned was an expression of anxiety. The bai’s total attitude was that of a man with a nervous smile, displaying good manners amid subdued terror.
“You will surely wish then,” said bai Hulagh, “to greet these representatives of your people and explain the situation. Assure them of our regret for the condition of the port, reverence.”
We will manage, Stavros answered, beside himself with anxiety and restraining it, remembering how important it was that Hulagh be reassured. Have confidence, reverence, that you have nothing to dread if your younglings -will remain calm and not hamper operations.
And he turned his sled toward the control section of the shelter, following the rolling gait of Hada Surag-gi, who by regul standards, was almost running.
The big doors of the shelter opened, and beams glared through the dim interior, handled by the fantastic shapes of suited men, who walked heavy-footed through the ranks of dormant younglings. The door was closed again, a precaution. The second man used a counter, reckoning what radiation might have gotten into the shelter. Conscious younglings scurried to clear them a path, chittering in terror.
Stavros slid his vehicle forward, faced a suited form and saw the blind-glassed head pause in an attitude of astonishment.
“Consul Stavros?”
The tab on the suit said GALEY and the rank was lieutenant.
“Yes,” Stavros said, turned the communications screen by remote and spelled out a message on the basic-alphabet module, not trusting his slurred speech for complicated messages. I am inconvenienced by an accident. Speech is awkward, but prosthetics are very adequate. Speak normally to me and watch the screen. Be respectful of these regul. It will be necessary to transfer them to safety if you cannot guarantee normal operations here in the building.
“Sir,” Galey said, seeming confused by the situation, then drew a breath and let it go again. “You’re in command down here. What instructions? I’m afraid the power is going to be a major problem. We can possibly get a crew working on it, and you seem clean of contamination, but there are some considerable hot spots toward the port. The station is intact. We would rather evacuate.”
Building can be occupied? Livable?
“This building? Yes, sir. It seems so.”
Then we stay. Untoward weather a problem here. I have rest under control.
“The mri, sir— Galey said.”We’re not clear what happened here.”
We have a problem, Lt. Galey, but we’re resolving it. Kindly dispose your men so that we can resume normal operations here in the building. The communications station is accessible through that door. You will excuse me if I do not go with you.
“Yes, sir,” said Galey, and gave his courtesies to the regul also, wooden and perfunctory. The marines with him began to move about various duties, on suit phones, doubtless, where regul would not be privy to exchanges of comment and instruction.
“You deal with younglings,” Hulagh observed. “Favor. Are there other elders involved here?”
Other authorities, Stavros reckoned the bai’s meaning, authorities who could complicate agreements made between them. My apologies, bai Hulagh. This was an older youngling. And the elder who commands them must, as you surely remember from the treaty, defer to me where it regards the administration of Kesrith and its area. There is, however, one matter wherein his authority and mine might tend to cross.
“And this one matter, human bai?”
My missing assistant is military personnel. The bai of the arriving ship may feel that he can settle this matter best. This would be an occasion for him to intrude his authority into my domain here. Naturally I do not wish this. I feel that it would smooth matters over if it were possible for answers to be given in this matter.
Hulagh’s nostrils fluttered in rapid agitation. “Favor, reverence. We might suggest a search of the Dus plain, where there was conflict between my younglings and the mri outlaws. This is an unpleasant surmise, but if there are remains to be found—”
Stavros looked on the anxious bai without mercy. It is then the conclusion of the bai that this youngling is dead?
“It is most probable, reverence.”
But if he were not, it is more likely that one of your staff could direct a search with more success than one of the ship’s officers might. This is possible, is it not, bai? It would greatly augment my authority here and ease negotiations between us if it were possible that this lost youngling could be recovered. He is, of course, merely a youngling, and his experiences during the mri action would doubtless influence his mind to hysteria and cloud his judgments, so that no testimony he could give could be taken seriously. But it would please me if he were recovered alive.
The bai considered these things, and the understandings implicit in the words. “Indeed,” said bai Hulagh, “there is such an expert on my staff, a person familiar with the terrain. With your staff’s cooperation, this could be arranged at once.”
My gratitude, reverence. I will see to the disposition of necessities with the ship. And Stavros turned his sled away, seeking out Galey, while his hearing caught bai Hulagh urgently summoning Hada Surag-gi.
The reaction began to strike him. He found it difficult for the moment to concentrate on the numerical signals that activated the various programs of the sled. He found his eyes misting. This was unaccustomed. He had the emotional reaction under control again by the time he swung the sled in with casual nonchalance beside Galey, who did not seem to know whether to offer condolences or congratulations on survival.
“You’re alone here, sir?” Galey asked.
As you have noticed, difficulties abound. No delays. Is Koch in command up there?
“Yes, sir.”
Then get me contact with him directly. I can patch this console in with the main board. Are you able to get a ship down here with sufficient personnel to staff work crews and give me office staff?
“Not quickly. The port’s completely gone. But the station is in good shape. Servos everywhere.” Galey bent over the console of the com unit, fingering regul controls helplessly.
“Here,” Stavros said, with some satisfaction, keyed in and started the sequence of changes that put them through to the warship Saber, which had brought them all that clutter of personnel that would begin to make Kesrith human: soil experts, scientists.
And weapons.
His command, Kesrith, his. There was no med staffer going to rule him unfit to govern; and deep in his heart he knew that he needed that hulking merchant prince of the Alagn as much as doch Alagn presently needed him.
He saw the shock on the face of the com officer of Saber; and at once that face vanished, replaced by that of Stavros’ military counterpart, Koch.
“Stavros?” Koch asked.
A little difficulty speaking, he keyed the answer, replacing the visual. We have regul stranded down here. Stand by to assist us with on-world operations. We need food, drinkable water.
“We were not prepared for regul nationals.”
Unforeseen circumstances. All decisions regarding Kesrith and regul are mine. Situation here is under control. Presently seeking my aide, possible casualty of attack by mri. Hot areas reportedly confined to port. I request military personnel detached from Saber to my command until we can clean up.
“Excellency,” said Koch, “the medical facilities of Saber are at your disposal if you will care to come up to the station.”
Negative. Regul services are adequate. The situation is too urgent. My condition is good, considering. I am pursuing matters under my authority granted as governor of Kesrith. Send down scientists, military aides, all attached personnel and equipment as soon as area is cleared.
“It may be advisable to wait.”
Send down personnel as requested.
There was a long delay. “All right,” said Koch. “A medic will accompany the party.”
On Kesrith, said Stavros, medic will await my convenience.
Koch digested this also. At last he nodded, accepting. “You have the authority, right enough. But ship’s personnel stay under my command. You’ll have the civs as soon as we can find solid ground for them. Starship Flower is attached to your personal service, with my compliments, sir. She’s probe, though, not combat Does the situation warrant immediate armed support?”
Negative.
“There is weather down there.”
This is evidently frequent. Wait, then. We are pursuing operations here with available personnel. You are invited to come planetside and exchange courtesies when we get the wreckage cleared.
A sled hummed into the vicinity. Stavros heard it, and put them momentarily on visual from his side again, watching with satisfaction as Koch beheld a regul elder for the first time.
This is bai Hulagh, Stavros told him, cutting out the visual , again. A most influential regul, sir, if you please. We have achieved a certain necessary cooperation here, which is to the advantage of both species.
“Understood,” Koch said slowly, and seemed utterly taken aback: a military man, Koch, born and bred. He had been presented a situation with which he could not deal, and fortunately recognized it.
“You’ll get your help,” Koch said, and Stavros closed out the communication with an inward satisfaction, cast a look at Galey. Scan the area here, he said to the lieutenant. And when you’ve made sure where it’s safe, we’ll start clearing these younglings back to normal duties. This is the bai’s staff. All due considerations to them, Lt. Galey.
“Reports are coming in,” he said. “The whole area seems cool and secure. The building seals held very well.”
Stavros breathed a sigh of relief.
“My younglings,” said Hulagh, “will find means of restoring the water and repairing the collectors for the power.” He waved a massive hand. “Hada will attend other matters, given use of transport. I believe some of the vehicles at the water plant may have survived intact”
AT THE ENTRANCE to Sil’athen a dus met them, warding with such strength that Niun’s dus shied off. And there in the rocks, half buried in the sands, lay Eddan’s remains; and not far away lay a tangle of black that had been Liran and Debas, and gold that had been Sathell.
Melein veiled herself and drew aside, being she’pan and unable to look upon death; but Niun came and reverently arranged the visor over Eddan’s face, and it was long before he could look up and face the human that hovered uncertainly by.
He cleansed his hands in the sand, and made the reverence sign and rose. The human also made such a sign, in his own fashion, a respect which Niun accepted as it was given. “They chose this end,” he said to Duncan, “and it was better for them here than for those that stayed.”
And he poured a little of their precious water, and turned his back to wash, hands and face, and veiled again. When he looked up at the rocks he saw two other dusei, that began to come down from their heights; and he gave back at once.
His own dus came between, and tried to approach the three warding beasts that had formed a common front against them. Noses extended, they circled back and forth, and then the great gentle creature that had been Eddan’s, or so Niun thought it, reared up and cried out, driving the dus away. But the smallest of the three hesitated between, and followed the stranger-dus of Niun, and its fellow came after.
The largest, Eddan’s, gave a plaintive moan and retreated from these traitor-dusei, that he no longer knew. Niun felt its anger, and trembled; but when he moved away from this place, not alone his own dus came, but the two that had been of Liran and Debas, a tight triangle with his own. They called and moaned, and would not yet suffer Niun to come near them, but they came away from their duty all the same, choosing life, leaving matters to the dus of Eddan, who settled by his dead and remained faithful.
“Lo’a-ni dus,” Niun saluted that one softly, with great respect; but he shut his heart to it, because the warding impulse was too strong to bear.
And he shouldered his burden again and began walking, his course and Duncan’s converging with that of Melein.
There was no need to speak of what they had found. The dusei walked ahead of them, and now and then one would make to go back and go toward Duncan, but Niun’s dus would not allow this, and constantly circled toward the rear to prevent them when they did so. Soon they seemed to understand that this particular tsi’mri was under safe-conduct and gave up their attempts on him.
They were at the entrance to the inner valley of Sil’athen, and here was another sort of warder. Niun saw it across the flat sweep of sand, and, touching the human on the arm, he bent and picked up a tiny stone. He hurled it far, far out across the flat sand, toward the central depression.
It erupted, a circumference twenty times the length of a dus, a cloud of sand from the edge of the burrower’s mantle as it rose and dived again a few lengths farther.
The human swore in a tone of awe.
“I have shown you,” said Niun, “so that you will understand that a man without knowledge of this land—and without a dus to walk with him—will not find his way across it. Across the great sands, there are said to be larger ones than what you saw. The dusei smell them out. They smell out other dangers too. Even mri do not like to walk this country alone, although we can do it. I do not think you can.”
“I understand you,” said Duncan.
They walked quietly thereafter, near the wall of the cliffs, where the safe course was, past caves sealed and marked with stones, and the strange shapes of Sil’athen’s rocks one by one passed behind them, ringing them about and shutting off view of the way they had come.
“What is this place?” Duncan asked in a lowered voice, as they passed the high graves of the she’panei
“Nla’ai-mri,” said Niun. “Sil’athen, the burying place of our kind.”
And thereafter Duncan said nothing, but looked uneasily from one side of the valley to the other as they passed, and once backward, over his shoulder, where the wind erased their tracks, wiping clean all the trace that men had ever walked this way.
Melein led them now, walking at their head, her hand on the back of Niun’s dus, which ambled slowly beside her, and the beast even seemed to enjoy that contact. Deep into the canyons they went, by a path that Niun had never walked, down the aisle of rock that belonged to the tombs of the she’panei. Here there were signs graven on the rocks—names, perhaps, of ancient she’panei, or directions: Melein read them, and Niun trusted her leading, that she knew their way though she herself had never walked it.
She tired, and it seemed at times that she must surely stop, but she would not, only paused for breath now and again, and went on. The sun that was at noon became the fervent blaze of afternoon, and sank so that they walked in the cold shadow of the cliffs, dangerous if not for the protecting dusei that probed the way for them.
Deep in that shadow they came to the blind end of the cliffs, and Niun looked to Melein, suddenly wondering if she had not after all lost their way, or whether this was where she meant that they should stop. But she gazed upward at a trail that he had not seen until he followed the direction of her gaze, that could not be seen at all save from this vantage point. It led up and up into the red rocks, toward a maze of sandstone pillars that thrust fingers at the sky. “Niun,” Melein said then, and cast a glance backward. He looked where she did, toward Duncan, who, exhausted in the thin air, had slumped to rest over his pack. The dusei were moving toward him. One extended a paw. Duncan froze, lying still, his head still pillowed on the pack.
“Yai!” Niun reproved the dus, who guiltily retracted the curious paw. The dusei in general retreated, radiating mingled confusion.
And in his own mind was unease at the thought of entering that steep, tangled maze with the human in their company, where a misstep could be the end of them. “What shall I do with him?” he asked of Melein, in the high language, so that Duncan could not understand. “He should not be here. Shall I find a way to be rid of him?”
“The dusei will manage him,” she said. “Let him alone.” He started to protest, not for his own sake, but for fear for her; but she did not look as if she were prepared to listen.
“He will go last when we are climbing,” he said, and gathering in his belly all the same was a knot of fear. Intel had seen the future clearly: I have an ill feeling, she had said the night they all died; and he had such a dread now, a cold, clear premonition that here was a point of no return, that he was losing some chance or passing something; and the human wound himself deeper and deeper into his mind.
He did not want him. He carried Duncan in his mind the way he carried the memories of the attack, indelible. He looked at the human and shuddered with sudden and vehement loathing, and found himself carrying the human’s due burden, and not knowing what else to do with it. He fingered the pistol.
But he had been made kel’en for the honor of the People, not for outright butchery; and Melein had ordered otherwise, easing his conscience. He was not able to make such a decision. It was hers to say, and she had said, agreeing with his better conscience.
And suddenly Duncan was looking at him, and he slipped his fingers into his belt, trying to cover his thoughts and the motion at once. “Come,” he said to Duncan. “Come, we are going up now.”
He set himself first on the narrow climb, and saw at once that Melein was scarcely able to make the climb on that eroded, unused track. He braced his feet where he could and reached for her hand, and she took his fingers crosshanded, to favor her injured side. He moved very carefully, each time that he must give a gentle pull to help her, for he saw her face and knew that she was in great pain.
Duncan came after, and the dusei last of all, clumsy and scattering rocks that rattled into the deep canyon, but their claws and great strength made them surer-footed than they looked.
And halfway, the sound of an aircraft reached them. It was Melein’s keen hearing that caught it first, between steps, as she was resting; and she turned and pointed where it circled above the main valley. It could not see or detect them where they were, and they were free to watch it, that tiny speck in the rosy halflight that remained.
Niun had view not only of that, but of Duncan’s back, as the human stood holding his place against a great boulder and looking outward at that ship; and he could not but think how gladly Duncan would have run to signal it, and how he might well do so if he had some future chance.
They were no longer alone in the world.
“Let us climb,” said Melein, “and get off this cliffside before it circles this way.”
“Come,” said Niun sharply to Duncan, with hatefulness in his tone; and Duncan turned and climbed after them, away from what in all likelihood was hope of rescue.
Looking down another time to help Melein, Niun looked out and did not see the aircraft; and that gave him no comfort at all. It could as easily appear directly overhead, passing the cliffs and sandstone fingers that gave them only partial cover.
And to his relief, once they gained the top of the cliffs, they were not faced with another flat, but went down a slight decline, and followed a winding track among sandstone pillars that were now burning red against the purpling sky. There was strong wind, that skirled small clouds among the pillars and erased their tracks as they made them.
Duncan’s dry cough began again and continued a time until the human had caught his breath from the climb. They were at high altitude, and it was far drier air than the lowlands. Here on the highlands, over much of the rest of the land, there was no rain, only blowing sand. A sea lay beyond, the The’asacha, but it was small and dead as the Alkaline Sea that bordered the regul city; and beyond that sea was a mountain chain, the Dogin, the mere skeletons of eroded mountains that still were tall enough to cast the winds this way and that across the backbone of the continent, and generated storms that never fell on the uplands plain, but down-country, in the flats.
The clouds that rimmed the sky now were headed to shed their load of moisture on the lowlands, affording them neither concern for the storm nor hope of water from it. All that it would bring them was a dark sky and a hard and dangerous walk without the stars. The sound of the aircraft intruded suddenly upon Niun’s hearing: he shepherded human and dusei toward the deepest shadows, in the gathering dark—Melein had sought shelter at once. If the aircraft saw anything it would be the image of a dus, a hot, massive silhouette for their instruments, something that was common enough to see in the wilds. If they fired at every dus on Kesrith, they would be a long time in their searching.
It passed. Niun, his fist entangled in the human’s robes, a grip he had not relaxed since he herded them in together, let go and drew his first even breath.
“We may rest here a moment,” said Melein in a thin, tired voice.”It is a long walk from here—I must rest.”
Niun looked at her, seeing her pain, that she had tried so long to hide. On the climb he had felt her every wince in his own vitals. And they were not to rest long. He was distressed with this, feeling that she was spending her last strength against this urgency to go farther. And without her, there was nothing.
He took the cloth for a blanket, and settled her against the side of the dus, into that friendly warmth, and was glad when she relaxed against that comfort he offered, and the line of pain knit into her brow, eased and began to vanish. “I will be all right,” she said, touching his hand, And then her eyes widened and he whirled about upon a shadow—a darting reach for a water flask and Duncan was gone, into the maze of rocks in the dark.
Niun swore and sprang after him, hearing the moaning roar of the dusei at once behind him. He came round the side of a pillar, half expecting ambush, which would have been idiocy on the human’s part, and did not meet it. Nor was there sight or sign of Duncan. And he had left Melein, and sweat broke out on him, only to think what could happen if Duncan circled on them and attacked her, hurt as she was.
Then the sound of a dus hunting arose, moaning carried on the wind, and that cry meant quarry sighted. He blessed the several gods of his caste and ran toward that sound, pistol in hand.
So he met Melein, a pale wraith in the dark, and a dus beside her: and together they found the blind way where the other dusei had Duncan pent.
“Yai!” Niun called the beasts, before they should close in and kill; and they wheeled in a slope-shouldered and truculent withdrawal, only enough to let Duncan rise from the ledge where he had been cornered. He would not. He huddled there, unveiled in the scramble he had made, his naked face contorted with exhaustion and anger. He coughed rackingly, and his nose poured blood.
“Come down,” said Melein.
But he would not, and Niun went in after him, pushing the dusei aside. Then Duncan made to move, but he fell again, and sat still and dropped his head on his folded arms.
Niun took the strap of the water flask and ripped it from Duncan’s hand, and let him rest the moment, for they were all hard-breathing.
“It was a good attempt,” said Niun.”But the next time I will kill you; it is a wonder that the dusei did not kill you this time.”
Duncan lifted his face, jaw set in anger. He shrugged, a gesture of defiance, a gesture spoiled by an attack of helpless coughing.
“You would have signalled the airship,” said Melein,”and brought them down on us.”
Duncan shrugged again, and came to his feet, went with them of his own accord in leaving the blind pocket The dusei were still blood-roused, and confused by being set on and drawn off their quarry; and Niun walked between them and the human. Melein followed after them as they went back to the place where they had abandoned their gear in the chase.
There they sank down where they had begun to rest, doubly exhausted now; and Niun stared at Duncan thoughtfully, thinking what might have happened, and what damage might have been done them.
There was Melein, fragile with her injury.
And there was an aircraft in the vicinity that wanted only the least error from them, the least slip into the open at the wrong moment, in order to locate and put an end to them.
“Cover your face,” Niun said at last.
Duncan stared at him sullenly, as if he would defy that order, but in the end he lowered his eyes and arranged the veil, and stared at him still.
The dus moaned and reared up.
“Yai!” Niun ordered him, and he subsided, swaying nervously. The dus-anger stirred his own blood. He fought it down and mastered it, as a man must, who went among dusei, be more rational than they.
Duncan shifted aside, tearing his glance from them and the beasts, fixing it instead on the rock before them.
“We will move on,” said Melein after a time, and pulled herself to her feet, carefully, painfully. She faltered, needed Niun’s immediate hand to steady her.
But she set her hand then upon the dus, and the beast ambled out to the fore, and she was able to walk at its side, a slow pace and deliberate—the beast the only safety they had in this dark and close passage through the rocks.
Niun gathered up the water flasks, and left the human all the rest of the burden to carry, and hurried him on with a heavy hand, in among the two other dusei, before they should lose sight of Melein’s pale figure.
The dusei, their oily hides immune to the poison of wind-flowers, their keen senses aware of other dangers, were the only means that they could dare to move after dark in this place; and the dark, as Melein was surely reckoning, was friendly to them as it would not be to those that pursued them.
The long walk led them into more open areas, where they crossed fearfully exposed stretches of sand under the ragged clouds; and they made it in among the sandstone formations again as they heard the distant sound of the aircraft still in the area.
It came close. Duncan looked to the skies as if in hope, looked back sharply as Niun whipped the av-tlen from its sheath, a whisper of edged metal.
They faced each other, he and Duncan, standing still as the aircraft circled off again, out of hearing. Niun put the weapon back into its sheath with a practiced reverse.
“Someone,” Duncan said, his voice almost unrecognizable from his raw throat, “someone knows where to look for you. I somehow don’t think my people would know that.”
It was sense that struck cold to Niun’s heart. He glanced at Melein.
“We cannot stop again for rest,” she said. “They must not find us, not here. We must be at the place before light and come away again. Niun, let us hurry.”
He pushed the human gently. “Come,” he said.
“Is it her?” Duncan asked, nodded back toward Melein without moving from where he stood. “Is it somehow to do with her that the regul keep after you?”
“It could not be,” he said with assurance; and then another thought began to grow in him with horrid clarity, mental process working again where for a long time there had been only shock. He looked again to Melein, spoke in the hal’ari, the high language. “It could not be that they are hunting us. They could not know that we exist. What are two mri to them, with others dead? Or how could regul have reached the edun to know survivors left it? They could not have climbed among those ruins. It is this human, this cursed human. He has ties back in the city, a master, and for his sake the regul tracked me across the flats. If it is the regul, they are still on that trail. There are regul and humans at work in this thing.”
Her eyes grew troubled. “Let us go,” she said suddenly. “Let us go now, quickly. I do not know what we will do with him, but we cannot settle it now.”
“What are you saying?” Duncan demanded of them suddenly in his hoarse voice. Perhaps there were certain words, a sideward look, that he had caught amid what they had said. Niun looked on him and thought uneasily that Duncan did suspect how little his life might weigh with them.
“Move,” Niun said again, and pushed him, not gently. Duncan abandoned his questions and moved where he was told without arguing.
And if it were Duncan that was hunted, and regul were tracking them for his sake, then, Niun thought, Duncan would ultimately have to go to the enemy in such a manner to stop that search, in such a manner that he could not betray to them the fact that a she’pan of the People was still alive.
O gods, Niun mourned within himself, urged toward murder and dishonor, and not seeing any other course.
But the aircraft did not come again, and he was. able to forget that threat in the urgency of their present journey—to put off thinking what he might have to do if the search resumed.
Twice, despite Melein’s wishes, they had to rest, for Melein’s sake; and each time, when Niun would have stayed longer, she insisted and they walked again, at last with Niun holding her arm, her slim fingers clenching upon his against the unsteadiness of her legs.
And after the mid of the night, they entered a narrow canyon that wound strangely, dizzily, and began to be a descent, where the walls leaned together threateningly over their heads and cast them into dark deeper than the night outside.
“Use your light,” Melein said then. “I think there is stone overhead now entirely.” And Niun used Duncan’s penlight, ever so small a beam to find their footing. Down and down they went, a spiralling course and narrow, until they suddenly came upon a well of sky above them, where the night seemed brighter than the utter black they had travelled. Here was a widening, where walls were splashed with symbols the like of which had once adorned the edun itself.
The foremost dus reared aside, gave a roar that echoed horridly all up and down the passage, and Niun swung the beam leftward, toward the dus. There in a niche was a huddled knot of black rags and bones.
A guardian’s grave.
Niun touched his brow in reverence to the unknown kel’en, and because he saw Duncan standing too near that holy place, he drew him back by the arm. Then he turned his light on the doorway where Melein stood, a way blocked by stones and sealed with the handprint of the guardian who had built that seal and set his life upon it.
Melein signed a reverence to the place with her hand, and suddenly turned to Duncan and looked at him sternly. “Duncan, past the grave of the guardian you must not go or you will die. Stand here and wait. Touch nothing, do nothing, see nothing.” And to Niun: “Unseal it. It is lawful.”
He gave the light to her and began, with the uppermost stones, to unseal what the guardian had warded so many years, a shrine so sacred that a kel’en would wait to the death in warding it. He knew what choice the man had made. Food and water the kel’en had had, the liberty thereafter to range within sight of his warding-place, to hunt in order to survive; but when the area failed him, when illness or harsh weather or advancing age bore upon the solitary kel’en, he had retreated to this chosen niche to die, faithful to his charge, his spirit hovering over the place in constant guardianship.
And perhaps Intel herself had stood here and blessed the closing of this door, and set her kiss upon the brow of the brave guardian, and charged him with this keeping.
One of the kel’ein who had come with her from Nisren, forty years ago, when the Pana had come to Kesrith.
The rocks rattled away from the opening with increasing ease, until Melein could step over what was left, setting foot into the cold interior. The light held in her hand ran over the walls, touched writings that were the mysteries of the Shrine of shrines, convoluted symbols that covered all the walls. For an instant Niun saw it, then sank down to his knees, face averted lest he see what he ought not For a time he could hear her tiniest step in that sacred place; and then there was no sound at all, and he dared not move. He saw Duncan against the far wall of the well, the dusei by him, and not even they moved. He grew cold in his waiting and began to shiver from fear.
If she should not come back, he must still wait. And there was no stir of life within, not even the sound of a footstep.
One of the dusei moaned, its nerves afflicted with the waiting. It fell silent then, and for a long time there was nothing.
Then came a stirring, a quiet rhythmic sound at first from within the shrine; and at last he recognized it for the sound of soft weeping that became yet more bitter and violent
“Melein!” he cried aloud, turning bis eyes to that forbidden place; and shadows were moving within the doorway, a soft flow of lights. His voice echoed impiously round the walls and startled the dusei, and he scrambled to his feet, terrified to go in and terrified not to.
The sound stopped. There was silence. He came as far as the door, set his hand on it nerved himself to go inside. Then he heard her light steps somewhere far inside, heard the sounds of life, and she did not summon him. He waited, shivering.
Things moved inside. There was the sound of machinery. It continued, and yet at times he heard her steps clearly. And he remembered with a panic that he had turned his back on Duncan, and whirled to see.
But the human only stood, no closer than Melein had permitted, and made no attempt to see.
“Sit down,” he bade Duncan sharply; and Duncan did so where he stood, waiting. Niun cursed himself for seeking after Melein and forgetting the charge she had set on him, to mind matters outside. He had put them both at Duncan’s mercy had the human braved the dusei to take advantage of it. He settled on the sand himself, at such an angle that he could watch the human and yet steal glances toward the shrine. He wrapped his arms about his knees, locked his hands with numbing force, and waited, listening.
It was a long, long wait, in which he grew miserable and changed position many a time. It seemed in his sense of time that it must be drawing toward dawn, although the overcast sky visible above them still was dark. And for a long, long time there was no sound at all from within the shrine.
He hurled himself to his feet finally, impatient to go again to the door, and then persuaded himself that he had no business to invade that place. In his misery he paced the small area he had to pace and looked down betimes at the human, who waited as he had been warned to wait. Duncan’s eyes were unreadable in the almost-dark.
There was the sound of footsteps again. He turned upon the instant, saw the white flash of the penlight in the doorway. He saw Melein, a shadow, carrying the tiny light in her fingers, her arms clasped about something.
He went as close as he dared, saw that what she carried was some sort of casing, ovoid, made of shining metal. It had a carrying bar recessed into it at one end, but she bore it as she might have carried an infant, as something precious, though she staggered with the weight of it and could not step over the stones bearing it.
“Take it,” she said in a faint, strained voice, and he galvanized himself out of his paralysis of will and reached forth his arms to receive it, dismayed by the weight of what she had managed to carry. It was cold and strange in balance and he shivered as he took it against him.
And he was cold again when he saw her face, moisture glistening there in the reddish light that began to spread behind her, and shadows leaping within the shrine from this side and that: she had turned once to look back, and then gazed back at him as from some vast distance.
Melein, he tried to say to her, and found it impossible. She was Melein still, and sister: but something else was contained in her, and he did not know how to speak to that, to call her back. He held out his hand, anxious at the fire behind her; and she took it and stepped over the rocks at the entry, and came with him. Her skin was cold. Her hand slipped lifelessly from his when she no longer needed him.
Duncan waited, backed a little from the both of them, continuing to stare into the light that was growing behind them. Perhaps he understood that something of great value was being destroyed. He looked dazed, confused.
There was left only the strange, cold ovoid. Niun bore it in both his arms as Melein started for the passage outward. He knew that he surely bore an essential part of the Pana, which name his caste could not even speak without fear, which a kel’en ought never to see, let alone handle.
The kel’en who had borne it here had devoted himself to die afterward, to hold it secret and undisturbed. This had been an honorable man, of the old way, the Kel of the Between; such a man would have been shocked at Niun s’Intel.
But he drew courage from holding it, for by it Melein had come into her power: he felt this of a surety. She had been only half a she’pan in his eyes, appointed by violence and necessity. But now he believed that the essential things had passed, that Intel had given her all she needed. She’pan, he could call her hereafter, believing implicitly that she knew the Mysteries. She had been face to face with the Pana, understanding what a kel’en could not. He did not envy her this understanding: the sound of her weeping still haunted him.
But she knew, and she led, and hereafter he trusted her leading implicitly.
They fled, they and the human and the dusei, out of the well, where smoke began to billow up, betraying them to the sky, where flames lit the walls with red and pursued them with heat. They entered the ascending turns of the way that they had come, into the cold dark.
THE NOM, in its first day of new operations, was aswarm with human technicians. Stavros revelled in the sound and scurry of humanity, after so long among the slow-moving regul. Reports came in, a bustle of human experts adding their agility to the technology of regul in repairs of the damaged plants, in clearing the wreckage left by the storm and the fighting.
And at a point judged stable enough to support a ship, probe Flower rested her squat body out on the height to the side of the city opposite the ruined port: a small vessel for a star-capable craft, a ship without the need for vast secure landing area, her design enabling her to operate in complete independence.
It had been a fortunate decision that brought several such probes on the mission, against the need for such difficult landings, despite their lack of defense against attack. Saber still rested up at the station, spacemade and spacebound, a kilometer long and incapable of landing anywhere.
Flower, despite the name, was an ungainly shell, without fragility, without exposed vanes, without need of landing gantries and docks, an ugly ship, meant for plain, workman duties.
She brought technicians, scientists, who were already beginning to sift through the remnant of Kesrith’s records, to sample the air, the soil, to perform the myriad tasks that would begin to appropriate the world to human colonists.
“Favor,” bai Hulagh had said, seeing operations begin. “We regret in the light of this new good feeling, the unfortunate destruction of our equipment in the calamity at the port. We might have been of much assistance.”
Regul younglings in general were not so easily adaptive: they fretted at the nearness of humans, and preferred to work in their own groups. They made it no secret that they would gladly be off Kesrith now, to seek the security of their own kind in regul space.
But Hulagh had taken some few of them into his own office within the Nom and when the younglings came out, they had smiles for humans and great courtesy, and a powerful fear of the bai.
Until the storms descended, and the dusei returned.
The report came in first from the water plant, Galey’s group, that reported to Flower that there were animals moving in large numbers there upon the heights; and Flower confirmed it, and flashed the same to the biologists, and in the doing of it, to Stavros.
Stavros locked his sled into the track that would take him to the far side of the Nom, and whisked through several changes to the observation deck, disengaged, and went on manual through the doors and out into the acrid wind.
A ruddy bank of cloud was sweeping in, and there, there, all round the visible horizon, sat the dusei.
A chill went over him, that had nothing to do with the wind, or the biting smell of Kesrith’s rains. He sat in the sled, the wind whipping at his sparse hair. He saw Flower squatting on her hilltop; and the distant water plant, and vehicles speeding for cover as the storm came down; and airships, running for the makeshift field before the storm should hit: miracle if the crews could get them secured in time. He clenched his fist in rage, foreseeing damage, ships picked up by Kesrith’s winds and hurled like toys about the field—human equipage, that, expensive and irreplaceable.
He shifted onto Flower’s wavelength and heard Flower giving frantic instructions. They were warning the aircraft off, seeking means to route them round the storm to temporary landing elsewhere. He watched as lightning lit the clouds, and the clouds bred and built, and rolled in with frightening rapidity, red-lit with Arain’s glow.
And the dusei in unending rows sat, and watched, and maintained their vigil. The rains began to fall.
Stavros shivered as the first drops spattered the nose of the sled. It was not a place to sit encased in metal, with the lightning flashing overhead. He backed, opened the doorway, entered the Nom and sealed the door after, still hearing Flower’s chatter, with weather-radar on his receptor, a bow of storm that clutched at the sea’s edge, at the city itself.
Flower, he sent, breaking in on their communications. Flower: Stavros.
They acknowledged, a thin metallic sound, interrupted by static.
Flower: the dusei, the dusei—
“We have observed, sir. We are regretfully busy—”
He broke in again. Flower: drive off the duset. Break them up, drive them away.
They acknowledged the order. He sat his sled feeling as if he had lost his mind, as if all reason departed him. Doubtless Flower believed that he had lost his senses. But the ominous heaviness in the air persisted. His skin prickled. He could not bear the dus-presence, watching, watching at the storm’s edge.
Responsible?
He refused to believe it. Yet in panic he had diverted Flower to deal with them. He heard them discussing the task—too wise to discuss the wisdom of it in his hearing. He sat with his skin drawn into gooseflesh, his teeth near to chattering, a quavering and sickly old man, he thought, a man who had been among strangers too long.
He could countermand his own order, break in again and bid them tend more important matters.
But neither could he rid himself of the fear of the dusei.
His screens went all to static, robbing him of the power to communicate with anyone. The static lasted, and there came a note over his receptors that shrilled, ear-tormenting, and passed beyond audibility. He powered down, quickly, desperate, of a sudden consumed with the fear that the sled itself might be malfunctioning, himself trapped, helpless to move or call for help.
He watched, through a curtain of rain against the glass, the line of the dusei begin to break, the beasts scattering; and still he shivered, terrified as he saw many of them break not toward the hills, but toward the city, entering its streets, ranging where dusei were not wont to come.
Attacking.
The static continued.
A regul voice came over the loudspeaker, distorted by static, unintelligible. The address system cut in and out sporadically. Hail rattled against the windows, shaking them dangerously. Stavros hastily tried to cut in the stormshields on the observation deck, and they did not operate. He thought to put the sled on battery, and obtained responses from it, but his screens were still dead. Somewhere there was a crash, a heavy impact of falling plastiglass: and wind and the smell of rain went through the Nom halls.
Stavros backed the sled, tried to engage the track and fouled the order sequence, began again.
It took. He whisked himself out of the area and around the corner, finding the hall a wreckage, unshielded windows lying on the carpet at the end of the hall, curtains whipping loose from their bases. Regul younglings cowered in the hall.
Deprived of the screen, he could not communicate with them. They closed about him, babbling questions, seeking any elder, even human, who could advise them. He pushed the sled through them and sought the downramp, the safer side of the building, where the offices were. The hall here was clear. The public address continued to sputter.
He found Hulagh’s offices open, navigated his way with difficulty, and found the bai himself frantically attempting the closure of the stormshields.
A dus was outside. It reared itself against the thin plastiglass. The glass bowed, shook under the raking impact of the claws.
Hulagh backed his sled, fingering controls desperately; and Stavros sat still, watching the attack in horror. There was not a door in the Nom that would operate, nothing they could do if the beasts broke in. The windows quivered.
“Gun!” he cried at Hulagh, trying to make himself understood aloud. “Gun!”
And he backed, and Hulagh either understood or reached the same conclusion. They moved, as rapidly as the sleds would allow; and Hulagh rounded the desk and sought a pistol, holding it in shaking hands.
But the dus retreated, a shambling brown shape quickly lost in the sheeting rain across the square.
There were others, vague brown shapes that gathered and moved, milling nervously, and slowly, as if they had forgotten what they were about, they disappeared into the streets of the city and were gone.
In time the rain slacked, leaving only pocked puddles, and the stormshields suddenly operated all at once, too late for the storm.
The public address became clear, a constant chatter of instructions. Stavros’ screens sorted themselves into clarity.
“Stavros, Stavros, do you read?”
Clear, he said. All clear; and cut them off, for of a sudden there was a greyness before his eyes and he was content only to stay still, to breathe, to wait until the labored beating of his heart and the roaring in his ears subsided.
There is a window out on the second floor, Stavros advised Hulagh. Injuries there, I think.
“Younglings will attend to it.”
They neither one mentioned the dus. Flower was still trying to advise him what its operations were doing. He heard them talking to the aircraft, that had drawn off in advance of the storm, shepherding their lost searchers home again to the city.
And one of the aircraft answering, the rough accented voice of Hada Surag-gi. “Favor, favor, seeking return to mission, Flower-bai, seeking return to search.”
And a human voice, also from an aircraft, cursing and demanding an explanation of the jamming.
Stavros wiped his face, cut off the chatter, and looked at the bai.
“Never in my experience,” said the bai. “Never, reverence.” And Hulagh jabbed at buttons and summoned a youngling servitor, ordering soi, and records; and cursed the slowness of youngling wits. His breathing was at an alarming rate. It was several moments before he seemed in control of himself. “They have all gone mad,” he said.
Their world, said Stavros. Theirs, before the mri.
The soi came, borne by a youngling so agitated that the cups danced on the tray; and Stavros drank his unsweetened and drew the welcome warmth into his chilled belly.
At length he had the courage to touch the controls to open the stormshields again, remembering the beast even as he did so; and the square was deserted. Of a surety no regul and no humans would venture out until it was known where the dusei had gone.
He felt that he would see the apparition that had attacked the window in his nightmares thereafter; if the regul were prone to bad dreams the bai would share it.
“I am very old,” said Hulagh in a querulous tone. “I am too old for such things, bai Stavros. The regul who took this world were mad.” He sipped at his soi. “The mri controlled them. Now nothing does.”
There can be barriers, Stavros said. We can build them.
Hulagh was silent a long time, throughout most of the cup of soi. His nostrils worked rapidly. At last he blew a sigh and turned his sled from the window. “Holn,” he said.
Reverence?
“Holn concealed records. I did not ask, and they did not say: and I know now.” Nostrils worked in great flaring breaths of air. “Stavros-bai, you and I have failed to ask questions. Now, now, you and I, Stavros-bai, we have been handed only fragments of what we should have known about Kesrith. We are together in difficulty; and we share an enemy, Stavros-bai.”
Holn.
“Holn,” said Hulagh. “They were clever, human reverence; and I shall not be able to face the anger of my doch if I come back destitute. Ship, equipment, everything, reverence Stavros. I am ruined. But likewise Holn has cheated you.”
Bai Hulagh, you have a purpose in volunteering this information.
“The fortunes of doch Alagn,” said Hulagh, “are here, with myself, with these surviving younglings. I will not be sent back in disgrace on a human ship. We shall deal, Stavros.”
An alliance, reverence?
“An alliance, bai Stavros. Trade. Exchange. Ideas.—Revenge.”
Stavros met the dark, glittering eyes. From Kesrith, he said, there are territories to be explored.
“It is first necessary,” said Hulagh,”to hold Kesrith.”
As the Holn and the mri held it, said Stavros, with its resources used. Even the dusei. Even them.
And he fell to staring out the window, at the roiling sky, and saw the ruin of the port, and the rain, and considered the resources with which they had to work; and for the first time his hopes began to hold a taint of doubt
When he shut his eyes he still saw the beast at the window, irrational, uncontrollable as the elements: he hated them, the more so perhaps because they were without rationality, because they were, like the storm, of the elemental forces.
Antipathy to all that was regul and Kiluwan, the dusei.
But they were a part of Kesrith that could neither be ignored nor destroyed.
A combination of random elements, the world of Kesrith; and hereafter, he foresaw, was not under the control of George Stavros. He could no longer control. He shared Kesrith with beasts and with regul.
He clenched his hand on controls and listened to Flower again, hearing the babble of search craft that were bound out yet another time on their continuing patterns, trying to find one lost soul in all that wilderness, where dusei ran wild and the storms raked the land with violence.
Almost he bade them give it up.
But he had already given Flower irrational orders enough. He did not make the move. He saw one of the aircraft circle far out over the ruins of the edun and continue west, a speck quickly lost in the haze.
MELEIN WAS asleep finally. Niun, wiping the weariness from his eyes, settled the heavy metal ovoid into his lap and leaned his head back against the warm, breathing side of the dus. Duncan lay sprawled in the sand, on his stomach, his tattered and makeshift robes inadequate to afford him much protection from scrapes and sand-sores. His skin, bare above the boots, was scored with abrasions and sunburn. His eyes, unprotected by the veil, without the membrane to ease them, ran tears that streaked a perpetual coating of dust, like a dus gone miuk.
Duncan was exhausted for the moment, beyond causing them any trouble. Niun noted that a jo had settled against the rock, its luin-camouflage a little too dark for the red sandstone, where it clung for shade in this hottest part of the day. The name meant mimic. The creature harmed nothing. It waited for snakes, which were its natural food. It was not a bad campmate, the jo.
Niun nodded over his charge, his arms clasped about it, and rested his head, and finally relaxed enough to sleep awhile, now that Melein had settled. She had almost fainted before they stopped in this shelter, overburdened and hurting more than she wanted to admit. She had gone aside from them, into the privacy of the rocks, and taken cloth with her, in long strips: “I think it will help my side,” she said; and because there was no kath’en or kel’e’en to attend her, she attended to herself. The ribs were broken, he much feared, or at the least cracked. He was worried, with a deep cold fear, that would not leave him.
But she had come back, hand pressed to her side, and smiled a thin smile and announced that she felt some better, and that she thought she could sleep; and the tension unwound from Niun’s vitals when he saw that she could do so, that her pain was less.
The fear did not go away.
He bore Duncan’s presence, his dread of anything Duncan might do to him far less than fear for Melein, for losing her, for ending alone.
The last mri.
He dreamed of the edun, and its towers crumbling in fire, and woke clutching the smooth shape of the pan’en to him in the fear that he also was falling into the Dark.
But he sat on the sand, the dus unmoving behind him. The jo, with a deft swoop, descended on a lizard, and bore it back to his upside-down perch on the rock, shrouding his meal with his mottled wings, a busy and tiny movement as it fed, swallowing the lizard bit by bit.
Niun set the pan’en beside him so that he could feel it, constantly, against him, and leaned his head against the dus. He drowsed again, and awoke finding the heat unpleasant. He looked toward the advancing line of the sunlight, that had crept up on Duncan, and saw that it had enveloped him to the waist, falling on the bare skin of his knee and hand. The human did not stir.
“Duncan,” said Niun. He obtained no reaction, and reluctantly bestirred himself, leaned forward and shook at the human. “Duncan.”
Brown eyes stared up at him, bewildered, heat-dazed.
“The sun, stupid tsi’mri, the sun. Move into the shade.”
Duncan dragged himself into a new place and collapsed again, ripped aside the veil and lay with the cooler sand against his bare face. His eyes blinked, returning sensibility within them, as Niun resumed his place.
“Are we ready to move on?” he asked in a faint voice.
“No. Sleep.”
Duncan lifted his head and looked around at Melein, lay down again facing him. “Somewhere,” he said in a faint whisper, “my people will have come to Kesrith by now. She needs medical help. You know that. If it were sure that those up there are humans—we could contact an aircraft. Listen: the war is over. I don’t think you know us well enough to believe it, but we wouldn’t pursue matters any further. No revenge. No war. Come with me. Contact my people. There would be help for her. And no retaliations. None.”
Niun listened to the words, patient, believing at least that Duncan believed what he was saying. “Perhaps it is even true,” he said. “But she would never accept this.”
“She will die. But with help?”
“We are mri. We do not accept medicines, only our own. She has done what can be done under our own ways. Should strangers touch her— No. We live or we die, we heal or we do not heal.” He shrugged. “Maybe our way of doing things is not even a wise one. Sometimes I have thought it was not But we are the very last, and we will keep to the things that all our ancestors before us have observed. There is no use now for anything but that.”
And he fell to thinking how Melein had planned, and that they had won this last small victory over tsi’mri, that they had gathered to themselves the holiness and the history of their kind; and his fingers ran over the smooth skin of the pan’en that he kept by him.
“I have broken two traditions,” he admitted at last. “I have taken you and I have carried burdens. But the honor of the she’pan I will not compromise. No. I do not believe in your doctors. And I do not believe in your people and your ways. They are not for us.”
Duncan looked at him, long and soberly. “Even to survive?”
“Even to survive.”
“If I get back to my own people,” said Duncan finally, “I’m going to make sure it’s known what the regul did, what really happened that night at the port. I don’t know whether it will do any good; I know it can’t change anything for the better. But it ought to be told.”
Niun inclined his head, a respect for that gesture. “The regul,” he said,”would see you dead before they would let you tell those things. And if you hope on that account that I will let you leave our company and go to them, I must tell you I will not.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t believe you know what they will do, either your kind or the regul.”
Duncan was silent thereafter, staring into nothing. He looked very worn and very tired. He rubbed at a line of dried blood that had settled into an unshaven trail; and he was quiet again, but seemed not apt to sleep.
“Don’t run again,” Niun advised him, for he disliked the human’s mood. “Don’t try. I have made you too easy with us. Do not trust it.”
Brown eyes flicked up at him, tsi’mri and disturbing. Duncan gathered himself up to a sitting position, moving as if every muscle ached, and rubbed his head with a grimace of discomfort. “I had rather stay alive,” Duncan said, “like you would.”
The words stung. They were too nearly true. “That is not all that matters,” Niun said.
“I know that,” Duncan said. “A truce. A truce: a peace between us at least until you’ve got her to somewhere safe, until she’s well. I know you’d kill for her; I know that under other circumstances you might not. I understand that whatever she is, she’s someone very special—to you.”
“A she’pan,” said Niun, “is Mother to a house. She is the last A kel’en is only the instrument of her decisions. I can make no promises except for my own choice.”
“Can there not be another generation?” Duncan asked suddenly, in his innocence, and Niun felt the embarrassment, but he did not take offense. “Can you not—if things were otherwise??”
“We are bloodkin, and her caste does not mate,” he answered softly, moved to explain what mri had never explained to outsiders: but it was simply kel lore, and it was not forbidden to say. It lent him courage, to affirm again the things that had always been fixed and true. “Kath’en or kel’e’en could bear me children for her, but there are none. There is no other way for us. We either survive as we were, or we have failed to survive. We are mri; and that is more than the name of a species, Duncan. It is an old, old way. It is our way. And we will not change.”
“I will not be the cause,” said Duncan, “of finishing the regul’s handiwork. I’ll stay with you. I made my try. Maybe again, sometime, maybe, but not to anyone’s hurt, hers or yours. I have time. I have all the time in the world.”
“And we do not,” said Niun. He thought with a wrench of fear that Duncan, wiser than he in some things, for human kel’ein were able to cross castes—suspected that Melein would not live; and it answered a fear in his own heart. He looked to see how she was resting; and she was still asleep. The sight of her regular breathing quietly reassured him.
“With time and quiet,” said Duncan, “perhaps she will mend.”
“I accept your truce,” said Niun, and in great weariness, he unfastened his veil and looped the end of the mez over his shoulder, baring his face to the human. It was hard, shaming to do; he had never shown his face to any tsi’mri; but he had taken this for an ally, even for the moment, and in the tightness of things, Duncan deserved to see him as he was.
Duncan looked long at him, until the embarrassment became acute and Niun flinched from that stare.
“The mez is a necessity in the heat and the dryness,” Niun said. “But I am not ashamed to see your face. The mez is not necessary between us.”
And he curled himself against the pan’en, and against the solid softness of the dus, and attempted to rest, taking what ease he could, for they would move with the coolness and concealment of evening, at a time when surely regul trusted even a mri would not dare the cliffs.
There was the sound of an aircraft, distant, a reminder of alien presence in the environs of Sil’athen. Niun heard it, and gathered himself up to listen, to be sure how close or how far it was. Melein was awake, and Duncan stirred, seeking at once the direction of the sound.
It was evening. The pillars had turned red, burning in the twilight. Arain was visible through them, a baleful red disk, rippling in the heat of the sands.
Melein sought to rise. Niun quickly offered her his hands and helped her, and she was no longer too proud to accept that help. He looked at her drawn face and thought of his own necessary burden. His helplessness to do anything for her overwhelmed him.
“We must be moving,” she said. “We must go down again, to Sil’athen. There is no other exit I know from this place. But with the aircraft—” Her face contracted in an expression of anger, of frustration. “They are watching Sil’athen. They believe that the place hides us—and if they have men afoot—”
“I hope they are afoot,” said Niun. “That would give me satisfaction. “ And then he remembered Duncan, and was glad that he had been speaking in the hal’ari, as she had used with him. But it was likely enough that they were regul that they had to deal with, who would not go afoot.
“The climb down,” she said, “—I think it would be best to move just at the last light, so that we can see to climb. There will not be a moon up until sometime later. That will give us some dark to cross the open place at the beginning.”
“That is the best we can do,” he agreed. “We will eat and drink before we go. We may not have another chance to stop.”
And what that journey would cost Melein weighed heavily on his mind.
“Duncan,” he said quietly, while they shared food, both of them unveiled, “I will not be able to do more than carry what I must carry. On the climb—”
“I will help her,” Duncan said.
“Down is easier,” Melein said, and looked askance at Duncan, as if she found their arrangement far from her liking.
It was the last of the food that they had brought with them. Thereafter they must hunt, and quickly they must find water again, in this place where luin were not frequent. Niun’s mind raced ahead to these things, difficulties upon difficulties, but ones more pleasant than those most immediate.
They set out again toward the trail they had used, and when they stood finally looking down that great chasm, dim and unreal in the faded light, shading into black at the bottom, he held the pan’en close to him and dreaded the climb even for himself. When he considered Melein, he turned cold.
If she falls, he thought to warn Duncan; but it would do no good, to dishonor what small trust there was between them, and he thought that the human must know his mind. Duncan returned that stare, plain and accepting the charge that was set on him.
“Go first,” Niun bade him, and the human looped the trailing mez across his face and secured it firmly as Niun had already done with his own. Then he set his feet on the down-slope, bracing them carefully, offering his hand up for Me-lein’s.
“Niun,” Melein said, a glance, a patent distress. It was the only thing at which she had shown fear, committing herself to the hands of a human, when she was already in much pain.
Then, her hand pressed to her side, she reached her fingers toward Duncan’s, and carefully, carefully, she set her feet on the downslope, beginning the descent with Duncan’s hand to steady her, he bracing his body against whatever security there was, his arm extended to give her a firm support should she slip. In small stages they descended; and Niun stood with the pan’en a cold and comfortless weight in his arms, watching while they disappeared together into that shadow.
The dusei waited behind him, shifting weight nervously.
And then something intruded on his hearing, from behind him.
Aircraft, skimming above the pillars.
He grasped the carrying-bar of the pan’en, the only way to carry it in the descent, and hissed to the dusei and started the descent, terrified lest he cause them to have been seen, lest in his haste now he slip and come down on Melein and Duncan.
The aircraft passed directly overhead, a roar of power that echoed off the narrow walls, and he crouched low against a rock, shuddering against the strain of holding position on that slope. Pebbles skidded under his outmost foot. He took the chance as the aircraft passed beyond view and slid a few lengths lower, into the shadow, and the great bodies of the dusei came behind him, sharing his fear, communicating back to him an anxiety that made his stomach heave. He began to think he could not hold the pan’en: his fingers felt cut to the bone; and after he had gone a distance more he could not feel much pain, only an increasing numbness and lack of control over his fingers. He braced himself against a rock and shifted hands, reversing his entire position on the cliffside, showered from above by pebbles and dust from the claws of the dusei. They were at such a place now that they could not stop, and he plunged down a desperate slide, until he entered the deepest dark.
And at a stopping place he overtook Melein and Duncan, and Duncan’s face looked toward him in that faintest of light. Melein still held to his hand, bent for a moment against a boulder.
She moved on then, weakly, leaning much on Duncan; and Niun took the stable place they had had, braced his body against the weight he held, and waited, to stop the dusei, to hold them there, awkward as it was, until she was safely down. They came, shouldered against him, and he held them with a quiet will, an intense willing that they be still, hush, stop. They were patient, even in this awkward state, joined with his senses.
The aircraft passed again, lights winking against the dim sky overhead. Niun looked up at it, trembling with the strain, and held his place, helpless, with the growing conviction that they were lost.
They had surely been spotted, at the worst of all times, in the worst of all places.
It circled yet again.
He settled the pan’en in the right hand again and set out downward, hoping, desperately hoping that Melein and Duncan had had time, for there were no more resting places that he remembered. He went, boots sliding on the trail, bringing up against one and another rock with a force that his muscles were too tired to absorb. He came down and down until he could hardly control his descent, and dropped from the last turn to the sand, driven to one knee by the impact
The dusei came after, clambering down with much scratching of claws and scattering of sand, safe at the bottom.
And Melein sat, a pale huddle of robes in the shadow, and Duncan knelt by her. Her hand was pressed to her lips, and the other hand to her side, and her robes were stained with blood.
He fell to his knees beside her, the pan’en in his arms, and she could not prevent the cough that she stanched with her veil. Blood came. He saw it, and the membrane flashed across his vision, blinding him. He shivered, unable to see for a moment, and then it cleared.
“It began on the climb,” Duncan said. “I think the ribs gave way.”
And the aircraft circled at the top of the cleft.
Niun looked up at it in a blindness of rage.
“Be free of us,” he bade Duncan, and rose up, letting the pan’en fall to the sand. He looked last at Melein, her eyes closed, her face relaxed, her body supported in Duncan’s arms—not even a sen’en to attend her.
He gave a sharp call to his dusei, and began to walk, quickly, toward the end of the small valley, toward the main valley of Sil’athen.
“Niun!” Duncan shouted after him, which he did not regard.
He saw the aircraft hovering, at the valley’s end. He reached for the cords at the end of the siga’s long sleeves, and fastened them to their places on the honor belts at his shoulders, freeing his arms from the encumbering cloth; and he worked life into his hands, scored and numbed as they were from carrying the pan’en.
Duncan was running now, trying to overtake him. He heard the human—a racking cough, immediate payment for that rashness in Kesrith’s thin air. He saw the aircraft on the sand, and regul descending, standing on the ramp. The dus at his side moaned a roar of menace, and the other two scattered out, flanking them—dus-tactics in hunting, the outrunners.
He saw the regul about to fire, the weapon lifted. He was not in its line when it discharged; but his eyes were clear and his hand steady when he fired; and the regul crumpled, a mass of flesh still stirring. They did not die easily, body-shot. A moment later the ramp drew up, toppling the wounded regul: coward, Niun cursed the regul flier.
And darted into the rocks and scrambled for cover as it lifted, swinging over near him, drawing off again. He was in the open now, in the main valley, and other aircraft hovered.
They would have him, eventually. He ran low among the rocks that bordered the open sands, pursued by the aircraft with their sensors, and finally, a desperate tactic, braced and fired against the nearest—all without effect for the first several shots. Then the aircraft began having difficulty, and skidded off into a great cloud of sand amid the valley.
Others swooped in. The sky was alive with the sound of them: they passed low and drew off, warned by the fate of the other.
He ran and he rested, and by now the air was tinged with the coppery taste of too much exertion in the thin air, and he could not see clearly to fire back at them. Shots tore up the rocks where he hid, and he staggered as rock became shrapnel and tore his arm, bringing a warm flow of blood.
Lights played across the cliffs, making it impossible to stay hidden. There was scant cover, and shots tore at all of it. He ran, and fell, and scrambled up and raced for the next rock, and what had become of the dusei he did not know: it was not their kind of fight, this fury of fire and light.
The valley became ruin, steles and natural formations blasted to rubble. It was the final vengeance of the regul on his kind, to destroy the last sanctity of the People; and to ruin the land, as they had destroyed all that they had touched.
A near miss threw him rolling, dazed, blinded by the membrane that shielded his eyes, and he rose up and ran, too harried to fire any longer, only to run and run until they had him a clear target
An aircraft pressed at him, diving low, throwing sand from the wind of its passing. And then he thought with a sudden and clear satisfaction, and shifted left, toward the end of the valley, toward an old, old place, under the sightless eyes of Eddan and Liran and Debas, his teachers.
Fight with the land; make it your ally, they had been wont to tell him; and he heard them clear and calmly through the roar of the aircraft.
He fell, sprawling, and the aircraft continued on over him, hovered, kicking up sand; and he lay still, still as it settled, playing lights over the sand where he lay.
It touched; and the earth exploded, a great pale shape rearing up, heaving the aircraft, catching the craft in the convulsions of the mantle: burrower and machine, entangled in a cloud of sand, and the concussions of its struggles shaking the earth. Niun rolled and tried to run, but an edge of the mantle or a shock of air hurled him sprawling, and then another impact, and he saw the world go up in fire as the aircraft exploded.
And dark, thereafter.
“Niun!”
Someone was calling him out of that dark, that had not the familiarity of the brothers; but it was a familiar voice all the same.
Light broke over him. He moved limbs that were buried in sand, and heard the sound of engines.
“Niun!”
He lifted his head and drew himself up, standing on legs that swayed under him, shielding his eyes from the light with his arm.
Waiting.
“Niun!” It was Duncan’s voice, from a ragged silhouette before the lights. “Don’t fire. Niun, we have Melein aboard. She is not dead, Niun.”
He went blank at that horrid shock, mind not functioning, and came near to falling. And then the kel-law echoed in his mind, reminding him that there was a she’pan to be served; and that above all else, he could not leave her alone in the hands of strangers.
“What do you want of me?” he cried, his voice breaking with fury, with rage at Duncan, and treachery, and dishonor. “Duncan, I remind you what you swore?”
“Come in,” Duncan said. “Niun, come in with us. Safe conduct. I still swear it”
He hesitated, and the strength went out of him, and he made a gesture of surrender, and began, slowly, to walk into the lights, toward the silhouettes that waited for him, tall and human.
Better than the regul, at least.
And out of the tail of his eye, a squat dark form. He saw it, saw the move, knew treachery.
He palmed the as’ei, whirled and threw; and the fire took him, and he never felt the sand.
“Hada Surag-gi is dead,” said Galey.”The mri are hanging on.”
Duncan wiped his face, and in the same gesture, swept the head-cloth off and ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. He stumbled back through the narrow confines of the aircraft and shouldered past the medic who had already twice ordered him to keep his seat.
He sat down on the deck, unsteady in the motion of the aircraft, and regarded the two mri, wrapped in white, a tangle of tubing and monitoring connections from the automed units keeping their lives by means that the mri would find distasteful if they knew.
But they would have the chance to know.
“They’re going to make it, both of them,” the medic said. And then, frowning, with a glance at the sheet-wrapped hulk to the rear: “That particular regul was an officer of the Nom, with connections. There are going to be some questions asked.”
“There will be some questions asked,” Duncan said in a still voice, and looked at the mri, dismissing the medic from his mind. He sat with his legs tucked under him, still in the tattered and makeshift robes, and with his mind elsewhere; and at last the medic drew off to talk to the crew.
They had spoken little to him after the first excitement of recovering him alive; they were put off, perhaps, by the look of him, the strangeness of a man who had come alive from the desert of Kesrith, keeping company with mri and insisting with such vehemence on the possession of a mri treasure.
He touched Melein’s brow, smoothed the metallic-bronze of her hair, noting the steady pulse on the monitors that assured him of their lives. Melein’s golden eyes opened, the membrane cleared slowly back, and she seemed to be exploring the curious place that she had seen in her intervals of waking, rediscovering the strangeness that had taken them in. She was curiously calm, as if she had accepted to be here. He took her long slim fingers in his hand, and she pressed his hand with a faint effort
“Niun is all right,” he told her. He was not sure she understood this, for there was not a nicker. “There is the object you wanted,” he added, but she did not look; likely all these concerns were distant from her, for they were heavily drugged.
“Kel’en,” she whispered.
“She’pan?” he answered: perhaps she confused him with Niun.
“There will be a ship,” she said. “A way off Kesrith.”
“There will be,” he said to her, and reckoned that he had told her the truth.
The war was done. They were free of regul. A human ship—there would be that—a chance for them. It was the most the mri would ever ask of tsi’mri.
“There will be that,” he said. She closed her eyes then.
“Shon’ai,” she said, with a taut, faint smile. He did not know the word. But he thought that she meant acceptance.
The deck slanted. They were coming in. He told her so.