And the floor shook again, and the lights began dimming.
There was a time of quiet.
He found it possible finally to move his legs, arms, to drag himself up, and he staggered through littered sen-hall into the winding corridor down to main hall. A great shadow met him there, his dus, that almost threw him off his feet in the pressure of its body: he used it then, leaning on it, and staggered past the litter that confused the hall, and out into the light, the open city—there began to see the dead, old sen’ein, children of the Kath—a kel’en, crushed by a toppling wall.
He found Sa’er, a huddled shape in blue at the bottom of the ramp, a golden hand clenched about a stone, a face open-eyed and dusty with the sand of Kutath.
“Ka’aros!” he called with all the strength in him, remembering her son, and there was no answer.
The People’s trail was marked with dead, the old, the fragile, the young: all that was gentle, he thought, everything.
He heard a sound of thunder, looked up and saw a flash, a mote of light. Something operating in-atmosphere. He expected, even while he ran with all the speed that was in him, the white flash that would kill him, as he left the protective zone.
But it went over the horizon. The sound died.
Beyond the city, beyond the pitiful ruin, there stretched a line of figures, alive and moving. He made haste to follow, desperate, exhausted. The dus moved with him, blood-feelings stirred in it, that caught up his rage and fear and cast it back amplified.
He overtook the last of the column finally, his throat dry, his lungs wracked with coughing. Blood poured from his nose and tasted salt-coppery in his mouth.
“The kel’anth?” he asked. A narrow-eyed kel’e’en pointed toward the head of the column. “The she’pan?” he asked again. “Is she well?”
“Yes,” one said, as if to answer him at all were contamination.
He kept moving at more than their pace, seeing the column’s head, passed kel’ein that carried kath-children, and kath’ein that carried infants, and kel’ein that supported old ones of any caste, though few enough of the old were left them.
They went toward the mountains, that promised concealment, as they were pitifully exposed on this bare, naked sand. He saw the line extended over the roll of the land, and it seemed yet impossibly far, beyond his strength at the pace he tried. He paused, cut a bit of pipe that was left as a stub from someone else’s cutting, a prize that was seen by others too, and he offered them of his, but none would deign to touch it. Leaving the rest to them, he sucked the water from a sliver and managed simply to keep his feet under him and to stay with the middle of the column—outside it, for he felt their hatred, the looks that the Sen cast him.
He had betrayed himself before the Sen; they knew, they had seen the nature of him, and whence he was they guessed . . . if not what. They could not know the reason that they were attacked, but that they were mri, and that the tsi’mri invaded, and they were dying at such hands as his.
* * *
No attack came on them. He was not amazed by it, for there was little inclination for a large orbiting craft to waste its energies on so small a target as they made. But the city came under periodic fire. They could look back and see it, the shields flaring rainbow colors under the rainless sun, and the whole of the city settling into increasing ruin. The city that had stood dreamlike against the setting sun itself glowed and died like embers, and the towers were down, and ugliness settled over it.
“A-ei,” mourned an old kath’en. “A-ei.”
And the children wept fretfully, and were hushed.
The Sen shook their heads, and there were tears on the faces of the old ones.
From the Kel there were no tears, only looks that burned, that raged. Duncan turned his face from them, and kept moving at such times as the column rested, until at last he had sight of Melein’s white robes, and he knew the tall kel’en by her, with the dus.
They were well; that was enough to know, to take from him some of the anguish. He kept them in sight for the rest of that day, and when they at last paused at evenfall, he came to them.
Niun knew his presence. The dus went first, and Niun turned, looking for his approach.
Duncan settled quietly near them.
“You are all right?” Niun asked him.
He nodded.
Melein turned her face from him. “Doubtless,” she said finally, “your wish was good, Duncan; I believe that. But it was useless.”
“She’pan,” he murmured with a gesture of reverence, grateful even for that; he forbore to argue with her: among so many dead, argument had no place.
Niun offered him a bit of pipe. He showed his, and declined, and with his av-tlen, cut off a bit of it that was sickly sweet in his mouth. There was a knot at his stomach that would not go away.
A cry went up from the Kel. Hands pointed. What looked like a shooting star went over, and descended toward the horizon.
“Landing,” Duncan murmured, “near where the ship was. There will be a search now.”
“Let them come into the mountains looking,” said Niun.
Duncan put a hand to his stomach, and coughed, and wiped his eyes of the pain-tears. He found himself shaking.
He also knew what had to be done.
He rested. In time he made excuse, a modest sort of shrug that denoted a man on private business, and rose and moved away from the column; the dus followed him. He was afraid. He tried to keep that feeling down, for the dus could transmit that. He saw the desert before him, and felt the weakness of his own limbs, and the terror came close to overwhelming him, but he had no other options.
The dus suddenly sent a ward-impulse, turned.
He looked back, saw the other dus.
There was a black shadow a distance to the side of it. Duncan froze, remembering that Niun, like him, had a gun.
Niun walked across the sand toward him, a black shape in the dark. The wind fluttered at his robes, the moon winked on the brass of the yin’ein and the plastic of the visor, and on the j’tai that he had gained. The great dus walked at his side, turn-toed, head down.
“Yai,” Duncan cautioned his, made it sit beside him.
Niun stopped at talking distance, set hand in belt, a warning. “You have strayed the column widely, sov-kela.”
Duncan nodded over his shoulder, toward the horizon. “Let me go.”
“To rejoin them?”
“I still serve the she’pan.”
Niun looked at him long and closely, and finally dropped his veil. Duncan did the same, wiped at the blood that began to dry on his lips.
“What will you do?” Niun asked.
“Make them listen.”
Niun made a gesture that spoke of hopelessness. “It has already failed. You throw yourself away.”
“Take the People to safety. Let me try this. Trust me in this, Niun.”
“We will not surrender.”
“I know that. I will tell them so.”
Niun looked down. His slender fingers worked at one of the several belts. He freed one of the j’tai, came toward Duncan, stood and patiently knotted the thong in a complicated knot.
Duncan looked at it when he had done, found a strange and delicate leaf, one of the three j’tai that Niun had had from Kesrith.
“It was given me by one of my masters, a man named Palazi, who had it from a world named Guragen. Trees grew there. For luck, he said. Good-bye, Duncan.”
He gave his hand.
Duncan gave his. “Good-bye, Niun.”
And the mri turned from him, and walked away, the one dus following.
Duncan watched him meet the shadow, and vanish, and himself turned and started on the course that he had plotted, the sand and rocks distorted in his vision for a time. He resumed the veil, grateful for the warmth of the beast that walked beside him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Beast mind, beast sense. It protected. Duncan inhaled the cold air carefully and staggered as he came down
the gentle rise—an ankle almost twisted: death in the flats. He took his warning from that and rested, leaned against the dus as he settled to the cold sands and let the fatigue flow from his joints. A little of the blue-green pipe remained in his belt-pouch. He drew his av-tlen and cut a bit of it, chewed at it and felt its healing sweetness ease his throat.
It was madness to have tried it, he had to realize in the burning days, madness to have imagined that he could make the wreckage in time, that they would have stayed where there was no life.
But there was no choice. He was nothing among the People, but a problem that Niun did not need, an issue over which he might have to kill; a problem to Melein, who must explain him.
He served the she’pan.
There was no question of this in him now: if he walked and found nothing, still it only proved that his own efforts were worth nothing, as those of An-ehon had been nothing, and the burden passed: the she’pan had other kel’ein.
He gathered himself and began to walk again, staggered as the dus suddenly lurched against him with a snarl. He blinked in dull amazement as a cloud of sand puffed up from the side of a rock and something ran beneath the sand, not like a burrower’s fluttering broad mantle, but something lithe and narrow that—like the burrower—dug a small pit, a funnel of sand.
“Yai,” he called hoarsely, restraining the dus, that would have gone for it and dug it into the light with its long venomed claws. Whatever was there, he did not know the size of it, or its dangers. He caught the hunt-sense from the dus, put it down with his own will, and they skirted the area, climbed up the near ridge. When he looked down, he saw all the area dotted with such small pits. There was regularity about them, like points on concentric circles. They formed a configuration wide enough to embrace a dus.
“Come,” he wished the beast, and they moved, the dus giving small, dissatisfied whuffs, still desiring to go back.
But of other presence there had been no sign. There was the cold and the wind and the streaming light of Na’i’in; there was the track of their own passing swiftly obliterated by the wind, and once, only once, a tall black figure on a dune crest.
One of the kel’ein, an outrunner of the People, another band, perhaps, insolently letting himself be seen. Duncan had felt exposed at that, felt his lack of skill with the yin’ein . . . the unknown under the sand did not frighten him half so much as the thought of encounter with others.
—Of encountering a she’pan other than Melein. It was, he thought, a mri sort of fear—a hesitance to break out of that familiarity which was Melein’s law. With that fear, with mri canniness, he kept to the low places, the sides, the concealments available in the land, and his eyes, dimmed by his lowered visor, carefully scanned the naked horizons when he must again venture across the flat.
The great rift of the lost sea came into view at noontime. He looked away into that hazy depth where sand ribboned off into the chasm in wind-driven falls, and lost his sense of height and depth in such dimensions. But scanning the horizon, he knew where he was, that was not far from the place he sought.
He kept moving, and by now the lack of solid food had his stomach knotting. The ache in his side was a constant presence, and that in his chest beat in time with the ebb and flow of his life.
Dus.
He felt it, and looked up as if someone had called his name. Niun? he wondered, looking about him, and yet did not believe it. Niun was with the People; he would not have deserted Melein, or those in his charge. There were the Kath and the Sen, that could not make such a trek as he had made, kel’en and unencumbered.
Yet the dus-feeling was there.
Left. Right. He scanned those horizons, stroked the velvet rolls of flesh on the neck of his own beast, sent question to its mind. Ward-impulse went out from it.
No illusion, then.
With his nape hairs prickling he kept moving, constantly aware of that weight against his senses.
Brother-presence.
Dus-brother.
The dus beside him began to sing a song of contentment, of harmony, that stole the pain and stole his senses, until he realized that he had walked far and no longer knew the way he walked.
No, he projected at it, no, no, no. He thought of the ship, thought of it again and again, and desired, urged toward it.
Affirmation.
And threat.
Darkness came then, sudden and soft and deep, and full of menace, claws that tore and fangs that bit and over it all a presence that would not let him go. He came to awareness again still walking, shivering periodically in the dry, cold wind. His hands and arms were sandburned and bloody, so that he knew that he had fallen hard at some time and not known.
Ship, he thought at the beast.
Hostile senses surrounded him. He cried out at the dark and it thrust itself across his path, stopping him. He stood shuddering as it rubbed round his legs, vast, heavy creature that circled him and wove a pattern of steps.
Others came, two, five, six dusei, a third the size of the one that wove him protection. He shuddered in horror as they came near and surrounded him, as one after another they reared up man-tall and came down again, making the sand fly in clouds.
There was a storm-feeling in the air, a sense charged and heavy with menace.
Storm-friends, the mri called them, the great brothers of the cold wind.
And none such had been known on and Kutath, no such monsters had this world known.
They have come here of their own purpose, Duncan thought suddenly, cold, and frightened. He remembered them entering the ship, remembered them, whose hearts he had never reached, living with them on the long voyage.
A refuge from humans, from regul. They had fled their world. They chose a new one, the escape that had lain open for them, that he had provided.
Closer they came, and his dus radiated darkness. Bodies touched, and a numbing pulse filled the air, rumbling like a wind-sound or like earthquake. They circled, all circled, touching. Duncan flung himself to his knees and put his arms about the neck of his beast, stopping it, feeling the nose of a stranger-dus at the nape of his neck, smelling the hot breath of the beast, heat that wrapped and stifled him.
Ship, he remembered to think at them, and cast the disaster of An-ehon with his mind, the towers of Kesrith falling. Pleasure came back, appalling him.
No! he cried, silently and aloud. They fled back from him.
He cast them images of waterless waste, of a sun dying, of dusei wasting in desolation.
Their anger flooded at him, and his own beast shuddered, and drew back. It fled, and he could not hold it.
He was alone, desolate and blind. Suddenly he did not know direction or world-sense. His senses were clear, ice-clear, and yet he was cut off and without that inner direction that he had known so long.
“Come back,” he cried at the dus that lingered.
He cast it edun-pictures, of water flowing, of Kesrith’s storms, and ships coming and going. Whether it received on this level he did not know. He cast it desire, desperate desire, and the image of the ship.
There was a touch, tentative, not the warding impulse.
“Come,” he called it aloud, held out his hands to it. He cast it fellowship, mri-wise—together, man and dus.
Life, he cast it.
There was hesitance. The warding impulse lashed fear across his senses, and he would not accept it. Life, he insisted.
It came. All about him he felt warding impulse, strong and full of terrors, such that the sweat broke but on him and dried at once in the wind. But his dus was there. It began to walk with him, warding with all its might.
Traitor to its kind. Traitor human and traitor dus. He had corrupted it, and it served him, went with him, began to be as he was.
Fear cast darkness about them and the afternoon sun seemed dimmer for a time; and then the others were gone, and there appeared finally black dots along a distant ridge, watching.
Children of Kutath, these dusei, flesh of the fl
esh that had come from Kesrith, and partaking not at all of it.
Only the old one remembered—not events, but person, remembered him, and stayed.
* * *
By late afternoon the wind began rising, little gusts at first that skirled the sand off the dune crests and swept out in great streamers over the dead sea chasm. Then came the flurries of sand that rode on battering force, that made walking difficult, that rattled off the protective visor and made Duncan again wrap the mez doubled about his face. The dus itself walked half-blind, tear-trails running down its face. It moaned plaintively, and in sudden temper reared up, shook itself, blew dust and settled again to walk against the wind.
The others appeared from time to time, walking the ridges, keeping their pace. They appeared as dark shadows in the curtain of sand that rode the wind, materialized as now a head and now less, or a retreating flank. What they sent was still hostile, and full of blood.
Duncan’s beast growled and shook its head, and they kept moving, though it seemed by now his limbs were hung with lead and his muscles laced with fire. He coughed, and blood came, and he became conscious of the weight of the weapons that he bore, weapons that were useless where he was bound, and more useless still were he dead, but he would not give them up. He clenched in one hand the sole j’tal he wore, and remembered the man that had given it, and would not be less.
Su-she’pani kel’en. The she’pan’s kel’en.
Pain lanced up his leg. He fell, cast down by the treacherous turn of stone, carefully gathered himself up again and leaned on the dus. The leg was not injured. He tried to suck at the wound the stone had made on his hand, but his mouth was dry and he could not. There was no pipe hereabouts. He hoarded what moisture he had and chose not to use the little supply that remained to him, not yet.
And one of the lesser dusei came close to him, reared up so that his own interposed its body. There was a whuffing of great lungs, and the lesser backed off.
Ship, he thought suddenly, and for no reason.
Desire.
There was no warding impulse from the stranger. He felt only direction, sensed presence.