It was indeed nature’s logic—and politics—but Suth was smug in it, suffused with a feeling of power and rightness after his long suffering. There would be a new order on this ship, his ship. And for Horag to succeed in an operation where great Alagn had failed miserably . . . . Ambitions occurred to him, incredible in scope.
“It is not necessary,” he said, “that humans know we exist.”
“No,” Nagn agreed, “but until they realize we have an elder on this ship, they will be continuing on their own course of action. They will do what pleases them without consulting us.”
“If all witnesses die,” said Suth, “—there is no event.”
“Eldest?”
“We are far from human bases; we can do what pleases us.”
“Strike at elders?”
“Secure ourselves.”
Nagn considered this, her nostrils flaring and shutting in agitation. Finally they remained open. “With their rider ship and their probe as well, they have mobility we do not.”
“Mri could even the balance.”
“Even mri have some memory, eldest. They will not hire to us.”
“On that world, Nagn Alagn-ni, there is power. It struck back at our ship; we experienced it and we know the sites of it. If both mri and human witnesses perish—then regul worlds are freed of an inestimable danger; and humans can ask questions—but regul need give no answers.”
Nagn grinned, a slow relaxation of her jaws and a narrowing of her eyes.
Chapter Five
Yet again the beasts shifted position, not to be buried, shaking the sand off with a vengeance. The gale had fallen off markedly, and Na’i’in shone brighter this morning than it had yesterday noon. Duncan stumbled to his feet, muscles aching. He had slept finally, when the dusei no longer roused so often; and he was stiff, the more so that the great beasts had pressed on him and leaned on him: instinct, he reckoned, to keep his chilling body up to their fever warmth. They milled about now, blew and sneezed wetly, clearing their noses. Duncan shivered, folding his arms about him, for the cold wind threatened to steal what warmth he had gathered.
Time to move. Anxiety settled on him as he realized he could see horizon through the curtain-like gusts; if he could see, so could others, and he had lingered too long. He should have been on his way in the night, when the sand had ceased to come so heavily; he should have realized, and instead he had settled down to sleep.
Stupidity, his mri brother had been wont to tell him on other occasions, is not an honorable death.
“Hai,” he murmured to the dusei, gathered up his pack, shrugged into it, started off, with a protest of every muscle in his body, making what haste he could.
He took a little more of the dried food, with a last bite of the pipe, and that was breakfast, to quiet his hunger pangs. The dusei tried to cajole their share, and he gave to his own, but when he offered to the others, his began a rumbling that boded trouble.
He at once flung the handful wide, and the two stranger dusei paused, themselves rumbling threats, letting the pace separate them. After a moment they lowered their heads and took the food, and the curtaining sand began to come between. The storm-night was over, truces broken. His heart still beat rapidly from the close call, the injudiciousness of his own dus to start a quarrel while he had his hand full of something the others wanted. He glanced back; one of them stood up on its hind legs, a towering shadow, threatening their backs; but his own whuffed disgust and plodded on, having evidently dismissed the seriousness of the threat. His was tame only in the sense it wanted to stay with him, which dusei had done with the mri of Kesrith for two thousand years, coming in out of their native hills, choosing only kel-caste, bonding lifelong; and not even the mri knew why. Kath’ein had-no need and sen’ein minds were too complex and cold for the dusei’s taste: so the mri said. But for some mad reason, this one had chosen a human—its only existing choice, perhaps, when mri on Kesrith had perished.
He had a dread of it someday departing his side, deserting him for the species it preferred; truth be told, that parting would be painful beyond bearing, and lonely after, incredibly lonely. He needed it, he suspected, with a crippled need a kel’en of the mri might never have. And perhaps the dus knew it.
He walked, his hand on the beast’s back, looked over his shoulder. The other two were only the dimmest shadows now. They would choose, perhaps, other kel’ein . . . He hoped not the kel’ein who followed him now; that was a dread thought.
His rumbled with pleasure, blowing at the sand occasionally, shambling along at his pace, turning its face as much as might be from the wind.
But after a time that pleasure-sound died, and something else came into its mood, a pricklish anxiety.
The skin contracted between his shoulders. He looked back, searching for shadows in the amber haze—coughed, blind for a moment.
The dus had stopped too, began that weaving which accompanied ward-impulse, back and forth, back and forth between him and some presence not far distant.
“Hush,” he bade it, dropped to his knees to fling his arms about its neck and distract it, for a determined pursuer could use that impulse to locate them.
A mri who pursued . . . could well do that.
The impulse and the weaving stopped; the beast stood still and shivered against him, and he scrambled up and started it moving again, facing the wind, blind intermittently in the gusts, and with the beast’s disturbance sawing at his nerves like primal fear.
The land did not permit mistakes. He had made one, this morning, out of weakness.
Turn, he thought, and meet his pursuers, plead that he carried a message that might mean life or death for all the mri?
One look at his habit and his weapons and his human-brown eyes . . . would be enough. Mri—meant the People; outsiders and higher beasts were tsi’mri: not-People. He and the dus were equal in their eyes; it was built into the hal’ari that way, and no logic could argue without words to use.
It was a stranger behind him, no one of the tribe he knew: they would have showed themselves long since if that were the case; there was more than curiosity involved, if pursuit continued after the storm. He was sure of it now, with a gut-deep knowledge that he was in serious trouble.
Kel’ein did not walk far alone, not by choice. There was a tribe somewhere about, and a Kel which had set itself to trail an invader.
* * *
Hlil stopped with the sand-veiled shadow of the city before him, sank down on his heels on the windward side of a low dune and surveyed the altered outlines of the ruin tsi’mri had left.
An-ehon. His city. He had never lived in it; but it was his by heritage. He had come here in the journeyings which attended the accession of a she’pan, when he was very young; had sat within walls while the Sen closed themselves within the Holy and the Mother gained the last secrets she had to know, which were within the precious records of the city.
No more. It was over, the hundred thousand years of history of this place—ended, in his sight, in an instant. He had seen the towers falling, comrades slain on right and on left of him, and for so long as he lived he would carry that nightmare with him.
What he had to do now . . . was more than recover the tents, the Things, which concerned only life; it was to retake the Holy, and that . . . that filled him with fear. The stranger-she’pan had laid hands on him, giving him commission to handle what he must: perhaps she had the right to do so. He was not even certain of that. An-ehon was destroyed, the means of teaching she’panei gone with it, and they must trust this stranger, who claimed to hold in herself the great secrets. It was all they had, forever, save what rested here.
Merai, he had thought more than once on this journey, with even the elements turning on them, Merai, o gods, what should I do?
He did so now, thinking of the city before them, of the tribe—gods, of the tribe, pent within that narrow cut and the sand moving. In his mind was a vision of them being overwhelmed in it by sand falls, or the sandslip bu
ilding all down the cut, gravity bearing them in a powdery slide into the basin, a fall which turned his stomach to contemplate.
He had sent five hands of kel’ein back when the storm began, to aid if they could. That far he went against the she’pan’s plans, dividing his force. Perhaps she would forgive; perhaps she would curse, damning him, cutting him off from the tribe for disobedience. That was well enough, he thought, tears welling up in his throat, if only it saved the rest of the children. There was following orders and there was sanity; and the gods witness he tried to choose aright . . . to obey and to disobey at once.
Sand slipped near him. Ras had caught up with him, came over the crest and slid down to a crouch at his side. In a moment more came Desai, third-rank kel’en, blind in one eye, but the one that saw, saw keenly: a quiet man and steady, and after him came Merin, a Husband, and the boy Taz . . . an unscarred, who had begged with all his heart to come. There were others, elsewhere, lost in the rolls of the land and the gusting wind. He took to heart what the kel’anth had said of ambushes and ships, and kept his forces scattered.
He waited a moment, letting the others take their breaths, for beyond this point was little concealment. Then he rose up, started down the trough, keeping to the low places where possible, while his companions strayed along after him at their own rate, making no grouped target for the distance-weapons of tsi’mri.
But when they neared the buildings and crossed the track by which they had fled the city, and came upon the first of the dead, anger welled up in him, and he paused. Black-robe: this had been a kel’en. He gazed at the partially buried robes, the mummy made of days in the drying winds, ravaged by predators: they must have held feast in An-ehon.
The others overtook him; he walked on without looking at them. Ahead were the shells of towers, geometries obscured in sand, horizonless amber in which near buildings were distinct even to the cracks in their walls and the distant ones hove up as shadows. And everywhere the dead.
“This was Ehan,” Desai said of the next they came to; and “Rias,” said Merin of another, for the Honors these dead wore could still distinguish them, when wind and dryness had made them all alike.
From time to time they spoke names of those they saw among the passages between the ruined buildings; and the dead were not only kel’ein, but old sen’ein, gold-robes, scholars, whose drying skulls had held so much of the wisdom of the People; young and old, male and female, they lay in some places one upon the other, folk that they had known all their lives; among them were the bodies of kath’ein, blue-robes, the saddest and most terrible—the child-rearers and children. Walls had fallen, quick and cruel death; in other places the dead seemed without wound at all. There were the old whose bronze manes were dark and streaked with age; many, many of their number, who had not been strong enough to bear the running; and in many a place a kel’en’s black-robed body lay vainly sheltering some child or old one.
Name after name, a litany of the dead: kath Edis, one of his own kath-mates, and four children, two of whom might be his own: that hit him hard; and sen’ein, wise old Rosin; and kel Dom: they had come into the Kel the same year. He did not want to look and must, imposing horrors over brighter memories.
And the others, who had lost closer kin, Kel-born, who had kin to lose: Taz, who mourned trueparents and sister and all his uncles; and Ras—Ras passed no body but that she did not look to see.
“Haste,” he said, having his fill of grieving. But Ras trailed last, disobedient, still searching, almost lost to them in the murk.
He said nothing to that: matters were thin enough between them. But he looked at no more dead; and the others grew wise, and did not, either, staying close with him. Chance was, he thought, that they could run head-on into members of their own party, if they were not careful in this murk, come up against friends primed to expect distance-weapons and primed to attack . . . an insanity: he had no liking at all for this kind of slipping about.
Suddenly the square lay before them, vast, ribboned with blowing sand which made small dunes about the bodies which lay thicker here than elsewhere in the city. At the far side hove up the great Edun, the House of the People, Edun An-ehon, sad in surrounding ruin. It was mostly intact, the four towers, slanting together, forming a truncated pyramid. The doorway gaped darkly open upon steps which ran down into the square. The stone of the edun was pitted and scarred as the other buildings; great cracks showed in the saffron walls, but this place which had been the center of the attack had also held the strongest defense, and it had survived best of any structure hope of success, of doing quickly what they had come to do and getting away safely.
He moved and the others followed, on a course avoiding the open square, taking their cover where they could find it among the shattered buildings and the blowing sand. Finally he broke away at a run, up the long steps, toward that ominous dark within, hard-breathing with the effort and thinking that at any moment fire might blast out at him.
It did not. He slid through the doorway and inside, against the wall, where dust slipped like oil beneath his feet, where was silence but for the wind outside and the arriving footsteps of the others. They entered and stopped, all of them listening a moment. There was no sound but the wind outside.
“Get a light going,” he bade Taz. The boy fumbled in the pouch he carried and knelt, working hastily to set fire in the oilwood fiber he had brought. Ras arrived, last of them. “Stay out there,” Hlil ordered her, “visible; others will be coming soon.”
“Aye,” she said, and slipped back out again into the cold wind, a miserable post, but no worse than the dark inside.
The flame kindled; Taz shielded it with his body and lit a knot of fiber impaled on an oilwood wand. They all, he, Merin, and Desai, kept bodies between the fire and the draft from the door. Merin lit other knots and passed them about. Outside, Ras’s low voice reported no sight of the others.
Hlil took his light and walked on. The inner halls echoed to the least step. Cracks marred the walls, ran, visible once eyes had adjusted to the dim light, about the higher walls and ceilings, marring the holy writings there.
The entry of kel-tower was clear, and that of Sen, the she’pan’s tower and Kath . . . affording hope of access to their belongings. But when he looked toward the shrine his heart sank, for that area of the ceiling sagged, and the pillars which guarded that access were damaged. He felt of them and stone crumbled at his least touch on the cracks.
He had to know; he went farther into the shrine, thrust his light-wand into a cracked wall and passed farther still.
“Hlil,” Merin protested, behind him.
He hesitated, and even as he stopped a sifting of plaster hit his shoulders and dimmed the light.
“Go back,” he bade Merin and the others. “Stand clear.”
The Holy was there, that which they venerated and the Holy of the Voyagers; his knees were weak with dread of the great forbidden; but in his mind was the hazard of losing them once for all, these things which were more than the city and more than all their lives combined.
He moved inward; the others disobeyed and followed: he heard them, saw the lights moving with him, casting triple shadows of himself and the pillars and the inner screen.
Beyond that—the stranger-she’pan had given him her blessing to go: that first, she had bidden him. He was shaking unashamedly as he put out a hand and moved the screen aside.
A tiny box of green bronze; figures of corroding metal and gold; a small carven dus and a shining oval case as large as a child: together they were the Pana, the Mysteries, on which he looked, on which no kel’en ought ever, to look. He thrust out a hand almost numb, gathered up the smallest objects and thrust them, cold and comfortless, within the breast of his robes. He passed the box to Merin, whose hands did not want to receive it. Last he reached for the shining ovoid, snatched it to him in a sifting of dust and falling plaster. It was incredibly heavy for its size, staggered him, hit a support in a cascade of plaster and fragments. He stu
mbled back at the limit of his balance, hit the steadying hands of Desai who snatched him farther, outside, as dust rolled out at them and they sprawled, shaken by the rumble of falling masonry. It stopped.
“Sir?” Taz’s voice called.
“We are well enough.” Hlil answered, holding the pan’en to him, bowed over it, though the chill seemed to flow from it into his bones. Other hands helped him rise with it: the light of the door showed in a shaft of dust, and the figures of Taz and Ras within it, casting shadows. He carried his burden to the doorway, past them and out into the light and the storm, knelt down and laid the pan’en and the other objects on the top of the steps. Merin added the ancient box, stripped off his veil to shield the Holy objects . . . so did he, and Ras and Desai too. He looked up into the faces of the others, which were stark with dread for what they had in hand. He looked from one to the other, chilled with a sense of separation . . . for kel’ein died, having touched a pan’en: such was the law. Or if they lived, then forever after they were known by it: pan’ai-khan, somewhere between Holy and accursed.
“I have dispensation,” he said. “I give it you.”
They crouched down, huddled together, he and the others, protecting the Holy as if it were something living and fragile, that wanted mortal flesh between it and the elements.
The boy Taz was not with them.
“Taz—are you well?” Hlil shouted into the dark.
“I am keeping the fire,” the boy said. “Kel-second, the dust is very thick, but there is no more falling.”
“The gods defend us,” Hlil muttered, conscious of what he had his hand on, that burned him with its cold. “Only let it hold a little while longer.”
* * *
Duncan paused, where a scoured ridge of sandstone offered a moment’s shelter from the wind, flung his arms about the thick neck of the dus and lowered his head out of the force of the gusts. He coughed, rackingly; his head ached and his senses hazed. The storm seemed to suck oxygen away from him. He uncapped the canteen and washed his mouth, for the membranes were so dry they felt like paper . . . . He swallowed but a capful. He stayed a moment, until his head, stopped spinning and his lungs stopped hurting, then he found the moral force to stand and move again.