And the dead, revealed in their numbers, stretching in a line from the bottom of the steps to the far side of the square. Those he had to look on too.
“We might bury them, sir,” said a young voice. He looked to his left, at Taz. The boy had lost all his kin in the rout. All.
“No. We have strength for what we do, barely that.”
“Aye,” Taz said . . . scarless, no one yet in the Kel; but he had great grace, and Hlil was grateful for that.
“Forgive, kel Taz.”
“Sir,” Taz said quietly, and turned away, for a few moments finding something essential to do with the packing.
It was that way with many of them. The Kel-born had lost most, knowing their kin in certainty. He looked on Ras, who labored with the others, and hoped, seeing that energy in her, that there might be some healing worked.
He could set his hand to none of the work; he paced back inside, restless, saw the last kel’ein returning from the storerooms. “Do not take the lamps yet,” he bade them. “Ros, wait here; we have two still up in sen-tower.”
“Aye,” the one of them said. Hlil walked out again with the other, counting them, counting those outside, making sure he had all their whereabouts. They were all there. He reassured himself, stood in the cold with arms folded, watching while the readied bundles were carried down the steps, piled there, a little to the side of a heap of the dead.
“Ras,” one of those at the bottom called up. The kel’en gazed down at that pitiful tangle of black and lifted his face upward. “Kel Ras—”
O gods, Hlil thought, cursing that man.
Ras left the others at the top and walked down the steps, no haste, no show of dread. Hlil watched, and after a moment followed. It was Nelan s’Elil who lay there; there was no doubting it. He stood by as Ras knelt by the body of her truemother, watched Ras take from among the dusty black robes the beautiful sword which had been that of Kov her father. The j’tai, Ras did not touch, the Honors which her truemother had won in her life; those passed only in defeat, and Nelan had never suffered that.
“Ras,” he said. She sat still, the sword across her lap, the wind settling sand in the folds of her robes. No one moved, not she, not kel Tos’an who had summoned her. “Ras,” he said again.
She straightened, rising, turned her unveiled face toward him, the sword gathered to her breast. There was no expression; to a friend even a kel’e’en might have shown something. He was consumed with the need to get her away from this place.
“Go back,” he said. “We cannot attend to one lost, and not others. Duty, Ras.”
She took the fastenings of the sword in hand, carefully unhooked her own and replaced it, laid what was hers against Nelan’s body.
And walked away, to stand supervising the others, having spoken no word to him.
He walked away too, up the steps, not looking back, cast a naked-faced scowl at kel’ein who had paused in their work. There was a hasty return to it. He reached the top, started to turn and look down.
And suddenly, from inside, a snap of power, a flare of lights.
Everyone stopped in that instant; and there was a heart-stopping rumble.
“Run!” he shouted; they moved, raced ahead of a cloud which billowed out from the door. But the full collapse did not follow.
The two young sen’ein outside started back up the steps running. “No!” he forbade them, and went himself, paused in the doorway, in the choking dust. “All of you,” he shouted back, “stay out.”
He tucked the tail of the zaidhe across his face for a veil, entered the white cloud which the wind whipped away as rapidly as it poured forth. Somewhere inside one cold light shone undamaged, giving no help in the swirling dust: no light of theirs, but a powered lamp.
The whole center had given way. He looked at the ceiling, waded farther through the rubble, disturbing nothing he could avoid, the membrane of his eyes flicking regularly to clear the dust and sending involuntary tears to the outer corner of his eyes.
At one such clearing he saw what he had feared to see, a white-dusted bundle of black amid the rubble.
“Ros,” he called, but there was no answer, no pulse to his touch, which came away wet-fingered. He looked up, heartsick, at the ruined ceiling where electric light cast a blinding haze, saw, to his left, sen-hall’s access, likewise alight.
“Sen Kadas,” he shouted, and obtained only echoes and the steady sifting of plaster.
He left the kel’en’s body, entered the access, coughing in the dust. Cracks were everywhere in the spiral corridor. Bits of the wall crumbled to his touch. He trod carefully, ascended to sen-hall itself. The window there had given way, admitting daylight in a huge crack through which the wind swirled patterns of dust.
And beyond . . . lights gleamed through a farther doorway.
“Sen Kadas,” he called. “Sen Otha?”
There was no response. He ventured in, within a room of row upon row of machinery . . . knew what he was seeing, which was the City itself, the mind, which had taught she’panei and sen’ein time out of mind. This too was a Holy, a Mystery not for a kel’en’s sight. He walked farther, stopped as he realized the cracks which ran everywhere, the ruin which had plunged down through the very core of the tower, taking machinery and masonry, everything.
“Sen’ein,” he called.
Light pulsed, a white light which glared down at him from the machine. He looked up at it, blinking in that blinding radiance.
“Who?” a voice thundered.
“Hlil s’Sochil,” he answered it, trembling creeping through him.
“What is your authorization?”
“From the she’pan Melein s’Intel.”
Lights flared, points of red and amber visible through the white glare, from somewhere beyond it.
“Where is the she’pan?” it asked.
He retreated from it in dread; the light died. With all his heart he would have fled this place, but two of his company were lost. He crept aside to the walls, trod the vast aisles of machinery amid the lights. More lights were being added constantly, places which had been dark coming alive, like something stirring to renewed power.
“Sen’ein,” he called hoarsely.
Suddenly the floor slipped underfoot, a tiny Jolt, that penetrated to his heart. He edged back.
And gazing down into the rubbled collapse at the core, he saw what ended hope of the sen’ein, gold cloth in the slide, amid blocks larger than a man. He could not reach them; there was no means—no need.
“Gods,” tie muttered, sick at heart, and, reckoning the disrespect of that here, shuddered and turned away.
“I am receiving,” An-ehon thundered. The white eye of the machine flared. “Who?”
He fled it, walking softly, quickly as he could—gained the doorway into the sen-hall and kept going, breathless, into the spiraling passage down.
A shadow met him in the turning: one-eyed Desai, who had not followed orders. He grasped the kel’en’s arm, grateful for that living presence.
“Haste,” he said, turning Desai about; they descended together, past the ruin at the bottom, and out, out into the anxious gathering at the door. Hlil drew breath there, coughed, wiped his face with a sleeve which was powdered white with dust.
“Away,” he ordered them. “Get these things away from the edun. There is nothing we can do here. Lately-dead have no more claim than the others.”
They obeyed, with small murmurings of grief. He disregarded proprieties and took burdens himself, took up one at the bottom of the steps, for kel Ros, while the remaining sen’ein prepared to draw the sled holding the Pana alone.
“Move out,” he ordered them, watched them all form file and begin the journey. Ras passed him, lost in some thought of her own, bearing a burden too heavy for her; but most did. He gazed on her with a personal misery which dulled itself in other things, anxiety for all his charges. Nothing which he had touched had gone right. They had lost lives, had lost sen’ein—helpless even to bury the
lost ones.
His leading.
He looked back, last of those who left the city, blinked in the wind—turned from the ruin which was not the city he wished to remember.
Three lives lost; and the tribe itself—it was not certain that anyone survived there to need the things they had gathered. It was his decision to go on, his decision now, to take all that was theirs when they might have halved the weight and abandoned the possessions sessions of the dead.
He understood one rule, that waste was death; that what one gave the desert it never gave back, to world’s end.
He did what he knew to do, which was to yield nothing.
* * *
The bleeding had started again. The wound sealed and broke open again by turns, whenever the slope of the land put him to effort. Duncan clenched the arm against his body and tried to move it as little as possible in his walking. A cough urged at him and that was worse—much worse, if that set in. He tried desperately to pace his breathing, tasting copper in his mouth, the sky occasionally acquiring dark edges in his Sight. He was followed; he knew that he was, and the slow rolls of the eternal flat gave him and them cover. He sought no landmarks, but the sun’s last light, a spot of lurid flame in the west, tainted with the thinning dust.
The dus beside him radiated occasional surges of flight impulse and of anger, confused as he, driven. Occasionally small life rippled the sand ahead, clearing their path, a surreal illusion of animate sands.
And one did not. He stepped into yielding sand, cords whipping up his leg. He snatched out his shortsword and hacked at the strands . . . sand-star, smallish one, else it had been up to his face: they grew that large. This one recoiled, wounded; and the dus ate it, the while he stumbled on his way, half-running a few steps in sickened panic. Whether it had gotten above the boot or not, his flesh was too numb to feel. He walked with the blade in hand after that, finding the hilt comfort in the approach of dark. He ought to take the visor up, he reckoned, before he stumbled into worse; but the sand still blew, and when he tried it for a time his eyes stung so he was as blind without as with. He lowered it again to save himself the misery, and trusted to the beast and to the sword.
The sun sank its last portion beyond the horizon and it was night indeed; whether stars shone or not, whether the dust had cleared that much he could not tell.
He rested in the beginning of the dark; he must. After the tight-ness had relaxed from his chest and his head pounded less severely he began with dull stubbornness to gather himself up, reckoning that if he were to go on living he had no choice about it.
And suddenly the dus sent him strong, clear warning, an apprehension like a chill wind on their backtrail. Come, he sent it, and started to move at all the pace he could.
Madness, to begin a race with mri. He had lost it already. Better sense by far to turn and fight: they would give him the grace of one-at-a-time.
And that was worth nothing if one lost in the first encounter. He gasped breath and tried to hit a steady pace.
Abruptly the dus deserted him, headed off at a tangent to the left. Panic breathed at his shoulders; he turned with it, staying with the beast, having lost control of it. It was taking him to the attack, into it; he felt the wildness surge into his brain—and suddenly—fragments.
It hit from all sides, dus-sense, all about him.
The others.
They had come. His skin contracted in the rage they sent; they had made a trap, the dusei. A fierceness settled into his bones, an alien anger—danger, danger, danger—
A dus reared up out of the dark in front of him, higher than his head; he shied from it, spun, met a kel’en a sword’s length from him.
He flung his sword up, low; steel turned the blade as the kel’en closed with him, shadow and hard muscle and a dus-carried wash of familiarity that stopped him cold. A hard hand seized his arm and hurled him back.
Niun.
He gasped breath, struggled for mental balance, spun left in the sudden awareness of others on them, dus-sense warning them.
“Who are they?” Niun asked him, shortsword likewise in his hand. “What have you stirred?”
“Another tribe.” He gasped for air, shifted his grip on his hilt as he tried to make figures out of the darkness about them. Dusei were at their backs, more than their own two. He drew a shaken breath and lifted his visor, made out a dim movement in the dark before them.
“Who are you?” Niun shouted out.
“The hao’nath,” the answer came back, male and hoarse. “Who are you?”
“Kel’anth of the ja’anom. Get off my trail, hao’nath! You have no rights here.”
There was long silence.
And then there was nothing, neither shadow nor response. Dus-sense went out like a lamp flame, and Duncan shivered convulsively, gasped for the air that suddenly seemed more abundant.
Steel hissed into sheath. Niun tugged down his veil, giving his face to him; Duncan sheathed his sword and did the same, and Niun offered him his open hands.
Duncan embraced him awkwardly, aware of his own chill and the mri’s fever-warmth, his own filthiness and the mri’s fastidious cleanliness.
“Move,” Niun said, taking him by the shoulder and pushing him; he did so, and about them the shadows of dusei gave way, scattered, save his own and the great dus which was Niun’s. He struggled to keep Niun’s pace, no arguments or breath wasted. That was trouble at their backs, only gone back to report; Niun’s long strides carried them off southerly, to rougher land—broke at times into a run, which he matched for a while. It ended in his coughing, doubled up, trying only to walk.
Niun kept him moving, down a gentle roll of the land, an ill dream of pain and dus-sense, until his knees began to buckle under him in the sand and he sank down before a joint should tear and lame him.
Niun dropped to his heels beside him, a hand on his shoulder, and the dusei, his and the other, made a wall about them. “Sov-kela?” Niun asked of him: my-brother-of-the-Kel? He caught his breath somewhat and gripped Niun’s arm in return.
“I reached them. Niun, I have been up there, in the ships.”
Niun was silent a moment; disturbance jolted through the dus sense. “I believed,” Niun said, “you had gotten through when there were no more attacks; but—not that you would have gone among them. And they let you go. They let you go again.”
“Regul have come,” Duncan said, and felt the shock fed back to him. The membrane flashed across Niun’s eyes. A human might have cried aloud, so intense that feeling was.
“Regul and not humans?”
“Both.”
“Allied,” Niun said. Anger fed through. Despair.
“No more firing. Regul did the firing; humans have realized by now . . . Niun, they have listened. The she’pan—they sent a message. She can contact them. Talk with them.”
Again the membrane flashed across. Duncan shivered in that feeling.
“Have you taken hire?” Niun asked. It was a reasonable question, without rancor. The Kel was mercenary.
“I take no hire.”
The dusei caught that feeling too, and wove them together. Niun reached out and caught the wrong arm, let it go at his flinching . . . rubbed at the blood on his fingertips.
“I thought,” Duncan said, “I could reason with someone. The hao’nath kel’anth came up on me. He knew something was wrong. Knew it; and he or the dus moved before I did.”
“Dead?”
“I left him against the pipestalks; dus poison, broken bones or not—I stayed to keep him out of the sand: no more than that.”
“Gods,” Niun spat. He faced him away, took the pack from him, hooked a strap over his own shoulder and started them moving. Duncan blinked, blear-eyed with relief at having that weight gone, and tried to keep his pace, staggering somewhat in the loose sand. Niun delayed and flung a fever-hot arm about him, hurrying him.
“What are they likely to do?”
“I would challenge,” Niun said. “But that would sui
t them. It is the tribe that is in danger now.”
“Melein—”
“I do not know.” Niun pulled at him, for all his efforts to keep stride. “Gods know who is with the she’pan at the moment. I am here; Hlil, in the city . . . The hao’nath have gone back to their own she’pan; they will not challenge the kel’anth of a tribe without her consent, not if she is available . . . But they will not stop that long. If—” He caught his breath. “If they take us here, I can challenge, aye, but one after the other. The meeting of she’panei . . . is different. The she’pan is our protection; we are hers.”
He said nothing else, hard-breathing with a human burden. Duncan took his own weight, cupped the veil to his mouth with his hand to warm the air, went blindly, by sound, by dus-sense, at last with Niun dragging at him.
* * *
They found a place to rest finally, hard ground, a ridge which stretched a stone’s cast along the sands. Duncan flung himself down in an aching knot and fumbled anxiously after the canteen, trying to ease his swollen throat . . . offered to Niun, who drank and put it away. The dusei crowded as close to them as possible as if themselves seeking comfort, and for the time at least there was no intimation of pursuers. Duncan leaned against his dus, his sides heaving harder than those of the beast, wiped at his nose beneath the veils and wanted nothing more than to still and breathe, but Niun disturbed him to see to his wound, soaked a strip torn from his veil in the saliva of his dus and bandaged it. Duncan did not question; it felt better, at least.
“These tsi’mri in the ships,” Niun said. “You know them?”
“I know them.”
“You talked with them—a very long time.”
“No. A day and a night.”
“You walk slowly, then.”
“Far out of my way. Not to be followed; and I walk slowly, yes.”
“Ai.” Niun sat still a moment, nudged finally at the pack he had carried. It was question.
“Food.” Duncan reached for it, to show him. Niun caught his wrist, released it.