They would die doing that; there was no sane reason for them to preserve the ja’anom for his possession.
The five halted before them, individually.
“Kel’anth of the ja’anom!” the central one shouted. “We are the ja’ari, the ka’anomin, the patha, the mari, the hao’nath! I am kel’anth Tian s’Edri Des-Paran daithenon, of she’pan Edri of the ja’ari. We hear reports of landings; and I ask: does the Kel’anth of the ja’anom have an answer?”
“Kel’anth of the ja’anom!” shouted the one farthest right. “I am kel’anth Rhian s’Tafa Mar-Eddin, daithenon, of the she’pan Tafa of the hao’nath. And my question you well know.”
There was silence after. They had spoken in the hal’ari, not the mu’ara of tribes: and that the kel’anth of the hao’nath was alive to protest in person . . . here was a stubborn man.
“Kel’anthein! I am kel’anth Niun s’Intel Zain-Abrin, daithenon, of she’pan Melein of the’ ja’anom and of all the People.” He drew in a second great breath, clenched the sword tightly in his fists. “I am kel’anth of the Voyagers, of those who went out from the world; heir of An-ehon and Le’a’haen, of Zohain and Tho’e’i-shai; kel’anth of the Kel of the People. Hand of the she’pan of the Mysteries; for she’pan Melein I took the ja’anom, and in her name I defend it if challenged, or challenge if she so decides. The path we take is our path, and I defend her right to walk it. Be warned!”
They stood still a moment. Somewhere the dus stirred, troubling, and he willed it silent.
A rustling of cloth and steps approached behind him, a breath of holy incense, a wisp of white robes in the corner of his eye that he dared not turn from his enemies.
Melein.
“Kel’anth of the ja’anom!” shouted Rhian of the hao’nath. “Ask your she’pan for a message and we will bear it.”
Any word of enemies must, by custom, pass through him. “Tell them,” Melein shouted back in her own voice. “Call your she’panei here. Call them here.”
* * *
More dead lay in the great square, corpses becoming barriers to sand which drifted in waves across the pavings, the scale of everything reduced by the great edun which towered even in ruin. “Straight through the center,” Galey said in a low voice, and led the way for them. Boaz insisted it was the sane thing, that mri would not attack from ambush if the approach were direct: she had that information from Duncan.
Forty years humans had been fighting mri, and all experience denied that theory: mri had fired from ambush; had done precisely—the realization hit him with sudden irony—what humans had done. No human had ever walked plainly up to mri. He recalled stories of mri who had advanced alone against humans, berserkers, shot to rags. Of a sudden things fit, and sickened him.
And the dead . . . everywhere—alien; but dead infants were tragedy in any reckoning. Here a woman had fallen, her arms spread wide to shield a trio of children, covering them with her robes as if that could save them; here one of the warriors had died, bearing a blue-clad infant in his arms; or a pair of the gold-robes, embraced and tucked up still sitting, as if the flight had become too much for them and they had resigned themselves to die; an older child, whose mummified body preserved the gesture of an outstretched hand across the sandy stones, reaching toward what might have been its mother.
Alien and not. Regul had killed them; or perhaps he had. It was Haven, and Kiluwa, and Asgard, and Talos, and all the evils they had done to each other. It was world’s end, and earnestly he wished for some stir of life within these ruins, some relief from such things.
The steps hove up before them; he kept walking, hands at his side, toward the dark inside. He knew of edunei, these places that served mri for fortresses and what else no one knew. Shrines. Holy places. Homes. No one understood. Forty years and no one understood. Forty years and no one had understood that the warrior Kel was not the whole of the mri culture; no one had known that there was Kath or Sen, that two-thirds of the mri population were strictly noncombatant.
The place afflicted all of them. From time to time the regs had stared at some sight worse than the others, stared longer than they might from curiosity, shook their heads. They were born to the war; anyone under forty could say that, but this was not a thing they had had to see firsthand.
No one spoke. Boaz paused at the top of the steps to take a picture of the way they had come, of the square with its dead. Then the dark of the interior took them in, and their footsteps and the suck and hiss of the breathers echoed in great depth.
Galey took his torch in hand and switched it on, played it over the rubble which blocked most of the accesses to the towers. “Hey!” he shouted, trying the direct approach to the uttermost; and winced at the echoes.
“Left tower,” Boaz said.
“Place is like to fall in on us,” Galey objected, but he went, the others with them, into the left-hand access, up a spiraling passage dark before their light and dark after, a place for ambushes if any existed anywhere in the city.
Light shone at the top; the great room there had a split wall; and beyond, through another doorway—he walked in that direction, to anticipate Boaz, who was sure to go without their protection. His heart beat fearfully as he saw the rows of machines. He had seen the like before, on Kesrith.
“Shrine,” he said aloud.
Boaz paused in the doorway and looked back at him, advanced again carefully. The whole center of the floor was gone, a pile of rubble and twisted steel.
And lights burned on the panels, far into the dark.
“Don’t touch anything,” Lane said. The tech pushed himself to the fore, looked about him, pulled Shibo and Kadarin aside from a circle marked on the flooring. Galey’s own foot had crossed that line. He took it back.
“Weapons,” Lane said, “very likely controlled from here.”
And the last word was choked into hush, for there was a gleam of light from above, the circle suddenly drowned in glare.
“An-hi?” a mechanical voice thundered. Boaz shook her head in panic, denying understanding; it asked again, more complexly, and again and again and again.
Weapons, Galey thought in sick terror. O God, the ships up there . . . We’ve triggered it.
Lane moved, thrust himself into the circle, into the light that bathed him in white unreality. He looked up at the source of it, at screens that flared with mri writings:
“Hne’mi!” he cried at it: Friend! It was one of the only words they knew.
It hurled words back, complex and then simple, repeating, repeating, repeating.
And struck. Lane sprawled, still, glaze-eyed from the instant he hit the floor. “No fire!” Galey cried, seeing a gun in Shibo’s hand. Every board was alight, the screens alive, and the light flaring blue. Boaz reached for Lane’s outflung hand . . . changed her mind and drew back; all of them froze. Galey shifted a glance toward the door, to Shibo and Kadarin, whose faces were stark with fright, to Boaz, whose face was fixed toward the machine, the white light turning her to shadow and silver—to Lane, who was quite, quite dead.
Eventually there was silence again. The light faded. Galey chanced a quick move, herding the two men, dragging at Boaz. They all ran, into the sunlight of the room outside, with the machine flaring to life again, thundering its questions.
“Go,” he urged them. “Get out of here.” He hastened them to the access, down, into the lower hall. They pelted across it, a flight close to panic; he seized at Kadarin and stopped when they reached the open air, listening.
There was only the sunlight and the square, unchanged. They stood there, their breathers, hissing into the breathers, their eyes mutually distraught.
“We couldn’t help him,” Galey said. “There’s nothing to be done for him. We get out of this—we come back for him.”
They accepted that . . . seemed to.
“It was what Duncan said,” Boaz broke the silence after a moment. “Machines. What he described.”
There had been no firing aloft, no hostile act from th
e city. The holocaust had come close to them, but it had not happened. It waited, perhaps, on orders. Mri orders. Perhaps that was what it had asked of them.
Who are you?
What am I to do?
An idiot power seeking instruction.
“If there’s a link between the cities,” Galey said, “we may just have sent a message.”
Shibo and Kadarin said nothing, only looked at Boaz, at plump, fragile Boaz, who had become their source of sanity: a mri world, and they needed mri answers.
“I’d say that’s likely,” she agreed. “Maybe it has; but they haven’t fired yet.”
“And we get out of here,” Galey said. “Now.”
He strode down the steps, the others behind him, past a knot of kel’ein corpses, out across the open square. His mistake, his responsibility. It had been a brave act on Lane’s part, to try to deal with the machine. He could have done something; he was not sure what . . . pulled Lane out, it might have been.
“Mr. Galey,” Boaz said, her breath wheezing in her mask; she pulled it down a moment, gasped as they walked. “We have nothing to report. We can’t go back with this.”
He said nothing for a long space of walking, trying to think in the interval, to draw his mind back from Lane and onto next matters. He stopped when they had cleared the square, among the ruined buildings, looked at the face of Shibo and Kadarin. “We get back to the shuttle,” he said. “We try another site.”
“Sir,” said Kadarin, “no argument, but what could we have done that we didn’t? What can we do with a thing like that? Mri maybe, but that thing—”
“I got another worry,” said Shibo, “what happens when we try to move that shuttle with that thing stirred up.”
“Mri,” Boaz said, “are in open country; Duncan gave us truth in what he told us. We should take the rest of it—look for mri, not the machines.”
“We’re near enough the rim,” Galey said, “I’ll slide for it and stay low, and that’s the best we can do. We’ve got no help but that. But we can’t go off cross-country. We’ve got our corridors set up, Boz, to get us from one point to the other without crossing what we figure for defense zones, and that doesn’t give us much space in this region for any search. But I figure we keep this mission going; another site, maybe—in better condition.” He looked at the ground, hands in pockets, a cold knot in his belly, looked up at them after a moment. “I reckon not to include Lane in the report; it goes quick, no space for explaining; they have enough excuse for canceling us off this business and going some other route. If I were Lane I wouldn’t want that. That’s my feeling on it; that we keep trying.”
“While we do,” Boaz said, looking straight at the others, “we hold out hope of another solution. Of stopping what we’ve seen here. We go back . . . and what else are they going to do? We stay out here; just by that we prove there’s hope in an approach to these people. We remove fear . . . and we bring sanity to this situation.”
The two regs nodded. Galey did, reckoning plainly it was court martial. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a long walk.”
* * *
It took time, that the she’panei should come from their tribes to that sandy slope; some were very old, and all reluctant. Niun stood still, aching from the long strain of standing, watching with a sense of unreality five white-robed figures advancing from separate points of the horizon, each accompanied by her kel’anth and several sen’ein.
Melein started forward eventually, to meet them on equal ground at the bottom of the slope. He walked with her, slowly, with sen’anth Sathas joining them. He offered no words; if she wanted to speak, she would. Doubtless her mind was as full as his; doubtless she had some clear intention in this madness. He hoped that this was the case.
To challenge them all, perhaps, after giving them her ultimatum. So she had done with the she’pan of the ja’anom.
They stopped; the others came to them, as close as warriors might come to one another, a stone’s easy toss: such also was the distance for she’panei in the rare instance that they must meet. Kel’ein remained veiled; she’panei and sen’ein met without, elder faces, masked in years. One by one they named themselves, Tafa of the hao’nath; Edri of the ja’ari; Hetha’in of the patha; Nef of the mari; Uthan of the ka’anomin. Tafa and Hetha’in bore the kel-scars, and only Nef was as young as middle years.
“Your kel’anth has used powerful names,” said Tafa, when the naming came to Melein herself. “What do you use?”
“I am Melein s’Intel, Melein not-of-the-ja’anom, out of Edun Kesrithun of the last standing-place of the Voyagers, heir of the cities of Kutath and of the edunei of Nisren, of Elag called Haven, and of Kesrith. For names I begin with Parvet’a, who led us out, and who began the line of which we two are born; and I say that we are home, she’panei. Ja’anom met us and would not acknowledge my claim. I took the ja’anom.”
Eyes nictitated. There was not a glance or a word among them.
“Will you challenge?” Melein asked. “Or will you hear?”
There was the sound of the wind whipping at their robes, the whisper of sand moving. Nothing more.
“I need kel’ein,” Melein said, “the service of forty hands of kel’ein from each Kel; lend them. Such as survive I shall send back again with Honors which those who did not go will envy.”
“Where will you take them?” asked Hetha’in. “To what manner of conflict, and for what purpose? You have brought us attack, and tsi’mri, and the wasting of our cities. Where will you take them?”
“I am the foretold,” Melein said. “And I call on you for your children and their strength, for the purpose for which we went out in the beginning, and I shall build you a House, she’panei.”
There were small movements, a glancing from one to the other, who ought never to look to one another, who were never united.
“We have trailed a tsi’mri among you,” Tafa said.
“That you have,” Melein answered her. “See, and trust your Sight, she’panei; by the Mystery of the Mysteries, by the Seeing . . . give me kel’ein who have the courage to fight this fight and sen’ein to witness and record if in your shrines.”
“With tsi’mri?” cried Tafa. “With walking-beasts?”
“By them you know that I am not Kutathi; and by that you know what I am, Tafa of the hao’nath. See! We are at a point, she’panei of deciding. Our ship is gone; our enemies are many; of the millions who went out, my kel’anth and I are the last alive. We two—made it home, and do you by your suspicion destroy us, who have survived all that tsi’mri have done? Sit down and die, she’panei; or give me the forces I need.”
Tafa of the hao’nath turned her back, walked away and stopped by her kel’anth. A coldness settled at Niun’s belly. For a moment he had hoped . . . that five she’panei who could unite against an intruder could see farther than most.
The kel’anth of the hao’nath walked forward: Rhian s’Tafa; Niun moved out to meet him, met the eyes above the veil, of an older man than he, and worn with hurt and dus-poison and the march that had worn them both. There was nothing of hate there now, only of regret. There had been such in Merai’s eyes when they had met, that sorrow. He wished to protest; it was double suicide, Tafa’s madness . . . but in challenge they were held even from speaking.
The kel’ein of two tribes should ring them about, shield the other castes from such a sight; here kel’anthein did that office, too few to do more than make the token of a ring.
They drew, together, a long hiss of steel; Rhian’s blade lifted to guard; he lifted his own, waited, slipped his mind into hand and blade, nothingness and now.
A pass; he turned it and returned, cautiously; countered and returned. He was not touched; Rhian was not. The blades had breathed upon each other, no more. This was a Master, this Rhian. Another pass and turn, a flutter of black cloth, cut loose; his eyes and mind were for the blade alone; a fourth pass: he saw a chance and a trap, evaded it.
“Stop!”
Tafa’s sharp command; they paused, alike poised on guard. He thought of treachery, of the insanity of trusting strangers. But not tsi’mri: mri. Eyes amber as his own regarded him steadily beyond the two blades.
“Kel’anth of the hao’nath,” Tafa cried. “Disengage!”
Niun stayed still as the kel’anth retreated the one pace which took them out of sword’s-distance. “Disengage,” Melein bade him. “The hao’nath have asked.”
He stepped his pace back, stood until the hao’nath kel’anth had sheathed his sword; then he ran his own into sheath, steadily enough for all the tautness of his nerves. It was challenger’s prerogative, to stop the contest without a death; challenge then might be returned from the other side, without mercy.
It dawned on him slowly that he had won, that this man had gotten out alive, and he was glad of that, for his bravery. He did not relax. They might all try his measure, one after the other. He tried to subdue the pulse which hammered in his veins; one thing to fight well; the greater matter was discipline, not to be shaken by any tactic, fair or foul.
“We lend you your two hundred,” Tafa said, “and our kel’anth with them. You might demand more; but this we offer.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Acceptable,” Melein said. The breath left Niun’s lungs no more swiftly, but the pounding of his heart filled his ears.
“And we lend,” said the she’pan of the patha, “our kel’anth and two hundred to stay if they bring fair report of you. We cannot sit under one tent, she’pan; but let our kel’anthein do so, and bring us word again what they have seen, whether to do what you ask or to challenge. This is fair, in our thinking.”
“So,” said mari and ja’ari almost at one breath.
“We ka’anomin are out of Edun Zohain, far out of our range. Our allegiance is to the ma’an mri, but we agree unless the ma’an send to recall us. For a hand of days let them observe; and that long we will wait for answer.”
“Agreeable,” said Melein, and other heads bowed. “A hand of days or less. Life and Honors.”
She turned away; the other she’panei did so, with their sen’ein. Kel’anthein remained a moment, covering the retreat.