Niun held his breath while the rogue lifted his rheum-blinded eyes toward that sound, mobile lips working nervously. It rocked. It gave another explosive snort and shifted its weight, easing aside. The shoulder hit the screen. It toppled with a brazen crash, and the beast whirled, bathed in the glow from the inner shrine. Niun flung his arm over his eyes in horror lest he see the Forbidden, and then, surety in his heart, he reached for his gun, futile against a dus.
He must attack whatever threatened the Forbidden, to prevent, if he could, the invasion of the Sen-shrine. He sighted for the brain, the first of the two brains, knowing full well the following convulsions would destroy him with the dus.
But the dus did not take that step beyond. It lowered its weeping head and nosed at the corpse, disarranging the veil; and when it had done so, it moaned and slowly, almost distractedly, swung its head about, putting its shoulder between its head and the gun, and began to withdraw from the Shrine.
And when it had done so, when it walked the hall outside, still giving that lost-infant sound, for the first time Niun clearly knew it.
Medai’s dus.
There was no mri who could claim, other clues removed, to know any dus but his own, and not even that one, given much passage of time. Dusei were too similar and too mutable, and one could only say that this one was like the dus he knew.
But that this particular one had not killed him, that it had been primarily interested in the body, and departed unsatisfied—that action he understood. Dusei were troubled at death. Other animals ignored the dead, but dusei did not understand, did not accept it. They grieved and searched and fretted, and eventually died themselves, more often than not. They rarely outlived their masters, pining away in their search.
And this one was hunting something it had not found.
Medai’s dus, come looking for him.
A dus that was sickly and covered with sores and deep in the throes of a madness that did not come on swiftly, although regul said that Medai had died but a night ago.
A dus that was thin and starved as its dead master.
A chill feeling grew in Niun, until he was physically shivering, not alone from dread of the dus. He bolstered his gun and glanced fearfully at the nakedness of the inner shrine, on which he ought never to have looked.
It should not have happened. He washed his hands with the water of the offerings, and without setting foot across the forbidden line, he set the screen in place again, his fingers reverent on the inanimate metal. He had lived. The gods, like men, could forgive the irreverence of dusei; and he had looked within the Sen shrine, and felt shaken, but not to the death. He had seen brightness, but nothing of the Objects, or nothing that he could identify as the Holy. He tried to put this from his mind. It was not for a kel’en to have seen. He did not want to remember it.
And Medai—
He set up the lamp again, and refilled it, and lighted it, restoring its comforting glow. Then on his knees he mopped up the spilled oil that by the mercy of the gods had not kept burning; and all the while he worked, exhausted and trembling from his vigil, he thought, and nursed that cold feeling that lodged under his heart.
At last he washed his hands for respect and laid hands on Medai for the irreverence he had to commit: the thought borning in his mind gave him no peace otherwise. He did it quickly, once he had gathered his courage, carefully unfastened the clothing and examined the wound, and found it—shaming his suspicion and his act—as the regul had said.
Ika’al.
“Forgive me,” he said to the spirit of Medai; and reverently reclosed the robes and washed the face and replaced the veils. Then he cast himself on his face before the shrine and made the proper prayers to the several ancestor-gods of his caste for rest for the soul of Medai, with more sincerity than he had ever used on his cousin when he was living.
This should have absolved him and given him peace, having surrendered to that which was proper and honest, but it did not.
He had in him a gathering certainty that, whatever the evidence of his eyes and the testimony of the regul, Medai had not laid down his life willingly.
The dus, so close to a kel’en’s mind, was miuk’ko and grown so thin that it could pass shrine doors; and the body of Medai, once solid with muscle, was thin as the mummified dead.
Kel-quarters were independent units within the regul ship plan, because of the dusei, which the regul feared beyond all logic; and because of the stringent caste laws that a kel’en must observe with respect to contact with outsiders.
But essentially that kel’en was always at the mercy of the regul, who supplied that unit with food, water, even the air he breathed. All that a kel’en could do to assert his independence was lock the door.
Had they wanted him dead, they could have stopped the air and cast him into cold space afterward. But these were tsi’mri, and more than that, they were strangers to the People, a strange new branch of regul; and they might not have known enough to deal with a kel’en. Regul were not fighters.
Not directly.
Consumed by the thought that took shape in him, he rose up and left the shrine, took an offering vessel of water and a pannikin, and went out to the outer hall, to the door, where the mad dus still crouched before the edun.
He had known it must be there, waiting. It was near what it desired, but could not find it. He had been as sure of its lingering there as he was sure how it had been driven mad. It was no less dangerous for its once having been tame; it could still rise up and kill oh impulse. But when he set the water before it, it sniffed at the offering curiously and at last bestirred itself, nosing down into the water. The contents of the pannikin disappeared. Niun filled it a second and a third and a fourth time, add only at the fourth did the beast suddenly avert its head in refusal.
He sank down on his heels and studied the creature, thin as it was and its fur gone in patches. A great open wound was fresh on its side.
Medai’s dus, come from regul care, from violence, from starvation. It would not have left Medai of choice even after he was dead.
Regul would not act as mri would act. They were capable of collusion, of bribery, of deceit, of slaughter of their own young, but never of murder of an adult, never of that. They could neither kill nor lie in cold blood; they hired mri to attend to their enemies.
So he had always been taught, by those who knew the regul better than he, by those who had dealt with regul lifelong.
So he had implicitly believed.
As had Medai.
He rose and walked inside, back to the Shrine, and sat down beside the body of his cousin, arms locked about him, staring without comprehension at the serpentine writings that recorded and concealed the history of the People.
Murder had been done, in one manner or another, whatever name the regul gave it. A kel’en had been killed by his own employers, and his dus weakened to the point that they could drive it out to die naturally—one body to return to the Kel, the act of ignorant regul; another disposed of by predators and scavengers, or at best those incapable of betraying what had happened. Regul hands and regul conscience were doubtless clean. Medai had finally done as they had wished.
He wished desperately to go upstairs and tell someone. He wished to run to Eddan for counsel, to alert the she’pan. But he had nothing for proof but a beast that lay outside the door. He had nothing on which to hang such an accusation, no shape to his suspicion, no motive he could reckon which would have driven the regul to compel a kel’en to such an action.
It was irony of a kind, he thought, that of all whom Medai might have trusted to see to his avenging, he had come to the hands of his oldest rival; and the only likely witness of the truth was a miuk’ko.
Dusei, it was said, lived in the present; they had no memories for what had happened, only for persons and places. It had sought home, the House where it had first lived; it had sought Medai; it had found the one, and not the other.
Chapter Eight
Niun had begun, before
the others had even stirred, to prepare for the journey to Sil’athen. There was the water drawn, and the ritual store of food, a token only, and the real provisions that were for the living.
With much effort he took the body of Medai from the small Shrine and bound it with cords to the regul litter on which it had come. The dus that waited by the doorway saw, but paid no heed to what he did.
Then the others began to come: Eddan and Pasev and Dahacha and the rest of the Kel. The dusei came down too, and the miuk’ko by the door withdrew a space. There in the sunlight it subsided, massive head between its paws, sides heaving. It was deep in shock.
“Miuk,” murmured Debas, horrified to see what sat at their gates.
But Pasev, who was, despite having killed many humans, a gentle soul, went and tried to call to it, staying out of its reach. It reared aside with a plaint of rage and sank down again a little distance away, exhausted by its effort. The dusei of the edun drew aside from it, agitated, sensing the distress of their fellow and the danger he posed. They formed a tight knot about the Kel and commenced that circling action by the guard dus, protecting the Kel from the threat of the rogue.
And eyes were on Niun, questioning. He shrugged and picked up the ropes of Medai’s improvised sled. “It came,” he said, “into the shrine last night.” He looked at Eddan. “It was hunting someone.”
And he saw the ugly surmise leap into the kel’anth’s eyes: a wise man, Eddan, if he were not kel’en. And quietly Eddan turned and gestured to Pasev, to Liran and Debas and Lieth. “Stay here,” he said. “Guard the she’pan.”
“Eddan,” said Pasev, “the she’pan forbade—”
“Any who wish to stay besides these may stay. Guard the she’pan, Pasev.”
And Niun, not waiting for them, started out, knowing already by the resistance of the sled that he was going to pay dearly for his obstinacy, when the she’pan and all the rest had given him a way to escape this kinsman’s duty.
Slowly, painfully, the miuk’ko heaved itself up and tried to follow the sled. It went only as far as the roadway, and there sank down, exhausted, at the end of its strength.
The other dusei flanked it, one still pacing between the dus and the remaining Kel, watching the rogue. They did not follow the burial party. They were not wanted. They guarded the edun.
And Eddan and the other kel’ein overtook Niun on the slope that led to the hills, and offered their hands to the rope. He did not object to this. He felt pained that they must make this gesture, showing him their fellowship, as if that needed to be shown.
He veiled himself, one-handed, lowered the visor, already conserving the moisture his panting breaths tended to waste. He had taken along more than the usual quota of water, knowing the toll it would exact of them. One did not work on Kesrith: this was for youngling regul and for regul machines. Exertion would wring the moisture from the body and bring hemorrhage without proper caution.
But none of them said the obvious, that the journey was ill-advised.
Never had the Kel defied the Mother, not directly.
And it came to Niun then that the Mother had recourse available: she might have directly ordered Eddan. She had not done this.
Uncharitably, he attributed it not to love, but that she drank again of komal, and therefore could not be awakened when Melein brought his refusal back to her: such was Intel, she’pan of Kesrith. It had happened before.
He held to this irreverent anger, refusing to believe that she had relented, for this, at least, had never happened before, not in all the years that he had made requests of her. He did not think that she would begin now that he defied her.
He refused to repent his stubbornness even when the trail grew steeper, and the rocks tormented his feet and the air came like cold fire into his lungs.
In the sky, the regul ships continued to come and go, their speed making mock of the agony of the small figures of mri—ships carrying more and more of their kind into refuge before humans should come and claim the world.
* * *
The trail to Sil’athen was no trail, but a way remembered by all mri that had ever walked it. There was, no real trace of it among the rocks, save that it was devoid of the largest obstacles and tended from landmark to landmark. Niun knew it, for burials had been common enough in his life, though he had never seen the ceremonies surrounding a birth; he had been too young for Melein’s. He drew on the sled’s ropes alone now, following after Eddan’s tall slim figure, wrestling the sled among the small rocks until he had to wrap a fold of his robes about his torn hands to save them. His breath came hard and his lungs ached; he was accustomed to weapons-work, not to labor like tsi’mri; and every few paces of altitude gained made breathing that much more difficult.
“Niun,” one and another of the brothers would say, “let me take it a time.” But he shook off their offering hands here. Only the oldest, save Pasev, whom Eddan had placed in command back at the edun, had come on this trek. His conscience tormented him now, that his stubbornness might prove the death of one of these brave old men; and surely, he thought, the she’pan had foreseen this, and he had been too blind with his own self-importance to consider that her reasons might not have involved him. He had thought the worst of Medai, and repented it now; and it began to dawn on him that he might have been mistaken in other things.
But it would shame these men now, having begun, to turn back. He had brought them out here, he with his stubborn pride; he welcomed the pain, that drove clear thought from his mind, atonement for his pettiness, against them, against the dead. Medai had been no coward, no man light-of-thought; he was certain of that now, that his cousin had held a long time, against perfidy of his masters, against the gods knew what else.
And why these things had been: this was still beyond him.
“Eddan,” he said quietly, when they rested in the shadow of a high crag, and the sand beyond them rippled in the ruddy light of Arain’s zenith. A borrower had his lair out on the flat beyond. He had seen it pock the surface, sand funnelling down as it reacted to the breeze, thinking it had prey.
“Ai?”
“I think you believe Medai’s death was not what the regul said.”
Eddan, veiled, moved his hand, a gesture that agreed.
“I think,” Niun continued, “that the Kel has already discussed this, and that I was probably the only one in the Kel who was surprised to find that so.”
Eddan looked at him long. The membrane nictitated across his eyes, flashed clear again. “Niun,” he said, “that is an uncharitable thing, to assume that we would willfully keep you from our thoughts in such a matter.”
“But perhaps it is still so, sir, that you had reasons.”
Eddan’s hand closed on Niun’s wrist, a hard grip. Eddan had taught him the yin’ein; there was none more skillful than Eddan and Pasev, to divide a man body from soul with delicacy; one could not see the blade move. And the strength was still in his hand. “Do not look to serve regul, Niun s’Intel Zain-Abrin. You serve the she’pan; and one day you will be in my place. I think that day is coming soon.”
“If I should be kel’anth,” said Niun, cold at the words of omen, and unsure what he meant by that, “then it will be a very small Kel. Everyone else is senior to me.”
“You will have your honor, Niun. There was never doubt of this in our minds, only in yours. It will come.”
He was disturbed to the heart by the deadly urgency of this, at Eddan’s pressing this upon him. “I have never fought,” he objected. “How am I fit for anything?”
Eddan shrugged again. “We are the Hand; others do the planning. But be sure that you have a use and that the she’pan has planned for it. Remember it. Medai was considered and rejected. Remember that too.”
He sat stunned, all his surmises torn down and laid waste at once. “Sir,” he said, but Eddan thrust away from him and rose, turning his face from him, making it plain that he wanted no further question on the matter. Niun rose to his feet, seeking some way to ask
, let his hand fall helplessly: when Eddan would not answer, he would not answer, and quite probably it was all Eddan could say, all that he knew how to say.
The she’pan is well-pleased with his death, Melein had said; the coldness of that still chilled him. And: Medai was considered and rejected, Eddan had told him.
For the first time he pitied his cousin, saw everything turned inside out.
Himself, in his youthful jealousy—Medai, whose crime had been only that he had looked on Melein, and that the she’pan had planned otherwise. Kesrith was a hard and unforgiving world. The Mother of Kesrith was like her world, without mercies.
His own stubbornness had run counter to her will. He had defied her, knowing nothing of her reasons. He had done a thing which kel’ein did not do and tested her resolve to stop him, at a time when the People could least afford division.
It was possible, he thought, that not alone the regul had killed Medai—that the she’pan and even Melein had had their part in it.
He pitied Medai, fearing for himself. He would have wished to have spoken with his cousin, both of them men now, and not one only—to have learned of Medai the things Eddan could not tell him. He looked at the black-shrouded form on the litter as he took up the ropes again, and found that all his confidence had left him.
He need not have been alone these years, he thought suddenly, and Medai need not have died, and so many things need not have happened, if he had not made the she’pan choose between them.
It was not alone the regul that had killed Medai.
* * *
It was evening when they reached the holy place, the cliffs, the windy recesses where the caves of Sil’athen hid the dead of the People that had died away from sun-burial. There were many, many graves, the oldest dating from before Kesrith had known regul, the last those that had been born on Nisren, and had fled here for refuge.