Her eyes grew troubled. “Let us go,” she said suddenly. “Let us go now, quickly. I do not know what we will do with him, but we cannot settle it now.”
“What are you saying?” Duncan demanded of them suddenly in his hoarse voice. Perhaps there were certain words, a sideward look, that he had caught amid what they had said. Niun looked on him and thought uneasily that Duncan did suspect how little his life might weigh with them.
“Move” Niun said again, and pushed him, not gently. Duncan abandoned his questions and moved where he was told without arguing.
And if it were Duncan that was hunted, and regul were tracking them for his sake, then, Niun thought, Duncan would ultimately have to go to the enemy in such a manner to stop that search in such a manner that he could not betray to them the fact that a she’pan of the People was still alive.
O gods, Niun mourned within himself, Urged toward murder and dishonor, and not seeing any other course.
But the aircraft did not come again, and he was able to forget that threat in the urgency of their present journey—to put off thinking what he might have to do if the search resumed.
* * *
Twice, despite Melein’s wishes, they had to rest, for Melein’s sake; and each time when Niun would have stayed longer, she insisted and they walked again, at last with Niun holding her arm, her slim fingers clenching upon his against the unsteadiness of her legs.
And after the mid of the night, they entered a narrow canyon that wound strangely, dizzily, and began to be a descent, where the walls leaned together threateningly over their heads and cast them into dark deeper than the night outside.
“Use your light,” Melein said then. “I think there is stone overhead how entirely.” And Niun used Duncan’s penlight, ever so small a beam to find their footing. Down and down they went, a spiralling course and narrow, until they suddenly came upon a well of sky above them, where the night seemed brighter than the utter black they had travelled. Here was a widening, where walls were splashed with symbols the like of which had once adorned the edun itself.
The foremost dus reared aside, gave a roar that echoed horridly all up and down the passage, and Niun swung the beam leftward, toward the dus. There in a niche was a huddled knot of black rags and bones.
A guardian’s grave.
Niun touched his brow in reverence to the unknown kel’en, and because he saw Duncan standing too near that holy place, he drew him back by the arm. Then he turned his light on the doorway where Melein stood, a way blocked by stones and sealed with the handprint of the guardian who had built that seal and set his life upon it.
Melein signed a reverence to the place with her hand, and suddenly turned to Duncan and looked at him sternly. “Duncan, past the grave of the guardian you must not go or you will die. Stand here and wait. Touch nothing, do nothing, see nothing.” And to Niun: “Unseal it. It is lawful.”
He gave the light to her and began, with the uppermost stones, to unseal what the guardian had warded so many years, a shrine so sacred that a kel’en would wait to the death in warding it. He knew what choice the man had made. Food and water the kel’en had had, the liberty thereafter to range within sight of his warding-place, to hunt in order to survive; but when the area failed him, when illness or harsh weather or advancing age bore upon the solitary kel’en, he had retreated to this chosen niche to die, faithful to his charge, his spirit hovering over the place in constant guardianship.
And perhaps Intel herself had stood here and blessed the closing of this door, and set her kiss upon the brow of the brave guardian, and charged him with this keeping.
One of the kel’ein who had come with her from Nisren, forty years ago, when the Pana had come to Kesrith.
The rocks rattled away from the opening with increasing ease, until Melein could step over what was left, setting foot into the cold interior. The light held in her hand ran over the walls, touched writings that were the mysteries of the Shrine of shrines, convoluted symbols that covered all the walls. For an instant Niun saw it, then sank down to his knees, face averted lest he see what he ought not. For a time he could hear her tiniest step in that sacred place; and then there was no sound at all, and he dared not move. He saw Duncan against the far wall of the well, the dusei by him, and not even they moved. He grew cold in his waiting and began to shiver from fear.
If she should not come back, he must still wait. And there was no stir of life within, not even the sound of a footstep.
One of the dusei moaned, its nerves afflicted with the waiting. It fell silent then, and for a long time there was nothing.
Then came a stirring, a quiet rhythmic sound at first from within the shrine; and at last he recognized it for the sound of soft weeping that became yet more bitter and violent.
“Melein!” he cried aloud, turning his eyes to that forbidden place; and shadows were moving within the doorway, a soft flow of lights. His voice echoed impiously round the walls and startled the dusei, and he scrambled to his feet, terrified to go in and terrified not to.
The sound stopped. There was silence. He came as far as the door, set his hand on it, nerved himself to go inside. Then he heard her light steps somewhere far inside, heard the sounds of life, and she did not summon him. He waited, shivering.
Things moved inside. There was the sound of machinery. It continued, and yet at times he heard her steps clearly. And he remembered with a panic that he had turned his back on Duncan, and whirled to see.
But the human only stood, no closer than Melein had permitted, and made no attempt to flee.
“Sit down,” he bade Duncan sharply; and Duncan did so where he stood, waiting. Niun cursed himself for seeking after Melein and forgetting the charge she had set on him, to mind matters outside. He had put them both at Duncan’s mercy had the human braved the dusei to take advantage of it. He settled on the sand himself, at such an angle that he could watch the human and yet steal glances toward the shrine. He wrapped his arms about his knees, locked his hands with numbing force, and waited, listening.
It was a long, long wait, in which he grew miserable and changed position many a time. It seemed in his sense of time that it must be drawing toward dawn, although the overcast sky visible above them still was dark. And for a long, long time there was no sound at all from within the shrine.
He hurled himself to his feet finally, impatient to go again, to the door, and then persuaded himself that he had no business to invade that place. In his misery he paced the small area he had to pace and looked down betimes at the human, who waited as he had been warned to wait. Duncan’s eyes were unreadable in the almost-dark.
There was the sound of footsteps again. He turned upon the instant, saw the white flash of the penlight in the doorway. He saw Melein, a shadow, carrying the tiny light in her fingers, her arms clasped about something.
He went as close as he dared, saw that what she carried was some sort of casing, ovoid, made of shining metal. It had a carrying bar recessed into it at one end, but she bore it as she might have carried an infant, as something precious, though she staggered with the weight of it and could not step over the stones bearing it.
“Take it,” she said in a faint, strained voice, and he galvanized himself out of his paralysis of will and reached forth his arms to receive it, dismayed by the weight of what she had managed to carry. It was cold and strange in balance and he shivered as he took it against him.
And he was cold again when he saw her face, moisture glistening there in the reddish light that began to spread behind her, and shadows leaping within the shrine from this side and that: she had turned once to look back, and then gazed back at him as from some vast distance.
Melein, he tried to say to her, and found it impossible. She was Melein still, and sister: but something else was contained in her, and he did not know how to speak to that, to call her back. He held out his hand, anxious at the fire behind her; and she took it and stepped over the rocks at the entry, and came with him. Her skin was cold. Her
hand slipped lifelessly from his when she no longer needed him.
Duncan waited, backed a little from the both of them, continuing to stare into the light that was growing behind them. Perhaps he, understood that something of great value was being destroyed. He looked dazed, confused.
There was left only the strange, cold ovoid. Niun bore it in both his arms as Melein started for the passage outward. He knew that he surely bore an essential part of the Pana, which name his caste could not even speak without fear, which a kel’en ought never to see, let alone handle.
The kel’en who had borne it here had devoted himself to die afterward, to hold it secret and undisturbed. This had been an honorable man, of the old way, the Kel of the Between; such a man would have been shocked at Niun s’Intel.
But he drew courage from holding it, for by it Melein had come into her power: he felt this of a surety. She had been only half a she’pan in his eyes, appointed by violence and necessity. But now he believed that the essential things had passed, that Intel had given her all she needed. She’pan, he could call her hereafter, believing implicitly that she knew the Mysteries. She had been face to face with the Pana, understanding what a kel’en could not. He did not envy her this understanding: the sound of her weeping still haunted him.
But she knew, and she led, and hereafter he trusted her leading implicitly.
They fled, they and the human and the dusei, out of the well, where smoke began to billow up, betraying them to the sky, where flames lit the walls with red and pursued them with heat. They entered the ascending turns of the way that they had come, into the cold dark.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Nom, in its first day of new operations, was aswarm with human technicians. Stavros reveled in the sound and scurry of humanity, after so long among the slow-moving regul. Reports came in, a bustle of human experts adding their agility to the technology of regul in repairs of the damaged plants, in clearing the wreckage left by the storm and the fighting.
And at a point judged stable enough to support a ship, probe Flower rested her squat body out on the height to the side of the city opposite the ruined port: a small Vessel for a star-capable craft, a ship without the need for vast secure landing area, her design enabling her to operate in complete independence.
It had been a fortunate decision that brought several such probes on the mission, against the need for such difficult landings, despite their lack of defense against attack. Saber still rested up at the station, spacemade and spacebound, a kilometer long and incapable of landing anywhere.
Flower, despite the name, was an ungainly shell, without fragility, without exposed vanes, without need of landing gantries and docks, an ugly ship, meant for plain, workman duties.
She brought technicians, scientists, who were already beginning to sift through the remnant of Kesrith’s records, to sample the air, the soil, to perform the myriad tasks that would begin to appropriate the world to human colonists.
“Favor,” bai Hulagh had said, seeing operations begin. “We regret in the light of this new good feeling, the unfortunate destruction of our equipment in the calamity at the port. We might have been of much assistance.”
Regul younglings in general were not so easily adaptive: they fretted at the nearness of humans, and preferred to work in their own groups. They made it no secret that they would gladly be off Kesrith now, to seek the security of their own kind in regul space.
But Hulagh had taken some few of them into his own office within the Nom and when the younglings came out, they had smiles for humans and great courtesy, and a powerful fear of the bai.
Until the storms descended, and the dusei returned.
The report came in first from the water plant, Galey’s group, that reported to Flower that there were animals moving in large numbers there upon the heights; and Flower confirmed it, and flashed the same to the biologists, and in the doing of it, to Stavros.
Stavros locked his sled into the track that would take him to the far side of the Nom, and whisked through several changes to the observation deck, disengaged, and went on manual through the doors and out into the acrid wind.
A ruddy bank of cloud was sweeping in, and there, there, all round the visible horizon, sat the dusei.
A chill went over him, that had nothing to do with the wind, or the biting smell of Kesrith’s rains. He sat in the sled, the wind whipping at his sparse hair. He saw Flower squatting on her hilltop; and the distant water plant, and vehicles speeding for cover as the storm came down; and airships, running for the makeshift field before the storm should hit: miracle if the crews could get them secured in time. He clenched his fist in rage, foreseeing damage, ships picked up by Kesrith’s winds and hurled like toys about the field—human equipage, that, expensive and irreplaceable.
He shifted onto Flower’s wavelength and heard Flower giving frantic instructions. They were warning the aircraft off, seeking means to route them round the storm to temporary landing elsewhere. He watched as lightning lit the clouds, and the clouds bred and built, and rolled in with frightening rapidity, red-lit with Arain’s glow.
And the dusei in unending rows sat, and watched, and maintained their vigil. The rains began to fall.
Stavros shivered as the first drops spattered the nose of the sled. It was not a place to sit encased in metal, with the lightning flashing overhead. He backed, opened the doorway, entered the Nom and sealed the door after, still hearing Flower’s chatter, with weather-radar on his receptor, a bow of storm that clutched at the sea’s edge, at the city itself.
Flower, he sent, breaking in on their communications. Flower: Stavros.
They acknowledged, a thin metallic sound, interrupted by static.
Flower; the dusei, the dusei—
“We have observed, sir. We are regretfully busy—”
He broke in again. Flower: drive off the dusei. Break them up, drive them away.
They acknowledged the order. He sat his sled feeling as if he had lost his mind, as if all reason departed him. Doubtless Flower believed that he had lost his senses. But the ominous heaviness in the air persisted. His skin prickled. He could not bear the dus-presence, watching, watching at the storm’s edge.
Responsible?
He refused to believe it. Yet in panic he had diverted Flower to deal with them. He heard them discussing the task—too wise to discuss the wisdom of it in his heating. He sat with his skin drawn into gooseflesh, his teeth near to chattering, a quavering and sickly old man, he thought, a man who had been among strangers too long.
He could countermand his own order, break in again and bid them tend more important matters.
But neither could he rid himself of the fear of the dusei.
His screens went all to static, robbing him of the power to communicate with anyone. The static lasted, and there came a note over his receptors that shrilled, ear-tormenting, and passed beyond audibility. He powered down, quickly, desperate, of a sudden consumed with the fear that the sled itself might be malfunctioning, himself trapped, helpless to move or call for help.
He watched, through a curtain of rain against the glass, the line of the dusei begin to break, the beasts scattering; and still he shivered, terrified as he saw many of them break not toward the hills, but toward the city, entering its streets, ranging where dusei were not wont to come.
Attacking.
The static continued.
A regul voice came over the loudspeaker, distorted by static, unintelligible. The address system cut in and out sporadically. Hail rattled against the windows, shaking them dangerously. Stavros hastily tried to cut in the stormshields on the observation deck, and they did not operate. He thought to put the sled on battery, and obtained responses from it, but his screens were still dead. Somewhere there was a crash, a heavy impact of falling plastiglass: and wind and the smell of rain went through the Nom halls.
Stavros backed the sled, tried to engage the track and fouled the order sequence, began again.
It took.
He whisked himself out of the area and around the corner, finding the hall a wreckage, unshielded windows lying on the carpet at the end PC the hall, curtains whipping loose from their bases. Regul younglings cowered in the hall.
Deprived of the screen, he could not communicate with them. They closed about him, babbling questions, seeking any elder, even human, who could advise them. He pushed the sled through them and sought the downramp, the safer side of the building, where the offices were. The hall here was clear. The public address continued to sputter.
He found Hulagh’s offices open, navigated his way with difficulty, and found the bai himself frantically attempting the closure of the stormshields.
A dus was outside. I reared itself against the thin plastiglass. The glass bowed, shook under the raking impact of the claws.
Hulagh backed his sled, fingering controls desperately; and Stavros sat still, watching the attack in horror. There was not a door in the Nom that would operate, nothing they could do if the beasts broke in. The windows quivered.
“Gun!” he cried at Hulagh, trying to make himself understood aloud. “Gun!”
And he backed, and Hulagh either understood or reached the same conclusion. They moved, as rapidly as the sleds would allow; and Hulagh rounded the desk and sought a pistol, holding it in shaking hands.
But the dus retreated, a shambling brown shape quickly lost in the sheeting rain across the square.
There were others, vague brown shapes that gathered and moved, milling nervously, and slowly, as if they had forgotten what they were about, they disappeared into the streets of the city and were gone.
In time the rain slacked, leaving only pocked puddles, and the stormshields suddenly operated all at once, too late for the storm.
The public address became clear, a constant chatter of instructions. Stavros’ screens sorted themselves into clarity.
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