Faded Sun Trilogy Omnibus

by C. J. Cherryh

  * * *

  It was the kel’e’en Tuas who went, who went striding out to the human ship in the last hour before their parting, and the camp turned out to wish her well; paused again in its labor when the ship Flower lifted, to watch it until it was out of sight.

  “They will see Kesrith,” Niun murmured, that night before they slept, in Kel-tent.

  “Would you have gone?” Duncan asked. “Have you not had enough of voyaging?”

  “A part of my heart went.” Niun sank down on his arm, and Duncan did, and the dusei settled each at their backs. There was now besides them, only Rhian’s, in the hao’nath camp, and the wild one, somewhere in the far north. “I have wondered,” Niun said, “why the dusei chose . . . why ourselves, why Rhian, why Ras and Hlil, and Taz. I thought it might be for your sake, sov-kela; you have always had a strange way with them. But look you—look you: they chose those who would go out. Who would meet strangeness. Who would look longest and deepest into the Dark. That is how they always chose. I think that is so.”

  Duncan did not answer for a moment . . . gazed at the dus, at him. “No more. Only we hold it off here. Long enough.”

  “We wait,” Niun said. “And we hold it off.”

  * * *

  It was a larger city, after so many years: sprawling buildings and domes and covered avenues in the place of regul order. The scent of the wind was the same: acrid and abrasive; and the light . . . the red light of Arain. It must have rained that morning. Puddles stood at the curb before the Nom, and Boaz stopped a moment to stare about her, to reckon with change.

  The three kel’ein with her did not make evident their curiosity. Doubtless they were curious, but they were under witness, and did not show it. It was much from them, that they all came, leaving the dusei on the ship . . . her asking.

  Governor Stavros was dead, years ago; she had learned that even while Flower was inward bound. And there were changes more than the buildings.

  “Come,” she bade her companions, noting sourly the escort of military personnel which formed for them, with guns and formalities; she had her own, she reflected with grim humor. They walked through the doors of the Nom and into the once-remembered corridors, into a reception of officials, outstretched hands and nervous smiles for her, simply nervous looks for her tall companions.

  “The governor’s expecting you,” one advised her, showing her the way to offices she remembered very well without. She went, and the kel’ein walked after her.

  Stavros dead; and more than Stavros. The uniforms were different, the official emblems were subtly changed. There was a moment’s feeling of madness, to have come back to the wrong world, the wrong age. There was a new constitution, so they had said at station: civilian government, a dismantling of the powers that had been AlSec and a reorganization of the bureaus; a restoration of institutions abandoned in the war, as if there was any going back. Kesrith had become a major world, an administrative headquarters for wide regions.

  For a moment she yearned for Luiz, for his comfort: and that was gone. He had died by a world of a yellow star, whose name humans did not know, and probably the kel’ein did not . . . died in jump, still lost in the vertigo of no-time, in a place where human flesh did not belong, between phases. Luiz had always leaned on the drugs. She had, until the last, that she and some few of the crew risked what the mri did, to take jump without them: she played at shon’ai with the kel’ein, as the sen played, with wands, and not with weapons.

  Your hands are not apt to weapons, they told her.

  She blinked, offered a handshake to the middle-aged man who was introduced to her. Governor Lee.

  And uncertainly Lee offered his hand to the kel’ein. She opened her mouth to warn, sensed laughter behind the veils, a slight crinkling of Hlil’s amber eyes as he touched the offered hand with his fingertips. So Tuas touched. Ras would not, but stood with hands behind her; that was courtesy enough.

  “Mri representatives,” Lee said. “And the report is—a mishap overtook the other ships; and the regul.”

  “A mishap, yes,” she said. “I understand regul are scarce here.”

  Lee’s eyes slid from hers. He offered her and the mri chairs, seated himself behind his desk. Boaz sat down in the chair, but the kel’ein sat down on the carpet, against the wall where they might see the governor, which was for them more comfort.

  “It is open knowledge,” Lee said, “that the regul have—detached themselves. We don’t know why, or in what interest. They’ve gone from Kesrith, abandoned worlds nearby, left every human vicinity. They explore in their own directions, perhaps. You can’t answer . . . from your own viewpoint . . . or from events where you come from—why, can you?”

  “They don’t like us,” Boaz said.

  “No. Clearly they don’t. Many who stayed here . . . many who were closest in contact with us . . . suicided.” He shifted uncomfortably. “The mri envoys . . . do they understand?”

  “Every word.”

  “They agree to peace?”

  Boaz shook her head slightly. “To contact. Across an expanse wider than you imagine, sir. And regul are mightily afraid of them. A virtue—as anxious as I’ve heard the colonies are, out here. But the mri are explorers . . . from here to the rim.”

  “And mercenaries,” Lee said. “On, our side? Is that the proposal?”

  “We have been mercenaries,” Hlil said, “if that is the use of the hire we offer.”

  “But there is cost,” Lee said.

  “Always,” Ras answered.

  “What cost? In what—do you expect payment?”

  “A place to stand,” Ras’s quiet voice pursued. “For that, the Kel is at your bidding, so long as you maintain us a world where only your feet and ours touch. And supplies, of course. We are not farmers. And ships; we shall need them.”

  Lee gnawed at his lip. “So you offered the regul. What benefit did they have of the bargain?”

  “Ask,” Boaz said, her palms sweating. “You are on the wrong track, governor. Ask why; ask why, and you will get a different answer.”

  “Why?” Lee asked after a moment. “Why do you make such a bargain?”

  “For the going,” said Ras very softly. “The going itself is our hire. Use us wisely, human sen’en, for we are a sharp sword, to part the Dark for you. So we did for the regul, I have heard, giving them many worlds. And when we have gone far enough, and the tether strains . . . bid us good-bye, and be wiser than the regul. We are the Face that Looks Outward. We are makers of paths, walkers on the wind; and the going itself . . . is the hire for which we have always served.”

  Boaz pressed her lips together, thinking for one cold moment on the dead worlds, about which human councils would have to know, the course of mri homeworlds, destroyed beneath the mri in fear, fears which had to come to former wielders of the Sword: dread that mri might serve others, one’s near neighbors. Fear. Fear had killed the worlds between.

  To use the mri, one had to play the Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go.

  The belief that it would be different . . . this, she cherished, as she believed in humankind.

  She played the Game.

  * * *

  It was a quiet place, the morning on the heights of the carven rocks, looking down on the plain of statues and on the Edun of the People, the heights where there was only the wind for company, the wind and the hope of dusei, which sometimes ventured in for the good hunting, to the terror of the elee.

  Merai Niun-Tais hunted here many a morning, and many a morning wasted moments, in this place of the best view of all, from which one could survey all the land from the northern flats to the hazy depths of the basins westward, out of which the great winds came.

  He was a dreamer of dreams, was Merai. Patience, the she’pan counseled him; he had yet to win his scars . . . save one that his truefather had dealt him in the Game, to mind him of discipline, and the vice of rashness, to venture the blades with a Master.

  But each night he list
ened to the songs in Kel; and the songs were true. He knew that they were, for Duncan was with them, and talked sometimes, when they could persuade kel Duncan to tell them the tales; the tales made all their hearts burn to hear them, and made them look at the stars with hope.

  From the days that he had been in Kath until he took the black robes of Kel he had climbed this height to hunt, and to think of far worlds . . . and secretly, to tease the dusei which came—sometimes—maddeningly close. Forlorn hope: they did not come to kel’ein now; they were all wild, all the dusei born of the great pair of the ja’anom Kel, and the one belonging to old Rhian of the hao’nath—even it had gone wild, in Rhian’s passing.

  There was one which came most persistently. He had hoped for it this morning, secretly, shamefully, had concealed a tidbit of meat to take to it; but it failed him. He set about his hunting, moving carefully among the rocks, skin out the creatures which sheltered at the deep places, near the watering of Ele’et.

  And in hunting, he looked up. There was a star, a star in daylight, that burned.

  He stood staring while the brightness became a glare, and the glare a shape.

  Then he began to run, racing toward the edun, his heart pounding against his ribs. He was late to bear the news, for all the Kel had come out to see. He slowed his step in the sight of his trueparents and of Duncan; and of the she’pan, for even the Mother had come down out of her tower; and the sen, theirs of the ja’anom and the visitors of other tribes.

  The ship settled, obscured in sand, crouched low and waited still for a time, until the sand had settled. Then a hatch opened, and a ramp came down to them.

  Kel’ein; they were kel’ein foremost of the strangers, black-robes with dusei at their sides, three of them, striding out across the sands in haste toward the Kel.

  He knew their names; they had been sung all his life. And the Kel stood still only for a moment more, then walked faster and faster to meet them, with the kel’anth and Duncan far in the lead.

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