The Faded Sun Trilogy Omnibus

by C. J. Cherryh

  Therefore I shall observe.

  Again the flare of anger. “Do so, then, at your own hazard. I shall inform your youngling if he is found that you miss his services and he would be well advised to return to you.”

  I should be grateful, Stavros spelled out with deliberation. I shall inform my people when they come that you are not responsible for any delay in withdrawal—if it should happen that my aide is recovered safely and there is no damage to our chosen landing site, or to necessary facilities, such as this building or the water or power plant. However, if these things do occur, other conclusions may be drawn.

  There was silence, bai Hulagh still on the screen, while the bai reflected on this statement of intent. Stavros had expected anger, threat, bluster. Instead some quieter emotion passed within the bony mask of a face, betrayed only by the rapid flare of nostrils.

  “If the human envoy will assure us that this is indeed the case and accommodation may be made, then we will make every effort to preserve these facilities and to accomplish the recovery of your youngling alive. It will, however, be necessary to warn the human envoy that there will be necessary operations at the port and, for the security of the Nom and all within, it will be preferable for the honorable human elder to observe through remote channels and not through the windows. Your consideration, favor, sir.”

  I understand. Favor, sir. I am presently satisfied that you are doing your utmost. He would not, voluntarily, have surrendered his view through the windows, not trusting the limited view provided by regul services; but the barrage was intense and the windows rattled ominously, and he began to believe the bai’s warning. The regul building was undergoing repeated shocks. He knew the bai’s warning for an honest one.

  It only remained to question what was happening to occasion the firing. The regul, he reminded himself, closing the storm shield, did not lie.

  Therefore it was true that mri had landed and that Sten Duncan was somewhere out on the flats, but one never assumed anything with the regul.

  Then the floor shook, and sirens wailed throughout the building.

  Stavros locked the sled onto a track and whisked himself back to the main lobby, where a group of younglings frantically waved at him, trying to offer him instructions all at once.

  “Shelter, reverence, shelter!” they said, pointing at another hall, a ramp leading down. He considered and thought that it might at the moment be wise to listen.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Duncan was spent, a burden, a hazard. Niun set hands on him and pushed him downslope, to shelter under an overhang by a boiling pool, forcing him farther under as he wedged his own body after.

  It was scantly in time. A near burst of fire hissed across the water and crumbled rock near them: blind fire, not aimed. The searching beams continued, lacing the area. Niun saw the face of Duncan in the reflected light, haggard and swollen-eyed—unprotected by the membrane that hazed Niun’s own vision when the smoke grew thick. Duncan’s upper lip showed a black trail that was blood in the dim light. It poured steadily, a nuisance that had become more than nuisance. The human heaved with a bubbling cough and tried to stifle it. The reek in the air from the firing and from the natural steam and sulphur was thick and choking. Niun twisted in the narrow confines, fastidious about touching the bleeding and sweating human, and at last, exhausted, abandoned niceties in such close quarters. They lay in a space likely to become their tomb should another shot crumble the ledge over them; mri and human bones commingled for future possessors of Kesrith to wonder at.

  This was delirium. The mind could not function under such pounding shocks as bracketed them constantly. Niun found the regul amazing in their ineptness. They two should have been dead over and over, had the regul had any knowledge of the land; but the regul had not, were firing blind at a landscape as unknown and alien to them as the bottom of the sea. The world was lit in constant flares of white and red, swirled in mists and steam and smoke and clouds of dust, like the Hell that humans swore by—that of mri was an unending Dark.

  The water splashed, singing and bubbling; Niun lowered the visor of the zaidhe, he the outermost, shielding the human with his own body: ironic arrangement, chance-chosen, one he would have reversed at the moment if it were possible.

  An explosion heaved the earth, numbed the senses, drove their numbed bodies into a fresh convulsion of terror.

  And hard upon that a white light lit the rocks, grew, ate them, devoured all the world; and a pressure unbearable; and Niun knew that they were hit, and tried to move to roll but into the open before the ledge came down. The pressure burst over him, and it was red . . .

  . . . wind, wind in great force, skirling away the smoke and mist, making the red swirl before his membraned, visored eyes. Niun moved, became aware that he moved, and that he lived.

  And all about them was light, sullen and ugly red.

  He gathered himself up, the light at his back, and turned to the light, and saw the port.

  There was nothing.

  He stood—legs shuddering under him. He thought that he cried out, so great was his pain, and shut his eyes, and opened them, trying to see through the flame, until the tears poured down his face. But of Ahanal, of Hazan, there was nothing to be seen. Within the city itself, fires blazed, sending smoke boiling aloft.

  And even while he watched, an aircraft lifted from near the horizon, circled for a distance out to sea, and came back again, lights blinking lazily.

  He followed it with his eyes, the aircraft circling, rounding over the city, through the smoke—beginning to come about toward the hills.

  Toward the edun.

  He wished to turn his face from it, knowing, knowing already the end. He turned with it, watched, a great knot swelling in his throat, and his body cold and numb, and the center of him utterly alive to what began to happen.

  The first tower of the edun, that of the Kel, flared in light and went, slowly tumbling. The sound reached him, a numbing shock, and after that the wind, as the towers fell, as the whole structure of the edun hung suspended and crumbled down into ruin.

  And the ship circled, light and free, lazily winking in the dark as it rose above the smoke and came, insolently, over their heads.

  His pistol was in his hands: he turned and lifted it, and fired one futile burst at those retreating lights, none others in the sky. The lights blurred in his eyes, the betraying membrane, or tears: it flashed and cleared, and he fired again.

  And the lights continued on a moment, and a red light blossomed and fragments went spinning in various trajectories, ruin upon ruin, pistol shot or the turbulence that must surround the port.

  It healed nothing. He turned, looked again at the edun where not even flames remained, and his stomach spasmed, a wrench that weakened his joints and made him dizzy. In that moment he would have wished to be without senses, to be weak, to fall, to sink down, to do anything but continue to stand, helplessly.

  Dead. Dead, all of them.

  He stood, not knowing whether to return to the ruin at the port, to go on as he was going, or whether there was reason to go, or to do anything but sit where he was until morning, when the regul would come to finish matters. He found no limit to what senses could absorb. He felt. He was not numb. He only wished to be, battered by the wind that stole the sound from the night, whipping at his robes, a steady snap of cloth that was, here, louder than the silence that had fallen over everything.

  The People were dead.

  He remained. For survivors there were duties, respects, rites that wanted doing. He was not of Medai’s temperament.

  He slipped pistol into its holster, and clenched his icy hands under his arms, and began to reckon with the living.

  The Hand of the People, a kel’en; and there were his kin to bury, if the regul had not done it in killing them, and after that there was a war the regul perhaps did not look to fight.

  And then he looked toward the ledge, and looked on his human prisoner, and met his eyes. Here also was a man tha
t waited to die, that also knew, in small measure, what desolation was.

  He could kill, and be alone thereafter, a vast, vast silence; a tiny act of violence after the forces that had stormed across the skies of Kesrith and ruined the world.

  A tiny and miserable act. Vengeance for a world deserved something of equal stature.

  “Get up,” he said quietly, and Duncan gathered himself up, shoulder to the rock, staring back at him.

  “We will go up to the hill,” he told Duncan. “The house of my people—I do not think there will be more aircraft.”

  Duncan turned and looked, and without demur, without question, started walking ahead of him.

  The world was changed about them. Landmarks that had been on the Dus plain for eons were gone. The ground was pocked with scars that filled with boiling water. Duncan, leading the way, blind, bound, misstepped and went in up to the knee, with nothing more than a hoarse sob of shock; and Niun seized him and pulled him back, steadying him, while the human stood and gasped for air.

  He kept a hand on Duncan’s arm thereafter, and guided him, knowing the way; and preserved the human against another time.

  The light came, the red light of Arain, foul and murky. Niun looked back toward the port, and saw in the first light the full truth of what he had already known: that nothing survived.

  Neither Ahanal nor Hazan.

  And when he looked on the hill where the Edun of the People had stood, it was one with the sand and the rocks—as if nothing built by hands had ever stood there.

  He saw also in the light what prize he had taken, an exhausted creature that struggled for every upward step, whose face and mouth and chest were spattered with blood that poured afresh from the nose, injury or atmosphere, it was uncertain. The eyes were almost shut, streaming tears not of seeming emotion but of outraged tissues—a face naked in the sun, and indecent, and more bewildered than evil: he did not know why the human kept walking at such cost, toward such little reward—easier by far the death of the land’s violence than what mri and human had exchanged for forty years.

  But there was a point past which there was no thinking, only the fact that one lived; and that continued whether one wanted or wished otherwise.

  He understood such a mind, that deep shock which admitted no decisions. He had never thought that he would freeze in crisis; yet he had frozen, and the cold of that moment when the People died was still locked round his mind and his heart and seemed never apt to go away, not though he had revenge, not though he killed every regul that breathed and heaped humanity on the desolation as well.

  It was a shock in which their two lives were of like value, which was nothing at all.

  He pushed the human ahead, neither hating now nor pitying, finding no reason for sparing a human when he had the ruin of the edun to face for himself. He thought perhaps that Duncan sorrowed for his own failed duty, which lay lost in burning Kesrith; that Duncan also mourned failure, as miserable as he.

  But Duncan had all the human worlds for kinsmen, knowing that they survived; and it was possible to hate the human when he let himself think on this. He would not return this one to his kind: while he lived, Duncan would live. While he had to face what had become of Kesrith, the man Duncan would do the like.

  They came to the edun by full daylight, untroubled by ships or any sign of life from the skies. Down in the city there might be. It did not extend to them. When Niun thought of it, he thought of going down and destroying them—methodically, joylessly: regul, who had no capacity for war.

  Who had finally, in one cowardly act, destroyed the People.

  There was irony there that was worth bitter laughter. He looked on the mound of rubble that had been the edun and felt moved to that or to tears; and Duncan, no longer forced to walk, simply slumped to his knees and leaned against the shoulder of the causeway. Niun heard his hollow cough and kicked him gently, reached down when that was not enough to rouse him, and caught his arm, pulling him up again.

  There was work to be done, at least so far as they could try; and he was loath to have the ruin touched at all by tsi’mri hands, but he had not the strength alone. He drew the av-tlen and pried loose the knots at Duncan’s wrists with its point, carefully unwound the thongs that were embedded in Duncan’s swollen flesh and looped the recovered leather through its ring on his own belts.

  Duncan, trying to work his hands to life, looked at the edun, and looked at him, a question. Niun jerked his head in response and Duncan comprehended and began to walk. They waded through rubble, stepped carefully among chunks of the walls that were cast down and shattered. Here had been simple fire, not the radiation that doubtless bathed the city and made the place uninhabitable. Niun pushed at the heap of rubble that blocked their way, and saw that beneath that pile of heavy stone and fine dust lay at least one of the Kel.

  There was no use to move that mass, no hope of moving it entirely. Instead Niun took stones and began to heap them round the visible body like cairn, and Duncan, seeing what he was about, began to gather up rocks of the proper size and pass them to him.

  This offended him bitterly, that the human offered rather than suffered compulsion; but it was needed, and he would not suffer the human to touch the grave itself. And it occurred to him at the same moment that Duncan might well smash his skull with one of those self-same stones the moment he turned his back entirely, and that this might be what the human was preparing, so he kept from turning his head while he worked.

  They finished, and from this place they went deeper into the ruin and into places dark and difficult, where heaps of rubble towered overhead and sifted dust and pebbles downslope at them. And the core of all the deepest ruin was the Shrine that he had sought.

  It was all too deeply buried.

  If it had been possible, he would have sought out whatever relics he could carry and taken them away into the sanctity of Sil’athen, where his kinsmen also would have been buried; but perhaps humans would never be curious enough to desecrate this place with their machines, to sift out the debris and leavings of a species which no longer mattered in the universe.

  And here the destruction reached that central citadel of himself that had yet to feel it; and he trembled and his senses almost left him. He reached out and sought support, and touched the wrong stone, bringing a slide that buried the place at their feet and brought a sift of powder down on them. The only thing he saw clearly was Duncan’s face, terror in his eyes as for an instant they seemed likely to go under the weight of rubble and earth; and then the sifting stopped and the place grew still.

  A stone shifted somewhere, and another; there was another slide, and silence, the fall of a few pebbles.

  And in that silence came a thin and distant cry.

  Duncan heard it: if not for that confirming glance sideward, Niun would have thought it illusion. But it came from the direction that had been Kath, where the deepest storerooms were.

  He turned and began to pick his way through the ruin, careful, careful with his life now, and that of her who had cried aloud, down in the dark.

  “Melein!” he cried, and paused and listened, and that same thin sound returned to him.

  He reached the place, estimating where it lay, and a wall had fallen there, and finer rubble atop it; but the steel regul-made doors had held.

  Too well. They were barred by a weight that could not be moved, that they lacked tools to chip away and machines to lift. Niun tore his hands on it, and his muscles cracked, and Duncan added his force, but it would not slide; and at last they both sat down, gasping for air, coughing. Duncan’s nose started pouring blood again. He wiped it in a bloody smear and his hands were shaking uncontrollably.

  “Is it,” Duncan asked, “ventilated down there?”

  It was not. It added a fear atop the others. “Melein,” Niun called out “Melein, do you hear?”

  He heard some manner of answer, and it was a woman’s voice and a young voice, high and thin and clear: it was Melein. He reckoned it below
them, and tried to figure the exact location of it, and marked with a heel a spot on the floor.

  Then he wrenched a reinforcing rod from the ruin and began with careful chips to dig—no firing down into that sanctuary, no such recklessness. He dug with that and with his fingers, and Duncan saw what he was doing and helped him, alternating strokes that pounded deeper into the cubit-thick flooring, and now and again they paused to paw away the dust they had made. The sun grew hot, and the only sound now was the steady chink of steel on the cemented earth, and he had heard no word from Melein in a very long time. He was tormented with fear, knowing how small the space below was, how scant the air must be; and fear lest the gap they were making miss the small space where she was sheltered; and fear lest the whole floor give way.

  They broke through. Air flooded out of that blackness, stale and depleted and cold.

  “Melein,” he shouted down, and had no answer.

  He began to work yet harder, ramming chips from the edges of the hole, widening it, admitting more and more air, sending a shaft of sunlight down into that place. They exposed steel rods, and worked in the other direction, where they could make a wider hole, and from time to time he would call down to her, and hear nothing.

  It was at last a size to admit a body; and he considered it, and the human who would remain above, and how they were to get up again, and thought desperately of killing Duncan; but he could not come up with Melein in his arms, not so easily; and he was not sure whether the cloth of his robes could bear his weight, or what else might avail.

  “I will go down,” said Duncan, and opened a pocket and took out a length of cord, and from another a small light. He offered these precious things with a naive forthrightness that for a moment disarmed Niun.

  “The drop,” Niun said, inwardly shuddering at the thought of him near Melein, “is my height and half again.” He did not add what revenge he would take if Duncan were careless, if he harmed Melein, if he could not recover her alive: these things were useless. He sat helpless and watched as Duncan worked his body—a little heavier than his—into that gap and dropped, with a heavy sound into the dark.