The Faded Sun Trilogy (69 page)

“I was surprised that you took me there.”

“I had no choice. It is always done. I could not bring you into the Kel like a kel’e’en, without this night.”

Duncan tucked in his own veil, and breathed easier to know himself well-acquitted. “Doubtless you were worried.”

“You are kel’en; you have learned to think as we think. I am surprised that you chose a resting-night. It was wise. And,” he added, “if you send the kath’en the
ka’islai,
and she does not return them, then you must go and fetch them.”

“Is that how it is done?”

Niun laughed, a soft breath. “So I have heard. I myself am naïve in such matters.”

They came to main hall, and Duncan went behind Niun as he paid his morning respects at the shrine; he stood silently there, thinking strangely of a place in his childhood, sensing in another part of his thoughts a dus that was fretting and impatient, confined in kel-hall.

And of a sudden came the machine-voice, An-ehon, deep and thundering through all the halls, through stone and flesh:

Alarm . . . alarm . . . ALARM.

He froze, dazed, as Niun thrust past him. “Stay here!” Niun shouted at him, and rushed for sen-hall access, where a kel’en had no business to be. Duncan stopped in mid-step—cast about left and right, saw other kel’ein rushing down from kel-tower; and there were kath’ein; and Melein herself, descending from the tower of the she’pan, seeking sen-access at a near-run amid the frightened questions that were thrown at her.

“Let me come!” Duncan cried at her, overtaking her, and she did not forbid him. He followed her up, up into sen-hall, where alarmed sen’ein boiled about like disturbed insects, gold about Niun’s black, who stood before An-ehon’s flickering lights—who questioned it, and obtained screens lighted with pictures the rudest kel’en could understand: the desert, and a dying glow in a rising cloud on the far horizon.

The ship.

Melein thrust her way through the sen’ein, that crowded from her path, and the while she laid hands on the panels her eyes were for the screens. Duncan tried to follow her, but the sen’ein caught at him, thrust out their hands in his path, forbidding.

“Strike was made from orbit,” An-ehon droned, the while the mad alarm dinned from another channel.

“Strike back,” Melein ordered.

“
No!
” Duncan shouted at her. But An-ehon’s flicker-swift reaction showed a line of retaliation plotted, intersecting orbit.

Lines flashed rapidly, perspectives shifting.

“Unsuccessful,” An-ehon droned.

And the panels all flared, and the air filled with sound that began too deep to hear and finished like thunder. The floor, the very foundations shook.

“Attack has been returned,” said An-ehon. “Shields have held.”

“Stop it,” Duncan shouted, pushed sen’ein brutally aside and broke through to Melein, stopped when Niun himself thrust a hand in his way. “Listen to me. That will be a class-one warship up there. You cannot beat it from earthside. We have no ship now, no way out—do not answer fire. They can make a cinder of this world. Let me call them, let me contact them, she’pan.”

Melein’s eyes were terrible as they met his: suspicion, anger . . . in that moment he was alien, and close to the edge of her rage.

The thunder came again. The mri held their sensitive ears, and Melein shouted another order for attack.

“Target is passing out of range,” An-ehon said when the noise had faded. “Soon coming up over Zohain. Zohain will attack.”

“You cannot fight it,” Duncan shouted at them, and seized Niun’s arm, received from the mri a look that matched Melein’s. “Niun, make her see. Your shielding will not go on holding. Let me call them.”

“You see what good your signal from the ship did,” said Niun. “That is their answer to your signal of friendship. That is their word on it.”

“Zohain has fallen,” said An-ehon. “Shields did not hold. I am receiving alarm from Le’a’haen . . . There is another attack approaching this zone. Alarm . . . alarm . . . ALARM . . . ALARM . . .”

“Get your people out!” Duncan shouted at them.

Terror was written in the eyes of Melein and Niun, nightmare repeated: the floor shook. There was a rumbling crash outside the edun.

“Go!” Melein cried. “The hills, seek the hills!”

But she did not, nor Niun, while the Sen broke for the door, for outside, abandoning possessions, everything. Even over the sounds of An-ehon cries could be heard elsewhere in the edun.

“Get out, get out—both of you,” Duncan pleaded. “Wait for a break in the attack and get out of here. Let me try with the machine.”

Melein turned to Niun, ignoring him. “Kel’anth, lead your people.” And before Niun could move, she looked up at the banks that were An-ehon. “Continue to fight Destroy the invaders.”

“This city is holding,” droned the machine. “Outer structures may be drained of shielding to protect the edun complex. When this city falls, there are others. We are coordinating defenses. We are under multiple attack. We advise immediate evacuation. We advise the she’pan to secure her person. Preservation of her person is of overriding importance.”

“I am leaving,” Melein said; and to Duncan, for Niun had gone: “Come. Haste.”

He thrust past her, to the console. “An-ehon,” he said, “give me communication—”

“Do not permit it!” Melein shouted, and the machine struck, a force that lit the air and hurled him numb and cold against the floor.

He saw her robes pass him, and she was running, running, down the center of sen-hall, with the floor shuddering under renewed attack . . . it shook beneath him, and he tried repeatedly to gather his numbed limbs under him.

The floor bucked.

“Alarm . . . ALARM . . . ALARMLLL . . .” cried An-ehon.

He rolled his head, dragged a shoulder over, saw areas of the banks going dark.

And the floor shook again, and the lights began dimming.

There was a time of quiet.

He found it possible finally to move his legs, arms, to drag himself up, and he staggered through littered sen-hall into the winding corridor down to main hall. A great shadow met him there, his dus, that almost threw him off his feet in the pressure of its body: he used it then, leaning on it, and staggered past the litter that confused the hall, and out into the light, the open city—there began to see the dead, old sen’ein, children of the Kath—a kel’en, crushed by a toppling wall.

He found Sa’er, a huddled shape in blue at the bottom of the ramp, a golden hand clenched about a stone, a face open-eyed and dusty with the sand of Kutath.

“Ka’aros!” he called with all the strength in him, remembering her son, and there was no answer.

The People’s trail was marked with dead, the old, the fragile, the young: all that was gentle, he thought, everything.

He heard a sound of thunder, looked up and saw a flash, a mote of light. Something operating in-atmosphere. He expected, even while he ran with all the speed that was in him, the white flash that would kill him, as he left the protective zone.

But it went over the horizon. The sound died.

Beyond the city, beyond the pitiful ruin, there stretched a line of figures, alive and moving. He made haste to follow, desperate, exhausted. The dus moved with him, blood-feelings stirred in it, that caught up his rage and fear and cast it back amplified.

He overtook the last of the column finally, his throat dry, his lungs wracked with coughing. Blood poured from his nose and tasted salt-coppery in his mouth.

“The kel’anth?” he asked. A narrow-eyed kel’e’en pointed toward the head of the column. “The she’pan?” he asked again. “Is she well?”

“Yes,” one said, as if to answer him at all were contamination.

He kept moving at more than their pace, seeing the column’s head, passed kel’ein that carried kath-children, and kath’ein that carried infants, and kel’ein that supported old ones of any caste, though few enough of the old were left them.

They went toward the mountains, that promised concealment, as they were pitifully exposed on this bare, naked sand. He saw the line extended over the roll of the land, and it seemed yet impossibly far, beyond his strength at the pace he tried. He paused, cut a bit of pipe that was left as a stub from someone else’s cutting, a prize that was seen by others too, and he offered them of his, but none would deign to touch it. Leaving the rest to them, he sucked the water from a sliver and managed simply to keep his feet under him and to stay with the middle of the column—outside it, for he felt their hatred, the looks that the Sen cast him.

He had betrayed himself before the Sen; they knew, they had seen the nature of him, and whence he was they guessed . . . if not what. They could not know the reason that they were attacked, but that they were mri, and that the tsi’mri invaded, and they were dying at such hands as his.

*   *   *

No attack came on them. He was not amazed by it, for there was little inclination for a large orbiting craft to waste its energies on so small a target as they made. But the city came under periodic fire. They could look back and see it, the shields flaring rainbow colors under the rainless sun, and the whole of the city settling into increasing ruin. The city that had stood dreamlike against the setting sun itself glowed and died like embers, and the towers were down, and ugliness settled over it.

“A-ei,” mourned an old kath’en. “A-ei.”

And the children wept fretfully, and were hushed.

The Sen shook their heads, and there were tears on the faces of the old ones.

From the Kel there were no tears, only looks that burned, that raged. Duncan turned his face from them, and kept moving at such times as the column rested, until at last he had sight of Melein’s white robes, and he knew the tall kel’en by her, with the dus.

They were well; that was enough to know, to take from him some of the anguish. He kept them in sight for the rest of that day, and when they at last paused at evenfall, he came to them.

Niun knew his presence. The dus went first, and Niun turned, looking for his approach.

Duncan settled quietly near them.

“You are all right?” Niun asked him.

He nodded.

Melein turned her face from him. “Doubtless,” she said finally, “your wish was good, Duncan; I believe that. But it was useless.”

“She’pan,” he murmured with a gesture of reverence, grateful even for that; he forbore to argue with her: among so many dead, argument had no place.

Niun offered him a bit of pipe. He showed his, and declined, and with his
av-tlen,
cut off a bit of it that was sickly sweet in his mouth. There was a knot at his stomach that would not go away.

A cry went up from the Kel. Hands pointed. What looked like a shooting star went over, and descended toward the horizon.

“Landing,” Duncan murmured, “near where the ship was. There will be a search now.”

“Let them come into the mountains looking,” said Niun.

Duncan put a hand to his stomach, and coughed, and wiped his eyes of the pain-tears. He found himself shaking.

He also knew what had to be done.

He rested. In time he made excuse, a modest sort of shrug that denoted a man on private business, and rose and moved away from the column; the dus followed him. He was afraid. He tried to keep that feeling down, for the dus could transmit that. He saw the desert before him, and felt the weakness of his own limbs, and the terror came close to overwhelming him, but he had no other options.

The dus suddenly sent a ward-impulse, turned.

He looked back, saw the other dus.

There was a black shadow a distance to the side of it. Duncan froze, remembering that Niun, like him, had a gun.

Niun walked across the sand toward him, a black shape in the dark. The wind fluttered at his robes, the moon winked on the brass of the
yin’ein
and the plastic of the visor, and on the
j’tai
that he had gained. The great dus walked at his side, turn-toed, head down.

“Yai,” Duncan cautioned his, made it sit beside him.

Niun stopped at talking distance, set hand in belt, a warning. “You have strayed the column widely, sov-kela.”

Duncan nodded over his shoulder, toward the horizon. “Let me go.”

“To rejoin them?”

“I still serve the she’pan.”

Niun looked at him long and closely, and finally dropped his veil. Duncan did the same, wiped at the blood that began to dry on his lips.

“What will you do?” Niun asked.

“Make them listen.”

Niun made a gesture that spoke of hopelessness. “It has already failed. You throw yourself away.”

“Take the People to safety. Let me try this. Trust me in this, Niun.”

“We will not surrender.”

“I know that. I will tell them so.”

Niun looked down. His slender fingers worked at one of the several belts. He freed one of the
j’tai,
came toward Duncan, stood and patiently knotted the thong in a complicated knot.

Duncan looked at it when he had done, found a strange and delicate leaf, one of the three
j’tai
that Niun had had from Kesrith.

“It was given me by one of my masters, a man named Palazi, who had it from a world named Guragen. Trees grew there. For luck, he said. Good-bye, Duncan.”

He gave his hand.

Duncan gave his. “Good-bye, Niun.”

And the mri turned from him, and walked away, the one dus following.

Duncan watched him meet the shadow, and vanish, and himself turned and started on the course that he had plotted, the sand and rocks distorted in his vision for a time. He resumed the veil, grateful for the warmth of the beast that walked beside him.

Beast mind, beast sense. It protected. Duncan inhaled the cold air carefully and staggered as he came down the gentle rise—an ankle almost twisted: death in the flats. He took his warning from that and rested, leaned against the dus as he settled to the cold sands and let the fatigue flow from his joints. A little of the blue-green pipe remained in his belt-pouch. He drew his
av-tlen
and cut a bit of it, chewed at it and felt its healing sweetness ease his throat.