The Faded Sun Trilogy (103 page)

Niun was there, as dazed as he—mri, and stable. Duncan rose to his feet, walked, aching from the convulsion of his muscles, and the dus went beside him. There was a silence everywhere, kel’ein and all the others staring at him, at them, who were also there, who assembled with Niun at center. Rhian was there, a mind he had felt all too long as hunter; Hlil, Ras; and unscarred Taz, dazed and frightened to be dragged into commonality with kel’anthein.

They met, met eyes. Duncan felt his heartbeat even yet tending from his own normal pace, struck at his dus and stopped it. Heat rose to his face, consciousness that he knew strangers as he knew Niun, was known by them.

“I am sorry,” Taz murmured, as if it were his fault a dus had chosen him.

“No one answers where dusei are concerned,” Niun said. “They choose. They find something alike in us—gods know what.”

“They sense the strangers,” Duncan said thickly. “They are here—to protect. There is another one still wild, still out here. Why . . . I do not sense. Their own business, it maybe.”

“We are going into the city,” Niun said. “Kath and all but a few hands of sen’ein stay in camp, with a guard. They have taken service.”

Duncan looked from him, to the white figure of Melein among the Sen, and beyond, to the pillar-sentinels of the elee.

Attack. He realized that of a sudden.

Alignments made sense suddenly, mri and tsi’mri, to draw the line and set all enemies across it. Mri had no allies.

“Did you not understand?” Niun asked. “We take this place.”

The dusei had realized it . . . had come to take sides, as they had chosen on Kesrith.

With mri. With several in particular, who had something in common.

Madness, perhaps; Duncan reckoned so.

The ships were indeed retreating. Suth studied the screens, smiled, keyed a signal to his own crew.

Shirug
began to move, a slow withdrawal from the world, keeping
Santiago
and
Saber
constantly in scan.

And on screen, bai Degas waited. “We have begun,” Suth advised the human bai. “As agreed we will keep to pattern with each other. And our communications will remain linked to yours, reverend bai Degas.”

“I am instantly available in emergency.”

“Favor, bai.” Suth gaped a grin; he liked this human, after a fashion. There was a pleasantness about him in sharp contrast to the others, a sense of solidity in his reactions.

And for that reason he was to be feared: not dull, this bai Del Degas-si, not at all dull-witted. He retained things very well for a human.

“I shall turn contact over to a youngling now,” Suth said. “Our profound gratitude for this cooperation.”

“Favor reverence,” the human replied in lisping approximation of that courtesy. Suth grinned dutifully, shut off the contact for his own screen and leaned back in his sled.

Behind him the other sleds moved, entering his field of vision.

Nagn, Tiag Morkhug.

There was no elation, no exultation. It was not a time for such.

“Keep in close contact with this office,” Suth said. “When you sleep, do so in the presence of one of us four being awake. All channels are to be strictly monitored by some one of us.”

“This dismantling of mri sites,” said Nagn, “is
said
to be progressing. Human information is not always accurate.”

“
Lie,
Nagn. The word is
lie.
Humans deceive in false statements as well as actions; but we work with this particular action . . . indeed, we work with it.”

Morkhug puffed her nostrils uneasily. “I still dislike it. One threat gone: the mri sites; and I do not see the human advantage in this.”

“Unless they lie,” Nagn said.

“Impoverished mri,” said Tiag, “must take service with someone. Or die, of starvation.”

“Question,” said Nagn. “Do humans assume they will take service with them?”

Suth hissed. It was insanity, that regul adults sat here contemplating trues and maybe-trues regarding human minds. They learned. They all began to think in mad terms of shifting realities. He gathered a stylus from the board before him, held it between his palms and rolled it. “Observe, mates-of-mine, the flat face of the stylus. Where does it exist? Has it a place as it spins?”

“In fractional instants,” Nagn said.

“Analogy,” said Suth. “A model for imagination. I have found one. The place faces all directions for an instant, a blur of motion. Human minds are and are not so many faces that they seem ready to move in any direction. They are composite realities. They apparently face all directions simultaneously. This is human motive.” He laid the stylus down. “They are facing us and the mri simultaneously.”

“But action,” said Tiag. “They cannot act in all directions forever.”

“They act for themselves. What is of value to them?”

“Survival,” said Nagn.

“Knowledge,” Suth said. “They
state
that they are destroying the sites.”

Nostrils flared and shut in rapid alternation.

“I accept no data from humans,” Suth continued, feeling the palpitation of his hearts. “Mates-of-mine, among
forgetful
species, this is the only sanity. Among species which
imagine,
this is the only alternative. I have set a sane course. I made appropriate motions by human request, to avoid unprofitable developments. Humans state that they are destroying the sites: potentially true. They omit to state that they are gathering knowledge. We know that they
are using the elders of
Flower
as additional personnel. They have stated so, and if this is a lie, I do not find motive in it.”

“We are letting them destroy armaments we had counted useful to us,” Morkhug objected.

“No,” said Suth. “We do not do that. Our base . . . will not do that.”

*   *   *

“Nothing, sir.”

Luiz leaned against the side of the cushion to the right of Brown and shook his head sorrowfully. Brown’s eyes stared back at him with a bruised look . . . the man had not left this bridge, not he nor any of the rest of the military crew—had rather bedded down here near controls; the night shift was sleeping on pallets over against the storage lockers, and everyone kept movements quiet for their sakes. They had a full crew, with everyone awake; half on turn and turn about; and the men had given more than duty, monitoring scan, helping science staff with the rapid filing of data, the breakdown of delicate instruments and equipment, frantic storing of whatever might be damaged in a violent lift. There was no panic aboard; fear . . . that was an abiding guest.

They were alone, for the first time truly alone, save for—intermittently, a shuttle closer to Kutath than the big warships dared be; and Galey’s mission, down with them.

They hoped, at least. There was no contact with Galey. Harris’s mission could find them—if they were following the agreed sequence of sites; and the next thing they could look for was either holocaust or a progress report.

That they would delay to bring Boaz back . . . that, if it rested with her, they would not. Luiz scanned the master chart which plastered the pinup board . . . lingered on second site, where at best reckoning, she was. Eleven major targets. Even the young men had to come in for relief, somewhere in that world-spanning chain of targets; and then she would. He hoped so.

If nothing went wrong before then.

“I don’t expect word,” Brown murmured, evidently reckoning he was obliged to say something. “Takes a
while, to get there, to lay plans, a lot of things, sir. Could be quite a while.”

It was, he reckoned, a kindly attempt at comfort; he felt none.

*   *   *

Beyond the pillars of carved stone, the city Ele’et sat, a fantastical combination of glass and stone, aglow in the fading light. Kel’ein murmured with wonder; and Niun gazed on it thinking on his youth, on evenings spent in the hills above a regul city, looking on lights in the twilight, and dreaming dreams of ships and voyages and war, and Honors to win.

He looked on Melein, who walked among the Sen who had come with them, for all his wishing otherwise. She had no words, none, but she had simply set out with them, and what
she
would, she did. The Holy reposed in safety; she and her sen’ein, fifteen including Sathas himself, walked in the blackness of more than a thousand kel’ein, and said nothing of how they should take this place.

He had not far to reach for companions: they were near as the dusei, moving here and there throughout the column; he summoned, and they came, those not by him already, even to Taz, who was devastated by his fortunes. “Stay close,” he bade them all, and at Duncan especially he looked. “You have the other gun, sov-kela; and I would you stay nearer the she’pan. These are tsi’mri.”

“Aye,” Duncan murmured. The incongruity did not draw a flicker from him. They were two, Niun thought, who had known the old war, on different sides as they were; who knew the Kesrithi law—distance-weapons for those who would use them: the mercenary Kel had lost its compunction in such matters.

“They must know we are here,” said Hlil.

“Doubtless,” Niun said.

Nearness made the rocks of the hills take on strange form in the sunset, twisted shapes, joined by aisles of stone and glass; shapes shaped by hands, he realized of a sudden, the whole face of the hills hewn into abstract geometries, as the pillars had been hewn, with glass facing the intervals: hills, whole domes of rock the size of edunei . . . carved in elaborations the north side of which the sand-laden winds had eroded, and the size—the size
of it . . . only a tenth part was alight.

“Gods,” he murmured, for suddenly their number seemed very small, and the sky leaden and full of enemies.

Ward-impulse prickled in the air; something started in the sand before them, and another. Soon a whole cloud of burrowers fled in distress, and the sands rippled beyond that. It was as if the very sands hereabouts lived, writhing like the mutilated stones.

Water. Outspill from the city.

And dus-sense grew more and more disturbed. “Do not loose it,” he bade those about him. “You understand me. The beasts are not to be loosed.”

There was murmured agreement.

“Nor the Kel,” said Melein, startling them. “Take me this city. Do not destroy it. Do not kill until you must.”

“Go to the center,” he wished Melein. “You must have care.”

To his amazement she did so, without demur. He drew breath, surveyed the place before them, which balked them with a maze of walls and no streets, nothing of accesses, nothing of pattern.

He led them straight on as the wind would blow, with contempt for their barriers and their building and the logic of their structures. He led them to a great face of glass, which showed within a hallway, and carven stones, and great carven boulders rising out of the very floor, prisoned and changed in this tsi’mri place.

He drew his gun, unfired in years, and with wide contempt, burned an access. That fell ponderously, that shattered with a crash that woke the echoes and scattered glass among the carven stones. Warmth came out at them, and moisture-bearing air.

They walked within, glass ground under their boots, the dusei snorting at the prick of slivers which let blood. His own let out a hunting moan that echoed eerily through the vast halls, and found direction, guiding them all. He kept his gun in hand, and with a wave of his arm sent a flood of kel’ein the width of the hall, to find out all sides, all recesses of the carved monuments. They were beyond the glass now, and the floor echoed to their tread, itself patterned in mad designs.

And figures stood at the end of the hall, glittering with color, gods, the colors! As one they stopped, staring at
hues of green and deep blue and bright colors which had no name, none that he knew—the robes of mri-like folk who had no color, paler even than Duncan’s pallor, whose manes were white and long and shamelessly naked, the whole of their whiteness bejeweled and patterned.

He had walked alone into a regul city, which shared nothing at all with mri. He had the face for this, and walked ahead, with the dus beside him and comrades about him, wondering what they would do, whether challenge, whether panic and bring forth weapons.

They ran.

Weapons ripped from sheaths with one thousand-voiced rasp of steel. “No!” he said. “But keep your weapons in hand.”

He kept walking, calmly enough. They passed one archway and entered another, and into a tangle of carved stone that mimicked pipe roots, or some mad dream. Screaming began, wails, the fall of a city which had not yet struck a blow.

*   *   *

The steps of the great edun lay ahead, brown-hued in a lavender city, simplicity amid the maze. Galey drew in an insufficient breath through the trickle-flow of the breather, made the climb ahead of the others . . . staggering from weariness, but made it, into this sanctuary from the winds.

They brought their own lights and used them, not touching any that the place itself might have, for fear of alerting the guard systems, such as there might be. Galey looked about him at writing on the walls, at the wholeness of what the other edun had been, at a place untouched in the disaster.

“Appreciate what you’re seeing,” he said hoarsely, distorted in the mask. “This is a holy place to them; it’s their history and their home; it’s their Earth and these are its shrines. And we kill them. Remember that.”

The faces of Harris’s two men stared back at him, masked and demonic in the lamps’ glow, eyes betraying shock. Only Kadarin . . . Kadarin, who had been with Boaz . . . he understood.

“No one ought to kill something,” he said, “and not know it.” He pressed the mask tighter against his face,
sucked air and turned away toward the access of the machine hall . . . what must be so if the edunei were as identical as Boaz said, leading toward the tower.

And in the core of that tower must be the power accesses; structurally, it was the only place to expect them. A slender stem, which might be severed; but well-sheathed. Such a tower had stood in the other edun though all else had suffered severe damage.