The Faded Sun Trilogy (79 page)

He had sent five hands of kel’ein back when the storm began, to aid if they could. That far he went against the she’pan’s plans, dividing his force. Perhaps she would forgive; perhaps she would curse, damning him, cutting him off from the tribe for disobedience. That was well enough, he thought, tears welling up in his throat, if only it saved the rest of the children. There was following orders and there was sanity; and the gods witness he tried to choose aright . . . to obey and to disobey at once.

Sand slipped near him. Ras had caught up with him, came over the crest and slid down to a crouch at his side. In a moment more came Desai, third-rank kel’en, blind in one eye, but the one that saw, saw keenly: a quiet man and steady, and after him came Merin, a Husband, and the boy Taz . . . an unscarred, who had begged with all his heart to come. There were others, elsewhere, lost in the rolls of the land and the gusting wind. He took to heart what the kel’anth had said of ambushes and ships, and kept his forces scattered.

He waited a moment, letting the others take their breaths, for beyond this point was little concealment. Then he rose up, started down the trough, keeping to the low places where possible, while his companions strayed along after him at their own rate, making no grouped target for the distance-weapons of tsi’mri.

But when they neared the buildings and crossed the track by which they had fled the city, and came upon the first of the dead, anger welled up in him, and he paused. Black-robe: this had been a kel’en. He gazed at the partially buried robes, the mummy made of days in the drying winds, ravaged by predators: they must have held feast in An-ehon.

The others overtook him; he walked on without looking at them. Ahead were the shells of towers, geometries obscured in sand, horizonless amber in which near buildings were distinct even to the cracks in their walls and the distant ones hove up as shadows. And everywhere the dead.

“This was Ehan,” Desai said of the next they came to; and “Rias,” said Merin of another, for the Honors these dead wore could still distinguish them, when wind and dryness had made them all alike.

From time to time they spoke names of those they saw among the passages between the ruined buildings; and the dead were not only kel’ein, but old sen’ein, gold-robes, scholars, whose drying skulls had held so much of the wisdom of the People; young and old, male and female, they lay in some places one upon the other, folk that they had known all their lives; among them were the bodies of kath’ein, blue-robes, the saddest and most terrible—the child-rearers and children. Walls had fallen, quick and cruel death; in other places the dead seemed without wound at all. There were the old whose bronze manes were dark and streaked with age; many, many of their number, who had not been strong enough to bear the running; and in many a place a kel’en’s black-robed body lay vainly sheltering some child or old one.

Name after name, a litany of the dead: kath Edis, one of his own kath-mates, and four children, two of whom might be his own: that hit him hard; and sen’ein, wise old Rosin; and kel Dom: they had come into the Kel the same year. He did not want to look and must, imposing horrors over brighter memories.

And the others, who had lost closer kin, Kel-born, who had kin to lose: Taz, who mourned trueparents and sister and all his uncles; and Ras—Ras passed no body but that she did not look to see.

“Haste,” he said, having his fill of grieving. But Ras trailed last, disobedient, still searching, almost lost to them in the murk.

He said nothing to that: matters were thin enough between them. But he looked at no more dead; and the others grew wise, and did not, either, staying close with him. Chance was, he thought, that they could run head-on into members of their own party, if they were not careful in this murk, come up against friends primed to expect distance-weapons and primed to attack . . . an insanity: he had no liking at all for this kind of slipping about.

Suddenly the square lay before them, vast, ribboned with blowing sand which made small dunes about the
bodies which lay thicker here than elsewhere in the city. At the far side hove up the great Edun, the House of the People, Edun An-ehon, sad in surrounding ruin. It was mostly intact, the four towers, slanting together, forming a truncated pyramid. The doorway gaped darkly open upon steps which ran down into the square. The stone of the edun was pitted and scarred as the other buildings; great cracks showed in the saffron walls, but this place which had been the center of the attack had also held the strongest defense, and it had survived best of any structure hope of success, of doing quickly what they had come to do and getting away safely.

He moved and the others followed, on a course avoiding the open square, taking their cover where they could find it among the shattered buildings and the blowing sand. Finally he broke away at a run, up the long steps, toward that ominous dark within, hard-breathing with the effort and thinking that at any moment fire might blast out at him.

It did not. He slid through the doorway and inside, against the wall, where dust slipped like oil beneath his feet, where was silence but for the wind outside and the arriving footsteps of the others. They entered and stopped, all of them listening a moment. There was no sound but the wind outside.

“Get a light going,” he bade Taz. The boy fumbled in the pouch he carried and knelt, working hastily to set fire in the oilwood fiber he had brought. Ras arrived, last of them. “Stay out there,” Hlil ordered her, “visible; others will be coming soon.”

“Aye,” she said, and slipped back out again into the cold wind, a miserable post, but no worse than the dark inside.

The flame kindled; Taz shielded it with his body and lit a knot of fiber impaled on an oilwood wand. They all, he, Merin, and Desai, kept bodies between the fire and the draft from the door. Merin lit other knots and passed them about. Outside, Ras’s low voice reported no sight of the others.

Hlil took his light and walked on. The inner halls echoed to the least step. Cracks marred the walls, ran, visible once eyes had adjusted to the dim light, about the higher walls and ceilings, marring the holy writings there.

The entry of kel-tower was clear, and that of Sen, the she’pan’s tower and Kath . . . affording hope of access to their belongings. But when he looked toward the shrine his heart sank, for that area of the ceiling sagged, and the
pillars which guarded that access were damaged. He felt of them and stone crumbled at his least touch on the cracks.

He had to know; he went farther into the shrine, thrust his light-wand into a cracked wall and passed farther still.

“Hlil,” Merin protested, behind him.

He hesitated, and even as he stopped a sifting of plaster hit his shoulders and dimmed the light.

“Go back,” he bade Merin and the others. “Stand clear.”

The Holy was there, that which they venerated and the Holy of the Voyagers; his knees were weak with dread of the great forbidden; but in his mind was the hazard of losing them once for all, these things which were more than the city and more than all their lives combined.

He moved inward; the others disobeyed and followed: he heard them, saw the lights moving with him, casting triple shadows of himself and the pillars and the inner screen.

Beyond that—the stranger-she’pan had given him her blessing to go:
that first,
she had bidden him. He was shaking unashamedly as he put out a hand and moved the screen aside.

A tiny box of green bronze; figures of corroding metal and gold; a small carven dus and a shining oval case as large as a child: together they were the Pana, the Mysteries, on which he looked, on which no kel’en ought ever, to look. He thrust out a hand almost numb, gathered up the smallest objects and thrust them, cold and comfortless, within the breast of his robes. He passed the box to Merin, whose hands did not want to receive it. Last he reached for the shining ovoid, snatched it to him in a sifting of dust and falling plaster. It was incredibly heavy for its size, staggered him, hit a support in a cascade of plaster and fragments. He stumbled back at the limit of his balance, hit the steadying hands of Desai who snatched him farther, outside, as dust rolled out at them and they sprawled, shaken by the rumble of falling masonry. It stopped.

“Sir?” Taz’s voice called.

“We are well enough.” Hlil answered, holding the pan’en to him, bowed over it, though the chill seemed to flow from it into his bones. Other hands helped him rise with it: the light of the door showed in a shaft of dust, and
the figures of Taz and Ras within it, casting shadows. He carried his burden to the doorway, past them and out into the light and the storm, knelt down and laid the pan’en and the other objects on the top of the steps. Merin added the ancient box, stripped off his veil to shield the Holy objects . . . so did he, and Ras and Desai too. He looked up into the faces of the others, which were stark with dread for what they had in hand. He looked from one to the other, chilled with a sense of separation . . . for kel’ein died, having touched a pan’en: such was the law. Or if they lived, then forever after they were known by it:
pan’ai-khan,
somewhere between Holy and accursed.

“I have dispensation,” he said. “I give it you.”

They crouched down, huddled together, he and the others, protecting the Holy as if it were something living and fragile, that wanted mortal flesh between it and the elements.

The boy Taz was not with them.

“Taz—are you well?” Hlil shouted into the dark.

“I am keeping the fire,” the boy said. “Kel-second, the dust is very thick, but there is no more falling.”

“The gods defend us,” Hlil muttered, conscious of what he had his hand on, that burned him with its cold. “Only let it hold a little while longer.”

*   *   *

Duncan paused, where a scoured ridge of sandstone offered a moment’s shelter from the wind, flung his arms about the thick neck of the dus and lowered his head out of the force of the gusts. He coughed, rackingly; his head ached and his senses hazed. The storm seemed to suck oxygen away from him. He uncapped the canteen and washed his mouth, for the membranes were so dry they felt like paper . . . . He swallowed but a capful. He stayed a moment, until his head, stopped spinning and his lungs stopped hurting, then he found the moral force to stand and move again.

There was a bright spot in the world, which was the sun; in the worst gusts it was still all that could be seen. The dus moved, guiding him in his moments of blindness.

Then something else grew into reality, tall shadows like trees, branched close to the trunk and rising straight
up again, gaunt giants. Pipe. He went toward it, consumed with the desire for the sweet pulp which could relieve his pain and his thirst better than water. The dus lumbered along by him, willingly hurrying; and the shadows took on more and more of substance against amber sky and amber earth.

Dead. No living plants but pale, desiccated fiber materialized before him, strands ripped loose, blowing in the wind, a ghostly forest of dead trunks. He touched the blowing strands, drew his
av-tlen
to probe the trunk closest, to try whether there might be life and moisture at the core.

And suddenly he received something from the dus, warning-sense, which slammed panic into him.

He moved, ran, the beast loping along with him. He cursed himself for the most basic of errors:
Think with the land
the mri had tried to teach him:
Use it; flow with it; be it.
He had found a point in the blankness. He had been nowhere until he had found a point, the rocks, the stand of dead plants. He was nowhere and could not be located until he made himself somewhere.

And childlike, he had gone from point to point. The dus was no protection: it betrayed him.

Think with the land,
the Niun had said.
Never challenge beyond your capacity; one does not challenge the
jo
in hiding or the burrower in waiting.

Or a mri in his own land.

He stopped, faced about, blind in the dust, the shortsword clenched in his fist. Cowardice reminded him he was tsi’mri, counseled to take up the gun and be ready with it. He came to save mri lives; it was the worst selfishness to die, rather than to break kel-law.

Niun would.

He sucked down mouthfuls of air and scanned the area around about, with only a scatter of the great plants visible through the dust. The dus hovered close, rumbling warnings. He willed it silent, flexed his fingers on the hilt.

The dus shied off from the left; he faced that way, heart pounding as the slim shadow of a kel’en materialized out of the wind.

“What tribe?” that one shouted.

“The ja’anom,” he shouted back, his voice breaking with hoarseness. He stilled the dus with a touch of his hand; and in utter hubris: “You are in the range of the ja’anom. Why?”

There was moment’s silence. The dus backed, rumbling threat.

“I am Rhian s’Tafa Mar-Eddin, kel’anth and daithon of the hao’nath. And your geography is at fault.”

His own name was called for. They proceeded toward challenge by the appointed steps. It was nightmare, a game of rules and precise ritual. He took a steadying breath and returned his
av-tlen
to its sheath with his best flourish, emptying his hands. He kept them at his sides, not in his belt, as Rhian had his. He wanted no fight.

“Evidently the fault is mine,” he said. “Your permission to go, kel’anth.”

“You give me no name. You have no face. What is that by you?”

“Come with me,” Duncan said, trying the most desperate course. “Ask of my she’pan.”

“Ships have come. There was fire over the city.”

“Ask of my she’pan.”

“Who are you?”

The dus roared and rushed; pain hit his arm even as he saw the mri flung aside. “Not” Duncan shouted as the dus spun again to strike. The dus did not; the mri did not move; Duncan reached to the numb place on his arm and felt the hot seep of moisture.

Two heartbeats and it had happened. He trembled, blank for the instant, knowing what had hit, the palm-blades, the
as-ei,
worn in the belt. The dus’s attack, the mri’s reflex—both too quick to unravel: dusei read
intent.