The aircraft passed directly overhead, a roar of power that echoed off the narrow walls, and he crouched low against a rock, shuddering against the strain of holding position on that slope. Pebbles skidded under his outmost foot. He took the, chance as the aircraft passed beyond view and slid a few lengths tower, into the shadow, and the great bodies of the dusei came behind him, sharing his fear, communicating back to him an anxiety that made his stomach heave. He began to think he could not hold the pan’en: his fingers felt cut to the bone; and after he had gone a distance more he could not feel much pain, only an increasing numbness and lack of control over his fingers. He braced himself against a rock and shifted hands, reversing his entire position on the cliffside, showered from above by pebbles and dust from the claws of the dusei. They were at such a place now that they could not stop, and he plunged down a desperate slide, until he entered the deepest dark.
And at a stopping place he overtook Melein and Duncan, and Duncan’s face looked toward him in that faintest of light. Melein still held to his hand, bent for a moment against a boulder.
She moved on then, weekly, leaning much on Duncan; and Niun took the stable place they had had, braced his body against the weight he held, and waited, to stop the dusei, to hold them there, awkward as it was, until she was safely down. They came, shouldered against him, and he held them with a quiet will, an intense willing that they be still, hush, stop. They were patient, even in this awkward state, joined with his senses.
The aircraft passed again, lights winking against the dim sky overhead. Niun looked up at it, trembling with the strain, and held his place, helpless, with the growing conviction that they were lost.
They had surely been spotted, at the worst of all times, in the worst of all places.
It circled yet again.
He settled the pan’en in the right hand again and set out downward, hoping, desperately hoping that Melein and Duncan had had time, for there were no more resting places that he remembered. He went, boots sliding on the trail, bringing up against one and another rock with a force that his muscles were too tired to absorb. He came down and down until he could hardly control his descent, and dropped from the last turn to the sand, driven to one knee by the impact.
The dusei came after, clambering down with much scratching of claws and scattering of sand, safe at the bottom.
And Melein sat, a pale huddle of robes in the shadow, and Duncan knelt by her. Her hand was pressed to her lips, and the other hand to her side, and her robes were stained with blood.
He fell to his knees beside her, the pan’en in his arms, and she could not prevent the cough that she stanched with her veil. Blood came. He saw it, and the membrane flashed across his vision, blinding him. He shivered, unable to see for a moment, and then it cleared.
“It began on the climb,” Duncan said. “I think the ribs gave way.”
And the aircraft circled at the top of the cleft.
Niun looked up at it in a blindness of rage.
“Be free of us,” he bade Duncan, and rose up, letting the pan’en fall to the sand. He looked last at Melein, her eyes closed, her face relaxed, her body supported in Duncan’s arms—not even a sen’en to attend her.
He gave a sharp call to his dusei, and began to walk, quickly, toward the end of the small valley, toward the main valley of Sil’athen.
“Niun!” Duncan shouted after him, which he did not regard.
He saw the aircraft hovering, at the valley’s end. He reached for the cords at the end of the siga’s long sleeves, and fastened them to their places on the honor belts at his shoulders, freeing his arms from the encumbering cloth; and he worked life into his hands, scored and numbed as they were from carrying the pan’en.
Duncan was running now, trying to overtake him. He heard the human—a racking cough, immediate payment for that rashness in Kesrith’s thin air. He saw the aircraft on the sand, and regul descending, standing on the ramp. The dus at his side moaned a roar of menace, and the other two scattered out, flanking them—dus-tactics in hunting, the outrunners.
He saw the regul about to fire, the weapon lifted. He was not in its line when it discharged; but his eyes were clear and his hand steady when he fired; and the regul crumpled, a mass of flesh still stirring. They did not die easily, body-shot. A moment later the ramp drew up, toppling the wounded regul: coward, Niun cursed the regul flier.
And darted into the rocks and scrambled for cover as it lifted, swinging over near him, drawing off again. He was in the open now, in the main valley, and other aircraft hovered.
They would have him, eventually. He ran low among the rocks that bordered the open sands, pursued by the aircraft with their sensors, and finally, a desperate tactic, braced and fired against the nearest—all without effect for the first several shots. Then the aircraft began having difficulty, and skidded off into a great cloud of sand amid the valley.
Others swooped in. The sky was alive with the sound of them: they passed low and drew off, warned by the fate of the other.
He ran and he rested, and by now the air was tinged with the coppery taste of too much exertion in the thin air, and he could not see clearly to fire back at them. Shots tore up the rocks where he hid, and he staggered as rock became shrapnel and tore his arm, bringing a warm flow of blood.
Lights played across the cliffs, making it impossible to stay hidden. There was scant cover, and shots tore at all of it. He ran, and fell, and scrambled up and raced for the next rock, and what had become of the dusei he did not know: it was not their kind of fight, this fury of fire and light.
The valley became ruin, steles and natural formations blasted to rabble. It was the final vengeance of the regul on his kind, to destroy the last sanctity of the People; and to ruin the land, as they had destroyed all that they had touched.
A near miss threw him rolling, dazed, blinded by the membrane that shielded his eyes, and he rose up and ran, too harried to fire any longer, only to run and run until they had him a clear target.
An aircraft pressed at him, diving low, throwing sand from the wind of its passing. And then he thought with a sudden and clear satisfaction, and shifted left, toward the end of the valley, toward an old, old place, under the sightless eyes of Eddan and Liran and Debas, his teachers.
Fight with the land; make it your ally, they had been wont to tell him; and he heard them clear and calmly through the roar of the aircraft.
He fell, sprawling and the aircraft continued on over him, hovered, kicking up sand; and he lay still, still as it settled, playing lights over the sand where he lay.
It touched; and the earth exploded, a great pale shape rearing up, heaving the aircraft, catching the craft in the convulsions of the mantle: burrower and machine, entangled in a cloud of sand, and the concussions of its struggles shaking the earth. Niun rolled and tried to run, but an edge of the mantle or a shock of air hurled him sprawling, and then another impact, and he saw the world go up in fire as the aircraft exploded.
And dark, thereafter.
* * *
“Niun!”
Someone was calling him out of that dark, that had not the familiarity of the brothers; but it was a familiar voice all the same.
Light broke over him. He moved limbs that were buried in sand, and heard the sound of engines.
“Niun!”
He lifted his head and drew himself up, standing on legs that swayed under him, shielding his eyes from the light with his arm.
Waiting.
“Niun!” It was Duncan’s voice, from a ragged silhouette before the lights. “Don’t fire. Niun, we have Melein aboard. She is not dead, Niun.”
He went blank at that horrid shock, mind not functioning, and came near to falling. And then the kel-law echoed in his mind, reminding him that there was a she’pan to be served; and that above all else, he could not leave her alone in the hands of strangers.
“What do you want of me?” he cried, his voice breaking with fury, with rage at Duncan, and treachery, and
dishonor. “Duncan, I remind you what you swore—”
“Come in,” Duncan said. “Niun, come in with us. Safe conduct. I still swear it.”
He hesitated, and the strength went out of him, and he made a gesture of surrender, and began, slowly, to walk into the lights, toward the silhouettes that waited for him, tall and human.
Better than the regul, at least.
And out of the tail of his eye, a squat dark form. He saw it, saw the move, knew treachery.
He palmed the as’ei, whirled and threw; and the fire took him, and he never felt the sand.
* * *
“Hada Surag-gi is dead,” said Galey. “The mri are hanging on.”
Duncan wiped his face, and in the same gesture, swept the head-cloth off and ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. He stumbled back through the narrow confines of the aircraft and shouldered past the medic who had already twice ordered him to keep his seat.
He sat down on the deck, unsteady in the motion of the aircraft, and regarded the two mri, wrapped in white, a tangle of tubing and monitoring connections from the automed units keeping their lives by means that the mri would find distasteful if they knew.
But they would have the chance to know.
“They’re going to make it, both of them,” the medic said. And then, frowning, with a glance at the sheet-wrapped hulk to the rear: “That particular regul was an officer of the Nom, with connections. There are going to be some questions asked.”
“There will be some questions asked,” Duncan said in a still voice, and looked at the mri, dismissing the medic from his mind. He sat with his legs tucked under him, still in the tattered and makeshift robes, and with his mind elsewhere; and at last the medic drew off to talk to the crew.
They had spoken little to him after the first excitement of recovering him alive; they were put off, perhaps, by the look of him, the strangeness of a man who had come alive from the desert of Kesrith, keeping company with mri and insisting with such vehemence on the possession of a mri treasure.
He touched Melein’s brow, smoothed the metallic-bronze of her hair, noting the steady pulse on the monitors that assured him of their lives. Melein’s golden eyes opened, the membrane cleared slowly back, and she seemed to be exploring the curious place that she had seen in her intervals of waking, rediscovering the strangeness that had taken them in. She was curiously calm, as if she had accepted to be here. He took her long slim fingers in his hand, and she pressed his hand with a faint effort.
“Niun is all right,” he told her. He was not sure she understood this, for there was not a flicker. “There is the object you wanted,” he added, but she did not look; likely all these concerns were distant from her, for they were heavily drugged.
“Kel’en,” she whispered.
“She’pan?” he answered: perhaps she confused him with Niun.
“There will be a ship,” she said. “A way off Kesrith.”
“There will be,” he said to her, and reckoned that he had told her the truth.
The war was done. They were free of regul. A human ship there would be that—a chance for them. It was the most the mri would ever ask of tsi’mri.
“There will be that,” he said. She closed her eyes then.
“Shon’ai,” she said, with a taut, faint smile. He did not know the word. But he thought that she meant acceptance.
The deck slanted. They were coming in. He told her so.
Book Two:
Shon’jir
Chapter One
The mri was still sedated. They kept him that way constantly, dazed and bewildered at this place that echoed of human voices and strange machinery.
Sten Duncan came to stand at the mri’s bedside as he did twice each day, under the eye of the security officer who stood just outside the windowed partition. He came to see Niun, permitted to do so because he was the only one of all at Kesrith base that knew him. Today there was a hazy awareness in the golden, large-irised eyes. Duncan fancied the look there to be one of reproach.
Niun had lost weight. His golden skin was marked in many places with healing wounds, stark and angry. He had fought and won a battle for life which, fully conscious, he would surely have refused to win; but Niun remained ignorant of the humans who came and went about him, the scientists who, in concert with his physicians, robbed him of dignity.
They were enemies of mankind, the mri. Forty years of war, of ruined worlds and dead numbered by the millions—and yet most humans had never seen the enemy. Fewer still had looked upon a mri’s living and unveiled face.
They were a beautiful people, tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictitating membrane that protected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once humanlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders’ ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them.
In the next room, similarly treated, lay Melein, called she’pan, leader of the mri: a young woman—and while Niun was angular and gaunt, a warrior of his kind, Melein was delicate and fine. On their faces both mri were scarred, three fine lines of blue stain slanting across each cheek, from the inner corner of the eye to the outer edge of the cheekbone, marks of meaning no human knew. On Melein’s sleeping face, the fine blue lines lent exotic beauty to her bronze-lashed eyes; she seemed too fragile to partake of mri ferocity, or to bear the weight of mri crimes. Those that handled the mri treated her gently, even hushed their voices when they were in the room with her, touched her as little as possible, and that carefully. She seemed less a captive enemy than a lovely, sad child.
It was Niun they chose for their investigations—Niun, unquestionably the enemy, who had exacted a heavy price for his taking. He had been stronger from the beginning, his wounds more easily treated; and for all that, it was not officially expected that Niun survive. They called their examination medical treatments, and entered them so in the records, but in the name of those treatments, Niun had been holographed, scanned inside and out, had yielded tissue samples and sera—whatever the investigators desired—and more than once Duncan had seen him handled with unfeeling roughness, or left on the table too near waking while humans delayed about their business with him.
Duncan closed his eyes to it, fearing that any protest he made would see him barred from the mri’s vicinity entirely. The mri had been kept alive, despite their extensive injuries; they survived; they healed; and Duncan found that of the greatest concern. The mri’s personal ethic rejected outsiders, abhorred medicine, refused the pity of their enemy; but in nothing had these two mri been given a choice. They belonged to the scientists that had found the means to prolong their lives. They were not allowed to wake—and that too was for the purpose of keeping them alive.
“Niun,” Duncan said softly, for the guard outside was momentarily staring elsewhere. He touched the back of Niun’s long-fingered hand, below the webbing of the restraint; they kept the mri carefully restrained at all times, for Niun would tear at the wound if he once found the chance: so it was feared. Other captive mri had done so, killing themselves. None had ever been kept alive.
“Niun,” he said again, persistent in what had become a twice-daily ritual—to let the mri know, if nothing more, that someone remained who could speak his name; to make the mri think, in whatever far place his consciousness wandered; to make some contact with the mri’s numbed mind.
Niun’s eyes briefly seemed to track and gave it up again, hazing as the membrane went over them.
“It’s Duncan,” he persisted, and closed his hand forcefully on the mri’s. “Niun, it’s Duncan.”
The membrane retreated; the eyes cleared; the slim fingers jerked, almost closed. Niun stared at him, and Duncan’s heart leaped in hope, for it was the first indication the mri had made that he was aware, proof that the mind, the man he knew, was und
amaged. Duncan saw the mri’s eyes wander through the room, linger at the door, where the guard was visible.
“You are still on Kesrith,” Duncan said softly, lest the guard hear and notice them. “You’re aboard probe ship Flower, just outside the city. Pay no attention to the man. That is nothing, Niun. It’s all right.”
Possibly Niun understood; but the amber eyes hazed and closed, and he slipped back into the grip of the drugs, free of pain, free of understanding, free of remembering.
They were the last of their kind, Niun and Melein—the last mri, not alone on Kesrith, but anywhere. It was the reason that the scientists would not let them go: it was a chance at the mri enigma that might never, after them, be repeated. The mri had died here on Kesrith, in one night of fire and treachery—all, all save these two, who survived as a sad curiosity in the hands of their enemies.
And they had been put there by Duncan, whom they had trusted.
Duncan pressed Niun’s unfeeling shoulder and turned away, paused to look through the dark glass partition into the room where Melein lay sleeping. He no longer visited her, not since she had grown stronger. Among mri she would have been holy, untouchable: an outsider did not speak to her directly, but through others. Whatever she endured of loneliness and terror among her enemies was not worse than humiliation. Her enemies she might hate and ignore, slipping into unconsciousness and forgetting; but before him, whose name she knew, who had known her when she was free, she might feel deep shame.
She rested peacefully. Duncan watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing for a moment, assuring himself that she was well and comfortable, then turned away and opened the door, murmured absent-minded thanks to the guard, who let him out of the restricted section and into the outer corridor.
Duncan ascended to the main level of the crowded probe ship, dodging white-uniformed science techs and blue-uniformed staff, a man out of place in Flower. His own khaki brown was the uniform of the Sur’Tac, Surface Tactical Force. Like the scientific personnel of Flower, he was an expert; his skills, however, were no longer needed on Kesrith or elsewhere. The war was over.
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