“Yes,” he said; and accepted her gesture of dismissal and left, still feeling in his bones the ache that the machine’s weapon had left; dazed he was still, and much that she had said wandered his mind without a tether to hold it… only that Melein meant to fight, and that therefore she would need him.
A’ani. Challenge. She’panei did not share: the she’pan served by the most skillful kel’en, survived. Melein prepared herself.
He returned in silence to the hall below, curled up in the corner, massaging his aching arms and reckoning in troubled thoughts that there was killing to be done.
“Is she all right?” Duncan intruded into his silence, unwelcome.
“She will not leave. She is talking to it, with them. She speaks of wars, kel Duncan.”
“Is that remarkable for the People?” Niun looked at him, prepared to be angry, and realized that it was a failure of words. “Wars. Mri wars. Wars-with-distance-weapons.” He resorted to the forbidden mu’ara, and Duncan seemed then to understand him, and fell quickly silent “Would that the dusei would come,” Niun declared suddenly, wrenching his thoughts from such prospects; and in his restlessness he went to the door and ventured to call to them, that lilting call that sometimes, only sometimes, could summon them.
It did not work this time. There was no answer this night, nor the next.
But on the third, while Melein remained shut in sen-tower, and they fretted in their isolation below, there came a familiar breathing and rattle of claws on the steps outside, and that peculiar pressure at the senses that heralded the dusei.
It was the first night that they two dared sleep soundly, warm next their beasts and sure that they would be warned if danger came on them.
It was Melein that came; a clap of her hands startled them and the beasts together, wakened them in dismay that she, though one of them, had found them sleeping.
“Come,” she said; and when they had both gained their feet and stood ready to do her bidding: “The People are near. An-ehon has lit a beacon for them. They are coming.”
CHAPTER Twenty
THE STORM days past had left banks of sand heaped in the city, high dunes that made unreal shapes in the light that whipped about the square.
Duncan looked back at the source, a beacon from the edun’s crest that flashed powerfully in the still-dark sky, a summons to any that might be within sight of the city.
And the People would come to that summoning.
They took nothing with them: the pan’en, the sled, everything they owned was left in the edun. If they fared well, they would return; if not, they had no further need. There was, he suspected, though Niun had not spoken overmuch of their chances, no question of flight, whatever happened.
The dusei were disturbed, the more so as they neared the city’s limits. Niun scattered them with a sharp command; it was not a situation for dus-feelings. The beasts left them, and vanished quickly into the dark and the ruins.
“Should I not go also?” Duncan asked.
The mri both looked at him. “No,” said Niun. “No,” Melein echoed, as if such an offering offended them.
And in the dawning, on the sand ridge facing the city, appeared a line of black.
Kel’ein.
The Face that is Turned Outward.
“Shon’ai,” Niun said softly. Shon’ai sa’jiran, the mot ran. The cast is made: no recalling it. “She’pan, will you wait, or will you come?”
“I will walk with you… lest there be some over-anxious kel’en on the other side. There are still she’panei. We will see if there is still respect for law.”
And in the first light of Na’i’in, the black line advanced, a single column. They walked to meet it, the three of them, and there were no words.
The column stopped, and a pair of kel’ein detached themselves and came forward.
Melein stopped. “Come,” Niun said to Duncan.
They walked without her. “Keep silent,” Niun said, “and keep to my left flank.”
And at speaking-distance, only barely, the strange kel’ein stopped; and hailed them. It was a mu’ara, and not a word of it could Duncan understand, but only she’pan.