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 diissoddenly sent award-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, sovkela.”
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.
CHAPTER Twenty-Two
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.
It was madness to have tried it, he had to realize in the burning days, madness to have imagined that he could make the wreckage in time, that they would have stayed where there was no life.
But there was no choice. He was nothing among the People, but a problem that Niun did not need, an issue over which he might have to kill; a problem to Melein, who must explain him.
He served the she’pan.
There was no question of this in him now: if he walked and found nothing, still it only proved that his own efforts were worth nothing, as those of An-ehon had been nothing, and the burden passed: the she’pan had other kel’ein.