He gathered himself and began to walk again, staggered as the dus suddenly lurched against him with a snarl. He blinked in dull amazement as a cloud of sand purled up from the side of a rock and something ran beneath the sand, not like a burrower’s fluttering broad mantle, but something lithe and narrow that like the burrower dug a small pit, a funnel of sand.
“Yai,” he called hoarsely, restraining the dus, that would have gone for it and dug it into the light with its long ven-omed claws. Whatever was there, he did not know the size of it, or its dangers. He caught the hunt-sense from the dus, put it down with his own will, and they skirted the area, climbed up the near ridge. When he looked down, he saw all the area dotted with such small pits. There was regularity about them, like points on concentric circle. They formed a configuration wide enough to embrace a dus.
“Come,” he wished the beast, and they moved, the dus giving small, dissatisfied whuffs, still desiring to go back.
But of other presence there had been no sign. There was the cold and the wind and the streaming light of Na’i’in; there was the track of their own passing swiftly obliterated by the wind, and once, only once, a tall black figure on a dune-crest.
One of the kel’ein, an outrunner of the People, another band, perhaps, insolently letting himself be seen. Duncan had felt exposed at that, felt his lack of skill with the yin’ein… the unknown under the sand did not frighten him half so much as the thought of encounter with others.
Of encountering a she’pan other than Melein. It was, he thought, a mri sort of fear a hesitance to break out of that familiarity which was Melein’s law. With that fear, with mri canniness, he kept to the low places, the sides, the concealments available in the land, and his eyes, dimmed by his lowered visor, carefully scanned the naked horizons when he must again venture across the flat.
The great rift of the lost sea came into view at noontime. He looked away into that hazy depth where sand ribboned off into the chasm in wind-driven falls, and lost his sense of “height and depth in such dimensions. But scanning the horizon, he knew where he was, that was not far from the place he sought.
He kept moving, and by now the lack of solid food had his stomach knotting. The ache in his side was a constant presence, and that in his chest beat in time with the ebb and flow of his life.
Dus.
He felt it, and looked up as if someone had called his name. Niun? he wondered, looking about him, and yet did not believe it. Niun was with the People; he would not have deserted Melein, or those in his charge. There were the Kath and the Sen, that could not make such a trek as he had made, kel’en and unencumbered.
Yet the dus-feeling was there. Left. Right. He scanned those horizons, stroked the velvet rolls of flesh on the neck of his own beast, sent question to its mind. Ward-impulse went out from it. No illusion, then.
With his nape hairs prickling he kept moving, constantly aware of that weight against his senses.
Brother-presence.
Dus-brother, The dus beside him began to sing a song of contentment, of harmony, that stole the pain and stole his senses, until he realized that he had walked far and no longer knew the way he walked.
No, he projected at it, no, no, no. He thought of the ship, thought of it again and again, and desired, urged toward it Affirmation.
And threat.
Darkness came then, sudden and soft and deep, and full of menace, claws that tore and fangs that bit and over it all a presence that would not let him go. He came to awareness again still walking, shivering periodically in the dry, cold wind. His hands and arms were sandburned and bloody, so that he knew that he had fallen hard at some time and not known.
Ship, he thought at the beast Hostile senses surrounded him. He cried out at the dark and it thrust itself across his path, stopping him. He stood shuddering as it rubbed round his legs, vast, heavy creature that circled him and wove a pattern of steps.