Others came, two, five, six dusei, a third the size of the one that wove him protection. He shuddered in horror as they came near and surrounded him, as one after another they reared up man-tall and came down again, making the sand fly in clouds.
There was a storm-feeling in the air, a sense charged and heavy with menace.
Storm-friends, the mri called them, the great brothers of the cold wind.
And none such had been known on arid Kutath, no such monsters had this world known.
They have come here of their own purpose, Duncan thought suddenly, cold, and frightened. He remembered them entering the ship, remembered them, whose hearts he had never reached, living with them on the long voyage.
A refuge from humans, from regul. They had fled their world. They chose a new one, the escape that had lain open for them, that he had provided.
Closer they came, and his dus radiated darkness. Bodies touched, and a numbing pulse filled the air, rumbling like a windsound or like earthquake. They circled, all circled, touching. Duncan flung himself to his knees and put his arms about the neck of his beast, stopping it, feeling the nose of a stranger-dus at the nape of his neck, smelling the hot breath of the beast, heat that wrapped and stifled him.
Ship, he remembered to think at them, and cast the disaster of An-ehon with his mind, the towers of Kesrith falling. Pleasure came back, appalling him.
No! he cried, silently and aloud. They fled back from him.
He cast them images of waterless waste, of a sun dying, of dusei wasting in desolation.
Their anger flooded at him, and his own beast shuddered, and drew back. It fled, and he could not hold it.
He was alone, desolate and blind. Suddenly he did not know direction or world-sense. His senses were clear, ice-clear, and yet he was cut off and without that inner direction that he had known so long.
“Come back,” he cried at the dus that lingered.
He cast it edun-pictures, of water flowing, of Kesrith’s storms, and ships coming and going. Whether it received on this level he did not know. He cast it desire, desperate desire, and the image of the ship.
There was a touch, tentative, not the warding impulse.
“Come,” he called it aloud, held out his hands to it. He cast it fellowship, mri-wise together, man and dus.
Life, he cast it.
There was hesitance. The warding impulse lashed fear across his senses, and he would not accept it Life, he insisted.
It came. All about him he felt warding impulse, strong and full of terrors, such that the sweat broke out on him and dried at once in the wind. But his dus was there. It began to walk with him, warding with all its might.
Traitor to its kind. Traitor human and traitor dus. He had corrupted ft, and it served him, went with him, began to be as he was.
Fear cast darkness about them and the afternoon sun seemed dimmer for a time; and then the others were gone, and there appeared finally black dots along a distant ridge, watching.
Children of Kutath, these dusei, flesh of the flesh that had come from Kesrith, and partaking not at all of it.
Only the old one remembered not events, but person, remembered him, and stayed.
By late afternoon the wind began rising, little gusts at first that skirled the sand off the dune crests and swept out in great streamers over the dead sea chasm. Then came the flurries of sand that rode on battering force, that made walking difficult, that rattled off the protective visor and made Duncan again wrap the met doubled about his face. The dus itself walked half-blind, tear-trails running down its face. It moaned plaintively, and in sudden temper reared up, shook itself, blew dust and settled again to walk against the wind.
The others appeared from time to time, walking the ridges, keeping their pace. They appeared as dark shadows in the curtain of sand that rode the wind, materialized as now a head and now less, or a retreating flank. What they sent was still hostile, and full of blood.