Duncan’s beast growled and shook its head, and they kept moving, though it seemed by now his limbs were hung with lead and his muscles laced with fire. He coughed, and blood came, and he became conscious of the weight of the weapons that he bore, weapons that were useless where he was bound, and more useless still were he dead, but he would not give them up. He clenched in one hand the sole j’tai he wore, and remembered the man that had given it, and would not be less.
Su-she’pani kef en. The she’pan’s kel’en.
Pain lanced up his leg. He fell, cast down by the treacherous turn of stone, carefully gathered himself up again and leaned on the dus. The leg was not injured. He tried to suck at the wound the stone had made on his hand, but his mouth was dry and he could not. There was no pipe hereabouts. He hoarded what moisture he had and chose not to use the little supply that remained to him, not yet And one of the lesser dusei came close to him, reared up so that his own interposed its body. There was a whuffing of great lungs, and the lesser backed off.
Ship, he thought suddenly, and for no reason.
Desire.
There was no warding impulse from the stranger. He felt only direction, sensed presence.
He called to his dus, softly, from a throat that had almost forgotten sound, and went, felt a presence at his left side, a warm breathing on the hand that hung beside him.
Doubly attended now he went. Another was with them, thought of destination, desired what they desired.
Men.
Shapes wandered his subconscious. Memory, no. Some elsewhere saw, cast vision, guided him. He knew this.
Shapes obscured in sand, a half-dome. Jaws closed on his hand, gently, gently… he realized that he was down, and that the dus urged him. He gathered himself up again and started moving, staggered as his boot hit something buried and something whipped at the leather, but it did not penetrate, and whipped sinuously away in the amber murk. Dus-feelings raged at it, and ignored it thereafter, preferring his company.
Night was on them, storm-night and world-night, friendly to them, hiding them. He knew the ship near, stumbled on pieces of it, bits of wreckage, bits of heat-fused sand, before its alien hulk took shape in the ribbons of sand, and he saw the havoc that had been made there.
And a half-dome, squat half-ovoid on stilts, the red wink of lights beaconing through the murk.
Dusei ringed him, all of them; fear-desire-fear, they sent.
“Yai!” he cried at them, voice lost in the wind. But his stayed, plodded its turn-toed way beside him as he walked toward that place, that alien shape on Kutath’s dead seashore.
He knew it as he came near, vast and blind as it was, knew the patterning of its lights And for an instant he did not know how to name it Flower.
The word for it came back, a shifting from reality to reality.
“Flower,” he hailed it, a cracked and unrecognizable voice in the living wind. “Flower open your hatch.”
But nothing responded. He gathered up a fist-sized stone and threw it against the hull, and another, and nothing answered. The storm grew, and he knew that he had soon to seek shelter.
And then he saw the sweep of a scanner eye, and light followed it, fixing him and the dus together in its beam. The beast shied and protested. He flung his arm up to shield his visored eyes, and stood still, mind flung back to another night when he had stood with this dus hi the lights, before guns.
There was long silence.
“Flower!” he cried.
The lights stayed fixed. He stood swaying in the gusts of wind, and held one hand firm against the dus’ back so that the beast would stand.
Suddenly the hatch parted and the ramp shot down, invitation.
He walked toward it, set foot on the ringing metal, and the dus stayed beside him. He lifted his hands, lest they mistake, and moved slowly.
“Boz,” he said.
It was strange to see her, the gray suddenly more pronounced in her hair, reminding him of time that had passed. He was conscious of the guns that surrounded him, of men that held rifles trained on him and on the dus. He took off the mez and zaidhe, so that they might know him. He smoothed his hair, that he had let grow: there was the stubble of beard on his face, that no mri would have. He felt naked before them, before Boaz and Luiz. He looked at their faces, saw dismay mirrored in their eyes.