Find where I have hidden the stone.
Is it near? Is it far?
Touch the dus and try to lie.
But not among brothers, not within the Kel or the Sen. “Melein,” Niun protested. “He fears the beast.”
“He fears,” she echoed harshly. “Tell me, Duncan, what they supposed of the record they put within this ship.”
“That it might be that it might be the location of mri bases.”
The feeling in the air was like that before a storm, thick and close and unreal. The great dus shivered, lifted its head. “Be still,” Niun whispered in its blunt ear, tugging at it to distract the beast.
“Ah,” said Melein. “And humans have surely duplicated this record. They will have taken this gift that was in the pan’en, that rested within then: hands. And to make us trust it, they gave us you.”
The dus cried out suddenly, moved, both of them. It hurled Duncan aside, away he rolled to the wall, sprawled at the impact and both dusei were on their feet, their panic tangible. “Yai!” Niun cried at his own, clapped his hands, struck it. It reacted, threw its weight against its lesser companion, and kept the confused dus at bay, constantly shifting to remain between it and him; and Niun flung himself to Duncan’s side, forcing his dus to shield them both.
The panic crested, subsided. Duncan was on his knees, holding his arm against his body, shuddering convulsively; his face was white and beaded with sweat. Niun touched him, dragged the arm outward and pushed up the sleeve, exposing the ugly, swelling wound.
Dus-poison.
“You will not die of it,” Niun told him, holding him, trying to ease the sickly shuddering that wracked the human. He was not sure that Duncan could understand him. Melein came, bent down, touched the wounded arm; but there was no pity in her, only cold curiosity.
The dusei crept back. The little one, abused, hung back and radiated distress, blood-feelings. The greater one nosed at Duncan, snorted and drew back, and the human flinched and cried aloud.
“You have hurt them both,” Niun said to Melein, thinking that she would feel remorse for one or the other, the dus or the man.
“He is still tsi’mri,” she said. “And Niun, he has lied to us from the beginning; I have known it; you have seen it.”
“You do not know what you have done,” said Niun. “He feared the dusei, feared this one most especially. How could you expect to get truth from him? The dus is hurt, Melein; I do not know how far.”
“You forget yourself.”
“She’pan,” he said, bowed his head, but it did not appease her. He took Duncan’s good arm and helped him to stand, and flung his arm about him, holding him on his feet. The human was in utter, deep shock. When Niun began to move, the dus came, and slowly, slowly they left the presence of the she’pan.
Sometimes the human fought his way out of the fever, became for a moment lucid; at such times he seemed to know where he was, and his eyes wandered his surroundings, where he lay against the dus, in the corner of the kel-hall. But it did not last. He could not hold, and retreated again into his delirium. Niun did not speak to him, did not brighten the lights too much; it was best to keep both man and dus as free of sensation as possible.
Finally, when by night-cycle there was no improvement, Niun went to Duncan, and, as a kath’en might undress a child, took from him his mez and zaidhe, and his robes too, so that he might take warmth from the dus. He bedded him between his own dus and the afflicted one, and covered him with a doubled blanket.
The poison was strong in him; and a bond had been forced between two creatures that had not been able to bear each other. The wound was a deep puncture, and Duncan had taken more venom from the hollow dewclaw than was good even for a mri who was accustomed to it. But the old ways said (and being kel’en, Niun did not know whether this was truth or fable) that a dus knew its man by this thereafter, that once the substance had gone into a man and he had lived, then he would nevermore be in danger from the venom or the anger of that particular dus, which would never part from him in life. This was not entirely so,’ for a man who handled dusei frequently received small scratches from the dewclaw; and occasionally deeper ones, which might make him fevered. But it was also true that a man not accustomed to a particular dus might react very stongly, even fatally, to a bad wound from it.