Melein, he tried to say to her, and found it impossible. She was Melein still, and sister: but something else was contained in her, and he did not know how to speak to that, to call her back. He held out his hand, anxious at the fire behind her; and she took it and stepped over the rocks at the entry, and came with him. Her skin was cold. Her hand slipped lifelessly from his when she no longer needed him.
Duncan waited, backed a little from the both of them, continuing to stare into the light that was growing behind them. Perhaps he understood that something of great value was being destroyed. He looked dazed, confused.
There was left only the strange, cold ovoid. Niun bore it in both his arms as Melein started for the passage outward. He knew that he surely bore an essential part of the Pana, which name his caste could not even speak without fear, which a kel'en ought never to see, let alone handle.
The kel'en who had borne it here had devoted himself to die afterward, to hold it secret and undisturbed. This had been an honorable man, of the old way, the Kel of the Between; such a man would have been shocked at Niun s'Intel.
But he drew courage from holding it, for by it Melein had come into her power: he felt this of a surety. She had been only half a she'pan in his eyes, appointed by violence and necessity. But now he believed that the essential things had passed, that Intel had given her all she needed. She'pan, he could call her hereafter, believing implicitly that she knew the Mysteries. She had been face to face with the Pana, understanding what a kel'en could not. He did not envy her this understanding: the sound of her weeping still haunted him.
But she knew, and she led, and hereafter he trusted her leading implicitly.
They fled, they and the human and the dusei, out of the well, where smoke began to billow up, betraying them to the sky, where flames lit the walls with red and pursued them with heat. They entered the ascending turns of the way that they had come, into the cold dark.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
THE NOM, in its first day of new operations, was aswarm with human technicians. Stavros revelled in the sound and scurry of humanity, after so long among the slow-moving regul. Reports came in, a bustle of human experts adding their agility to the technology of regul in repairs of the damaged plants, in clearing the wreckage left by the storm and the fighting.
And at a point judged stable enough to support a ship, probe Flower rested her squat body out on the height to the side of the city opposite the ruined port: a small vessel for a star-capable craft, a ship without the need for vast secure landing area, her design enabling her to operate in complete independence.
It had been a fortunate decision that brought several such probes on the mission, against the need for such difficult landings, despite their lack of defense against attack. Saber still rested up at the station, spacemade and spacebound, a kilometer long and incapable of landing anywhere.
Flower, despite the name, was an ungainly shell, without fragility, without exposed vanes, without need of landing gantries and docks, an ugly ship, meant for plain, workman duties.
She brought technicians, scientists, who were already beginning to sift through the remnant of Kesrith's records, to sample the air, the soil, to perform the myriad tasks that would begin to appropriate the world to human colonists.
"Favor," bai Hulagh had said, seeing operations begin. "We regret in the light of this new good feeling, the unfortunate destruction of our equipment in the calamity at the port. We might have been of much assistance."
Regul younglings in general were not so easily adaptive: they fretted at the nearness of humans, and preferred to work in their own groups. They made it no secret that they would gladly be off Kesrith now, to seek the security of their own kind in regul space.
But Hulagh had taken some few of them into his own office within the Nom and when the younglings came out, they had smiles for humans and great courtesy, and a powerful fear of the bai.
Until the storms descended, and the dusei returned.
The report came in first from the water plant, Galey's group, that reported to Flower that there were animals moving in large numbers there upon the heights; and Flower confirmed it, and flashed the same to the biologists, and in the doing of it, to Stavros.
Stavros locked his sled into the track that would take him to the far side of the Nom, and whisked through several changes to the observation deck, disengaged, and went on manual through the doors and out into the acrid wind.
A ruddy bank of cloud was sweeping in, and there, there, all round the visible horizon, sat the dusei.
A chill went over him, that had nothing to do with the wind, or the biting smell of Kesrith's rains. He sat in the sled, the wind whipping at his sparse hair. He saw Flower squatting on her hilltop; and the distant water plant, and vehicles speeding for cover as the storm came down; and airships, running for the makeshift field before the storm should hit: miracle if the crews could get them secured in time. He clenched his fist in rage, foreseeing damage, ships picked up by Kesrith's winds and hurled like toys about the fieldhuman equipage, that, expensive and irreplaceable.
He shifted onto Flower's wavelength and heard Flower giving frantic instructions. They were warning the aircraft off, seeking means to route them round the storm to temporary landing elsewhere. He watched as lightning lit the clouds, and the clouds bred and built, and rolled in with frightening rapidity, red-lit with Arain's glow.
And the dusei in unending rows sat, and watched, and maintained their vigil. The rains began to fall.
Stavros shivered as the first drops spattered the nose of the sled. It was not a place to sit encased in metal, with the lightning flashing overhead. He backed, opened the doorway, entered the Nom and sealed the door after, still hearing Flower's chatter, with weather-radar on his receptor, a bow of storm that clutched at the sea's edge, at the city itself.
Flower, he sent, breaking in on their communications. Flower: Stavros.
They acknowledged, a thin metallic sound, interrupted by static.
Flower: the dusei, the dusei
"We have observed, sir. We are regretfully busy"
He broke in again. Flower: drive off the duset. Break them up, drive them away.
They acknowledged the order. He sat his sled feeling as if he had lost his mind, as if all reason departed him. Doubtless Flower believed that he had lost his senses. But the ominous heaviness in the air persisted. His skin prickled. He could not bear the dus-presence, watching, watching at the storm's edge.
Responsible?
He refused to believe it. Yet in panic he had diverted Flower to deal with them. He heard them discussing the tasktoo wise to discuss the wisdom of it in his hearing. He sat with his skin drawn into gooseflesh, his teeth near to chattering, a quavering and sickly old man, he thought, a man who had been among strangers too long.
He could countermand his own order, break in again and bid them tend more important matters.
But neither could he rid himself of the fear of the dusei.
His screens went all to static, robbing him of the power to communicate with anyone. The static lasted, and there came a note over his receptors that shrilled, ear-tormenting, and passed beyond audibility. He powered down, quickly, desperate, of a sudden consumed with the fear that the sled itself might be malfunctioning, himself trapped, helpless to move or call for help.
He watched, through a curtain of rain against the glass, the line of the dusei begin to break, the beasts scattering; and still he shivered, terrified as he saw many of them break not toward the hills, but toward the city, entering its streets, ranging where dusei were not wont to come.