The question stopped him cold. What Duncan asked and what they had arrived at in Council were two different matters. The dus came between, forcing its way. Niun recoiled in his thoughts, blank to it, quickly enough, he hoped. Then the second dus made its appearance, unfelt until it came within sight around the tent corner. And all about them were listening. He set his hand on Duncan's shoulder. "Get in out of the wind, sov-kela.
Duncan went, unquestioning. Niun looked about at the others, the faces that expected answer of him, wondering the same things. "Ask of your own," he said. "We move in the morning. It would be presumption of me to wish that you will all be with us. But I do. And for my own Kel give me a very little time I ask this.
There was a murmuring. He walked through them, and into the tent, and no one followed, only the dusei. There was no one inside, but only Duncan, in the dim light of the wind vents overhead.
"I should not have asked you in public," Duncan said.
"Do not fret for it It was all right.
"I know," said Duncan in that same faint voice, "that something is wrong. Something went wrong. But not with them and you. Am I mistaken?
O gods, Niun thought, how much did you feel? The dusei were there; Duncan had a talent with them ... let them have too much, received back more than mri had ever gotten. His nature, he thought, that he reserves nothing.
"Where is your service?" he asked of Duncan.
"With the she'pan."
"And if we fight?
"You cannot fightf' Duncan lowered his voice in mid-breath at Niun's warning, made a gesture of helpless appeal. "You know the odds; you know, if they do not. You have no hope at all Do you want another Kesrith?
"If we fight are you mri?
"Yes," Duncan said after a moment.
"You could not be mistaken.
"No.
Niun opened his arms, embraced him, set him back at arm's length, staring into his anguished eyes. "Sov-kela if you are wrong, we will break your heart
"What did they decide?
"It was always decided. A mri way. Do you hear me? The she'pan has already determined what way she will lead; and perhaps she will use what you have given her but not not as you gave it.
"I hear you." The dusei crowded near, moaning shied off again. Duncan caught a breath and made a gesture as he would when he was without a word, let the breath go and the gesture fall, helpless. His dus came to him and he caressed its thick neck as if that were the most absorbing task in the world. "You choose your own way," he said finally. "If I have interfered, it was because I hoped there was a way the mri could survive and keep their own way. If I was wrong, it was tsi'mri taint, perhaps, a fondness for survival.
"No. You do not understand. I am not asking whether you can die with us. I am talking about the she'pan's order. Your honor ... is it mri?
Duncan stared at him, his face stark in the dim light, and for a moment frightened. The fear passed. "I warned them. I told them.
"If they are as you once were can they have believed a plain warning?
"Some likely not. But I gave it, all the same.
There was a stirring next the walls, the soft murmur of voices, diminishing; the stranger-kel'ein were departing the patchwork tent. Niun walked to the outside doorway, looked on the ja'anom who waited, solemn and quiet, Hlil foremost among them. He beckoned, and they came, settling into council in absolute quiet Duncan would have sought last rank, but Niun signed to him and cleared a place near him, not by rank, but in a place where those concerned in council business might be set out of their order.
"Is there any matter," he asked, "that passed out there that was not resolved?
No one spoke. But after a moment there was a stir from the second itaik, and heads turned as Ras stood up. She excused herself through first rank and came to center, and in disquiet Niun stood up, and Duncan. Ras came to Duncan and embraced him, and after that to Niun, as one would with an unscarred on his first day in Kel. "I swore to be first," she said.
Others came, Peras and Desai and Hlil and Merin; Dias and Seras and all of them from first rank to last, first Duncan and then himself, in strange and quiet courtesy; to the first he was numb, and toward the last, beginning to comprehend it not as irony, but as something given from the heart. They all settled in their places, even Duncan, and the dusei by him; and he was left staring at them with heat risen to his face and a dazed lack of grace.
After a moment he sat down, hands in lap, stared at them for some moments more before he could recover his wits or reason the tautness from his throat
"The matter before council," he managed finally in a voice which sounded distant in his own ears. "You asked to know it
Chapter Fifteen
No life existed here either. Boaz stared at the city from wind-sore eyes the damaged streets, the sand-choked alleys, and hope began to ebb. Her heart pounded in her ears with the steady strain; joints ached as from long fever, and popped with sharp little pains when the sand made the going hard. The boys wanted to carry the necessary pack; she refused that stubbornly, for they had their own. Her breath rasped in her throat and came too short through the hissing mask; if she could have shed anything, irrationally, it would be that rattling tank at her shoulder, and the mask that seemed more restraint on breathing than aid, but it was life. She turned the valve from time to time, shot a little oxygen in; it made her light-headed and her throat hurt. She blamed that and not the air and the cold.
There were at least no dead; they were spared that, at least There was no sign that rnri had visited here since the seas fled. But there had been fire from this place; regul and human fire had pinpointed to areas which had fired, finding their targets by that means. Something was alive here, but not-she began to be sure not flesh and blood. Not the mri they had needed to find.
Caley stopped ahead of her, slung his pack off and sat down on a fallen stone, arms slack between his knees; rest stop; Boaz was glad of it, and sat down, Kadarin next to her. They were three; by Galey's decision, since Lane's death they set themselves on strict schedule, and left Shibo with the ship, to monitor com and, Boaz suspected, to get word back if they met trouble. They were out of room for recklessness. Shibo was the other pilot capable of leaving them. Had those orders in certain contingencies, she suspected. Galey had not said. It was, perhaps, salve for a soldier's conscience that truth might get back if they did not.
"Got to be close to the central square," Galey said. "Or my direction's off.
She nodded. Galey and Kadarin looked terrible, faces lined with Kutath's cruel dryness, red-marked with the masks cracked lips, eyes red like sick animals'. Nails broke to the quick and skin at joints galled and cracked and crusted. Mri robes made sense, she reckoned; no way she could have persuaded the military, but mri who wore loose robes and exposed scarcely their eyes to this torment had more sense than they. She would have given much for the thickness of those coarse robes between her and the wind, which buried their feet in sand even while they sat. She thought of Duncan, who had walked this land on mri terms and come in strangely more whole than they; recalled the face, gaunt and changed, and narrow-eyed, smooth, as if humankind were burned out of it, and wrung out with the moisture; and placid, as if expressions were waste.
There had been a touch of the mri. Here save for the edunei things did not agree together. She looked about her, at stones which had a touch of lavenders amid the apricot dust of afternoon ... at streets and buildings. What it might have been in its prime, this great city her expert eye filled in, missing angles, shaping with the remembered fragments of the saffron-hued city of so many dead; alien arches, bizarre geometries, delicate symmetry of threes.