Shon'jir

He could not delay longer. He drew back, still hoping. There was nothing.

He had not expected a pilot: he had looked to fly himself. But when he climbed aboard he found the controls occupied by a sandy-haired man who bore Saber's designation of his sleeve. GALEY, the pocket patch said, LT.

"Sorry about the delay," Duncan said, for the air was hot, noon-heated. "Didn't know I wasn't solo on this one.”

Galey fired up, shrugged as the engines throbbed into life. "No matter. It's hot here, hot down there at the water plant on repair detail, too. I'd rather the ship, thanks.”

Duncan settled into the copilot's place, adjusted his gear, the equipment that Boaz had provided, into the space be­tween his feet, and fastened the belts. The ship lifted at an angle, swung off into 'an immediate sharp turn toward the hills. Cold air flooded them now that they were airborne, delicious luxury after the oven-heat of the aircraft on the ground.

"Do you know where we're going?" he asked of Galey.

"I know the route. I flew you out of there.”

Duncan gave him a second look, trying to remember him, and could not. It had been dark, a time too full of other concerns. He blinked, realizing Galey had said something else to him, that he had been drifting.

"Sorry," he said. "You asked something?”

Galey shrugged again. "No matter. No matter. HowM the kel'ein make out? Still alive, I hear.”

"Alive, yes.”

"This place we're going have something to do with them?”

"Yes.”

"Dangerous?”

"I don't know," he said, considering that for the first time. "Maybe.”

Galey absorbed that thought in several kilometers of silence, the white desert slipping beneath them, jagged with rocks. Duncan looked out, saw black dots below.

"Dusei," he said. Galey rocked over and looked.

"Filthy beasts," Galey said.

Duncan did not answer him or argue. Most of humankind would say the same, would wish the remaining mri dead, with just cause. He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughen into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

They circled out over Sil'athen, the long T-shaped valley remote in the highlands, a slash into the high plateau, much eroded, a canyon full of strange shapes carved by caustic rains and the constant winds that swept its length. There was wreckage there of ships not yet lifted back for salvage, air­craft that Niun had made the price of his taking; and wreck­age too of nature, many an aeons-old formation of sandstone blasted into fragments.

When they landed at the crossing of the high valley and stepped out into that place, into the full heat of Aram's red light, the silence came suddenly on them both, a weight that took the breath away. Duncan felt the air at once, a violent change from the pressurized and filtered air in the ship, and began coughing so painfully that he had at once to have recourse to the canteen. Filter masks and tinted goggles were part of the gear; he put his on, and adjusted the hood of his uniform to shield his head from the sun, while Galey did the same. The mask did not overcome the need to cough; he took another small sip of water.

"You all right?" Galey's voice was altered by the mask. Duncan looked into the broad, freckled face and felt better for the company of someone in such silence; but Galey did not belong, he in no wise belonged. Duncan slung his canteen over his shoulder, gathered up the gear, and tried not to listen to the silence.

"I'm all right," Duncan said. "Listen, if s a long ways down the canyon and up into those rocks. You don't have to come.”

"My orders say otherwise.”

"Am I not trusted with this?" Duncan at once regretted the outburst, seeing how Galey looked at him, shocked and taken aback. "Come on," he said then. "Watch your step.”

Duncan walked, at the slow pace necessary in the thin air, Galey walking heavy-footed beside him. The mri were right in the dress they adopted: to have any skin exposed in this sun was not wise; but when Galey began to drift toward the inviting shade of the cliffs, Duncan did not, and Galey re­turned to him.

"Don't walk the shade," Duncan said. "There are things you can miss there, that may not miss you. It's dark enough where we'll have to be walking, without taking u

Galey looked at him uneasily, but asked no questions. The wind sang strangely through the sandstone spires.

It was a place of ghosts: Sil'athen, burial place of the mri. Duncan listened to the wind and looked about him as they walked, at the high cliffs and caves that held their secrets.

A dead people, a dead world. Graves of great age surround­ed them here, those on the east with weathered pillars to mark them, those on the west with none. There were writings, many already beyond reading, outworn by the sands, and many a pillar overthrown and destroyed in the fighting that had raged up and down Sil'athen.

And in the sand they found the picked bones of a great dus.

Sadness struck Duncan when he saw that, for the beasts were companions of the mri, and dangerous as they could be, they could also be gentle: sad-faced, slow-moving protectors of their masters.

This, too, was added to the destruction of a way of life.

Galey kicked at the skull. "Fast-working scavengers," he said.

"Leave it alone," Duncan said sharply. Galey blinked, straightened, and took a more formal attitude with him.

It was a true observation nonetheless, that there were scav­engers in great numbers in the seemingly lifeless wastelands: nothing dropped to the sand but that something made use of it; nothing faltered or erred but that some predator was wait­ing for that error. The mri themselves did not walk the desert at night without the dusei to guide them. Even by day it was necessary to watch where one stepped, and to keep an eye to rocks that mieht hide ambush. Duncan knew the small de­pression that identified a burrower's lair, and how to keep the sun between himself and rocks to avoid the poisonous strands of windflowers. He knew too how to find water when he must, or how to conceal himself the latter an easy task in Sil'athen, where the constant winds erased the tracks of any passage, smoothing the tablet of the sands almost as soon as the foot left the ground. Skirling eddies of dust ran like a mist above the ground, occasionally stirring up in great whis­tling gusts that drove the sand in clouds.

Such a trackless, isolated place the mri had chosen… such an end Niun had chosen, as if even in passing they wished to obliterate all trace that they had been.

They had been here, he had learned in his long studies, his cajoling of translators, for many centuries, serving regul. Here and hereabouts they had fought against each other… for regul in the begi

So it had begun here until Holn flung the mri not against mri, but against humanity. Solitary, strange fighters: humans had known a single mri to taunt a human outpost, to provoke a reaction that sometimes ended with more casualties in his killing than humans were willing to suffer. Wise commanders, knowing the suicidal fury of these mri berserkers, held their men from answering, no matter how flagrant the provocation, until the mri, in splendid arrogance, had passed back to his own territory.

A challenge, perhaps, to a reciprocal act? Niun was capable of such a rash thing. Niun, whose weapons, worn on two belts at chest and hip, ranged from a laser to a thin, curved sword, an anachronism in the war he fought. An old, old way, Niun had called it AH what was left of it was here.

The place had a feeling of menace in its deeper shadows, where the sandstone cliffs began to fold them closer, a sense of holinesses and history, of dead that had never known of humankind. And there were deeper places, utterly alien, where mri sentinels had watched and died, faithful to a duty known only to themselves, and where the rocks hid things more threatening than the dead.

He had looked on such.

It lay there, distant above the cliffs where the canyon ended, where heaps of rock had tumbled in massive ruin.

"How far are we going?" Galey asked, with a nervous eye to the cliffs that confronted them. "We going to climb that?”

"Yes," Duncan said.

Galey looked at him, fell sflent again, and trod carefully behind him as he began to seek that way he knew, up among the rocks, a dus-trail and little more. It was there, as he remembered, the way up, concealed in dangerous shadow. He marked his way carefully with his eye, and began it, slowly.

Often in the climb he found himself obliged to pause, coughing, and to drink a little and wait, for the air was thin­ner still on the upper levels, and he suffered despite the mask. Galey too began to cough, and drank overmuch of their water. Duncan considered letting Galey, who had not come as he had, from a stay in sick-bay, carry more of the equip­ment; but Galey, from Saber's sterile, automated environ­ment, was laboring painfully.

They made the crest at last, and came into sunlight, among tall spires of rock, a maze that bore no track, no enduring sign to indicate that mri had walked here: in this place, as in Sil'athen, the wind scoured the sand.

Duncan stood, considering the sinking of red Arain beyond the spires, breathed the air cautiously, felt the place with all his senses. He had land-sense, cultivated in a score of trackless environments, and it drew at him, subtle and under the threshold of reason. Galey started to say something; Duncan curtly ordered silence, stood for a time, and listened. The omnipresent wind pulled at them, frolicked, singing among the spires. He turned left.

"Follow me," he said. "Don't talk to me. I last walked this in the dark, and things look different.”

Galey murmured agreement, still breathing hard. He was silent thereafter, and Duncan was able to forget his-presence as they walked. He would gladly have left Galey: he was not used to company on a mission, was not used to schedules or reports or being concerned for a night spent in the open and SurTac that he was, he had little respect for the regulars when they were stripped of their protective ships and their contact with superiors.