Kutath

There was movement behind him. It startled him… one shameful instant he tensed, thinking of ultimate treachery, tsi'mri, un-mri; steps approached him, solitary. Duncan, he thought, his heart pounding with despair ... he turned his head slightly as kel'en came to stand by him on his left.

Hlil. The shock of it destroyed his self-possession; the membrane flicked when Hlil looked at him straightly; and beyond Hlil, Seras came… too old, Niun thought anxiously; a Master of weapons, but too old for this. It was an act of courage more than of help to him. Steps stirred the sand on his right, and he looked that way… saw to his shock that it was Has, her eyes cold as ever; suicidal, he reckoned. They were four now. Suddenly there was another, their fifth; kel Merin of the Husbands, whom he hardly knew.

That changed the complexion of the matter. He turned again toward the five who came to challenge, his heart beating faster and faster, from wild surmises that this was somehow a trap, arranged, between his own and them; to surmises that for some mad reason these kel'ein came to defend his hold on the ja'anom. He could challenge all at once, take the strongest himself, use these four at least as a delay until he could turn his hand to the next.

They would die doing that; there was no sane reason for them to preserve the ja'anom for his possession.

The five halted before them, individually.

"Kel'anth of the ja'anomr the central one shouted. "We are the ja'ari, the ka'anomin, the patha, the mari, the hao'nath! I am kel'anth Tian sTEdri Des-Paran, daithenon, of she'pan Edri of the ja'ari. We hear reports of landings; and I ask; does the kel'anth of the ja'anom have an answer?”

"Kel'anth of the ja'anoml" shouted the one farthest right. "I am kel'anth Rhian s'Tafa Mar-Eddin, daithenon, of the she'pan Tafa of the hao'nath. And my question you well know.”

There was silence after. They had spoken in the hal'ari, not the mu'ara of tribes; and that the kel'anth of the hao'nath was alive to protest in person… here was a stubborn man.

"Kel'anthein! I am kel'anth Niun s'lntel Zain-Abrin, daithenon, of she'pan Melein of the ja'anom and of all the People." He drew in a second great breath, clenched the sword tightly hi his fists. "I am kel'anth of the Voyagers, of those who went out from the world, heir of An-ehon and LeVhaen, of Zohain and Tho'e'i-shai; kel'anth of the Kel of the People, Hand of the she'pan of the Mysteries; for she'pan Melein I took the ja'anom, and in her name I defend it if challenged, or challenge if she so decides. The path we take is our path, and I defend her right to walk it. Be warned!”

They stood still a moment. Somewhere the dus stirred, troubling, and he willed it silent.

A rustling of cloth and steps approached behind him, a breath of holy incense, a wisp of white robes in the corner of his eye that he dared not turn from his enemies.

Melein.

"Kel'anth of the ja'anom!" shouted Rhian of the hao'nath. "Ask your she'pan for a message and we will bear it.”

Any word of enemies must, by custom, pass through him. "Tell them," Melein shouted back in her own voice. "Call your she'panei here. Call them here.”

More dead lay in the great square, corpses becoming barriers to sand which drifted in waves across the pavings, the scale of everything reduced by the great edun which towered even in ruin. "Straight through the center," Galey said in a low voice, and led the way for them. Boaz insisted it was the sane thing, that mri would not attack from ambush if the approach were direct; she had that information from Duncan.

Forty years humans had been fighting mri, and all experience denied that theory; mri had fired from ambush; had done precisely the realization hit him with sudden irony what humans had done. No human had ever walked plainly up to mri. He recalled stories of mri who had advanced alone against humans, berserkers, shot to rags. Of a sudden things fit, and sickened him.

And the dead… everywhere alien; but dead infants were tragedy in any reckoning. Here a woman had fallen, her arms spread wide to shield a trio of children, covering them with her robes as if that could save them; here one of the warriors had died, bearing a blue-clad infant in his arms; or a pair of the gold-robes, embraced and tucked up still sitting, as if the flight had become too much for them and they had resigned themselves to die; an older child, whose mummified body preserved the gesture of an outstretched hand, across the sandy stones, reaching toward what might have been its mother.

Alien, and not. Regul had killed them; or perhaps he had. It was Haven, and Kiluwa, and Asgard, and Talos, and all the evils they had done to each other. It was world's end, and earnestly he wished for some stir of life within these ruins, some relief from such things.

The steps hove up before them; he kept walking, hands at his side, toward the dark inside. He knew of edunei, these places that served mri for fortresses and what else no one knew. Shrines. Holy places. Homes. No one understood. Forty years and no one understood. Forty years and no one had understood that the warrior Kel was not the whole of the mri culture; no one had known that there was Kath or Sen, that two-thirds of the mri population were strictly noncombatant.

The place afflicted all of them. From time to time the regs had stared at some sight worse than the others, stared longer than they might from curiosity, shook their heads. They were bom to the war; anyone under forty could say that, but this was not a thing they had had to see first hand.

No one spoke. Boaz paused at the top of the steps to take a picture of the way they had come, of the square with its dead. Then the dark of the interior took them in, and their footsteps and the suck and hiss of the breathers echoed in great depth.

Galey took his torch in hand and switched it on, played it over the rubble which blocked most of the accesses to the towers. "Hey!" he shouted, trying the direct approach to the uttermost; and winced at the echoes.

"Left tower," Boaz said.

"Place is like to fall in on us," Galey objected, but he went, the others with them, into the left-hand access, up a spiraling passage dark before their light and dark after, a place for ambushes if any existed anywhere in the city.

Light shone at the top; the great room there had a split wall; and beyond, through another doorway he walked in that direction, to anticipate Boaz, who was sure to go without their protection. His heart beat fearfully as he saw the rows of machines. He had seen the like before, on Kesrith.

"Shrine," he said aloud.

Boaz paused in the doorway and looked back at him, advanced again carefully. The whole center of the floor was gone, a pile of rubble and twisted steel.

And lights burned on the panels, far into the dark.

"Don't touch anything," Lane said. The tech pushed himself to the fore, looked about him, pulled Shibo and Kadarin aside from a circle marked on the flooring. Galey's own foot had crossed that line. He took it back.

"Weapons," Lane said, "very likely controlled from here.”

And the last word was choked into hush, for there was a gleam of light from above, the circle suddenly drowned in glare.

"An-hi?" a mechanical voice thundered. Boaz shook her head in panic, denying understanding; it asked again, more complexly, and again and again and again.

Weapons, Galey thought in sick terror. O God, the skips up there… We've triggered it.

Lane moved, thrust himself into the circle, into the light that bathed him in white unreality. He looked up at the source of it, at screens that flared with mri writings.

"Hne'mH" he cried at it; Friend! It was one of the only words they knew.

It hurled words back, complex and then simple, repeating, repeating, repeating.

And struck. Lane sprawled, still, glaze-eyed from the instant he hit the floor. "No fire!" Galey cried, seeing a gun in Shibo's hand. Every board was alight, the screens alive, the light flaring blue. Boaz reached for Lane's outflung hand… changed her mind and drew back; all of them froze. Galey shifted a glance toward the door, to Shibo and Kadarin, whose faces were stark with fright, to Boaz, whose face was fixed toward the machine, the white light turning her to shadow and silver to Lane, who was quite, quite dead.

Eventually there was silence again. The light faded. Galey chanced a quick move, herding the two men, dragging at Boaz. They all ran, into the sunlight of the room outside, with the machine flaring to life again, thundering its questions.

"Go," he urged them. "Get out of here." He hastened them to the access, down, into the lower hall. They pelted across it, a flight close to panic; he seized at Kadarin and stopped when they reached the open air, listening.

There was only the sunlight and the square, unchanged. They stood there, their breaths hissing into the breathers, their eyes mutually distraught

"We couldn't help him," Galey said. "There's nothing to be done for him. We get out of this we come back for him.”

They accepted that. . . seemed to.

"It was what Duncan said," Boaz broke the silence after a moment. "Machines. What he described.”

There had been no firing aloft, no hostile act from the city. The holocaust had come close to them, but it had not happened. It waited, perhaps, on orders. Mri orders. Perhaps that was what it had asked of them.

Who are you?

What am 1 to do?

An idiot power seeking instruction.

"If there's a link between the cities," Galey said, "we may just have sent a message.”

Shibo and Kadarin said nothing, only looked at Boaz, at plump, fragile Boaz, who had become their source of sanity; a mri world, and they needed mri answers.

"I'd say that's likely," she agreed. "Maybe it has; but they haven't fired yet.”

"And we get out of here," Galey said. "Now.”

He strode down the steps, the others behind him, past a knot of kel'ein corpses, out across the open square. His mistake, his responsibility. It had been a brave act on Lane's part, to try to deal with the machine. He could have done something; he was not sure what. . . pulled Lane out, it might have been.

"Mr. Galey," Boaz said, her breath wheezing in her mask; she pulled it down a moment, gasped as they walked. "We have nothing to report. We can't go back with this.”

He said nothing for a long space of walking, trying to think in the interval, to draw his mind back from Lane and onto next matters. He stopped when they had cleared the square, among the ruined buildings, looked at the faces of Shibo and Kadarin. "We get back to the shuttle," he said. "We try another site.”