“Chaikhe,” he murmured, “Chaikhe, nasith-tak, prha-Ashanome-ta-e-takkhe, au,Chaikhe—Aiela, Aiela- kameth—”
“Here. I am here.”
“A being—whose feel is Ashanome,but a stranger, a stranger to me— he,he, reaching—hypothesis: Tejef, Tejef one-and-not-one, Khasif—Chaikhe—Chaikhe, operating machinery, extended, mindless life-force— e-takkhe, e-takkhe, e-takkhe!”
Stop him!Isande cried in agony. Stop him! He is deranged, he can die—
He—needing something?Daniel wondered. He hated Ashakh to the depth of all that was human. Tejef had a little compassion. Ashakh was as remorseless as Ashanome’s machines. In a perverse way it pleased Daniel to see him suffer something.
Daniel, what is the matter with you?Isande exclaimed in horror.
Aiela broke them asunder, for their quarreling was like to drive him mad. Isande’s presence remained on the one side, stunned, fearing Daniel; and Daniel’s on the other, hating the iduve of Ashanome,hating dying. That was at the center of it—hating dying, hating being sent to it by beings like Ashakh and Chimele, who loved nothing and feared nothing and needed no one.
“Ashakh.” Aiela thrust that yielding body hard against the wall and the impact seemed to reach the iduve; but moments passed before the gazed look left his eyes and he seemed to know himself again. Then he looked embarrassed and brushed off Aiela’s hands and straightened his clothing.
“ Niseth,” he said, avoiding Aiela’s eyes. “I am disadvantaged before you.”
“No, sir,” said Aiela. “You saved my life, I think.”
Ashakh inclined his head in appreciation of that courtesy and felt of the weapon at his belt, looking thoughtfully at the amaut. It could not comfort Ashakh in the least that an outsider had witnessed his collapse, and if Kleph could have known it, he was very close to dying in that moment. But Kleph instinctively did the right thing in crouching down very small and appearing not at all to joy in the situation.
“You are correct,” said Ashakh to Aiela. “You were in danger, but it was side effect, a scattering of impulses. I feel—even yet—a disconnection, a disharmony without resolution. Tejef turned his mind to us and he is stronger than ever I felt him. He is—almost an outsider, not—outsider in the sense of e-nasulibut e-iduve.I cannot sort the minds out; they—he—Chaikhe—are involved with the machines—their impulses—hard to untangle. The strangeness burns—it confuses—”
“Perhaps,” said Aiela, ignoring Daniel’s silent indignation, “perhaps he has been too long among humans.”
Ashakh frowned. “You are m’metane,and you are not expected to go further in this. Tejef is a formidable man, and whatever Chimele’s orders, you are free of bond to me. It is not reasonable to waste you where there is no cause, and I doubt I shall have to face Chimele’s anger for disobeying her. Could you really aid me in some way, it would be different, but Tejef’s arrival in the city has altered the situation. She did not anticipate this when she instructed you.”
“My asuthi are aboard that ship.”
“ Au,kameth, what do you expect to do? I shall be hard put to defend myself, and I can hardly hold him from you forever. Should I fall in the attempt, as I doubtless will, there you will stand with thatupon your wrist and that ridiculous weapon of yours, quite helpless. In the first place you will hinder me, and in the second event, you will die for nothing.”
Aiela rested his hand on the offending pistol and looked up at the iduve with a hard set to his jaw. “My people are not killers,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean we can’t fend for ourselves.”
Ashakh hissed in contempt. “ Au.Kallia have had the luxury to be so sparing of life ever since we came and brought order to your worlds. But Tejef will bend every effort to destroy me. If he succeeds, you are disarmed. I would cheerfully give you this weapon of mine instead, but see, there is no external control, and you can neither calibrate nor fire it. No, Chimele gave her orders, and I assume she is casting me away as she did Khasif. She forbade me to seek out Chaikhe, but you are under no such bond. I do not require you for serach,though it would do me honor; and I should prefer to have you providing Chaikhe contact with your asuthi aboard Tejef’s ship.”
Listen to him,Isande urged, joy and relief flooding over her. But her happiness died when she met his determined resistance.
“No, sir,” said Aiela. “I’m going with you.”
He half expected a touch of the idoikkhefor his impudence, but Ashakh merely frowned.
“ Tekasuphre,” the iduve judged. “Chimele said you were prone to unpredictable action.”
“But I am going,” Aiela said, “unless you stop me.”
Ashakh broke into a sudden grin, a thing more terrible than his frown. “A vaikka-dhis,then, kameth. We will do what we can do, and he will notice us before Chimele burns this wretched world to cinders.”
“Ai, sir!” wailed Kleph, and applied his hands to his mouth in dismay at his own outburst.
In the next moment he had doused the light and attempted flight. Aiela snatched at him and seized only cloth, but Ashakh’s arm stopped the amaut short, restoring light that flashed wildly about the tunnel with the flailing of Kleph’s arms, and he had the being by the throat, close to crushing it, had Aiela not intervened. Ashakh simply dropped the little wretch, and Kleph tucked himself up in a ball and moaned and rocked in misery.
“Up,” Aiela ordered him, hauling on his collar, and the amaut obediently rose, but would not look him in the face, making little hisses and thuds in his throat.
“This person is untouchable,” said Ashakh; and in his language the word was e-takkhe,out of takkhenes.No closer word to enemy existed in the iduve vocabulary, and the killing impulse burned in Ashakh’s normally placid eyes.
“I have a bond on him,” Aiela said.
“Be sure,” Ashakh replied, no more than that: iduve manners frowned on idle dispute as well as on interference with another’s considered decisions.
What do you think you are?Isande cried, slipping through his screening. Aiela, what do you think you’re doing?
He shut her out with a mental wince. Not fair, not fair,her retreating consciousness insisted. Aiela, listen!
He seized poor Kleph by the arm and shook at the heavy little fellow. “Kleph: now do you believe I meant what I said? Does it offend your precious sensibilities, all this fine world gone to cinders? If you have any other plans for it, then get us to the port. Maybe we can stop it. Do you understand me this time?”
“Yes,” said Kleph, and for the first time since Ashakh’s arrival the saucer eyes met his squarely. “Yes, sir.”
Kleph edged past him to take the lead. His low brow furrowed into a multiplication of wrinkles so that his eyes were fringed by his colorless hair. His thin lips rolled in and out rapidly. How much he honestly could understand, Aiela was not sure. Almost he wished the little amaut would contrive to escape as soon as they made the port.
Aiela,Isande sent, what are you doing? Why are you screening?
Aiela shut her out entirely. Pity was dangerous. Let it begin and screens tumbled one after the other. He had to become for a little time as cold as the iduve, able to kill.
His mind fled back to the safe and orderly civilization of Aus Qao, where crime was usually a matter of personal disorder, where theft was a thing done by offworlders and the clever rich, and where murder was an act of aberration that destined one for restructuring. No kalliran officer had fired a lethal weapon on Aus Qao in five thousand years.
He was not sure that he could. Ashakh could do so without even perceiving the problem: he only reacted to the urgings of takkhenes,of the two of them the more innocent. A kallia must somehow, Aiela thought, summon up the violence of hate before he could act.