The Faded Sun Trilogy by C. J. Cherryh Page A

open this night, an ancient tradition, a respect to the dead. Shadows leaped and made the writings on the walls seem to writhe with independent life, writings that the she’pan said contained the history and wisdom of the People. All his life he had been surrounded by such things: writings covered every wall of the main hall and the Shrine and the she’pan’s tower, and the accesses of Kath and Kel—writings that the she’pan said were duplicated in every edun of the People that had ever existed, exact and unvaried. Through such writings the sen’ein learned. The Kel’ein could not. He knew only what had happened within his own life and within his sight, or those things he heard his elders recall.
    But Melein could read the writings, and knew what truth was, as did the she’pan, and grew cold and strange in that knowledge. He had asked once, when Melein was taken into the Sen, if he could not be taken too they had never in their lives been separated. But the she’pan had only taken his hands into hers, and turned the calloused palms upward. Not the hands of a scholar, she had said, and dismissed his appeal.
    Something stirred out in the hall, a slow shuffling, a click of claws on stone—one of the dusei that had strayed from the Kel-tower. They generally went where they chose, none forbidding them, even when they were inconvenient or destructive. It was not even certain that one could forbid them, for they were so strong that there could be no coercion. They sensed, in the peculiar way of dusei, when they were wanted and when not, and rarely would they stay where they were not desired.
    They understood the kel’ein, the belief was whose thoughts were unfearing and uncomplex, and for this reason each dus chose a kel’en or kel’e’en and stayed lifelong. One had never set affection on Niun s’Intel, though once he had tried—shamefully desperate—to trap a young one and to coerce it. It had fled his childish scheme, smashing the trap, knocking him unconscious.
    And never after that had he found any skill to draw one after him, as if that one, betrayed, had warned all its kind of nature of Niun s’Intel.
    The elder kel’ein said that it was because he had never truly opened his heart to one, that he was too sealed up in himself.
    He thought this false, for he had tried; but he also thought that the sensitive dusei had found him bitter and discontent and could not bear it.
    He believed so, hoping that this would change; but in the depth of his heart he wondered if it were possibly because he was not a natural kel’en. For a woman of the People all castes were open; for a man, there were only Kel-caste and Sen; and he had been both deprived in one sense and overindulged in others, simply because he was the last son of the House. It had meant that he received the concentrated efforts of all his teachers, that they had worked with him until he had understood, until his skill was acceptable. But in an edun full of sons and daughters, he thought that he might have failed to survive; his stubbornness would have brought him early challenge, and thePeople might then have been rid of his irritance in the House. He thought that he might have been a better kel’en if not for the Mother’s interference; but then many things might have been different if he were not the last; and so might she.
    Medai had pleased the Mother; and Medai was dead; but he sat here living, a rebel son to the Mother. She would have somewhat to say to him after Medai’s burying in the hills, when he must come back and face her. Thereafter would be bitter, bitter words, and himself without argument, and Melein on the she’pan’s side in it. He shrank from what the she’pan might say to him.
    But she would have to say it. He would not unsay what he had said.
    Again the scrape of claws. It was a dus. The explosive sough of breath and the heavy tread made it clear that the intruder was coming closer, and Niun willed it away from the Shrine, for