Dying of the Light Read online

  Dirk, silent, raised his hands above his head and emerged.

  “A mockman!” the taller Kavalar said. “Down here!”

  “No,” Dirk said carefully. “Dirk t’Larien.”

  The tall one ignored him. “This is rare good fortune,” he said to his companion with the laser. “Those jelly men of Roseph’s would have been poor prey at best. This one looks fit.”

  His young teyn made the odd noise again, and the left side of his face twitched. But his laser hand was quite steady. “No,” he told the other Braith. “Sadly, I do not think he is ours to hunt. This can only be the one that Lorimaar spoke of.” He slid his laser pistol back into his holster and nodded at Dirk, a very slight and deliberate motion, more a shifting of his shoulders than of his head. “You are grossly careless. The canopy locks automatically when full-closed. It may be opened from the inside, but—”

  “I realize that now,” Dirk said. He lowered his hands. “I was only looking for an abandoned car. I needed transportation.”

  “So you sought to steal our aircar.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” The Kavalar’s voice made every word a painful effort. “You are korariel of Ironjade?”

  Dirk hesitated, his denial caught in his throat. Either answer seemed likely to get him in trouble.

  “You have no answer to that?” said the scarred one.

  “Bretan,” the other cautioned. “The mockman’s words are no matter to us. If Jaantony high-Ironjade names him korariel, then such is truth. Such animals have no voice about their status. Whatever he might say cannot lift the name, so the reality is the same regardless. If we slay him, we have stolen Ironjade property and they will surely issue challenge.”

  “I urge you to consider the possibilities, Chell,” Bretan said. “This one, this Dirk t’Larien, he can be man or mockman, korariel of Ironjade or not. Truth?”

  “Truth. But he is no true man. Listen to me, my teyn. You are young, but I know of these things from kethi long dead.”

  “Consider nonetheless. If he is mockman and the Ironjades name him korariel, then he is korariel whether he admits it or no. But if that is truth, Chell, then you and I must go against the Ironjades in duel. He was trying to steal from us, remember. If he is Ironjade property, then that is an Ironjade theft.”

  The big white-haired man nodded slowly, reluctantly.

  “If he is mockman but not korariel then we have no problem,” Bretan continued, “since then he may be hunted. And what if he is a true man, human as a highbond, and no mockman at all?”

  Chell was much slower than his teyn. The older Kavalar frowned thoughtfully and said, “Well, he is no female, so he cannot be owned. But if he is human, he must have a man’s rights and a man’s name.”

  “Truth,” Bretan agreed. “But he cannot be korariel, so his crime would be his alone. I would duel him, not Jaantony high-Ironjade.” The Braith gave his strange grunt-growl again.

  Chell was nodding, and Dirk was almost numb. The younger of the two hunters seemed to have worked things out with a nasty precision. Dirk had told both Vikary and Janacek in no uncertain terms that he rejected the tainted shield of their protection. At the time, it had been an easy enough thing to do. On sane worlds like Avalon it would unquestionably have been the right thing as well. On Worlorn, things were not quite so clear.

  “Where shall we take him?” Chell said. The two Braiths spoke as if Dirk had no more volition than their aircar.

  “We must take him to Jaantony high-Ironjade and his teyn,” Bretan said in his sandpaper growl. “I know their tower by sight.”

  Briefly Dirk considered running. It did not seem feasible. There were two of them, with sidearms and even an aircar. He would not get far. “I’ll come,” he said when they started toward him. “I can show you the way.” It seemed that he would be given some time to think, in any event; the Braiths did not seem to know that Vikary and Janacek were already out at the City of the Starless Pool, no doubt trying to protect the hapless jelly children from the other hunters.

  “Show us, then,” Chell said. And Dirk, not knowing what else to do, led them toward the undertubes. On the way up he reflected bitterly that all this had come about because he was tired of waiting. And now, it seemed, he would wait after all.

  6

  At first, the waiting was sheer hell.

  They took him to the airlot on top of the empty tower after they discovered that the Ironjades were not to be found, and they forced him to sit in a corner of the windswept roof. The panic was rising in him by then, and his stomach was a painful knot. “Bretan,” he began, in a voice laced by hysteria, but the Kavalar only turned on him and delivered a stinging open-handed blow across the mouth.

  “I am not ‘Bretan’ to you,” he said. “Call me Bretan Braith if you must address me, mockman.”

  After that, Dirk was silent. The broken Wheel of Fire limped oh-so-slowly across the sky of Worlorn, and as he watched it crawl, it seemed to Dirk that he was very close to a breaking point. Everything that had happened to him seemed unreal, and the Braiths and the events of the afternoon were the least real of all, and he wondered what would happen if he were to suddenly leap to his feet and vault over the edge of the roof into the street. He would fall and fall, he thought, as one does in a dream, but when he smashed on the dark glowstone blocks below there would be no pain, only the shock of a sudden awakening. And he would find himself in his bed on Braque, drenched with sweat and laughing at the absurdities of his nightmare.

  He played with that thought and others like it for a time that seemed like hours, but when he looked up at last, Fat Satan had hardly sunk at all. He began to tremble then; the cold, he told himself, the cold Worlorn wind, but he knew that it was not the cold, and the more he fought to control it the more he shook, until the Kavalars looked at him strangely. And still the waiting went on.

  And finally the shakes ran their course, as had the thoughts of suicide and the panic before them, and an odd sort of calm swept over him. He found himself thinking again, but thinking of nonsensical things: speculating idly—as if he were soon going to place a wager—on whether the gray manta or the military flyer would return first, on how Jaan or Garse would fare in a duel with one-eyed Bretan, on what had happened to the jelly children in the distant Blackwiner city. Such matters seemed terribly important, though Dirk didn’t know why.

  Then he began to watch his captors. That was the most interesting game of all, and it served to pass the time as well as any other. As he watched, he noticed things.

  The two Kavalars had hardly spoken since they escorted him up to the rooftop. Chell, the tall one, sat on the low wall that surrounded the airlot only a meter away from Dirk, and when Dirk began to study him, he saw that he was quite an old man indeed. The resemblance to Lorimaar high-Braith was very deceptive. Although Chell walked and dressed like a younger man, he was at least twenty years senior to Lorimaar, Dirk guessed. Seated, his years weighed on him heavily. A distinct paunch bulged over the soft-shining metal of his mesh-steel belt, and his wrinkles were carved very deep into his worn brown face, and Dirk saw blue veins and splotches of grayish-pink skin on the back of Chell’s hands as they rested on his knees. The long useless wait for the Ironjades’ return had touched him too, and it was more than boredom. His cheeks seemed to sag, and his wide shoulders had unconsciously fallen into a tired slouch.

  He moved once, sighing, and his hands came off his knees and twined together, and he stretched. That was when Dirk saw his armlets. The right arm was iron-and-glowstone, twin to the one displayed so proudly by one-eyed Bretan, and the left was silver. But the jade was missing. It had been there once, but the stones had been torn from their settings, and now the silver bracelet was riddled by holes.

  While weary old Chell—it seemed suddenly hard for Dirk to see him as the menacing martial figure he had been just a short time ago—sat and waited for something to happen, Bretan (or Bretan Braith, as he demanded he be called) paced the hours away. He
was all restless energy, worse than anyone that Dirk had ever known, even Jenny, who had been quite a pacer in her time. He kept his hands deep in the slit pockets of his short white jacket and walked back and forth across the rooftop, back and forth, back and forth. Every third trip or so he would glance up impatiently, as if he were reproaching the twilight sky because it had not yet yielded up Jaan Vikary to him.

  They were a strange pair, Dirk decided as he watched them. Bretan Braith was as young as Chell was old—surely no older than Garse Janacek and probably younger than Gwen and Jaan or himself. How had he come to be teyn to a Kavalar so many years his senior? He was no high, either, he had given no betheyn to Braith; his left arm, covered by fine reddish hairs that glinted now and then when he walked very close and let them catch the sunlight, had no bracelet of jade-and-silver.

  His face, his strange half-face, was ugly beyond anything that Dirk had ever seen, but as the day waned and false dusk became real, he found himself getting used to it. When Bretan Braith paced in one direction, he looked utterly normal: a whip-lean youth, full of nervous energy held tightly in check, so tightly that Bretan almost seemed to crackle. His face on that side was unlined and serene; short black curls pressed tightly around his ear and a few ringlets dropped to his shoulder, but he had no hint of a beard. Even his eyebrow was only a faint line above a wide green eye. He appeared almost innocent.

  Then, pacing, he would reach the edge of the roof and turn back the way he had come, and everything would be changed. The left side of his face was inhuman, a landscape of twisted plains and angles that no face ought to have. The flesh was seamed in a half-dozen places, and elsewhere it was shiny-slick as enamel. On this side, Bretan had no hair whatsoever, and no ear—only a hole—and the left half of his nose was a small piece of flesh-colored plastic. His mouth was a lipless slash, and worst of all, it moved. He had a twitch, a grotesque tic, and it touched the left corner of his mouth at intervals and rippled up his bare scalp over the hills of scar tissue.

  In the daylight, the Braith’s glowstone eye was as dark as a piece of obsidian. But slowly night was coming, the Helleye sank, and the fires were stirring in his socket. At full darkness, Bretan would be the Helleye, not Worlorn’s tired supergiant of a sun; the glowstone would burn a steady, unwinking red, and the half-face around it would become a black travesty of a skull, a fit home for an eye such as that.

  It all seemed very terrifying until you remembered—as Dirk remembered—that it was all quite deliberate. Bretan Braith had not been forced to have a glowstone for an eye; he had chosen it, for his own reasons, and those reasons were not hard to comprehend.

  Dirk’s mind raced back to the earlier part of the afternoon and the conversation by the wolf’s-head aircar. Bretan was quick and shrewd, no doubt about that, but Chell might easily be in the early years of senility. He had been painfully slow to grasp anything, and his young teyn had led him by the hand at every point, Dirk recalled. Suddenly the two Braiths seemed much less fearful, and Dirk could only wonder why he had ever been so terrified of them. They were almost amusing. Whatever Jaan Vikary might say when he returned from the City in the Starless Pool, surely nothing could happen; there was no real danger from such as these.

  As if to underline the point, Chell began to mumble, talking to himself without realizing it, and Dirk glanced over and tried to hear. The old man jiggled a little as he spoke, his eyes vacantly staring. His words made no sense at all. It took Dirk several minutes to think things through, but he did, and it finally dawned on him that Chell was speaking in Old Kavalar. A tongue that evolved on High Kavalaan during the long centuries of interregnum, when the surviving Kavalars had no contact with other human worlds, it was a language that was quickly melting back into standard Terran, though enriching the mother language with words that had no equivalents. Hardly anyone spoke Old Kavalar anymore, Garse Janacek had told him, and yet here was Chell, an elderly man from the most traditional of the holdfast-coalitions, mumbling things he had no doubt heard in his youth.

  And so too Bretan, who slapped Dirk soundly because he used the wrong form of address, a form permitted only to kethi. Another dying custom, Garse had said; even the highbonds were growing lax. But not Bretan Braith, young and not high at all, who clung to traditions that men generations older than himself had already discarded as dysfunctional.

  Dirk almost felt sorry for them. They were misfits, he decided, more outcast and more alone than Dirk himself, worldless in a sense, because High Kavalaan had moved beyond them and could be their world no longer. No wonder they came to Worlorn; they belonged here. They and all their ways were dying.

  Bretan in particular was a figure of pity, Bretan who tried so hard to be a figure of fear. He was young, perhaps the last true believer, and he might live to see a time when no one felt as he did. Was that why he was teyn to Chell? Because his peers rejected him and his old man’s values? Probably, Dirk decided, and that was grim and sad.

  One yellow sun still glinted in the west. The Hub was a vague red memory on the horizon, and Dirk was thoughtful and in control, beyond all fear, when they heard the aircars approach.

  Bretan Braith froze and looked up, and his hands came out of his pockets. One of them came to rest, almost automatically, on the holster of his laser pistol. Chell, blinking, got slowly to his feet and suddenly seemed to shed a decade. Dirk rose as well.

  The cars came in. Two of them together, the gray car and the olive-green one, flying with an almost military precision side by side.

  “Come here,” Bretan rasped, and Dirk walked over to him, and Chell joined them so that the three were standing together, with Dirk in the center like a prisoner. The wind bit at him. All around, the glowstones of the city Larteyn were radiant and bloody, and Bretan’s eye—so close—shone savagely in its scarred nesting place. The twitching had stopped, for some reason; his face was very still.

  Jaan Vikary hovered the gray manta and let it float gently down, then vaulted over the side and came to them with quick strides. The square and ugly military machine, roofed over and armored so the pilot was not visible, landed almost simultaneously. A thick metal door swung open in its side, and Garse Janacek emerged, ducking his head a trifle and looking around to see what was the problem. He saw, straightened, and slammed the door with a resounding clang, then came over to stand at Vikary’s right arm.

  Vikary greeted Dirk first with a curt nod and a vague smile. Then he looked at Chell. “Chell Nim Coldwind fre-Braith Daveson,” he said formally. “Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn.”

  “And to yours,” the old Braith said. “My new teyn guards my side, and you know him not.” He indicated Bretan.

  Jaan turned, weighed the scarred youth quickly with his eyes. “I am Jaan Vikary,” he said, “of the Ironjade Gathering.”

  Bretan made his noise, his peculiar noise. There was an awkward silence.

  “More properly,” Janacek said, “my teyn is Jaantony Riv Wolf high-Ironjade Vikary. And I am Garse Ironjade Janacek.”

  Now Bretan responded. “Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn. I am Bretan Braith Lantry.”

  “I would never have known,” Janacek said with the barest trace of a smile. “We have heard of you.”

  Jaan Vikary threw him a warning glance. There seemed to be something wrong with Jaan’s face. At first Dirk thought it was a trick of the light—darkness was coming fast now—but then he saw that Vikary’s jaw was slightly swollen on one side, giving his profile a puffed look.

  “We come to you in high grievance,” said Bretan Braith Lantry.

  Vikary looked at Chell. “This is so?”

  “It is so, Jaantony high-Ironjade.”

  “I am sorry we must quarrel,” Vikary replied. “What is the problem?”

  “We must question you,” Bretan said. He put his hand on Dirk’s shoulder. “This one, Jaantony high-Ironjade. Tell us, is he korariel of Ironjade, or no?”

  Now Garse Janacek grinned openly and his hard blue eyes met
Dirk’s, laughing just a little in their icy depths, as if to say, Well, well, what have you done now?

  Jaan Vikary only frowned. “Why?”

  “Does your truth depend on our reasons, highbond?” Bretan asked harshly. His scarred cheek twitched violently.

  Vikary looked at Dirk. Clearly he was not pleased.

  “You have no cause to delay or deny us your answer, Jaantony high-Ironjade,” Chell Daveson said. “The truth is yes or the truth is no; there cannot be more to it than that.” The old man’s voice was quite even; he at least had no nervousness to conceal, and his code dictated each word that he would say.

  “Once you were correct, Chell fre-Braith,” Vikary began. “In the old days of the holdfasts, truth was a simple matter, but these are new times and full of new things. We are a people of many worlds now, not simply of one, and so our truths are more complex.”

  “No,” said Chell. “This mockman is korariel or this mockman is not korariel. That is not complex.”

  “My teyn Chell speaks the truth,” Bretan added. “The question I have put to you is quite simple, highbond. I demand your answer.”

  Vikary would not be pushed. “Dirk t’Larien is a man from the distant world of Avalon, far within the Tempter’s Veil, a human world where I once studied. I did name him korariel, to give him my protection and the protection of Ironjade against those who would do him harm. But I protect him as a friend, as I would protect a brother in Ironjade, as a teyn protects a teyn. He is not my property. I make no claim to own him. Do you understand?”

  Chell did not. The old man pressed his lips together beneath his little stiff mustache and mumbled something in Old Kavalar. Then he spoke aloud. Too loud, in fact, almost shouting. “What is this nonsense? Your teyn is Garse Ironjade, not this strange one. How can you shield him as a teyn? Is he of Ironjade? He is not even armed! Is he a man at all? Why, if he is, he cannot be korariel; and if he is not and he is korariel, then you must own him. I do not hear any sense in your mockman words.”