Dying of the Light Read online

  Though Dirk was not gagged, he did not try to speak. He sat with the cold metal to his back and his wrists chafing within their bonds, and he waited and watched and listened. From time to time he would glance toward Gwen, but she sat slumped with her head downcast and did not return his gaze.

  Singly and in pairs they came. The kethi of Braith. The hunters of Worlorn. From the shadows and dark places they came. Like pale ghosts. A noise and a vague shape at first, before they walked into the small circle of light and turned to men again. Even then they were more and less than human.

  The first to come led four tall rat-faced hounds, and Dirk recognized him from the wild gray plunge down the outer concourse. The man chained his hounds to the bumper of Roseph’s aircar, gave curt greetings to Pyr and Roseph and their teyns, then sat cross-legged on the floor a few meters from the prisoners. He did not speak, not once. His eyes fixed on Gwen and never left her, and he did not move at all. Nearby, Dirk could hear his hounds growling in the shadows, their iron chains twisting and rattling.

  Then the others came. Lorimaar high-Braith Arkellor, a brown giant in a pitch-black suit of chameleon cloth fastened with buttons of pale bone, arrived in a massive domed aircar of deep red. Within, Dirk could hear the sounds of a pack of Braith hounds. With Lorimaar was another man, a square fat man twice as heavy as Pyr, his bulk hard and solid as brick, his face pale and porcine. After them, alone and on foot, came a frail-looking oldster, bald and wrinkled and nearly toothless, with one hand of flesh and bone and one three-pronged claw of dark metal. The old man had a child’s head slung from his belt; it was still bleeding, and one leg of his white trousers bore the long brown stain of its dripping.

  Finally Chell arrived, as tall as Lorimaar, white-haired and mustachioed and very weary, leading a single huge Braith hound. Within the pool of light he stopped and blinked.

  “Where is your teyn?” Pyr demanded.

  “Here.” A rasp from the darkness. A few meters away a single glowstone shone dimly. Bretan Braith Lantry came forward and stood next to Chell. His face twitched.

  “All have gathered,” Roseph high-Braith said to Pyr.

  “No,” someone objected. “There is Koraat.”

  The silent hunter spoke up from the floor. “He is no more. He begged ending. I granted it. In truth, he was badly broken. He was the second keth I have watched die today. The first was my teyn, Teraan Braith Nalarys.” As he spoke, his eyes never left Gwen. He finished with a long breathless sentence in Old Kavalar.

  “Three of us are gone,” the old man said.

  “We shall have a silence for them,” Pyr said. He was still holding his baton, with its hardwood knob and its short blade, and he tapped it restlessly against his leg as he spoke, just as he had done in the tunnels.

  Through her gag, Gwen tried to scream. Pyr’s teyn, the gangling Kavalar with the wild black hair, came over and stood above her menacingly.

  But Dirk, ungagged, had gotten the idea. “I’m not going to keep silence,” he shouted. Or tried to. His voice was not quite up to shouting. “They were killers, all of them. Deserved to die.”

  All of the Braiths were looking at him.

  “Gag him and stop his screaming,” Pyr said. His teyn moved quickly to comply. When it was done, Pyr spoke again. “You shall have time enough to scream, Dirk t’Larien, when you run naked through the forests and you hear my hounds baying behind you.”

  Bretan’s head and shoulders turned awkwardly. Light glistened on his scar tissue. “No,” he said. “First claim is mine.”

  Pyr faced him. “I tracked the mockman. I took him.”

  Bretan twitched. Chell, still holding the great hound by a chain wrapped about one heavy hand, laid his other hand on Bretan’s shoulder.

  “This is no matter to me,” another voice said. The Braith who sat on the floor. Staring. Unmoving. “What of the bitch?”

  The others shifted their attention uneasily. “She can not be at issue, Myrik,” said Lorimaar high-Braith. “She is of Ironjade.”

  The man’s lips drew back sharply; for an instant his placid face was wildly distorted, a beast’s face, a rictus of emotion. Then it passed. His features settled into pale stillness again, everything held in check. “I will kill this woman,” he said. “Teraan was my teyn. She has set his ghost adrift upon a soulless world.”

  “Her?” Lorimaar’s voice was incredulous. “Is this truth?”

  “I saw,” replied the man on the floor, the one called Myrik. “I fired after her when she rode us down and left Teraan dying. This is truth, Lorimaar high-Braith.”

  Dirk tried to rise to his feet, but the gangling Kavalar pushed him down again, hard, and slammed his head back against the metal flank of the aircar to underline the point.

  The frail oldster spoke then—the clawed ancient who carried the child’s head. “Take her then as your personal prey,” he said, his voice as thin and sharp as the blade of the flaying knife that hung at his belt. “The wisdom of the holdfasts is old and certain, my brothers. She is no true woman now, if she ever was, neither heldwife or eyn-keth. Who is there to vouch for her? She has left her highbond’s protection to run with a mockman! If she was flesh of man’s flesh once, it is so no longer. You know the ways of the mockmen, the liars, the weres, the great deceivers. Alone with her in the dark, this mockman Dirk would surely have slain her and set in her place a demon like himself, fashioned in her image.”

  Chell nodded agreement and said something grave in Old Kavalar. The other Braiths looked less certain. Lorimaar traded scowls with his teyn, the square fat man. Bretan’s hideous face was noncommittal, half a mask of scar tissue, half blank innocence. Pyr frowned and continued to tap restlessly with his baton.

  It was Roseph who replied. “I ruled Gwen Delvano human when I was arbiter at the square of death,” he said carefully.

  “This is truth,” Pyr said.

  “Perhaps she was human then,” the old man said. “Yet she has tasted blood and slept with a mockman, and who will call her human now?”

  The hounds began to howl.

  The four that Myrik had chained to the aircar started the cacophony, and it was taken up by the pack locked inside Lorimaar’s domed vehicle. Chell’s massive canine snarled and pulled at his chain, until the elderly Braith jerked back angrily; then the creature sat and joined the howling.

  Most of the hunters glanced toward the silent darkness beyond their little circle (Myrik, frozen-faced and immobile, was the notable exception—his eyes never left Gwen Delvano), and more than one touched his side arm.

  On the edge of the circle, beyond the aircars and their pool of light, the two Ironjades stood side by side in shadow.

  Dirk’s pain—his head was pounding—abruptly seemed of no consequence. His body trembled and shook. He looked at Gwen; she was looking up, at them. At Jaan especially.

  He walked into the light then, and Dirk saw that he was staring at Gwen almost as fixedly as the man called Myrik. He seemed to move very slowly, like a figure in some dusty dream, a man asleep. Garse Janacek was alive and liquid at his side.

  Vikary was dressed in a mottled suit of chameleon cloth, all shades of black and blacker when he entered the circle of his enemies. By the time the hounds had quieted, he was wearing dusty gray. The sleeves of his shirt ended just above the elbow; iron-and-glowstone embraced his right forearm, jade-and-silver his left. For an endless instant he loomed very large. Chell and Lorimaar both stood a head taller, but somehow, briefly, Vikary seemed to dominate. He flowed past them, a striding ghost—how unreal he was even there—who walked through the Braiths as if he could not see them, and stopped near Gwen and Dirk.

  But it was all illusion. The noise subsided, the Braiths began to speak, and Jaan Vikary was just a man again, larger than many but smaller than some.

  “You trespass, Ironjades,” Lorimaar said in a hard angry tone. “You were not called to this place. You have no right to be here.”

  “Mockmen,” spat Chell. “False Kavalars.�
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  Bretan Braith Lantry made his singular noise.

  “Your betheyn I grant to you, Jaantony high-Ironjade,” Pyr said firmly, but his baton moved in nervous haste. “Discipline her as you will, as you must. The mockman is mine to hunt.”

  Garse Janacek had stopped a few meters away. His eyes moved from one speaker to another, and twice he seemed about to reply. But Jaan Vikary ignored all of them. “Remove the bindings from their mouths,” he said, gesturing toward the prisoners.

  Pyr’s long-limbed teyn stood over Dirk and Gwen, facing the Iron-jade highbond. He hesitated a long moment, then bent and undid the gags.

  “Thanks,” Dirk said.

  Gwen shook her head to throw loose hair out of her eyes and climbed unsteadily to her feet, her arms still bound behind her back. “Jaan,” she said in an uncertain voice. “You heard?”

  “I heard,” Vikary said. Then, to the Braiths, “Cut loose her arms.”

  “You presume, Ironjade,” Lorimaar said.

  Pyr, however, seemed curious. He leaned on his baton. “Cut loose her arms,” he said.

  His teyn pulled Gwen around roughly and used his knife to free her.

  “Show me your arms,” Vikary said to Gwen.

  She hesitated, then brought her hands out from behind her back and extended them, palms down. On her left arm the jade-and-silver shone. She had not removed it.

  Dirk watched, bound and helpless, feeling chill. She had not removed it.

  Vikary looked down on Myrik, who still sat with his legs crossed and his small eyes set on Gwen. “Rise to your feet.”

  The man rose and turned to face the Ironjade, taking his gaze from Gwen for the first time since he had arrived. Vikary started to speak.

  “No,” Gwen said.

  She had been rubbing her wrists. Now she stopped and laid her right hand on her bracelet. Her voice was steady. “Don’t you understand, Jaan? No. If you challenge him, if you kill him, then I will take it off. I will.”

  For the first time, emotion washed over Jaan’s face, and the name of it was anguish. “You are my betheyn,” he said. “If I do not . . . Gwen . . .”

  “No,” she said.

  One of the Braiths laughed. At the sound, Garse Janacek grimaced, and Dirk saw a savage spasm come and go on the face of the man called Myrik.

  If Gwen noticed, she paid no mind. She faced Myrik. “I killed your teyn,” she said. “Me. Not Jaan. Not poor Dirk. I killed him, and I admit it. He was hunting us, as you were. And killing the Emereli as well.”

  Myrik said nothing. Everyone was still.

  “If you must duel, then, if you really want me dead, duel me!” Gwen continued. “I did it. Fight me if your revenge is so important.”

  Pyr laughed loudly. An instant later his teyn joined him, and Roseph as well, then several of the others—the fat man, Roseph’s blocky stern-faced companion, the clawed ancient. All of them were laughing.

  Myrik’s face went blood-dark, then white, then dark again. “Betheyn-bitch,” he said. The shuddering rictus passed across his face once more, and this time everyone saw. “You jape me. A duel is . . . my teyn . . . and you a woman!”

  He ended with a scream that startled the men and set the hounds again to howling. Then he shattered.

  His hands rose over his head and clenched and unclenched, and he struck her across the face as she shied away from his fury, and suddenly he was on her. His fingers wrapped around her throat and he dove forward and she went over backwards, and then they were rolling over and over on the floor until they came up hard against the side of an aircar. Myrik came out firmly on top, with Gwen pinned beneath him and his hands digging deep into the flesh of her neck. She hit him then, hard across the jaw, but in his rage he scarcely seemed to feel it. He began to slam her head against the aircar, again and again and again, screaming all the while in Old Kavalar.

  Dirk struggled to his feet only to stand uselessly with his hands bound. Garse took two quick steps forward, and Jaan Vikary was finally moving. But it was Bretan Braith Lantry who reached them first and dragged Myrik off her with an arm around his neck. Myrik flailed wildly, until Lorimaar joined Bretan and between them they held the man still.

  Gwen lay inert, her head up against the plate-metal door where Myrik had slammed it. Vikary knelt at her side, on one knee, and tried to put an arm around her shoulders. The back of her head left a smear of blood on the side of the aircar.

  Janacek knelt too, quickly, and felt her pulse. Satisfied, he rose again and turned back to face the Braiths, his mouth tight with anger. “She wore jade-and-silver, Myrik,” he said. “You are a dead man. I issue challenge.”

  Myrik had stopped screaming, though he was panting. One of the hounds howled and fell silent.

  “Does she live?” Bretan asked in his sandpaper voice.

  Jaan Vikary looked up at him out of a face as strange and strained as Myrik’s had been just a short time before. “She lives.”

  “Good fortune,” said Janacek, “but no thanks to you, Myrik, nor will it make a difference. Make your choices!”

  “Let me loose!” Dirk said. No one moved. “Let me loose!” he shouted.

  Someone sliced apart his bonds.

  He went to Gwen, kneeling beside Vikary. Briefly their eyes met. Dirk examined the back of her head, where the dark hair was already beginning to crust with clotted blood. “A concussion at least,” he said. “Maybe a fractured skull, maybe worse. I don’t know. Are there medical facilities?” He looked at each of them. “Are there?”

  Bretan answered. “None functional in Challenge, t’Larien. The Voice fought me. The city would not respond. I had to kill it.”

  Dirk grimaced. “She shouldn’t be moved, then. Maybe it’s only a concussion. I think she’s supposed to rest.”

  Incredibly, Jaan Vikary left her in Dirk’s arms and stood up. He gestured to Lorimaar and Bretan, who held Myrik prisoned between them. “Release him.”

  “Release . . . ?” Janacek threw Vikary a puzzled glance.

  “Jaan,” Dirk said, “never mind about him. Gwen—”

  “Get her inside an aircar,” Vikary said.

  “I don’t think we should move—”

  “It is not safe here, t’Larien. Get her inside an aircar.”

  Janacek was frowning. “My teyn?”

  Vikary faced the Braiths again. “I told you to release that man.” He paused. “That mockman, as you would call him. He has earned the name.”

  “What do you intend, high-Ironjade?” Lorimaar said sternly.

  Dirk lifted Gwen and laid her gently in the back of the closest of the aircars. She was quite limp, but her breathing was still regular. Then he slid into the driver’s seat and waited, massaging his wrists to restore circulation.

  Everyone seemed to have forgotten him. Lorimaar high-Braith was still talking. “We recognize your right to face Myrik, but it must be singled, as Teraan Braith Nalarys lies dead. Since your own teyn challenged first . . .”

  Jaan Vikary had his laser pistol in his hand. “Release him and stand away.”

  Lorimaar, startled, let go of Myrik’s arm and stepped swiftly to the side. Bretan hesitated. “High-Ironjade,” he rasped, “for your honor and his, for your holdfast and your teyn, set down your weapon.”

  Vikary aimed at the half-faced youth. Bretan twitched, then released Myrik and fell back with a grotesque shrug.

  “What is happening?” the one-handed oldster was demanding in a shrill voice. “What is he doing?” Everyone ignored him.

  “Jaan,” Garse Janacek said in a horrified tone. “This has disarrayed your thoughts. Lower your gun, my teyn. I have challenged. I will kill him for you.” He laid his hand on Jaan’s arm.

  And Jaan Vikary wrenched free and pointed his weapon at Garse. “No. Stand back. You will not interfere, not now. This is for her.”

  Janacek’s face darkened; he had no grins now, none of his savage wit. His right hand balled into a fist, and he slowly raised it straight up in front of hi
s face. Iron-and-glowstone stood shining in the space between the two Ironjades. “Our bond,” said Janacek. “Think, my teyn. My honor, and yours, and that of our holdfast.” His voice was grave.

  “What of her honor?” Vikary said. Gesturing impatiently with his laser, he forced Janacek away from him and turned again on Myrik.

  Alone and confused, Myrik seemed not to know what was expected of him. His rage had deserted him, though he was still breathing hard. A trail of spittle, tinged pink by blood, ran from one corner of his mouth. He wiped it off with the back of his hand and looked uncertainly toward Garse Janacek. “The first of the four choices,” he began in a dazed voice. “I make the choice of mode.”

  “No,” said Vikary. “You make no choices. Face me, mockman.”

  Myrik looked from Vikary to Janacek and back again. “The choice of mode,” he repeated numbly.

  “No,” Vikary said again. “You gave Gwen Delvano no choices, she who would have faced you fair, in duel.”

  Myrik’s face twisted into a look of honest bafflement. “She? In duel? I . . . she was a woman, a mockman.” He nodded, as if he had settled everything. “She was a woman, Ironjade. Have you gone mad? She japed me. A woman does not duel.”

  “And you do not duel, Myrik. Do you understand? Do you? You”—he fired, and a half-second pulse of light took Myrik low, between his legs, so the man screamed—

  “do”—and he fired again, and burned Myrik in the neck just beneath his chin, and then waited as the man fell and his laser recycled—

  “not”—he continued, fifteen seconds later, and with the word a spurt of light that burned the writhing figure across the chest, and then Vikary was stepping backwards, toward the aircar—

  “duel!” he finished, half-in and half-out of the car, and with the word came a flick of his wrist and a fourth burst of light, and Lorimaar high-Braith Arkellor was falling, his weapon half-drawn.