Dying of the Light Read online

“We’re together, for the moment. We’re young and we’re strong, and we know who our enemies are and how to find them. And none of us can ever be Ironjades again—I’m a woman and Jaan’s an outbonder and you’re a mockman. Garse was the last Ironjade. Garse is dead. The rights and wrongs of High Kavalaan and the Ironjade Gathering died with him, I think, for this world at the least. There are no codes on Worlorn, remember? No Braiths and no Ironjades, only animals trying to kill each other.”

  “What are you saying?” Dirk said, though he thought he knew.

  “I’m saying that I’m tired of being hunted and hounded and threatened,” Gwen said. Her shadowed face was black iron; her eyes burned hot and feral. “I’m saying that it’s time we became the hunters!”

  Dirk regarded her in silence for a long time. She was very beautiful, he thought, beautiful in the way that Garse Janacek had been beautiful. She was a little like the banshee, he decided, and he grieved a private grief for his Jenny, his Guinevere who never was. “You’re right,” he said heavily.

  She stepped closer to him, wrapped him within the circle of her arms before he could react, and hugged him with all of her strength. His own hands came up slowly; he hugged her back, and they stood together for a good ten minutes, crushed against each other, her smooth cool cheek against his stubble. When she finally broke from him, she looked up, expecting him to kiss her, so he did. He closed his eyes; her lips felt dry and hard.

  The Firefort was cold at dawn. The wind swirled around it in hammering gusts; the sky above was gray and cloudy.

  On the roof of their building they found a corpse.

  Jaan Vikary climbed out carefully, his laser rifle in hand, while Gwen and Dirk covered him from the relative safety of the aircar. Ruark sat silently in the back seat, terrified. They had freed him before leaving the vicinity of Kryne Lamiya, and all the way back he had been alternately sullen and ebullient, not knowing what to think.

  Vikary inspected the body, which lay sprawled in front of the tubes, then returned to the car. “Roseph high-Braith Kelcek,” he said curtly.

  “High-Larteyn,” Dirk reminded him.

  “In truth,” he acknowledged, frowning. “High-Larteyn. He has been dead several hours, I would estimate. Approximately half of his chest has been blown away by a projectile weapon. His own sidearm is holstered.”

  “A projectile weapon?” Dirk said.

  Vikary nodded. “Bretan Braith Lantry has been known to use such a weapon in duel. He is a noted duelist, but I believe he has chosen his projectile gun only twice, rare times when he was not content to win by wounding. A dueling laser is a clean precise instrument. Not so this side arm of Bretan Braith’s. Such a weapon is designed to kill, even with a near miss. It is a great sloppy savage thing, and it makes for short deadly duels.”

  Gwen was staring out to where Roseph lay like a pile of rags. His clothing had the dirty dust color of the roof, and it flapped erratically in the wind. “This was no duel,” she said.

  “No,” Vikary agreed.

  “But why?” Dirk asked. “Roseph was no threat to Bretan Braith, was he? Besides, the code duello—Bretan is still a Braith, isn’t he? So isn’t he still bound?”

  “Bretan is indeed yet a Braith, and that is your ‘why’ for you, Dirk t’Larien,” Vikary said. “This is no duel. This is highwar, Braith against Larteyn. There are very few rules in highwar; any adult male of the enemy holdfast is fair prey, until a peace comes.”

  “A crusade,” Gwen said, chuckling. “That doesn’t sound much like Bretan, Jaan.”

  “It sounds a great deal like old Chell, however,” Vikary replied. “I suspect that his teyn swore him to this course as he lay dying. If this is truth, Bretan kills under a pledge, not simply in grief. He will have very little mercy.”

  In the back seat, Arkin Ruark leaned forward eagerly. “But this is all to the best!” he exclaimed. “Yes, listen to me, this is fine. Gwen, Dirk, Jaan my friend, listen. Bretan will kill them all for us, will he not? Kill them one and all, yes. He is enemy of our enemies, best hope we have, utter truth.”

  “Your Kimdissi proverb is misleading in this case,” Vikary said. “The highwar between Bretan Braith and the Larteyns makes him no friend of ours, except by chance. Blood and high grievance are not forgotten so easily, Arkin.”

  “Yes,” Gwen added. “It wasn’t Lorimaar that he suspected of hiding in Kryne Lamiya, you know. He burned that city in an effort to get us.”

  “A guess, a mere guess,” Ruark muttered. “Perhaps he had other reasons, his own, who can know? Perhaps he was mad, crazed with grief, yes.”

  “Tell you what, Arkin,” Dirk said. “We’ll drop you off in the open, and if Bretan comes along, you can ask him.”

  The Kimdissi flinched and looked at him strangely. “No,” he said. “No, safer to stay with you, my friends, you will protect me.”

  “We will protect you,” Jaan Vikary said. “You have done as much for us.” Dirk and Gwen exchanged glances.

  Vikary threw their aircar into sudden motion. They rose and flitted away from the roof over the dawn-dim streets of Larteyn.

  “Where . . . ?” Dirk asked.

  “Roseph is dead,” Vikary said. “Yet he was not the only hunter. We shall take a census, friends, we shall take a census.”

  The building that Roseph high-Braith Kelcek had shared with his teyn was located not too far from the Ironjade residence and very close to the undertubes. It was a large square structure with a domed metallic roof and a portico supported by black iron columns. They landed nearby and approached it stealthily.

  Two Braith hounds had been chained to the pillars in front of the house. Both of them were dead. Vikary looked them over. “Their throats were burned out with a hunting laser fired from some distance,” he reported. “A safe, silent kill.”

  He remained outside, laser rifle in hand, wary, standing guard. Ruark stayed close at his side. Gwen and Dirk were sent in to search the building.

  They found numerous empty chambers, and a small trophy room with four heads in it; three of them were old and dried, the skin tight and leathery, the features almost bestial. The fourth, Gwen said, was a Blackwiner jelly child, fresh-taken, from its look. Dirk touched the leather coverings on some of the furniture suspiciously, but Gwen shook her head no.

  Another room, close by, was full of miniature figurines: banshees and wolf packs, soldiers struggling with knife and sword, men facing grotesque monsters in strange combat. All of the scenes were finely executed in iron and copper and bronze. “Roseph’s work,” Gwen said tersely when Dirk paused despite himself and lifted one figure for inspection. She beckoned him to move on.

  Roseph’s teyn had been eating. They found him in the dining chamber. His meal—a thick stew of meat and vegetables in a bloody broth, with hunks of black bread on the side—was cold and half-consumed. A pewter mug full of brown beer stood next to it on the long wooden table. The Kavalar’s body was almost a meter away, still in its chair, but the chair lay flat on the floor and there was a dark stain on the wall behind it. The man no longer had a face.

  Gwen stood over him frowning, her rifle slung casually beneath one arm and pointing at the floor. She picked up his beer and took a sip before passing it to Dirk. It was tepid and stale, its head long gone.

  “Lorimaar and Saanel?” Gwen asked when they stood outside again, under the iron pillars.

  “I doubt that they have returned from the forest yet,” Vikary said. “Perhaps Bretan Braith is somewhere in Larteyn waiting for them. No doubt he saw Roseph and Chaalyn fly in yesterday. Perhaps he is lurking somewhere close at hand, hoping to pick off his enemies one by one as they return to the city. Yet I think not.”

  “Why?” That was Dirk.

  “Remember, t’Larien, we flew in at dawn, and in an unarmored aircar. He did not attack. Either he was sleeping, or he is no longer about.”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “In the wild, hunting our hunters,” Vikary said. “Only two of the
Larteyns remain alive to face him, but Bretan Braith has no way of knowing that. At his last knowledge, Pyr and Arris and even ancient Raymaar One-Hand were all living, and forces to be reckoned with. I would guess that he has flown off to take them by surprise, perhaps in the fear that otherwise they might return to the city in a group, discover their kethi slain, and thus be warned of his intentions.”

  “We should run then, yes, before he gets back,” Arkin Ruark said. “Go somewhere safe, away from this Kavalar madness. Twelfth Dream, yes, to Twelfth Dream. Or Musquel, or Challenge, anywhere. There will be a ship soon, then we will be safe. What do you say?”

  “I say no,” Dirk replied. “Bretan would find us. Remember the almost supernatural way he found Gwen and me in Challenge?” He looked pointedly at Ruark. To his credit, the Kimdissi remained admirably blank-faced.

  “We will stay in Larteyn,” Vikary said decisively. “Bretan Braith Lantry is one man. We are four, and three of us are armed. If we stay together, we are safe. We will post guards. We will be ready.”

  Gwen nodded and slipped her arm through Jaan’s. “I agree,” she said. “Bretan may not even survive Lorimaar.”

  “No,” the Kavalar said to her. “No, Gwen. I think you are wrong. Bretan Braith will outlive Lorimaar. That much l am sure of.”

  At Vikary’s insistence they searched the great subterranean garage before leaving the vicinity of Roseph’s residence. His guess paid off. With their own aircar stolen in Challenge and subsequently destroyed, Roseph and his teyn had borrowed Pyr’s flyer to return from the hunt in the wilderness; it was parked below. Jaan appropriated it. While it was not Janacek’s massive olive-green war relic by any means, it was still a good deal more formidable than Ruark’s little car.

  Afterwards they found quarters. Along the city walls of Larteyn, overlooking the steep sheer cliff that frowned down on the distant Common, were a series of guard towers with slit-windowed sentry posts above and living quarters below, within the walls themselves. The towers, each with a great stone gargoyle roosting on top, were strictly ornamental, a flourish to make the Festival city truly Kavalar. But they were easily defensible and gave an excellent overview of the city. Gwen selected one at random and they moved in, raiding their former apartment for personal effects and food and the records of the almost-forgotten (by Dirk, anyway) ecological researches that she and Ruark had conducted in the wilds of Worlorn.

  Once secure, they settled in to wait.

  It was, Dirk decided later, the worst thing they could have done. Under the pressure of their inactivity, all the cracks began to show.

  They set up a system of overlapping shifts, so two people were up in the guard tower at all times, armed with lasers and Gwen’s field binoculars. Larteyn was gray and empty and desolate. There was little for the watchers to do except study the slow ebb and flow of light in the glowstone streets, and talk. Mostly they talked.

  Arkin Ruark did his shifts along with the rest of them, and he accepted the laser rifle that Vikary forced on him, although with some reluctance. Over and over he insisted that he was unsuited to violence, that he could never fire the laser no matter what. But he consented to hold it, because Jaan Vikary asked him to. His relationships with all of them had changed radically. He stayed close to Jaan as often as he could, recognizing that the Kavalar was his real protector now. He was cordial to Gwen. She had asked him to forgive her for Kryne Lamiya, claiming that fear and pain had temporarily pushed her over into paranoia. But she was no longer “sweet Gwen” for Ruark; the bitterness between them came more to the surface every day. Toward Dirk, the Kimdissi maintained an uneasy, suspicious attitude, alternately smothering him in good fellowship and drawing back into formality when it became clear that Dirk was not warming. Ruark’s comments during the first watch they stood together indicated to Dirk that the chubby ecologist was waiting desperately for the Fringe shuttle Teric neDahlir, due to land the following week. He seemed to want nothing more than to remain safely in hiding and get offworld as soon as possible.

  Gwen Delvano waited for something entirely different, Dirk thought. While Ruark scanned the horizons with apprehension, Gwen was tense with anticipation. He remembered the words she had spoken when they talked together in the shadows of fire-wracked Kryne Lamiya. “It’s time we became the hunters,” she had said. She still meant it. When she and Dirk shared a watch, Gwen did all the work. She sat by the tall narrow window with an almost infinite patience, her binoculars hanging down between her breasts, her arms resting on the windowsill, jade-and-silver next to empty iron. She talked to Dirk without ever looking at him; all her attention was directed outside. Except for trips to the bathroom, Gwen refused to leave the window. Every once in a while she would lift her binoculars and study some distant building where she had glimpsed motion, and less frequently she would ask Dirk for a brush and begin to stroke her long black hair, which was constantly being disarrayed by the wind.

  “I hope that Jaan is wrong,” she said once while she sat brushing her hair. “I would rather see Lorimaar and his teyn come back than Bretan.” Dirk had mumbled some sort of agreement, on the grounds that Lorimaar—much older and wounded too—would be far less dangerous than the one-eyed duelist who hunted him. But when he said it, Gwen only set down her brush and gazed at him curiously. “No,” she said, “no, that isn’t the reason at all.”

  As for Jaantony Riv Wolf high-Ironjade Vikary, the waiting seemed to wound him worst of all. As long as he had been kept in action, as long as things had been required of him, he had remained the old Jaan Vikary—strong, decisive, a leader. Idle he was a different man. He had no role to play then; instead he had unlimited time to brood. It was no good. Though Garse Janacek was mentioned seldom in those last days, it was clear that Jaan was haunted by the specter of his red-bearded teyn. Vikary was too often grim, and he began to fall into sullen silences that would sometimes last for hours.

  He had earlier insisted that all of them should remain inside at all times; now Jaan himself began to take long walks at dawn and dusk when he was not on watch. During his hours in the guard tower most of his conversations were filled with rambling recollections of his boyhood in the holdfasts of the Ironjade Gathering, and tales taken from history, of martyred heroes like Vikor high-Redsteel and Aryn high-Glowstone. He never spoke of the future, and only rarely of their present circumstances. Watching him, Dirk felt he could almost see the man’s inner turmoil. In a matter of a few days, Vikary had lost everything: his teyn, his homeworld and his people, even the code that he had lived by. He was fighting it—already he had taken Gwen as teyn, accepting her with a fullness and a total dependence that he had never shown toward either her or Garse individually. And it seemed to Dirk that Jaan was trying to keep his code as well, clinging tightly to whatever pieces of Kavalar honor had been left to him. It was Gwen, not Jaan, who spoke of hunting the hunters, of animals killing each other now that all codes were gone. She worded things as if she spoke for her teyn as well as herself, but Dirk did not think that was so. Vikary, when he spoke of their impending struggles, always seemed to imply that he would be dueling Bretan Braith. On his long walks through the city he would drill with both rifle and side arm. “If I am to face Bretan, I must be ready,” he would say, and like an automaton he would take his daily practice, usually within sight of the tower, preparing himself for each Kavalar dueling mode in turn. One day he would run through death-square and ten-paces, burning down his phantom antagonists, and the next day it would be free-style and walk-the-line, and then single-shot and death-square again. Those on watch above would cover him and pray that no enemy saw the insistent throbs of light. Dirk was afraid. Jaan was their strength, and he was lost in his martial delusion, his half-spoken assumption that Bretan Braith would return and grant him the courtesies of code, despite everything. Despite all of Vikary’s vaunted prowess in duel, despite his daily ritual of drill, it seemed to Dirk increasingly unlikely that the Ironjade could triumph over Bretan in single combat.

&nbs
p; Dirk’s own sleep was plagued by recurrent nightmares of the half-faced Braith: Bretan with his strange voice and his glowing eye and his grotesque twitch, Bretan slim and smooth-cheeked and innocent, Bretan the destroyer of cities. Dirk woke from those dreams sweaty and exhausted, twisted in his bed clothes, remembering Gwen’s screams (high shrill laments like the towers of Kryne Lamiya) and the way Bretan looked at him. To banish these visions he had only Jaan, and Jaan had a weary fatalism about him now, though he might still go through the motions.

  It was Janacek’s death, Dirk told himself—and more, the circumstances of that death. Had Garse died more normally, Vikary would be an avenger more angry and impassioned and invincible than Myrik and Bretan combined. As it was, however, Jaan was convinced that his teyn had betrayed him, had hunted him like a beast or a mockman, and the conviction was destroying him. More than once, sitting with the Ironjade in the small watchroom, Dirk felt the urge to tell him the truth, to rush up to him and shout No, no! Garse was innocent, Garse loved you, Garse would have died for you! Yet he said nothing. If Vikary was dying this way, consumed by his melancholy and his sense of betrayal and his ultimate loss of faith, then how much quicker would the truth kill him?

  So the days passed and the cracks grew and Dirk watched his three companions with growing apprehension. While Ruark waited for escape, and Gwen for revenge, and Jaan Vikary for death.

  15

  On the first day of vigil it rained most of the afternoon. The clouds had been piling up in the east all morning, growing thicker and more threatening, obscuring Fat Satan and his children so the day was even gloomier than usual. Near noon the storm broke. It was a howler. The winds whistled by outside so loudly that the guard tower seemed to shake, and rivers of brown water ran wildly through the streets and down glowstone gutters. When the suns broke through at last—they were already close to setting—Larteyn glistened, its walls and buildings shining wetly and looking cleaner than Dirk had ever seen them. The Firefort seemed almost hopeful. But that was the first day of vigil.