Dying of the Light Read online

  On the second day things were back to normal. The Helleye rode a slow red path across the sky, Larteyn glowered dim and black below, and the wind brought back the dust of the Common that yesterday’s rains had washed away. At dusk Dirk spied an aircar. It materialized high above the mountains, a black dot, and swept out over the Common before turning back to descend on them. Dirk watched it carefully through the binoculars, his elbows resting on the stone sill of the narrow window. It was no car he knew—a dead black thing, a small stylized bat with wide wings and enormous headlamp-eyes. Vikary was sharing that watch with him. Dirk called him over to the window, and Jaan looked with disinterest. “Yes, I know that craft,” Jaan said. “It is no matter to us, t’Larien, only the hunters from the Shanagate Holding. Gwen reported seeing them leave this morning.” The aircar had vanished by then, lost among the buildings of Larteyn, and Vikary went back to his seat, leaving Dirk to reflect.

  In the days that followed, he saw the Shanagates several times, and they never ceased to seem unreal to him. How odd it was to think of them coming and going, untouched by all that had happened, living their lives as if Larteyn was still the peaceful dying city it seemed, as if no one had perished. They were so close to it all, and yet so distant and uninvolved; he could imagine them returning to their holdfast on High Kavalaan and reporting on how dull and uneventful life was on Worlorn. For them nothing had changed; Kryne Lamiya still sang its wailing dirge, and Challenge was still fervent with light and life and promise. He envied them.

  On the third day Dirk woke from a particularly virulent nightmare in which he was fighting off Bretan alone, and he was unable to get back to sleep afterwards. Gwen, off watch, was pacing back and forth in the kitchen. Dirk poured himself a mug of Vikary’s beer and listened to her for a while. “They should be here,” she kept complaining. “I can’t believe that they’re still searching for Jaan. Surely they must realize by now what’s happened! Why aren’t they here?” Dirk only shrugged at her and expressed hope that no one ever showed up; the Teric neDahlir was due soon. When he said that, she spun on him angrily. “I don’t care!” she snapped; and then, ashamed, she flushed red and came to the table and sat down. Beneath a wide green headband her eyes were haggard. She held his hand and told him haltingly that Vikary had not touched her since Janacek’s death. Dirk told her that it would be better for them once the starship came, once they were safely off Worlorn, and Gwen smiled and agreed with him, and after a time she wept. When she finally left him, Dirk went back and found his whisperjewel and held it in his fist, remembering.

  On the fourth day, while Vikary was out on one of his dangerous dawn walks, Gwen and Arkin Ruark quarreled during a watch, and she hit him with the butt of her laser rifle, hard across his bruised face where the swelling had only recently responded to ice packs and ointments. Ruark came down the ladder from the tower muttering that she was mad again, trying to kill him. Dirk, awakened from a sound sleep, was standing in the common room, and the Kimdissi stopped dead when he saw him. Neither of them said anything, but after that Ruark lost weight rapidly, and Dirk was certain that Arkin knew what he had only suspected previously.

  On the morning of the sixth day, Ruark and Dirk were sharing a wordless watch when the short man, in a fit of pique, suddenly threw his laser across the room. “Filthy thing!” he exclaimed. “Braiths, Ironjades, I don’t care, Kavalar animals is what they are, yes. And you, fine man from Avalon, eh? Ha! You are no better, no better at all, look at you. I should have let you duel, kill or be killed, like you wanted. That would have made you happy, yes? No doubt, no doubt. Loved sweet Gwen and made you a friend, and where is my gratitude, where, where?” His fat cheeks were growing hollow and sunken; his pale eyes shifted restlessly.

  Dirk ignored him, and Ruark soon fell silent. But later on that same morning, after he had picked up his laser and sat for a few hours staring at the wall, the Kimdissi turned to Dirk once again. “I was her lover too, you know,” he said. “She didn’t tell you that, I know, I know, but it is the truth, the utter truth. On Avalon, long before she ever met Jaantony and took her damn jade-and-silver, the night you sent her that whisperjewel. She was so drunk, you know. We talked and we talked, and she drank, and later on she took me to bed and the next day she didn’t even remember, you know that, she didn’t even remember. But that doesn’t matter, it is the truth, I was her lover too.” He trembled. “I never told her, t’Larien, or tried to make it come again. I am not such a fool like you are, and I know what I am, and it was only a thing of that moment. Yet it existed, that moment, and I taught her a lot and I was her friend, and I am very good at my work, yes I am.” He stopped and caught his breath and then silently left the tower, although there was still an hour to go before Gwen was scheduled to relieve him.

  When she finally came up, the first thing she did was ask Dirk what he had said to Arkin. “Nothing,” he replied truthfully. Then he asked her why, and she told him that Ruark had wakened her, crying, and telling her over and over that no matter what happened she should make sure their work was published, and that his name belonged on it, no matter what he had done, his name belonged on it too. Dirk nodded and gave up his binoculars and his post by the window to Gwen, and very soon they were talking of other things.

  On the seventh day the late-night watch fell to Dirk and Jaan Vikary. The Kavalar city wore its dull nighttime glow, the glowstone boulevards like sheets of black crystal beneath which red fires burned dimly, dimly. Near to midnight a light appeared over the mountains. Dirk studied it as it flew toward the city. “I don’t know,” he said, holding the binoculars. “It’s dark, hard to make out. I think I can see the vague outline of a dome, though.” He lowered his glasses. “Lorimaar?”

  Vikary stood over him. The aircar grew closer. It slid silently above the city, and its silhouette was distinct. “It is his car,” Jaan said.

  They watched it veer out over the Common and circle back, heading for the cliff face and the entrance to the underground airlot. Vikary looked thoughtful. “I would not have believed it,” he said. They went down to rouse the others.

  The man emerged from the darkness of the undertubes to find himself facing two lasers. Gwen had her pistol trained on him, almost casually. Dirk, armed with one of the hunting rifles, had aimed at the tube doors and stood with the sight pressed against his cheek, ready to fire. Only Jaan Vikary did not have a weapon out; he held his rifle loosely in his hands, and his side arm was holstered.

  The tube doors slid shut behind him, and the man stood very still, understandably frightened. It was not Lorimaar. It was not anyone Dirk knew. He lowered his rifle.

  The man’s eyes touched each of them in turn and finally settled on Vikary. “High-Ironjade,” he said in a low voice. “Why do you accost me?” He was a medium-sized man, horse-faced and bearded, with long blond hair and a scrawny build. He was dressed in chameleon cloth that was somber red-gray now, flushed and feverish like the glowstone blocks of the pavement.

  Vikary reached over and gently pushed Gwen’s pistol to the side. The act seemed to wake her. She frowned and holstered her weapon. “We were expecting Lorimaar high-Braith,” she said.

  “The truth,” Vikary affirmed. “No insult was intended, Shanagate. Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn.”

  The horse-faced man nodded and looked relieved. “And to yours, high-Ironjade,” he said. “No insult was taken.” He plucked at his nose nervously.

  “You fly Braith property, do you not?”

  He nodded. “In truth, and ours by right of salvage. My teyn and I stumbled on it in the wild while we pursued an ironhorn in flight. The creature stopped to drink, and there the car was, abandoned by a lake.”

  “Abandoned? Are you quite certain of that?”

  The man laughed. “I know Lorimaar high-Braith and fat Saanel too well, and take no chance of initiating high grievance with such as they. No, we found their bodies also. Some enemy had been waiting at their camp, inside the aircar we do believe, and when t
hey returned from hunting . . .” He gestured. “They will take no more heads, mockman or otherwise.”

  “Dead?” Gwen’s mouth was tight.

  “Entirely dead, each for several days,” the Kavalar replied. “Scavengers had descended on the corpses, of course, yet there was still enough left to determine who they had been. We found another aircar close at hand in the lake itself, in truth, wrecked and useless, and also marks in the sand that indicated other cars had come and departed. Lorimaar’s vehicle was still functional, though full of dead Braith hounds. We cleaned it out and claimed it. My teyn is following me in our own car.”

  Vikary nodded.

  “These are very unusual events,” the man was saying. He regarded the three of them shrewdly, with unconcealed interest. His gaze lingered for an uncomfortably long time on Dirk, and then on Gwen’s black iron bracelet, but he commented on neither. “Few Braiths seem to be about of late, fewer than normal, and now we find two of them slain.”

  “If you search hard enough you’ll find some others,” Gwen said.

  “They’re starting a new holdfast,” Dirk added, “in hell.”

  When the man had gone on his way they began the slow walk back to the watchtower. No one spoke. Long shadows grew from their feet and followed them down the somber crimson streets. Gwen walked as if she were exhausted. Vikary was almost jumpy; he carried his rifle warily, ready to snap it up and fire should Bretan Braith suddenly take form in their path, and his eyes probed every alley and dark place along their route.

  Back in the brightness of the common room, Gwen and Dirk slumped quickly to the floor, while Jaan stood for a moment just inside the door, his face thoughtful. Then he set down his weapons and broke out a bottle of wine, the same pungent vintage that he had shared with Garse and Dirk the night before the duel that never was. He poured three glasses and handed them around. “Drink,” he said, raising his own glass in a toast. “Things draw to a close. Now there is only Bretan Braith left. Soon he shall be with his Chell, or I shall be with Garse, and in either case we will have peace.” He drained his glass very quickly. The others sipped.

  “Ruark should drink with us,” Vikary announced abruptly as he refilled his glass. The Kimdissi had not accompanied them to their midnight rendezvous. His reluctance had not seemed to be from fear, however; at least Dirk did not think so at the time. Jaan had gotten him up, and Ruark had dressed with the rest of them, slipping into his finest silkeen suit and a little scarlet beret, but when Vikary had handed him a rifle at the door he had only looked at it with a curious smile and handed it back. Then he had said, “I have my own code, Jaantony, and you must respect it. Thank you, but I think I will stay here.” He delivered the statement with quiet dignity; beneath his white-blond hair his eyes looked almost cheerful. Jaan told him to continue the watch from the guard tower, and Ruark consented to that.

  “Arkin hates Kavalar wine,” Gwen said wearily to Jaan’s suggestion.

  “That is of no matter,” Jaan replied. “This is a bonding between kethi, not a party. He should drink with us.” He set down his wine glass and went up the ladder to the tower with easy grace.

  When he returned an instant later, he was less graceful. He dropped the last meter and stood staring at them. “Ruark will not drink with us,” he declared. “Ruark has hanged himself.”

  On that particular dawn, the eighth of their vigil, it was Dirk who went walking.

  He did not go into Larteyn itself. Instead he walked the city walls. They were three meters across, black stone covered over by thick slabs of glowstone, so there was no danger of falling. Dirk was alone on watch (Gwen had cut down Ruark’s body, and afterwards she had taken Jaan to bed), staring out on those walls with his laser uselessly in hand and his binoculars around his neck, when the first of the yellow suns came up and the fires of night began to fade. The urge had come upon him suddenly. Bretan Braith would not be coming back to the city, he knew; the watch was a useless formality now. He left his rifle leaning against the wall, next to the window, as he dressed warmly and went outside.

  He walked a long way. Other guard towers much like their own stood at regular intervals. He passed six of them, and estimated the distance from tower to tower to be roughly a third of a kilometer. Every tower had its gargoyle, and none of the gargoyles were quite alike, he noticed. Now, after everything, he suddenly recognized them. They were untraditional, those gargoyles, not Old Earth cast at all; they were the demons of Kavalar myth, grotesque mythologized versions of dactyloids and Hruun and githyanki soulsucks. All real, in a sense. Somewhere among the stars, each of those races still lived.

  The stars. Dirk paused and looked up. The Helleye had begun to edge above the horizon; most of the stars were gone already. He saw only one, very faint, a tiny red pinpoint framed by wisps of gray clouds. Even as he watched, it vanished. High Kavalaan’s star, he thought. Garse Janacek had shown it to him, a beacon for his run.

  There were too few stars out here anyway. These were no places for men to live, these worlds like Worlorn and High Kavalaan and Darkdawn, these outworlds. The Great Black Sea was too close on one hand, and the Tempter’s Veil screened off most of the galaxy, and the skies were bleak and empty. A sky ought to have stars.

  A man ought to have a code too. A friend, a teyn, a cause—something beyond himself.

  Dirk walked to the outer edge of the walls and stood staring down. It was a long, long drop. The first time he had sailed over the wall, on a sky-scoot, he’d lost his balance just from looking at it. The walls went down a ways, and below them the cliff went down forever, and way at the bottom a river ran through greenery and morning mists.

  He stood with his hands in his pockets, the winds ruffling his hair, shivering a bit. He stood and he looked. Then he took out his whisperjewel. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, as if it were a good luck charm. Jenny, he thought. Where had she gone? Even the jewel did not summon her back to him.

  Footsteps sounded nearby, then a voice. “Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn.”

  Dirk turned, the whisperjewel still in his hand. An old man was standing next to him. Tall as Jaan and old as poor dead Chell. He was massive and leonine, with a head of wild snow-white hair that blended into an equally stormy beard to form one magnificent mane. Yet his face was tired and faded, as if he had worn it a few centuries too long. Only his eyes stood out—intensely, insanely blue eyes, eyes like Garse Janacek once had, burning with icy fevers beneath his bushy brows.

  “I have no holdfast,” Dirk said, “and I have no teyn.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “An offworlder, eh?”

  Dirk bowed.

  The old man chuckled. “Well, you haunt the wrong city then, ghost.”

  “Ghost?”

  “A ghost of the Festival,” the old man said. “What else could you be? This is Worlorn, and the living men have all gone home.” He was wearing a black woolen cape with huge pockets, over garments of faded blue. A heavy disc of stainless steel hung just beneath his beard, suspended on a leather thong. When he took his hands from the pockets of his cape, Dirk saw that one of his fingers was missing. He wore no bracelets.

  “You have no teyn,” Dirk said.

  The old man grumbled. “Of course I had a teyn, ghost. I was a poet, not a priest. What sort of a question is that? Beware. I might take insult.”

  “You wear no iron-and-fire,” Dirk pointed out.

  “Truth enough, yet what of it? Ghosts need no jewelry. My teyn is thirty years dead, haunting some holdfast back in Redsteel, I imagine, and I’m here haunting Worlorn. Well, only Larteyn, if truth be known. Haunting an entire planet would be rather exhausting.”

  “Oh,” Dirk said, smiling. “Then you’re a ghost too?”

  “Well, yes,” the old man replied. “Here I stand, talking with you for lack of a good chain to rattle. What do you think I am?”

  “I think,” Dirk said, “I think you just might be Kirak Redsteel Cavis.”

  “Kirak Redstee
l Cavis,” the old man repeated in a gruff singsong manner. “I know him. A ghost if there ever was one. His particular fate is to haunt the corpse of Kavalar poetry. He goes about at night moaning, and reciting lines from the laments of Jamis-Lion Taal and some of the better sonnets of Erik high-Ironjade Devlin. During the full moon he sings Braith battle chanteys and sometimes the old cannibal dirge from the Deep Coal Dwellings. A ghost, in truth, and a most pathetic one. When he especially wants to torment one of his victims, he recites some of his own verse. I assure you that once you have heard Kirak Redsteel read, you pray for rattling chains.”

  “Yes?” Dirk said. “I don’t see why being a poet is quite so ghostly, in and of itself.”

  “Kirak Redsteel writes Old Kavalar poetry,” the man said with a frown. “And that is enough. It is a dying language. So who will read what he writes? In his own holdfast, men grow up speaking only standard star-talk. Perhaps they will translate his poetry, but it is really hardly worth the effort, you know. In translation it does not rhyme, and the meter limps along like a broken-backed mockman. None of it is any good in translation, not a bit. The rattling cadences of Galen Glowstone, the sweet hymns of Laaris-Blind high-Kenn, all those dreary little Shanagates exalting the iron-and-fire, even the songs of the eyn-kethi, those hardly count as poetry at all. All dead, every bit of it, surviving only in Kirak Redsteel. Yes, the man is a ghost. Why else did he come to Worlorn? This is a world for ghosts.” The old man tugged at his beard and regarded Dirk. “You are the ghost of some tourist, I would venture. No doubt you got lost while looking for a bathroom, and you have been wandering ever since.”

  “No.” Dirk said, “no. I was looking for something else.” He smiled and held up his whisperjewel.

  The old man studied it, squinting his hard blue eyes while the cold wind flapped his cape. “Whatever it is, it is probably dead,” he said. Far below them, down near the river that ran sparkling through the Common, a sound came drifting up: the faint, far-off wail of a banshee. Dirk’s head snapped around, and he looked to see where the sound had come from. There was nothing, nothing—only the two of them standing on the wall, and the wind pulling at them, and the Helleye high in a twilight sky. No banshee. The time for banshees had passed here. They were all extinct.