Dying of the Light Read online

  Dirk was nodding. “I’ve seen a Hruun or two during my travels. The other races are pretty much extinct, aren’t they?”

  “Perhaps,” Vikary said. “I looked at the illustrations I had found for a long time, and returned to them again and again. There was a quality about them that disturbed me. Finally, I puzzled out the truth. The Hruun, the dactyloids, the githyanki each bore a vague semblance to the gargoyles that sit at the door of every Kavalar holdfast. They were the demons of our myth cycles, Dirk!”

  Vikary stood up and began to pace slowly up and down the length of the room, still talking, his voice even and controlled, his excitement showing only in the act of pacing. “When Gwen and I returned to Ironjade I put forward my theory, based on the old legends, the Demonsong cycle of the great poet-adventurer Jamis-Lion Taal, and on the Academy data banks. Consider its truth: The colony Cavanaugh stands, with its cities on the plains and its far-flung mining operations. The Hrangans level the cities with a nuclear bombardment. Survivors live only in the deep shelters and out in the wild, in the mines. To make the planet their own, the Hrangans also land contingents of their slaveraces. Then they depart, not to return for a century. The mines become the first holdfasts, others are built later, carved deep into stone. Their cities gone, the miners revert to a more primitive level of technology, and soon establish a rigid survival-oriented culture. For endless generations they war against the slaveraces and against each other. At the same time, beneath the radioactive ruins of the cities, human mutations begin to arise . . .”

  Now Dirk stood up. “Jaan,” he said.

  Vikary stopped his pacing, turned, frowned.

  “I have been very damn patient,” Dirk said. “I understand that all this is of great concern to you. It’s your work. But I want some answers and I want them now.” He raised his hand and ticked off the questions on his fingers. “Who is Lorimaar? What did he want? And why do I have to be protected against him?”

  Gwen rose too. “Dirk,” she said, “Jaan is only giving you the background you need to understand. Don’t be so—”

  “No!” Vikary quieted her with a wave of his hand. “No, t’Larien is correct; I grow too enthusiastic whenever I speak of these matters.” To Dirk he said, “I will answer you directly, then. Lorimaar is a very traditional Kavalar, so traditional that he is out of place even on High Kavalaan itself. He is a creature of another age. Do you recall yesterday morning, when I gave you my pin to wear, and Garse and I both expressed concern about your safety after dark?”

  Dirk nodded. His hand went up and touched the small pin, snugly fastened to his collar. “Yes.”

  “Lorimaar high-Braith and others like him were the cause of our concern, t’Larien. The reasons are not easy to tell.”

  “Let me,” Gwen said. “Dirk, listen. The highbond Kavalars, the holdfast folk, always respected each other throughout the centuries—oh, they fought and warred, so much that some twenty-odd holdfasts and coalitions were destroyed utterly, leaving only the four great surviving holdfasts of modern times. Still, they recognized each other as human, subject to the rules of highwar and the Kavalar code duello. But there were others, you see—solitary people in the mountains, people who dwelled under the ruined cities, farmers. Those are just guesses—mine and Jaan’s—but the point is such people did exist, survivors outside the mining camps that became the holdfasts—those survivors the highbonds would not recognize as men and women. Jaan left something out of all that history, you see—oh, don’t fidget so. I know it was a long story, but it was important. You remember all that about the Hrangan slaveraces corresponding to the three demons of Kavalar myth? Well, the only problem with that is there are three slaveraces, but four kinds of demons. The worst and most evil demons of all were the mockmen.”

  Dirk frowned. “Mockmen. Lorimaar called me a mockman. I thought it was something like not-man, more or less.”

  “No,” Gwen said. “Not-man is a common term, mockman is unique to High Kavalaan. Shape-changers, the legends say, weres and liars. They can wear any form, but most often that of men, and they want to infiltrate the holdfasts. Inside, disguised as humans, they can secretly strike and kill.

  “Those other survivors—the farmers and the mountain families and the mutants and the unlucky, the other humans on Cavanaugh—those were the mockmen, the werefolk. They were not allowed to surrender, the rules of highwar did not apply. The Kavalars exterminated them, never trusting any to be human. They were alien animals. After centuries, those that remained were hunted for sport. The holdfast men always hunted in pairs, teyn-and-teyn, so each could swear to the humanity of the other when they returned.”

  Dirk looked aghast. “Does this still go on?”

  Gwen shrugged. “Seldom. Modern Kavalars admit the sins of their history. Even before the starships came, the Ironjade Gathering and Redsteel, the most progressive coalitions, had banned the taking of mockmen. The hunters had a custom. When they did not wish to kill a mockman immediately, for whatever reason, but wanted him as their personal prey later, they would brand him korariel, and no one else would touch him under penalty of duel. The Ironjade and Redsteel kethi went out and ran down all the mockmen they could, set them up in villages, and tried to bring them back to civilization from the savagery they had fallen into. All they caught they named korariel. There was a brief highwar over it, Ironjade against Shanagate. Ironjade won, and korariel took on a new meaning, protected property.”

  “And Lorimaar?” Dirk demanded. “How does he fit in?”

  She smiled wickedly, for a second reminding him of Janacek. “In any culture, a few diehards remain, true believers and fundamentalists. Braith is the most conservative coalition, and about a tenth of them—Jaan’s estimate—still believe in mockmen. Mostly hunters, who want to believe, and nearly all of them from Braith. Lorimaar and his teyn and a handful of his kethi are here to hunt. The game is more varied than on High Kavalaan, and no one enforces any game laws. In fact, there are no laws. The Festival pacts ended long ago. Lorimaar can kill anything he wants to.”

  “Including humans,” Dirk said.

  “If they can find them,” she said. “Larteyn has twenty citizens, I believe—twenty-one with you. Us, and a poet named Kirak Redsteel Cavis who lives in an old watchtower, and a pair of legitimate hunters from Shanagate. The rest are Braiths. Hunting mockmen, and other game when they can’t find mockmen. A generation older than Jaan, chiefly, and quite bloodthirsty. Except for stories they heard in their holdfasts, and maybe a few illicit man-kills in the Lameraan Hills, they know nothing of the old hunts except the legends. All of them are bursting with tradition and frustration.” She smiled.

  “And this goes on? No one does anything?”

  Jaan Vikary crossed his arms. “I have a confession to make, t’Larien,” he said gravely. “We lied to you yesterday, Garse and I, when you asked us why we are here. In truth, I was the one who lied. Garse told at least the partial truth—we must protect Gwen. She is an offworlder, no Kavalar, and the Braiths would gladly kill her for a mockman without the shield of Ironjade. The same is truth for Arkin Ruark, who knows nothing of this, not even that he has our protection. Yet he does. He too is korariel of Ironjade.

  “Our reasons for being here go beyond that, however. It was vital that I leave High Kavalaan at the time I did. When I took on my highnames and published my theories, I became at once very powerful and celebrated in highbond council, and very hated. Many religious men took personal insult from my contention that Kay Iron-Smith was a woman. I was challenged six times on that account alone. In the last duel, Garse killed a man, while I wounded his teyn so badly that he will never walk again. I was not willing to let this go on. Worlorn was empty of enemies, it seemed. At my urging, the Ironjade council dispatched Gwen on her ecological project.

  “Yet, at the same time, I became aware of Lorimaar’s activity here. He had already taken his first trophy, and word had come back to Braith and spread to us. Garse and I discussed the matter and determined to
stop it. The situation is explosive in the extreme. If the Kimdissi should learn that the Kavalars are hunting mockmen again, they would gladly spread the news to all the outworlds. There is little love lost between Kimdiss and High Kavalaan, as you may know. We do not fear the Kimdissi themselves, who espouse a religion and a philosophy as nonviolent as the Emereli. Other Fringe worlds are more dangerous. The Wolfmen are always volatile and erratic; the Toberians might end their trade agreements if they learn that Kavalars are hunting their laggardly tourists. Perhaps even Avalon would turn against us, should the news go beyond the Veil, and we would be barred from the Academy. These risks cannot be taken. Lorimaar and his fellows do not care, and the holdfast councils can do nothing. They have no authority here, and only the Ironjades have even the slightest concern about events light-years away, on a dying world. Thus Garse and I act against the Braith hunters alone.

  “Up to now, it has not come to open conflict. We travel as widely as we can, visiting each of the cities, searching for those who remain on Worlorn. Any we find we make korariel. We have found only a few—a wild child lost during the Festival, a few lingering Wolfmen in Haapala’s City, an ironhorn hunter from Tara. To each I give a token of my esteem”—he smiled—“a little black iron pin shaped like a banshee. It is a proximity beacon, to warn a hunter who gets too close. Should they touch any wearing such a pin, any of my korariel, it would be a dueling offense. Lorimaar may rant and rage, but he will not duel us. It would be his death.”

  “I see,” said Dirk. He reached up to his collar, unfastened the little iron pin, and tossed it on the table amid the remains of their breakfast. “Well, that’s lovely, but you can have your little pin. I am nobody’s property. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, and I can keep on taking care of myself.”

  Vikary frowned. “Gwen,” he said, “can you not convince him that it would be safer if—”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I appreciate what you are trying to do, Jaan, you know that. But I understand Dirk’s feelings. I don’t like being protected either, and I refuse to be property.” Her voice was curt, decisive.

  Vikary regarded them helplessly. “Very well,” he said. He picked up Dirk’s discarded pin. “I should tell you something, t’Larien. We have had better luck in finding people than the Braiths have simply because we search the cities while they hunt the forests, hopeless slaves to old habits. They seldom find anyone in the wild. Up to now they have had no inkling as to what Garse and I were doing. But this morning Lorimaar high-Braith came to me in grievance because the previous day he had come across likely game while hunting with his teyn, and had been prevented from taking that game.

  “The prey he sought was a man on a sky-scoot, flying alone above the mountains.” He held up the banshee-shaped pin. “Without this,” he said, “he would have forced you down or lasered you from the sky, run you through the wilderness, and finally killed you.” He put the pin into his pocket, stared at Dirk meaningfully for a minute, and left them.

  4

  “It’s unfortunate that you had to stumble into Lorimaar this morning,” Gwen said after Jaan had gone. “There was no reason for you to get involved, and I had hoped to spare you all the grisly details. I hope you will keep this confidential after you leave Worlorn. Let Jaan and Garse take care of the Braiths. No one else will do anything anyway, except talk about it and slander innocent people on High Kavalaan. Above all, don’t tell Arkin! He despises Kavalars, and he’d be off to Kimdiss in a shot.” She stood up. “For the present, I’d suggest we talk of more pleasant things. We have a short time together; I can only be your tour guide so long before I have to return to my work. There is no reason to let those Braith butchers spoil the few days we have.”

  “Whatever you say,” Dirk answered, anxious to please but still shaken by the whole business with Lorimaar and his mockmen. “You have something planned?”

  “I could take you back to the forests,” Gwen told him. “They go on and on forever, and there are hundreds of fascinating things to see in the wild: lakes full of fish larger than either of us, insect mounds bigger than this building erected by insects smaller than your fingernail, an incredible cave system that Jaan discovered beyond the mountainwall—he’s a born caver, Jaan. Still, today I think we should play it safe. We don’t want to pour too much salt into Lorimaar’s wound, or he and his fat teyn might hunt us both and Jaan be damned. Today I’ll show you the cities. They have a fascination too, and a kind of macabre beauty. As Jaan said, Lorimaar has not yet thought to hunt there.”

  “All right,” Dirk said, with little enthusiasm.

  Gwen dressed quickly and took him up to the roof. The sky-scoots still lay where they had discarded them a day earlier. Dirk bent to retrieve them, but Gwen took the silver-metal tissues from his hands and tossed them into the back of the gray manta aircar. Then she got the flight boots and controls and chucked them in afterwards. “No scoots today,” she said. “We’ll be covering too much ground.”

  Dirk nodded, and both of them vaulted over the car’s wings into the front seat. Worlorn’s sky made him feel as if he should be coming in from an expedition instead of just setting out on one.

  The wind shrieked around the aircar wildly, and Dirk briefly took the stick so Gwen could tie back her long black hair. His own gray-brown mop whipped around in mad convulsions as they raced across the sky, but thought had him too abstracted to notice, much less be annoyed.

  Gwen kept them high over the mountainwall and bore south. The placid Common with its gentle grassy hills and meandering rivers stretched far away to their right, until the sky came down to meet it. On the distant left, when the mountains dropped off, they could glimpse the edge of the wilderness. The choker-infested areas were obvious even from this altitude—yellow cancers spreading through the darker green.

  For nearly an hour they rode in silence, Dirk lost in his thoughts, trying to put one thing together with the next and failing. Until finally Gwen looked at him with a smile. “I like flying an aircar,” she said. “Even this one. It makes me feel free and clean, cut off from all the problems down there. You know what I mean?”

  Dirk nodded. “Yes. You’re not the first one to say that. Lots of people feel that way. Myself included.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I used to take you flying, remember? On Avalon? I’d fly for hours and hours, from dawn until dark that one time, and you’d just sit with an arm out the window, staring far and away with that dreamy look on your face.” She smiled again.

  He did remember. Those trips had been very special. They never spoke much, just looked at each other from time to time, and whenever their eyes met they’d grin. It was inevitable; no matter how hard he fought it, that grin had always come. But now it all seemed terribly far off, and lost.

  “What made you think of that?” he asked her.

  “You,” she said, and gestured. “Sitting there, slouched, with one hand hanging over the side. Ah, Dirk. You cheat, you know. I think you did it deliberately, to make me think of Avalon, and smile, and want to hug you again. Bah.”

  And they laughed together.

  And Dirk, almost unthinking, slid over in his seat and put his arm around her. She looked briefly into his face, then gave a small shrug, and her frown melted into a sigh of resignation and finally a reluctant smile. And she did not pull away.

  They went to see the cities.

  The city of the morning was a soft pastel vision set in a wide green valley. Gwen put the aircar down in the center of one of its terraced squares, and they strolled the broad boulevards for an hour. It was a gracious city, carved from delicately veined pink marble and pale stone. The streets were wide and sinuously curved, the buildings low and seemingly fragile structures of polished wood and stained glass. Everywhere they found small parks and wide malls, and everywhere art: statues, paintings, murals on sidewalks and along the sides of buildings, rock gardens, and living tree-sculptures.

  But now the parks were desolate and overgrown, the bl
ue-green grass gone wild. Black creepers snaked across the sidewalks, the parkside plinths were empty more often than not, and the sturdier tree-sculptures had grown into grotesque shapes that their shapers never dreamed of.

  A slow-moving blue river divided and subdivided the city, wandering this way and that in a course as meandering and tortuous as the streets along its bank. Gwen and Dirk sat near the water for a while, beneath the shadow of an ornate wooden footbridge, and watched the reflection of Fat Satan float red and sluggish on the water. And while they sat, she told him of how the city once had been, in the days of the Festival, before either of them had come to Worlorn. The people of Kimdiss had built it, she said, and they called it the Twelfth Dream.

  Perhaps the city was dreaming now. If so, its sleep was the final one. Its vaulted halls all echoed empty, its gardens were grim jungles, soon to be graveyards. Where laughter had once filled the streets, now the only sound was the rustling whisper of dead leaves blown by the wind. If Larteyn was a dying city, Dirk reflected while he sat beneath the bridge, then Twelfth Dream was a dead one.

  “This is where Arkin wanted to set up our base of operations,” Gwen said. “We vetoed him, though. If he and I were going to work together, it was clearly best that we live in the same city, and Arkin wanted it to be Twelfth Dream. I wouldn’t go along, and I don’t know if he’s ever forgiven me. If the Kavalars built Larteyn as a fortress, the Kimdissi crafted this city as a work of art. It was even more beautiful in the old days, I understand. They dismantled the best buildings and took the finest sculpture from the squares when the Festival ended.”