Dying of the Light Read online

  “You realize,” Gwen said before they started, “that we’re in the up lane. Descending traffic is supposed to stay on the other side of the median.” She pointed.

  “This is prohibited, no doubt, by the norms of ai-Emerel.” Dirk smiled. “But I don’t think the Voice will mind.”

  Gwen gave him a faint smile back, touched her instruments, and the manta beneath them leaped forward with a rush and gathered speed. Then for a long time they made their own wind as they swept through the gray gloom, faster and faster, Gwen pale and tight-lipped at the controls, Dirk beside her idly watching the level numbers as corridor after corridor flicked by.

  They heard the Braiths a long time before they saw them—the howling again, the wild baying shrieks unlike any canine that Dirk had ever heard before, made even wilder by the echoes that raced up and down the concourse in their wake. When he first heard the pack, Dirk reached out and snapped off the aircar’s lights.

  Gwen looked at him, questioning.

  “We don’t make much noise,” he said. “They’ll never hear us over the howls and their own shouts. But they might see the light coming up behind them. Right?”

  “Right,” she said. Nothing more. She was intent on the aircar. Dirk watched her in the pale gray light that remained to them. Her eyes were jade again, hard and polished, as angry as Garse Janacek’s could sometimes be. She had her gun at last, and the Kavalar hunters were somewhere ahead.

  Close to level 497 they passed an area littered with scraps of torn cloth that fluttered and stirred in the wash of their descent. One piece, bigger than the others, scarcely moved from where it lay in the middle of the boulevard. The remains of a brown patchwork greatcoat, ripped to shreds.

  Ahead, the howling came stronger and louder.

  A smile passed briefly across Gwen’s lips. Dirk saw it, and wondered, and remembered his gentle Jenny of Avalon.

  Then they saw the figures, small black shapes on the shadowed concourse, shapes that swelled rapidly into men and dogs as the manta swept forward toward them. Five of the great hounds were loping down the boulevard freely, close on the heels of a sixth, larger than any of them, that strained at the ends of two heavy black chains. Two men were on the far ends of the chains, stumbling behind the pack as the massive leader pulled them along.

  They grew. How fast they grew!

  The hounds heard the aircar coming first. The leader fought to turn, and one of the chains whipped loose from the hands of a hunter. Three of the free-roaming pack hounds spun, snarling, and a fourth began bounding back up the concourse toward the fast-descending car. The men briefly seemed confused. One was tangled in the chain he was holding when the lead dog reversed directions. The other, empty-handed, began to reach for something at his hip.

  Gwen turned on the lights. In the semi-darkness, the manta’s eyes were blinding.

  The aircar ripped into them.

  Impressions rolled over Dirk one after another. A lingering howl turned abruptly into a squeal of pain; impact made the manta shudder. Savage red eyes gleaming horridly close, a rat’s face and yellow teeth wet with slaver, then impact again, another shudder, a snap. More impacts, sickening fleshy sounds, one, two, three. A scream, a very human scream, then there was a man outlined in the wash of the headlamps. It took them an hour to reach him, it seemed. He was a large square man, no one that Dirk knew, dressed in thick pants and jacket of chameleon cloth that seemed to change color as they neared. His hands were up in front of his eyes, one clutching a useless dueling laser, and Dirk could see the sheen of metal peeking from beneath the man’s sleeve. White hair fell to his shoulders.

  Then, suddenly, after an eternity of frozen motion, he was gone. The manta shuddered once again. Dirk shook with it.

  Ahead was gray emptiness, the long curving boulevard.

  Behind—Dirk turned to look—a hound was chasing after them, dragging two chains noisily as it ran. But it dwindled smaller and smaller as he watched. Dark shapes littered the cold plastic street. No sooner had he started to count them than they were gone. A pulse of light flamed briefly overhead, coming nowhere near them.

  Shortly he and Gwen were alone again, and there was no sound except the rushing whisper of their descent. Her face was very still. Her hands were steady. His were not. “I think we killed him,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “We did. Some of the hounds as well.” She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “His name, as I recall, was Teraan Braith something.”

  Both of them were quiet. Gwen turned off the headlamps once more.

  “What are you doing?” Dirk said.

  “There are more ahead of us,” she said. “Remember the scream we heard.”

  “Yes.” He thought for a time. “Can the car take any more collisions?”

  She smiled faintly. “Ah,” she said. “The Kavalar code duello has several aerial modes. Aircars are often chosen as weapons. They are strongly built. This car is constructed to withstand laser fire as long as possible. The armor—Need I go on?”

  “No.” He paused. “Gwen.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t kill any more of them.”

  She glanced at him. “They’re hunting the Emereli,” she said, “and whoever else is unlucky enough to be left inside of Challenge. They would gladly hunt us.”

  “Still,” he said. “We can draw them off, win some time for the others. Jaan will get here soon. No one need be killed.”

  She sighed and her hands moved and she slowed the aircar. “Dirk,” she started to say. Then she saw something and brought them to a near halt, so they hovered and slid forward slowly. “Here,” she said, “look.” She pointed.

  The light was so dim, it was hard to make things out clearly, until they came closer, and then—a carcass of some sort, or what remained of one. In the center of the concourse, still and bloody. Chunks of meat scattered around it. Dried dark blood on the plastic.

  “That has got to be the victim we heard earlier,” Gwen explained in conversational tones. “Mockman hunters don’t eat their kill, you know. In one breath, they say the creatures aren’t human, only some sort of semi-sentient animals, and they believe it too. Yet the stench of cannibalism is too strong, even for them, so they don’t dare. Even in the oldest days, on High Kavalaan during the dark centuries, the holdfast hunters never ate the flesh of the mockmen they ran down. They would leave that, for the gods, for the carrion moths, for the sand beetles. After they had given their hounds a taste, of course, as a reward. The hunters do take trophies, however. The head. You see the torso there? Show me the head.”

  Dirk felt sick.

  “The skin too,” Gwen continued. “They carry flaying knives. Or they did. Remember, mockman hunting has been banned on High Kavalaan for generations. Even the highbond council of Braith has ruled against it. Such kills as the remaining hunters made were surreptitious. They have to hide their trophies, except maybe from each other. Here, though, well, let me just say that Jaan expects the Braiths to remain on Worlorn for as long as they can. He has told me there is talk of renouncing Braith, of bringing their betheyns from the homeworld’s holdfasts, and forming a new coalition here, a gathering that will bring back all the old ways, all the dead and dying ugliness. For a time, a year or two or ten, as long as the Toberian stratoshield can gather in the warmth. Lorimaar high-Larteyn, and the like, with no one to restrain them.”

  “It would be insane!”

  “Perhaps. That won’t stop them. If Jaantony and Garse were to leave tomorrow, it would be done. The presence of Ironjade deters them. They fear that if they and the other Braith traditionalists moved here in force, then the progressive faction of Ironjade would also send men in force. There would be nothing to hunt then, and they and their children would face a short, hard life on a dying world, without even the pleasures they covet, the joys of high hunt. No.” She shrugged. “But there are trophy rooms in Larteyn even now. Lorimaar alone boasts five heads, and it is said he has two jackets of ‘mockman’ skin
. He doesn’t wear them. Jaan would kill him.”

  She threw the aircar forward again, and once more they began to build up speed. “Now,” she said, “do you still want me to swerve aside the next time some of them come up? Now that you know what they are?”

  He did not answer.

  A very short time later the noises began once more below them, the drawn-out howls and the shouts, echoing down the otherwise empty concourse. They passed another overturned vehicle, its fat soft tires deflated and torn, and Gwen had to turn to pass around it. A little later there was a dead hulk of black metal blocking their descent, a massive robot with four tensed arms frozen in grotesque postures above its head. The upper part of its torso was a dark cylinder studded with glass eyes; the lower part was a base the size of an aircar, on treads. “A warder,” Gwen said as they went by the quiet mechanical corpse, and Dirk saw that the hands had been sheared off each of its arms in turn, and that the body was riddled with fused laser holes.

  “Was it fighting them?” he asked.

  “Probably,” she answered. “Which means that the Voice is still alive, still controls some functions. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard anything further from Bretan Braith. It could be that they’re having trouble down there. The Voice would naturally mass its warders to protect the city’s life functions.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. The Emereli don’t hold with violence. The warders are instruments of restraint. They fire sleep-darts, and I think they can emit tear gas from those grills in their base. The Braiths will win. Always.”

  Behind them the robot was already gone, and the concourse was empty once more. The noises ahead grew very loud.

  This time Dirk said nothing when Gwen bore down upon them and turned on her lights, and the screams and the impacts piled one upon the other. She got both of the Braith hunters, although afterwards she said she was not so sure the second one was dead. He’d been hit a glancing blow that spun him to one side, into one of his own hounds.

  And Dirk could find no voice at all, because as the man went stumbling and spinning off their right wing he lost his grip on the thing he had been carrying, and it flew through the air and smashed against the window of a shop, leaving a bloody path on the glass when it slid down to the floor. He had been holding it, Dirk noted, by the hair.

  The corkscrew road went around and around the tower that was Challenge, sinking slowly and steadily. It took more time than Dirk could have imagined to sink from level 388—where they surprised the second party of Braiths—to level one. A long flight in gray silence.

  They encountered no one else, neither Kavalar nor Emereli.

  On level 120 a solitary warder blocked their way, turning all its dim eyes on them and commanding them to halt in the voice—still even and cordial—of the Voice of Challenge. But Gwen did not slow, and when she neared, the warder rolled off out of her way, firing no darts and emitting no gas. Its echoing commands chased them down the concourse.

  On level fifty-seven the dim lights above them flickered and went out, and for an instant they flew in total darkness. Then Gwen turned on the headlamps and slackened her speed just a bit. Neither of them spoke, but Dirk thought of Bretan Braith and wondered briefly whether the lights had failed or had been turned off. The latter, he guessed; a survivor above had finally called his holdfast-brothers below.

  On level one the concourse ended in a great mall and traffic circle. They could see very little of it; only where the beams of the headlamps touched did shapes leap startlingly out of the ocean of pitch that surrounded them. The center of the mall seemed to be a tree of sorts. Dirk caught glimpses of a massive gnarled trunk, a virtual wall of wood, and they could hear leaves rustling above them. The road curved around the great tree and met itself. Gwen followed it, all around the wide circle.

  On the far side of the tree a wide gateway stood open to the night and Dirk felt the touch of wind on his face and realized why the leaves had been rustling. As they swept past the gateway, staying on the circle, he looked out. Beyond the gate a white ribbon of road led away from Challenge.

  And an aircar was moving low over the road, quickly, toward the city. Toward them. Dirk glimpsed it only for an instant. It was dark—but everything was dark in the meager outworld starlight—and metallic, some misshapen Kavalar beast he could not even begin to identify.

  It was not the Ironjades, of that he was sure.

  9

  “We have succeeded,” Gwen said dryly after they had moved beyond the gate. “They’re after us.”

  “They saw us?”

  “They had to. Our light, as we went past the open gateway. They couldn’t miss that.”

  Thick darkness rushed by them on either side, and the leaves still rustled above their heads. “We run?” Dirk said.

  “Their car will have working lasers, and ours doesn’t. The outer concourse is the only road open to us. The Braith aircar will chase us up, and somewhere above us the hunters will be waiting. We only killed two, maybe three. There will be more. We’re trapped.”

  Dirk was thoughtful. “We can loop around the circle again, go out the gate after they’ve entered.”

  “Yes, that’s an obvious try. Too obvious, though. There will be another aircar outside waiting for us, I’d guess. I have a better idea.” As she spoke, she slowed the manta and brought it to a halt. Immediately before them the road forked, amid the bright wash of the headlamps. To the left the traffic circle curved back on itself; to the right was the outer concourse, beginning its two-kilometer ascent.

  Gwen turned off the lights and darkness engulfed them. When Dirk started to speak, she quieted him with a sharp “Sssh!”

  The world was very black. He had gone blind. Gwen, the aircar, Challenge—everything had vanished. He heard leaves brushing against each other, and he thought he heard the other aircar, the Braiths, coming down on them, but that had to be his mind, for surely he would first have seen their lights.

  There was a gentle rocking motion, as if he were sitting in a small boat. Something hard touched his arm, and Dirk started, and then other somethings scraped against his face.

  Leaves.

  They were rising, right up into the low-hanging dense foliage of the great spreading Emereli tree.

  A branch, pushed down and then released, whipped him painfully across the cheek, drawing blood. Leaves pressed all around him. Finally there was a soft thud as the wings of the manta came hard against the bulk of a massive limb. They could rise no more. They hovered, blind, enveloped by darkness and unseen foliage.

  A very short time later a blur of light flashed by beneath them, curving off to the right, up the concourse. No sooner was it gone than another came into sight—from the left—turned sharply up the fork, and followed the first. Dirk was very grateful that Gwen had ignored his suggestion.

  They hovered amid the leaves for an endless time, but no other cars appeared. Finally Gwen lowered them back to the road. “That won’t lose them permanently,” she said. “When their trap closes and we’re not in it, they’ll begin to wonder.”

  Dirk was dabbing at the wetness on his cheek with his shirttail. When his fingers finally told him that the thin trickle of blood had dried, he turned in the direction of Gwen’s voice. He was still blind. “So they’ll hunt for us,” he said. “That’s good. While they’re being bothered by trying to figure out where we went, they won’t be killing any Emereli. And Jaan and Garse should get here soon. Now is the time for us to hide, I think.”

  “Hide or run,” came Gwen’s answer from the darkness. She still had not touched the aircar lights.

  “I have an idea,” Dirk said. He touched his cheek again. Then, satisfied, he began to tuck away his shirttails. “When you were swinging around the circle I noticed something. A ramp, with a sign. Just saw it briefly in the headlamps, but it reminded me. Worlorn has a subway network, right? Intercity?”

  “True,” Gwen said. “It’s dismantled, though.”

  “Is it? I know the trains don’t ru
n, but what about the tunnels? Did they fill them in?”

  “I don’t know. I hardly think so.” Suddenly the aircar’s headlamps woke again, and Dirk blinked at the sudden light. “Show me this sign,” Gwen said, and once more they began the wide circuit around the central tree.

  It was a subway entrance, as Dirk had guessed. A shallow ramp led down into darkness. Gwen stopped their forward motion and left them hovering a few meters away while she played the headlamps over the sign. “It will mean abandoning the aircar,” she said at last. “Our only weapon.”

  “Yes,” Dirk said. The entrance was much too narrow for the gray metal manta to pass; clearly the subway builders had not counted on anyone wanting to fly through their tunnels. “But that might be best. We can’t leave Challenge, and inside the city the car limits our mobility pretty severely. Right?” When Gwen did not answer immediately, he rubbed his head wearily. “It sounds right to me, but maybe I’m not thinking so clearly. I’m tired and I’d probably be scared if I stopped to think about this. I’ve got bruises and cuts and I want to get some sleep.”

  “Well,” Gwen said, “the subway might be worth a chance then. We can put a few kilometers between us and Challenge, and sleep. I don’t think the Braiths will think to hunt for us there, down in the tunnels.”

  “It’s decided, then,” Dirk said.

  They went about it very methodically. Gwen set the aircar down next to the subterranean ramp and got the sensor pack and the field supplies out of the back seat. They took the sky-scoots as well, changing into the flight boots and discarding their own footwear. And among the tools mounted on the underside of the banshee’s hood was a small hand torch, a metal-and-plastic rod as long as a man’s forearm that gave off a pale white light.

  When they were ready to depart, Gwen treated them both with null-scent again, then had Dirk wait by the subway entrance while she flew the aircar halfway around the great circle and left it standing in the center of the roadway near one of the largest first-level corridors. Let the Braiths think they had gone off into the interior labyrinths of Challenge; they’d have a fine long hunt ahead of them.