Dying of the Light

  “Too often these days Jaan lets his very name be threatened by such as you and Ruark. Jaan is in many ways a perverse and dangerous man, and the quirks of his mind often bring us into peril. Even his heroes—I remembered, one day, some of the stories he had told me in childhood, and was struck by the fact that all of Jaan’s favorite heroes were solitary men who suffered ultimate defeat. Aryn high-Glowstone, as an instance, who dominated an entire epoch of history. He ruled by force of personality the most powerful holdfast High Kavalaan ever knew, the Glowstone Mountain; and when his enemies leagued against him in highwar, all hands raised against his, he put swords and shields on the arms of his eyn-kethi and took them to battle to swell the size of his army. His foes were broken and humiliated, and so Jaan would tell me the story. Yet later I learned that Aryn high-Glowstone won no victory at all. So many of his holdfast’s eyn-kethi were slain that day that few remained to birth new warriors. Glowstone Mountain declined steadily in power and in population, and forty years after Aryn’s bold stroke the Glowstones fell and highbonds from Taal and Ironjade and Bronzefist took their women and children, leaving the halls abandoned. The truth of Aryn high-Glowstone is that he was a failure and a fool, one of history’s pariahs, and such are all Jaan’s mad heroes.”

  “Aryn sounds heroic enough to me,” Dirk said sharply. “On Avalon we’d probably credit him with freeing the slaves, even if he didn’t win.”

  Janacek glowered at him, his eyes like blue sparks set in his narrow skull. He tugged at his red beard in annoyance. “T’Larien, that comment is precisely what I warned you of. Eyn-kethi are not slaves, they are eyn-kethi. You judge wrongly and your translations are false.”

  “According to you,” Dirk said. “According to Ruark—”

  “Ruark.” Janacek’s tone was contemptuous. “Is the Kimdissi the source of all your information about High Kavalaan? I see that I have wasted time and words on you, t’Larien. You are already poisoned and you have no interest in understanding. You are a tool of the manipulators of Kimdiss. I will lecture you no more.”

  “Fine,” Dirk said. “Just tell me where Gwen is.”

  “I told you.”

  “When will she be back, then?”

  “Late, and then she will be tired. I am certain that she will not wish to see you.”

  “You are keeping her from me!”

  Janacek was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, his mouth grim. “It is the best course, t’Larien, for you as well as her, although I do not expect you to believe that.”

  “You have no right.”

  “In your culture. I have every right in mine. You will not be alone with her again.”

  “Gwen is not part of your damned sick Kavalar culture,” Dirk said.

  “She was not born into it, yet she took the jade-and-silver, and the name betheyn. Now she is Kavalar.”

  Dirk was trembling, his control gone. “What does she say to that?” he demanded, stepping closer to Janacek. “What did she say last night? Did she threaten to leave?” He jabbed the Kavalar with his finger. “Did she say she was coming with me, was that it? And you hit her and carried her off?”

  Janacek frowned and brushed Kirk’s hand away forcefully. “So you spy on us too. You do it poorly, t’Larien, but it is offensive nonetheless. A second mistake. The first was Jaan’s, in telling you the things he did, in trusting you and lending you his protection.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s protection!”

  “So you say. An idiot’s misplaced pride. Only those who are strong should reject the protections given the weak; those who are truly weak need them.” He turned away. “I will waste no more time with you,” he said, walking toward the dining chamber. There was a thin black carrying case lying on the table. Janacek opened it, clicking back both locks simultaneously and flipping up the lid. Inside Dirk saw five rows of the black iron banshee pins on red felt. Janacek held one up. “Are you quite certain that you do not want one of these? Korariel?” He grinned.

  Dirk crossed his arms and did not dignify the question with an answer.

  Janacek waited a moment for a reply. When none came, he slipped the banshee pin back into its place and closed the case. “The jelly children are not so choosy as you are,” he said. “Now I must bring these to Jaan. Get out of here.”

  It was early afternoon. The Hub burned dimly in the center of the sky, with the scattered small lights of the four visible Trojan Suns arrayed unevenly around it. A strong wind was blowing from the east, building into a gale, it seemed. Dust swirled through the gray and scarlet alleys.

  Dirk sat on one corner of the roof, his legs hanging out over the street, mulling his possibilities.

  He had followed Garse Janacek up to the airlot and had seen him depart, carrying the case of banshees and flying his massive squared-off military relic in its olive-green armor. The other two aircars, the gray manta-wing and the bright yellow teardrop, were gone as well. He was stranded here in Larteyn, with no idea of where Gwen was or what they were doing to her. He wished briefly that Ruark was somewhere around. He wished he had an aircar of his own. No doubt he could have rented one in Challenge, if he had thought of it, or even at the spacefield the night he had come in. Instead he was alone and helpless; even the skyscoots were missing. The world was red and gray and pointless. He wondered what to do.

  Abruptly it came to him as he sat and thought about aircars. The Festival cities he had seen were all very different, but they had one thing in common: none of them had nearly enough landing space to accommodate an aircar population equal to their human population. Which meant the cities had to be linked by some other kind of transportation network. Which meant that maybe he had some freedom of action after all.

  He got up and went to the tubes and then down to Ruark’s quarters in the base of the tower. Between two black-barked, ceiling-high plants in earthenware pots, a wallscreen waited, just as he remembered seeing it, dark and unlit, as it had been since Dirk arrived; there were very few people left on Worlorn to call or be called. But no doubt there was an information circuit. He studied the double row of buttons beneath the screen, selected one, and punched. The darkness gave way to a soft blue light, and Dirk breathed a little easier; the communications grid, at least, was still operational.

  One of the buttons was marked with a question mark. He tried it and was rewarded. The blue light cleared and suddenly the screen was full of small script, a hundred numbers for a hundred basic services, everything from medical aid and religious information to offplanet news.

  He punched the sequence for “visitor transport.” Figures flowed across the screen, and one by one Dirk’s hopes withered. There were aircar rental facilities at the spacefield and at ten of the fourteen cities. All closed. The functional aircars had left Worlorn with the Festival crowds. Other cities had provided hovercraft and hydrofoil boats. No longer. At Musquel-by-the-Sea, visitors could sail upcoast and down in a genuine wind-powered ship from the Forgotten Colony. Service terminated. The intercity airbus line was closed down, the nuclear-powered stratoliners of Tober and the helium dirigibles of Eshellin were all grounded and gone. The wallscreen showed him a map of the high-speed subways that had run from beneath the spacefield out to each of the cities, but the map was drawn all in red, and the legend below it explained that red meant “Depowered—No Longer Operational.”

  There was no transportation left on Worlorn except walking, it seemed. Plus whatever late visitors had brought with them.

  Dirk scowled and killed the readout. He was about to turn off the screen when another thought hit him. He punched for “Library” and got a query sign and instructions. Then he coded in “jelly children” and “define.” He waited.

  It was a short wait and he hardly needed the vast bulk of information the library threw at him, the details of history and geography and philosophy. The critical information he took in quickly, the rest he disregarded. “Jelly children,” it seemed, was a popular nickname for the followers of a pseudo-relig
ious drug cult on the World of the Blackwine Ocean. They were so called because they spent years at a time living in the cavernous inner dampness of kilometer-long gelatinous slugs that crept with infinite slowness along the bottom of their seas. The cultists called the creatures Mothers. The Mothers fed their children with sweet hallucinogenic secretions and were believed to be semi-sentient. The belief, Dirk noted, did not stop the jelly children from killing their host when the quality of her dream secretions began to decline, which invariably happened as the slugs aged. Free of one Mother, the jelly children would then seek another.

  Quickly Dirk cleared the screen of that data and consulted the library again. The World of the Blackwine Ocean had a city on Worlorn. It lay beneath an artificial lake fifty kilometers around, under the same dark, teeming waters that covered the surface of the Blackwiners’ homeworld. It was called the City in the Starless Pool, and the surrounding lake was full of life-forms brought in for the Festival of the Fringe. Including Mothers, no doubt.

  Out of curiosity, Dirk found the city on a map of Worlorn. He had no way of getting there, of course. He killed the wallscreen and walked into the kitchen to mix himself a drink. As he tossed it down—it was a thick off-white milk from some Kimdissi animal; very cold, bitter, but refreshing—he drummed his fingers very impatiently on the bar. The restlessness was growing in him, the urge to do something. He felt trapped here, waiting for one of the others to return, not knowing which it would be or what would happen then. It seemed as though he had been moved back and forth at the whim of others ever since he had first come down on the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies. He had not even come of his own volition; Gwen had called him with her whisperjewel, although she had hardly seemed to welcome him when he arrived. That, at least, he had begun to understand. She was trapped in a very complex web, a web that was political and emotional at the same time; and he seemingly had been pulled in with her, to stand helpless while half-understood storms of psychosexual and cultural tension swirled all around them. He was very tired of standing helpless.

  Abruptly, he thought of Kryne Lamiya. In a windswept landing deck two aircars sat abandoned. Dirk put his glass down thoughtfully, wiped his lip with the back of his hand, and went back to the wallscreen.

  It was a simple matter to find the location of all aircar landing facilities in Larteyn. There were airlots atop all of the larger residential towers, and a big public garage deep within the rock beneath the city. The garage, the city directory informed him, could be reached from any of twelve undertubes spaced evenly through Larteyn; its concealed doors opened in the middle of the plunging cliff that loomed above the Common. If the Kavalars had left any aircars at all in the shell of their city, that was where he would find them.

  He took the tubes down to ground level and the street. Fat Satan had climbed past zenith and was sinking toward the horizon. The glowstone streets were faded and black where the red gloom fell, but when Dirk walked through the shadows between the square ebon towers he could still see the cold fires of the city beneath his feet, the soft red glow of the rock, fading yet still persisting. In the open, he himself threw shadows, dim dark wraiths that piled clumsily atop one another—almost but not quite coinciding—and scuttled too swiftly at his heels to wake the sleeping glowstone into life. He saw no one else during his walk, although he wondered uneasily about the Braiths, and once he passed what must have been a dwelling. It was a square building with a domed roof and black iron pillars at its door, and chained to one of those pillars was a hound that stood taller than Dirk, with bright red eyes and a long hairless face that reminded him somehow of a rat’s. The creature was worrying a bone, but it stood when he walked past and growled deep in its throat. Whoever lived in that building clearly did not relish the idea of visitors.

  The undertubes still functioned. He fell and daylight vanished, and he got out again in the lower passages, where Larteyn had the greatest resemblance to the holdfasts of High Kavalaan itself: echoing stone halls with wrought-iron hangings, metal doors everywhere, chambers within chambers. A fastness in stone, Ruark had said once. A fortress, no part of which could be taken easily. But now abandoned.

  The garage was multileveled and dimly lit, with space enough for a thousand aircars on each of its ten levels. Dirk wandered through the dust for a half hour before he found even one. It was useless to him. Another beast-car, fashioned of blue-black metal in the grotesque likeness of a giant bat, it was more realistic and frightening than Jaan Vikary’s rather stylized manta-banshee. But it was also a burned-out hulk. One of the ornamental batwings was twisted and half-melted, and of the aircar itself only the body remained. The interior appointments, the power plant, and the weaponry were all gone, and Dirk suspected the gravity grid would be missing as well, though he could not see the underside of the derelict. He walked around it once and passed on.

  The second aircar he found was in even worse shape. In fact, it could hardly be called a car at all. Nothing remained but a bare metal frame and four rotting seats squatting in the midst of the tubing—a skeleton gutted of even its skin. Dirk passed by that one too.

  The next two wrecks he came to were both intact, but ghosts. He could only guess that their owners had died here on Worlorn, and the aircars had waited in the depths of the city long after they had been forgotten, until all power was gone. He tried both of them, and neither responded to his touch and his tinkerings.

  The fifth car—by then a full hour had passed—responded much too quickly.

  Thoroughly Kavalar, the car was a stubby two-seater with short triangular wings that looked even more useless than the wings on other aircars of High Kavalaan manufacture. It was all silver and white enamel, and the metal canopy was shaped to resemble a wolf’s head. Lasercannon were mounted on both sides of the fuselage. The car was not locked; Dirk pushed up on the canopy, and it swung open easily. He climbed in, snapped it shut, and looked out of the wolf’s great eyes with a wry smile on his face. Then he tried the controls. The aircar still had full power.

  Frowning, he killed that power again and sat back to think. He had found the transportation he was looking for, if he dared to take it. But he could not fool himself; this car was not a derelict like the others he had discovered. Its condition was too good. No doubt it belonged to one of the other Kavalars still in Larteyn. If colors meant anything—he wasn’t sure about that—then it probably belonged to Lorimaar or one of the other Braiths. Taking it was not the safest course he could choose, not by a long margin.

  Dirk recognized the danger and considered it. Waiting did not appeal to him, but neither did the prospect of danger. Jaan Vikary or no Jaan Vikary, stealing an aircar might just provoke the Braiths into action.

  Reluctantly, he swung back the canopy and climbed out, but no sooner had he emerged than he heard the voices. He eased the aircar canopy down and it closed with a faint but audible click. Dirk crouched and made for the safety of the shadows a few meters beyond the wolf-car.

  He could hear the Kavalars talking, and their footsteps noisily echoing, long before he saw them; there were only two, but they sounded like ten. By the time they had moved into the light near the aircar, Dirk was pressed flat against a niche in the garage wall, a small cavity full of hooks where tools had once been hung. He was not quite sure why he was hiding, but he was very glad of it. The things that Gwen and Jaan had told him of the other residents of Larteyn had not reassured him.

  “Are you sure of all this, Bretan?” one of them, the taller, was saying as they came into sight. He was not Lorimaar, but the resemblance was striking; this man had the same imposing height, the same tan and wrinkled face. But he ran more to fat than Lorimaar high-Braith, and his hair was pure white where the other’s had been mostly gray, and he had a small toothbrush of a mustache. Both he and his companion wore short white jackets over pants and shirts of chameleon cloth that had darkened to near-black in the dimness of the garage. And they both had lasers.

  “Roseph would not jape me,” the second Kav
alar said in a voice that rasped like sandpaper. He was much shorter than the other man, close to Dirk’s own height, and younger as well, very lean. His jacket had the sleeves cut off to display powerful brown arms and a thick iron-and-glowstone armlet. As he moved to the aircar, he came full into the light for an instant and seemed to stare at the darkness where Dirk was hidden. He had only half a face; the rest was all twitching scar tissue. His left “eye” moved restlessly as his face turned, and Dirk saw the telltale fire: a glowstone set in an empty socket.

  “How do you know this?” the older man said as the two paused briefly by the side of the wolf-car. “Roseph is fond of japes.”

  “I am not fond of japes,” said the other, the one who had been called Bretan. “Roseph might jape you, or Lorimaar, or even Pyr, but he dare not jape me.” His voice was horribly unpleasant; there was a grating rawness to it that offended the ear, but with the scars as thick as they were up and down his neck, Dirk found it surprising that the man could talk at all.

  The taller Kavalar pushed up against the side of the wolf’s head, but the canopy did not lift. “Well, if this is truth, then we must hurry,” he said querulously. “The lock, Bretan, the lock!”

  One-eyed Bretan made an odd noise partway between a grunt and a growl. He tried the canopy himself. “My teyn,” he rasped. “I left the head slightly ajar . . . I . . . it only took a moment to come up and find you.”

  In the shadows Dirk pressed back hard against the wall, and the hooks dug painfully into his back between the shoulder blades. Bretan frowned and knelt, while his older companion stood and looked puzzled.

  Then suddenly the Braith was standing again, and his laser pistol was snug in his right hand, trained on Dirk. His glowstone eye smoldered faintly. “Come out and let us discover what you are,” he announced. “The trail you left in the dust is very plain to see.”