“No, and I did not feel so good either, no lie. That changes nothing. So I am korariel maybe, so the Braiths are worse than the Ironjades, so Jaan uses violence to stop worse violence, maybe. Is that right? Ah, I cannot say. Tough moral issue, utter truth! Maybe Jaan’s duels serve some purpose, eh, for his people, for us. But your duel is utter folly, serves nothing, just gets you dead. And Gwen stays with Jaan and Garse forever, until they lose a duel maybe, and then it is not so pleasant for her.”
Ruark paused and finished his wine, then swiveled around on his stool to pour himself another glass. Dirk sat very still, Gwen’s eyes on him, her patient stare heavy enough to feel. His head pounded. Ruark was confusing everything, he thought again. He had to do the right thing, but what was it? Suddenly all his insights and his decisions had evaporated on him. The silence lay thick over the workroom.
“I won’t run,” Dirk said at last. “I won’t. But I won’t duel, either. I’ll go there and tell them my decision, refuse to fight.”
The Kimdissi swirled his wine and chuckled. “Well, a certain moral courage is in that. Utter truth. Jesus Christ and Socrates and Erika Stormjones and now Dirk t’Larien, great martyrs of history, yes. Maybe the Redsteel poet will write something on you.”
Gwen gave a more serious answer. “These are Braiths, Dirk, Braith highbonds of the old school. On High Kavalaan itself you might never be challenged to duel. The highbond councils recognize that offworlders don’t adhere to their code. But this is different. The arbiter will rule you forfeit, and Bretan Braith and his holdfast-brothers will kill you or hunt you down. By refusing to duel, in their eyes, you’ll have proven yourself a mockman.”
“I can’t run,” Dirk repeated. His arguments were all gone suddenly; he had nothing left but emotion, a determination to face the dawn and see it through.
“You push away your only sanity, yes, in truth. It is no cowardice, Dirk. The bravest choice of all, think that way, to risk their scorn by flight. Even then, you face peril. Probably they hunt you, Bretan Braith if he lives, the others if not, you know? But you’ll live, avoid them maybe, help Gwen.”
“I can’t,” Dirk said. “I promised them, Jaan and Garse.”
“Promise? What? That you’d die?”
“No. Yes. I mean, Jaan had me promise to be a brother to Janacek. They wouldn’t be in this duel if Vikary hadn’t been trying to get me out of trouble.”
“After Garse pushed you in,” Gwen said bitterly, and Dirk started at the sudden venom in her quiet tones.
“They could die tomorrow too,” Dirk said uncertainly. “And I’m responsible for that. Now you say I should desert them.”
Gwen stepped very close to him and lifted her hands. Her fingers lightly grazed his cheeks as she brushed gray-brown hair back from his forehead, and the wide green eyes stared into his. Suddenly he remembered other promises: the whisperjewel, the whisperjewel. And times long gone came flashing back, and the world spun, and right and wrong began to melt and run together.
“Dirk, listen to me,” Gwen said slowly. “Jaan has been in six duels because of me. Garse, who doesn’t even love me, has shared four of those. They’ve killed for me, for my pride, my honor. I didn’t ask it, no more than you asked for their protection. It was their conception of my honor, not my own. But still, those duels were for me as much as this one is for you. Despite that, you asked me to leave them, to return to you, to love you again.”
“Yes,” Dirk said. “But—I don’t know. I’ve left a trail of broken promises.” His voice was anguished. “Jaan named me keth.”
Ruark snorted. “If he named you dinner, you would jump into the oven, eh?”
Gwen just shook her head sadly. “You feel what? A duty? An obligation?”
“I guess,” he said reluctantly.
“Then you’ve answered yourself, Dirk. You’ve told me what my answer to you must be. If you feel so strongly that you have to fulfill the duties of a short-term keth, a bond that doesn’t even have any reality on High Kavalaan, how can you ask me to discard the jade-and-silver? Betheyn means more than keth.”
Her soft hands left his face. She stepped back.
Dirk’s hand shot out and caught her by the wrist. The left wrist. His grip closed around cold metal and polished jade. “No,” he said.
Gwen said nothing. She waited.
For Dirk, Ruark was forgotten, the workroom had faded to darkness. There was only Gwen, staring at him, eyes green and wide and full of—what? Promises? Threats? Lost dreams? She waited, all silent, and he fumbled over his words, never knowing what he would say next. And the jade-and-silver was cool in his hand, and he was remembering:
Red teardrops full of love, wrapped in silver and velvet, burning fiercely cold.
Jaan’s face: high cheekbones, the clean square jaw, the receding black hair, and the easy smile. His voice, quiet as steel, always even: But I do exist.
The white ghost towers of Kryne Lamiya, wailing, mocking, singing bright despair while a distant drum sounded its low, meaningless booms. In the middle of it all, defiance, resolution. Briefly he had known what to say.
The face of Garse Janacek: distant (the eyes blue smoke, the head held stiffly, the mouth set), hostile (ice in his sockets, a savage smile at play behind his beard), full of bitter humor (his eyes snapping, his teeth bared in death’s own grin).
Bretan Braith Lantry: a tic and a glowstone eye, a figure of fear and pity with a cold and frightening kiss.
Red wine in obsidian goblets, vapors that stung the eye, drinking in a room full of cinnamon and a strange fellowship.
Words. A new and special kind of holdfast-brother, Jaan said.
Words. He will be false, Garse promised.
Gwen’s face, a younger Gwen, slimmer, with eyes somehow wider. Gwen laughing. Gwen crying. Gwen in orgasm. Holding him, her breasts flushed and red, the blush spreading over her body. Gwen whispering to him, I love you, I love you. Jenny!
A solitary black shadow, poling a low barge down an endless dark canal.
Remembering.
His hand trembled where it gripped her. “If I do not duel,” he said, “you will leave Jaan, then? And come with me?”
Her answering nod was painfully slow. “Yes. I thought of it all day, talked about it with Arkin. We had planned it so he would bring you up here, and I’d tell Jaan and Garse that I had to work.”
Dirk unfolded his legs from beneath him, and they tingled to the jabs of a hundred tiny knives as the sleep and the stiffness ran out of them. He stood up, and he was decided. “You were going to do this anyway, then? It’s not just because of the duel?”
She shook her head.
“Then I’ll go. How soon can we leave Worlorn?”
“Two weeks and three days,” Ruark said. “No ship till then.”
“We’ll have to hide,” Gwen said. “All things considered, it’s the only safe course. I wasn’t sure this afternoon whether I should tell Jaan my decision or simply leave. I thought maybe we would talk, then go up together to face him. But the duel business settles it. You would not be allowed to leave now.”
Ruark climbed down off his stool. “Go, then,” he said. “I’ll stay, keep watch, you can call and I tell you what happens. Safe enough for me, unless Garsey and Jaantony lose their duel. Then I’d come quick, run and join you, eh?”
Dirk took Gwen’s hands. “I love you,” he said. “Still. I do.”
She smiled gravely. “Yes. I’m glad, Dirk. Maybe it will work again. But we have to move fast, lose ourselves thoroughly. From now on, all Kavalars are poison to us.”
“All right,” he said. “Where?”
“Go down and get your things, you’ll need warm clothing. Then meet me up on the roof. We’ll take the aircar and decide after we’re on our way.”
Dirk nodded and kissed her quickly.
They were airborne over the dark rivers and rolling hills of the Common when the first blush of dawn touched the sky, a crimson glow low in the east. Soon the first yellow
sun rose, and the darkness below turned to a gray morning mist that was fast dissolving. The manta aircar was open, as ever, and Gwen had pushed its speed to maximum, so the chill wind rushed about loudly, making it impossible to talk. While she flew, Dirk slept by her side, huddled up in a patchwork brown greatcoat that Ruark had given him before they left.
She woke him when the shining spear of Challenge came into sight ahead of them, by pushing gently against his shoulder. He had been sleeping lightly, uneasily. At once he straightened and yawned. “We’re there,” he said, unnecessarily.
Gwen did not answer. The manta slackened in speed as the Emereli city grew larger and nearer.
Dirk looked off toward the dawn. “Two suns are up,” he said, “and look, you can almost see Fat Satan. I guess they know we’ve gone.” He thought of Vikary and Janacek, waiting for him at the death-square chalked on the street, waiting with the Braiths. Bretan would have paced impatiently, no doubt, and then made his odd noise. His eye would be drained and cold in the morning, a dead ember in his scarred face. Maybe he was dead as well by now, or Jaan, or Garse Janacek. Briefly Dirk flushed with shame. He moved closer to Gwen and put an arm around her.
Challenge swelled before them. Gwen took the aircar up in a sharp ascent through a bank of wispy white clouds. The black maw of a landing deck lit at their approach and Dirk saw the numbers as Gwen took them in. The 520th level, an airlot vast and immaculate and deserted.
“Welcome,” a familiar tone said as the manta hovered and sank to the floor plates. “I am the Voice of Challenge. May I entertain you?”
Gwen killed the aircar’s power and climbed out over the wing. “We want to become temporary residents.”
“The charge is quite reasonable,” the Voice said.
“Take us to a compartment then.”
A wall opened, and another of the balloon-tired cars rolled out to meet them. In everything except color, it was twin to the one that had carried them during their last visit. Gwen got in, and Dirk began to load the vehicle with the luggage from the back seat of the aircar: a sensor pack that Gwen had brought along, three bags jammed with clothing, a package of field supplies for jaunts into the wild. The two sky-scoots, complete with flight boots, were on the bottom of the pile, but Dirk left them in the aircar.
The vehicle set off, and the Voice began to tell them about the various kinds of living quarters that it could provide. Challenge had rooms furnished in a hundred different styles, to make offworlders feel at home, although the flavor of ai-Emerel predominated.
“Something simple and cheap,” Dirk told it. “A double bed and cooking facilities and a wet-shower will do.”
The Voice deposited them in a small cubicle with pastel blue walls two levels up. It did have a double bed, which filled most of the room, plus a kitchenette built into one wall and a huge color viewscreen that filled three-quarters of another.
“Real Emereli splendor,” Gwen said sarcastically when they entered. She set down her sensor pack and clothing, and fell gratefully onto the bed. Dirk stashed the bags he was carrying behind a sliding panel-closet, then sat by Gwen’s feet on the edge of the bed and regarded the wallscreen.
“A wide selection of library tapes is available for your viewing pleasure,” the Voice said. “I regret to inform you that all regular Festival programming has been terminated.”
“Don’t you ever go away?” Dirk snapped.
“Basic monitoring functions continue at all times, for your safety and protection; but if you wish, my service function can be temporarily deactivated in your vicinity. Some residents prefer it this way.”
“Including me,” Dirk said. “Deactivate.”
“If you should change your mind or require some service,” the Voice said, “simply push the button marked with a star on any nearby wallscreen, and I will again be at your command.” Then it fell silent.
Dirk waited briefly. “Voice?” he said. No response. He nodded with satisfaction and went back to his inspection of the screen. Gwen, behind him, was already asleep, her hands cradling her head as she lay curled up on one side.
He wanted to call Ruark desperately, to find out what had happened at the duel, who had lived and who had died. But he did not think it would be safe yet.
One of the Kavalars—or more than one—might be keeping Ruark company in either his quarters or the workroom, and a call could give away their location.
He would have to wait. Before they had taken off, the Kimdissi had given them the call number of a deserted apartment two floors above his own, and told Dirk to try that number just past dusk. If it was safe, he promised to be there and respond to the buzz. If not, there would be no answer. In any case, Ruark did not know where the two fugitives had gone, so the Kavalars could not possibly force the information out of him.
Dirk was very tired. Despite his nap in the aircar en route, exhaustion weighed heavily on him, tinged with the dark colors of guilt. He had Gwen back at his side again at last, but he felt no exultation. Perhaps that would come later, when his other concerns had faded and they had begun to know each other once more, as they had known each other on Avalon seven long years ago. Yet that might not be until they were safely off Worlorn, away from Jaan Vikary and Garse Janacek and all the other Kavalars, away from the dead cities and the dying forests. They would go back inside the Tempter’s Veil, Dirk thought then as he sat and looked absently at the blank screen, leave the Fringe entirely, go to Tara or Braque or some other sane planet, maybe back to Avalon, maybe farther in than that, to Gulliver or Vagabond or Old Poseidon. There were a hundred worlds he had never seen, a thousand, more—worlds of men and not-men and aliens, all sorts of distant romantic places where no one had ever heard of High Kavalaan or Worlorn. He and Gwen could see those worlds together now.
Too tired to sleep, restless and ill at ease, Dirk began to play with the viewscreen, idly testing its capabilities. He flicked it on and punched the button marked with a query as he had the day before in Ruark’s apartment in Larteyn, and the same list of services flashed before him in figures three times the size. He studied them carefully, to learn what he could learn. Perhaps he might pick up some bit of knowledge that could be useful, become aware of something that could help them.
The list included a call number for planetary news. He tapped it out, hoping that the dawn duel in Larteyn would have been noted, maybe as an obituary. But the screen went gray on him, and white letters flashed “Service Terminated” on and off until he wiped them.
Frowning, Dirk tried another sequence, for spaceport information, to check Ruark’s data on the ship. This time he had better luck. There were three ships due within the next two standard months. The earliest, as the Kimdissi had said, would come in a little over two weeks from now, a Fringe shuttle named Teric neDahlir. What Ruark hadn’t mentioned, however, was that the ship was outbound, coming from Kimdiss and headed on toward Eshellin and the World of the Blackwine Ocean and finally ai-Emerel, its point of origin. A week after that a supply ship was due in from High Kavalaan. Then there was nothing until the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies returned, inbound.
There was no question of waiting that long, however; he and Gwen would simply have to catch the Teric neDahlir and switch ships on some other world farther out. Getting to the ship was going to be the biggest risk they faced, Dirk had decided. The Kavalars had virtually no chance of finding them here in Challenge, with an entire planet to search, but Jaan Vikary would certainly guess that they intended to go offworld as soon as possible. That meant he could be waiting for them at the spacefield when the time came. Dirk didn’t know how they would deal with that. He could only hope they would not have to.
Dirk cleared the screen and tried other numbers, noting which functions had been shut down entirely, which had been stripped to a skeleton status—medical emergency service, for one—and which still operated at Festival levels. Often there was a city-by-city breakdown, which convinced him that they had chosen correctly in coming to Challenge. The E
mereli had been determined to prove their tower-city immortal, and they had left nearly everything on in defiance of the cold and the dark and the coming ice. This would be an easy place to live. The other cities were in sorry shape by comparison. Four of the fourteen were entirely dark and depowered, and one of those had suffered so much erosion from wind and weather that it was already crumbling into dusty ruins.
For a time Dirk continued to punch buttons, but finally the game began to wear on him, and he grew bored and restive. Gwen slept on. It was still morning, impossible to call Ruark. He turned off the wallscreen, washed briefly in the waste cubicle, and then went back to the bed, flicking off the light panels. It was some time before he went to sleep. He lay in the warm darkness staring at the ceiling and listening to Gwen’s faint breathing, but his mind was far away and troubled.
Soon everything will be good again, he told himself, the way things were on Avalon. Yet he could not believe it. He did not feel like the old Dirk t’Larien, Gwen’s Dirk, the one he had promised himself he would become again. He felt, instead, as if nothing had changed; he labored on, as wearily, as hopelessly, as he had on Braque and the other worlds before it. His Jenny was with him again, and he should be full of joy, but he only knew a sick, tired feeling. As if he had failed her once again.
Dirk pushed the thoughts aside and closed his eyes.
When he woke, it was late afternoon. Gwen was already up and about. Dirk showered and dressed in soft faded garments of Avalon synthetic. Then the two of them went out into the corridors to explore the 522nd level of Challenge. They held hands as they walked.
Their compartment was one of thousands in a residential sector of the building. Around it were other compartments, identical to their own except for the numbers on the black doors. The floors and walls and ceilings of the corridors through which they walked were all carpeted in rich cobalt shades, and the lights that hung down at intersections—dim globes, restful, easy on the eyes—matched the hue.