Dying of the Light

by George R. R. Martin

  “Yes. He was the only one. It had to be. We met on Avalon, right after you and I . . . you know. Arkin helped me. It was a bad time. He was there when you sent your jewel to Jenny. I was crying and all. I told him about it, and we talked. Even later, after I met Jaan, Arkin and I stayed close. He was like a brother!”

  “A brother,” Dirk repeated. “Why would—”

  “I don’t know!”

  Dirk was thoughtful. “When you met me at the spaceport, Arkin was with you. Did you ask him to come along? I was counting on you being alone, I remember.”

  “It was his idea,” she said. “Well, I told him I was nervous. About seeing you again. He . . . he offered to come along and lend me moral support. And he said he wanted to meet you too. You know. After all I had told him on Avalon.”

  “And the day you and he took off into the wild—you know, when I got into trouble with Garse and then Bretan—what went on?”

  “Arkin said . . . an armor-bug migration. It wasn’t actually, but we had to check. We rushed away.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going? I thought that Jaan and Garse had beaten you up, that they were keeping you away from me. The night before, you’d said—”

  “I know, but Arkin said he’d tell you.”

  “And he convinced me to run away,” Dirk said. “And you, I suppose he told you that to convince me you should . . .”

  She nodded.

  He turned toward the window. The last light was gone from the tower tops. Above, a handful of stars sparkled. Dirk counted them. Twelve. An even dozen. He wondered if some of them were really galaxies, away across the Great Black Sea. “Gwen,” he said, “Jaan left this morning. From here to Larteyn and back, by aircar—how long should that take?”

  When she did not answer, he turned to look at her again.

  The walls were full of phantoms, and Gwen trembled in their light.

  “He should be back by now, shouldn’t he?”

  She nodded and lay back again on the pale mattress.

  The Siren City sang its lullaby, its hymn to final sleep.

  11

  Dirk walked across the room.

  The laser rifle was leaning up against the wall. He lifted it, felt once again the vaguely oily texture of the slick black plastic. His thumb brushed over the wolf’s head. He raised the weapon to his shoulder, sighted, fired.

  The wand of light hung for at least a full second in the air. He moved the rifle slightly, and the pencil beam moved with it. When it faded, and the after-image left his retinas, he saw that he had burned an uneven hole in the window. The wind was whistling through it loudly, making an odd dissonance with the music of Lamiya-Bailis.

  Gwen climbed unsteadily out of her bed. “What? Dirk?”

  He shrugged at her and lowered the rifle.

  “What?” she repeated. “What are you doing?”

  “I wanted to make sure I knew how it worked,” he explained. “I’m . . . I’m going.”

  She frowned. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll find my boots.”

  He shook his head.

  “You too?” Her face was hard, ugly. “I don’t need to be protected, damn it.”

  “It’s not like that,” he said.

  “If this is some idiot move to make yourself a hero in my eyes, it isn’t going to work,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

  He smiled. “What this is, Gwen, is some idiot move to make myself a hero in my eyes. Your eyes . . . your eyes aren’t important anymore.”

  “Why, then?”

  He hefted the rifle uncertainly. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe because I like Jaan, and owe him. Because I want to make it up to him for running out after he’d trusted me and named me keth.”

  “Dirk,” she began.

  He waved her quiet. “I know . . . but that isn’t all. Maybe I just want to get Ruark. Maybe it’s because Kryne Lamiya had more suicides than any other Festival city, and I’m one of them. You can pick your own motive, Gwen. All of the above.” A faint smile brushed across his face. “Maybe it’s because there are only twelve stars, you know? So it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

  “What good can you possibly do?”

  “Who knows? And why does it matter? Do you care, Gwen? Do you really?” He shook his head, and the motion sent his hair tumbling over his forehead once again, so once more he had to stop and brush it back. “I don’t care if you care,” he said forcefully. “You said, or implied, that I was being selfish back in Challenge. Well, maybe I was. And maybe I am now. I’ll tell you something, though. Whatever I’m going to do, I’m not asking to look at your arms first, Gwen. Know what I mean?”

  It was a fine exit line, but halfway out the door he softened, hesitated, turned back. “Stay here, Gwen,” he told her. “Just stay. You’re still hurt. If you have to run, Jaan said something about a cave. You know anything about a cave?” She nodded. “Well, go there if you have to. Otherwise stay here.” He waved a clumsy farewell at her with the rifle, then spun and walked away too quickly.

  Down in the airlot the walls were just walls—no ghosts, no murals, no lights. Dirk stumbled over the aircar he wanted in the dark, then waited while his eyes adjusted. His derelict was no product of High Kavalaan; it was a cramped two-seater, a black and silver teardrop of plastic and lightweight metal. No armor at all, of course, and the only weapon it carried was the laser rifle he laid across his lap.

  It was only a little less dead than the rest of Worlorn, but that little was enough. When he tapped into the power, the car woke, and the instruments lit the cabin with their pale radiance. He ate a protein bar quickly and studied the readings. The energy supply was low, too low, but it would have to do. He would not use the headlamps; he could fly by the scant starlight. And the heater was likewise to be dispensed with, as long as he had his leather jacket to keep him from the chill.

  Dirk slammed down the door, sealing himself in, and flicked on the gravity grid. The aircar lifted, rocking a bit unsteadily, but it lifted. He gripped the stick and threw it forward, and then he was outside and airborne.

  He had one brief flash of terror. If the grid had been feeble enough, he knew, there would be no flight at all, just a rolling rumble to the moss-choked ground below. The aircar throbbed and dipped alarmingly once clear of the lot, but only for an instant; then the grid caught hold and they rode up on the singing winds, and the only thing left tumbling was his stomach.

  Dirk climbed steadily, trying to push the small car as high as it would go. The mountainwall was ahead, and he had to clear it. Besides, he was not anxious to encounter other nocturnal flyers. High up, with his lights doused, he could see any other aircars that passed below him, but the chances were good that he would escape their notice.

  He did not look back at Kryne Lamiya, but he felt the city behind him, driving him onward, washing away his fears. Fear was so foolish; nothing mattered, death least of all. Even when the Siren City and its white and gray lights were gone, the music lingered, steadily fading and growing weaker, but always with him, always potent. One note, a thin wavering whistle, outlasted the rest. Some thirty kilometers from the city he was still hearing it, mixed with the deeper whistle of the wind. Finally he realized that the noise was coming from his own lips.

  He stopped whistling and tried to concentrate on flying.

  When he had been airborne for almost an hour, the mountainwall bulked up before him, or rather beneath him, for he was quite high by that time, and he felt closer to the stars and the pinpoint galaxies above than to the forests far below. The wind had grown shrill and furious as it forced its way through hairline cracks in the door seam, but Dirk was ignoring the sound.

  Where the mountains met the wilderness, he saw a light.

  He banked the aircar, circled, and began to descend. No lights should shine this side of the mountains, he knew; whatever it was, it should be investigated.

  He spiraled down until he was directly above the light, then stilled all f
orward motion of the aircar, hung hovering for a short moment, and faded his gravity grid. With infinite slowness, he settled, rocking back and forth slightly in the wind, falling quietly.

  There were several lights beneath him. The main source of illumination was a fire. He could tell that now; he could see it shifting and flickering as the winds fanned the flames this way and that. But there were other, smaller lights as well—steady and artificial, a circle of them off in the blackness not terribly distant from the fire. Perhaps a kilometer, he estimated, perhaps less.

  The temperature in the small cabin began to rise, and Dirk felt sweat on his skin, soaking his clothing beneath the heavy jacket. Smoke assaulted him as well; clouds of it, black and sooty, rose from the fire and obscured his view. Frowning, he moved the aircar until he was no longer directly above the blaze, and continued to descend.

  The flames rose up to greet him, long orange tongues, very bright against the plumes of smoke. He saw sparks as well, or embers, or something of that sort; they issued from the fire in hot bright showers, shooting off into the night and then vanishing. Drifting lower, he was treated to yet another display, a furious crackling of blue-white flame that came with a sharp scent of ozone and then was gone again.

  Dirk stopped the aircar dead when the fire was still decently below him. There were other people about—the circle of steady artificial lights—and he did not care to be seen. His black and silver aircar, motionless against the black sky, would not be easy to spot, but it would be a different story if he let himself be outlined by the flames. Although he had an unobstructed view from where he hovered, he still could not make out what was burning; the center of the fire was a shapeless darkness from which the sparks issued periodically. Around it he could see the dense tangle of chokers, their waxy limbs shining bright yellow in the reflected glare. Several had fallen into the heart of the conflagration and were contributing most of the black smoke as they shriveled and turned to ash. But the rest, the twisting fence that surrounded the black burning thing, refused to go up. Instead of spreading, the fire was visibly dying out.

  Dirk waited and watched it die. He was already fairly certain that he was looking at a fallen aircar; the sparks and ozone smell told him that much. He wanted to know which aircar.

  After the flames had dwindled and the sparks had ceased to storm, but before the fire had guttered out entirely and turned to greasy smoke, Dirk saw a shape. Briefly; a wing, vaguely batlike, twisted at a grotesque angle and poking toward the sky, a sheet of fire flaring behind it. That was enough; this was not any aircar he knew, though it was clearly of Kavalar manufacture.

  A dark ghost above the forest, he flitted away from the dying fire, toward the ring of man-made illumination. This time he maintained a greater distance. He did not need to go closer. The lights were quite bright, and the scene was etched in fine detail.

  He saw a wide clearing, ringed by electric torches, on the edge of some broad body of still water. Three aircars were down there, and he knew all three; the same trio had been down beneath the Emereli tree within Challenge when Myrik Braith had assaulted Gwen. One of them, the great-domed car with dark red armor, belonged to Lorimaar high-Braith. The other two were smaller, almost identical, except they were identical no longer, since one of them was visibly damaged, even seen from this distance. It was lying awkwardly, half submerged in the water, and part of it was misshapen and glowing. Its armored door gaped open.

  Stick figures moved about the wreck. Dirk would hardly have seen them at all except for their motion, so well did they blend with the background. Nearby, someone was leading Braith hounds from a gate in the flank of Lorimaar’s aircar.

  Frowning, Dirk touched his grid control and took his own car straight up, until the men and aircars were lost to sight and nothing remained below but a point of light in the forest. Two points, in truth, but the fire was a faint orange ember now, visibly fading.

  Safe in the black womb of sky, he paused to think.

  The damaged aircar had been Roseph’s, the same car they had stolen in Challenge, the car Jaan Vikary had flown to Larteyn that morning. He was sure of that. The Braiths had found him, clearly, and pursued him to the forest, lasered him down. But it seemed unlikely that he was dead; otherwise why the Braith hounds? Lorimaar wasn’t just taking his pack for a walk. It was more than likely that Jaan had survived to flee into the forest, and that the Braiths were going to hunt him down.

  Dirk considered briefly trying to effect a rescue, but the prospects seemed dim. He had no idea how to find Jaan in the night-shrouded outworld wild. The Braiths were better equipped for that than he was.

  He resumed his course toward the mountainwall, and Larteyn beyond. In the forest, armed and alone as he was, he could do Jaan Vikary no particular good. In the Kavalar Firefort, however, he could at the very least settle Ironjade’s score with Arkin Ruark.

  The mountains slid beneath him, and Dirk relaxed once more, though one hand fell to rest on the laser rifle that still lay across his lap.

  The flight took just under an hour; then Larteyn, red and smoldering, shouldered up out of the mountains. It looked very dead, very empty, but Dirk knew that for a lie. He kept low and wasted no time shooting straight across the low square rooftops and the glowstone plazas to the building that he had once shared with Gwen Delvano, the two Ironjades, and the Kimdissi liar.

  Only one other aircar waited on the windswept roof—the armor-clad military relic. Of Ruark’s small yellow flyer there was no sign, and the gray manta was missing as well. Dirk briefly wondered what had happened to it, abandoned back in Challenge, then shoved the thought aside as he descended for a landing.

  He kept the laser firmly in his grip as he climbed out. The world was still and crimson. He walked swiftly to the tubes, and rode down to Ruark’s quarters.

  They were empty.

  He searched them quite thoroughly, turning things this way and that, not caring what he disturbed, what he destroyed. All of the Kimdissi’s belongings were still in place, but Ruark was not there, nor was there any sign of where he had gone.

  Dirk’s own possessions remained as well, the few things he had left behind when he and Gwen had run, nothing but a small pile of light clothing he had brought from Braque. Useless here in the chill of Worlorn. He set down the laser, knelt, and began to rummage through the pockets of the soiled pants. It was not until he found it—jammed away, still in its wrappings of silver and velvet—that he really knew what he was looking for, and why he had come back to Larteyn.

  In Ruark’s bedroom he found a small cache of personal jewelry in a lockbox: rings, pendants, intricate bracelets and crowns, earrings of semi-precious stones. He pawed through the box until he found a thin fine chain with a silver-wire owl frozen in amber and suspended on a clip. It looked about the right size, that clip. Dirk tore away the amber and the owl and replaced them with the whisperjewel.

  Then he unsealed his jacket and his heavy shirt and hung the chain around his neck, so the cold red teardrop was next to his bare skin, whispering its whispers, promising its lies. The small stab of ice was painful against his chest, but that was all right; it was Jenny. Very shortly he grew used to it, and it passed. Salt tears rolled down his cheeks. He did not notice. He went upstairs.

  The workroom that Ruark had shared with Gwen was as cluttered as Dirk remembered it, but the Kimdissi was not there. Nor was he to be found in the deserted apartment above that where Dirk had called Ruark from Challenge. There was only one more place to search.

  Quickly he climbed to the top of the tower. The door was open. He hesitated, and then entered, holding his laser at the ready.

  The great living room was chaos and destruction. The viewscreen had been smashed or had exploded; glass shards were everywhere. The walls were scarred by laser fire. The couch had been overturned and ripped in a dozen places, stuffing pulled out in great handfuls and scattered. Some of it had been thrown into the fireplace, where it contributed to the sodden, smoky mess that choked
the hearth. One of the gargoyles, headless and upside down, leaned up against the base of the mantel. Its head, glowstone eyes and all, had been thrown into the sodden ashes of the fire. The air stank of wine and vomit.

  Garse Janacek was sleeping on the floor, shirtless, his red beard stained even redder by dribbled wine, his mouth hanging open. He smelled like the room. He was snoring loudly and his laser pistol was still clutched in one hand. Dirk saw his shirt balled up and lying in a pool of vomit that Janacek had tried to mop at halfheartedly.

  He walked around carefully and took the laser out of Janacek’s limp fingers. Vikary’s teyn was not quite the iron Kavalar that Jaan imagined him.

  Janacek’s right arm was still bound by iron-and-glowstones. A few of the red-black jewels had been forced from their settings; the empty holes looked obscene. But most of the bracelet was intact, except where it was marred by long scratches. Janacek’s forearm, above the bracelet, was also scarred. The scratches were deep, and often continuous with those scored in the black iron. Arm and armlet both were caked by dried blood.

  Near to Janacek’s boot Dirk saw the long bloodstained knife. He could imagine the rest. Drunk, no doubt, his left hand made awkward by his old wound, trying to pry the glowstones free, losing patience and stabbing wildly, dropping the blade in his pain and his rage.

  Stepping backward lightly, detouring around Janacek’s damp shirt, Dirk paused in the door frame, leveled his rifle, and shouted. “Garse!”

  Janacek did not stir. Dirk repeated his shout. This time the volume of snoring declined appreciably. Encouraged, Dirk stooped and picked up the nearest object at hand—a glowstone—and lofted it through the air at the Kavalar. It hit Janacek on the cheek.

  He sat up slowly, blinking. He saw Dirk and scowled at him.

  “Get up,” Dirk said. He waved his laser.

  Janacek rose shakily to his feet, looked around for his own weapon.

  “You won’t find it,” Dirk told him. “I’ve got it here.”

  Janacek’s eyes were blurred and weary, but he had slept off most of his drunkenness. “Why are you here, t’Larien?” he said slowly, in a voice tinged more by exhaustion than by wine. “Have you come to mock me?”