Dying of the Light

It took well over an hour for the other Braiths to assemble; for Dirk an hour of fading light and gathering strength. It was sunset, he soon realized; beyond the gateway, Fat Satan sank slowly out of sight. The darkness swelled around them, growing thicker and denser until finally the Kavalars were forced to turn on the headlamps of their aircars. By then Dirk's dizziness had all but passed. Pyr, noticing, had his hands bound behind his back and forced him to sit up against the side of one of the cars. They placed Gwen beside him, but did not remove her gag.

Though Dirk was not gagged, he did not try to speak. He sat with the cold metal to his back and his wrists chafing within their bonds, and he waited and watched and listened. From time to time he would glance toward Gwen, but she sat slumped with her head downcast and did not return his gaze.

Singly and in pairs they came. The kethi of Braith. The hunters of Worlorn. From the shadows and dark places they came. Like pale ghosts. A noise and a vague shape at first, before they walked into the small circle of light and turned to men again. Even then they were more and less than human.

The first to come led four tall rat-faced hounds, and Dirk recognized him from the wild gray plunge down the outer concourse. The man chained his hounds to the bumper of Roseph's aircar, gave curt greetings to Pyr and Roseph and their teyns, then sat cross-legged on the floor a few meters from the prisoners. He did not speak, not once. His eyes fixed on Gwen and never left her, and he did not move at all. Nearby, Dirk could hear his hounds growling in the shadows, their iron chains twisting and rattling.

Then the others came. Lorimaar high-Braith Arkellor, a brown giant in a pitch-black suit of chameleon cloth fastened with buttons of pale bone, arrived in a massive domed aircar of deep red. Within, Dirk could hear the sounds of a pack of Braith hounds. With Lorimaar was another man, a square fat man twice as heavy as Pyr, his bulk hard and solid as brick, his face pale and porcine. After them, alone and on foot, came a frail-looking oldster, bald and wrinkled and nearly toothless, with one hand of flesh and bone and one three-pronged claw of dark metal. The old man had a child's head slung from his belt; it was still bleeding, and one leg of his white trousers bore the long brown stain of its dripping.

Finally Chell arrived, as tall as Lorimaar, white-haired and mustachioed and very weary, leading a single huge Braith hound. Within the pool of light he stopped and blinked.

'Where is your teyn?' Pyr demanded.

'Here.' A rasp from the darkness. A few meters away a single glowstone shone dimly. Bretan Braith Lantry came forward and stood next to Chell. His face twitched.

'All have gathered,' Roseph high-Braith said to Pyr.

'No,' someone objected. 'There is Koraat.'

The silent hunter spoke up from the floor. 'He is no more. He begged ending. I granted it. In truth, he was badly broken. He was the second keth I have watched die today. The first was my teyn, Teraan Braith Nalarys.' As he spoke, his eyes never left Gwen. He finished with a long breathless sentence in Old Kavalar.

'Three of us are gone,' the old man said.

'We shall have a silence for them,' Pyr said. He was still holding his baton, with its hardwood knob and its short blade, and he tapped it restlessly against his leg as he spoke, just as he had done in the tunnels.

Through her gag, Gwen tried to scream. Pyr's teyn, the gangling Kavalar with the wild black hair, came over and stood above her menacingly.

But Dirk, ungagged, had gotten the idea. 'I'm not going to keep silence,' he shouted. Or tried to. His voice was not quite up to shouting. 'They were killers, all of them. Deserved to die.'

All of the Braiths were looking at him.

'Gag him and stop his screaming,' Pyr said. His teyn moved quickly to comply. When it was done, Pyr spoke again. 'You shall have time enough to scream, Dirk t'Larien, when you run naked through the forests and you hear my hounds baying behind you.'

Bretan's head and shoulders turned awkwardly. Light glistened on his scar tissue. 'No,' he said. 'First claim is mine.'

Pyr faced him. 'I tracked the mockman. I took him.'

Bretan twitched. Chell, still holding the great hound by a chain wrapped about one heavy hand, laid his other hand on Bretan's shoulder.

'This is no matter to me,' another voice said. The Braith who sat on the floor. Staring. Unmoving. 'What of the bitch?'

The others shifted their attention uneasily. 'She can not be at issue, Myrik,' said Lorimaar high-Braith. 'She is of Ironjade.'

The man's lips drew back sharply; for an instant his placid face was wildly distorted, a beast's face, a rictus of emotion. Then it passed. His features settled into pale stillness again, everything held in check. ''I will kill this woman,' he said. 'Teraan was my teyn. She has set his ghost adrift upon a soulless world.'

'Her?' Lorimaar's voice was incredulous. 'Is this truth?'

'I saw,' replied the man on the floor, the one called Myrik. 'I fired after her when she rode us down and left Teraan dying. This is truth, Lorimaar high-Braith.'

Dirk tried to rise to his feet, but the gangling Kavalar pushed him down again, hard, and slammed his head back against the metal flank of the aircar to underline the point.

The frail oldster spoke then-the clawed ancient who carried the child's head. 'Take her then as your personal prey,' he said, his voice as thin and sharp as the blade of the flaying knife that hung at his belt. 'The wisdom of the holdfasts is old and certain, my brothers. She is no true woman now, if she ever was, neither heldwife or eyn-keth. Who is there to vouch for her? She has left her highbond's protection to run with a mockman! If she was flesh of man's flesh once, it is so no longer. You know the ways of the mockmen, the liars, the weres, the great deceivers. Alone with her in the dark, this mockman Dirk would surely have slain her and set in her place a demon like himself, fashioned in her image.'

Chell nodded agreement and said something grave in Old Kavalar. The other Braiths looked less certain. Lorimaar traded scowls with his teyn, the square fat man. Bretan's hideous face was noncommittal, half a mask of scar tissue, half blank innocence. Pyr frowned and continued to tap restlessly with his baton.

It was Roseph who replied. 'I ruled Gwen Delvano human when I was arbiter at the square of death,' he said carefully.

'This is truth,' Pyr said.

'Perhaps she was human then,' the old man said. 'Yet she has tasted blood and slept with a mockman, and who will call her human now?'

The hounds began to howl.

The four that Myrik had chained to the aircar started the cacophony, and it was taken up by the pack locked inside Lorimaar's domed vehicle. Chell's massive canine snarled and pulled at his chain, until the elderly Braith jerked back angrily; then the creature sat and joined the howling.

Most of the hunters glanced toward the silent darkness beyond their little circle (Myrik, frozen-faced and immobile, was the notable exception-his eyes never left Gwen Delvano), and more than one touched his sidearm.

On the edge of the circle, beyond the aircars and their pool of light, the two Ironjades stood side by side in shadow.

Dirk's pain-his head was pounding-abruptly seemed of no consequence. His body trembled and shook. He looked at Gwen; she was looking up, at them. At Jaan especially.

He walked into the light then, and Dirk saw that he was staring at Gwen almost as fixedly as the man called Myrik. He seemed to move very slowly, like a figure in some dusty dream, a man asleep. Garse Janacek was alive and liquid at his side.

Vikary was dressed in a mottled suit of chameleon cloth, all shades of black and blacker when he entered the circle of his enemies. By the time the hounds had quieted, he was wearing dusty gray. The sleeves of his shirt ended just above the elbow; iron-and-glowstone embraced his right forearm, jade-and-silver his left. For an endless instant he loomed very large. Chell and Lorimaar both stood a head taller, but somehow, briefly, Vikary seemed to dominate. He flowed past them, a striding ghost-how unreal he was even there-who walked through the Braiths as