Dying of the Light

'Why did you split from Lorimaar?' Dirk asked.

'Why do you think? Jaan is close now. I must reach him first, before they do. Saanel insisted the crossing would be easier downstream, and I took the chance to disagree. Lorimaar is too tired to be suspicious now. He thinks only of his kill. His burn is still on fire, t'Larien! I think he sees Jaan Vikary lying bloody before him and forgets who it is he chases. So I went away from them, upstream, and for a time I feared I had made a mistake. The crossing was easier downstream, was it not?'

Dirk nodded again.

Janacek grinned. 'Then your arrival is a luck, in truth.'

'You are going to need more luck to find Jaan,' Dirk warned. 'The Braiths have probably crossed the river by now, and they have their hounds.'

'It does not concern me overmuch,' Janacek said. 'Jaan runs straight now, and I know something Lorimaar does not. I know what he runs for. A cave, t'Larien! My teyn has always been intrigued by caves. When we were boys together in Ironjade, often he would take me exploring beneath the earth. He took me into more abandoned mines than I ever wished to see, and several times we went under the old cities, the demon- haunted ruins.' He smiled. 'Blasted holdfasts, too, hearths blackened in ancient highwars and still teeming with restless ghosts. Jaan Vikary knew all such places. He would guide me through them and recite history to me, unendingly, tales of Aryn high-Glowstone and Jamis-Lion Taal and the cannibals of the Deep Coal Dwellings. He was ever a storyteller. He could make those old heroes live again, and the horrors as well.'

Dirk found himself smiling. 'Did he scare you, Garse?'

The other laughed. 'Scare me? Yes! He terrified me, but I became tempered in time. We were both young, t'Larien. Later, much later, it was in the caverns under the Lameraan Hills that he and I pledged iron-and-fire.'

'All right,' Dirk said. 'So Jaan likes caves-'

'One system opens very near to Kryne Lamiya,' Janacek said, returning to the issue at hand, 'with a second entrance close to where we stand. The three of us explored it during the first year we came to Worlorn. Now, I think that Jaan will complete his run underground, if he can. Thus we can intercept him.' He scooped up his rifle.

Dirk lifted his own weapon. 'You'll never find him in the forest,' he said. 'The chokers provide too much cover.'

'I would find him,' Janacek said, his voice a little ragged and more than a little wild. 'Remember our bond, t'Larien. Iron-and-fire.'

'Empty iron now,' Dirk said, glancing pointedly at Janacek's right wrist.

The Ironjade grinned his hard distinctive grin. 'No,' he said. His hand went into his pocket, came out, opened. In his palm the glowstone rested. A single jewel, round and rough-faceted, about twice the size of Dirk's whisperjewel, black and nearly opaque in the full ruddy light of the morning.

Dirk stared, then touched it lightly with a finger, so that it moved slightly in Janacek's palm. 'It feels… cold,' he said.

Janacek frowned. 'No,' he said. 'It burns, rather, as fire always does.' The glowstone vanished back into his pocket. 'There are stories, t'Larien, poems in Old Kavalar, tales they tell the children in the holdfast creche. Even the eyn-kethi know the stories. They tell them in their women's voices, but Jaan Vikary tells them better. Ask him sometime. Of the things teyn has done for teyn. He will answer you with great magics and greater heroisms, the old impossible glories. I am no storyteller or I would tell you myself. Perhaps then you could understand a bit of what it means, to stand teyn to a man and wear an iron bond.'

'Perhaps I already do,' Dirk said.

A long silence came between them as they stood on the slick mossy rock a bare half-meter apart, their eyes locked, Janacek smiling just a bit as he looked down on Dirk. Below them the river rushed by untiring, the sounds of its waters urging them to haste.

'You are not so terribly bad a man, t'Larien,' Janacek said at last. 'You are weak, I know, but no one has ever called you strong.'

At first that sounded like an insult, but the Kavalar seemed to intend something else. Dirk stopped to puzzle it out and found a second meaning. 'Give a thing a name?' he said, smiling.

Janacek nodded. 'Listen to me, Dirk. I will not tell you twice. I remember when I was a boy in Iron-jade, the first time I was warned of mockmen. A woman, an eyn-kethi-you would call her my mother, though such distinctions have no weight on my world -this woman told me the legend. Yet she told it differently. The mockmen she cautioned me against were not the demons I would learn of later from high-bond lips. They were only men, she said, not alien pawns, no kin to weres or soulsucks. Yet they were shape-changers, in a sense, because they had no true shapes. They were men who could not be trusted, men who had forgotten their codes, men without bonds. They were not real; they were all illusion of humanity without the substance. Do you understand? The substance of humanity-it is a name, a bond, a promise. It is inside, and yet we wear it on our arms. So she told me. This is why Kavalars take teyns, she said, and go abroad in pairs-because… because illusion can harden into fact if you bind it in iron.'

'A fine speech, Garse,' Dirk said when the other had finished. 'But what effect does silver have on the soul of a mockman?'

Anger passed quickly across Janacek's face, like the shadow of a drifting stormcloud. Then he grinned. 'I had forgotten your Kimdissi wit,' he said. 'Another thing I learned in youth was never to argue with a manipulator.' He laughed and reached out and clasped Dirk's hand briefly and tightly in his own. 'Enough,' he said. 'We will never meet as one, yet I can still be friend if you can still be keth.'

Dirk shrugged, feeling strangely moved. 'All right,' he said.

But Garse was already off. He had let go of Dirk's arm and touched his finger to his palm, and he rose straight up a meter and then lurched out over the water, moving quickly, leaning forward, somehow fleet and graceful in the air. Sunlight shone on his long red hair, and his clothes seemed to shift and flicker, changing colors. Halfway across the surging river he threw his head back and shouted something to Dirk, but the rash and tumble of the current swept his words away, and Dirk caught only the tone-a bloody, laughing exultation.

He watched until Janacek had reached the far side of the stream, somehow too tired to take to the air at once. His free hand slid into his jacket pocket and touched the whisperjewel. It did not seem quite so cold as before, and the promises-oh, Jenny!-came but faintly.

Janacek was soaring up above the yellow trees, up into a gray and crimson sky, his figure receding rapidly.

Wearily Dirk followed.

Janacek might disparage the sky-scoots as 'toys,' but for all that he knew how to fly one. He was soon racing far ahead of Dirk, climbing up the steady wind until he flew some twenty meters above the forest. The distance between the two of them seemed to widen steadily; unlike Gwen, Janacek was not inclined to stop and wait for Dirk to catch up.

Dirk contented himself with the role of pursuit. The Ironjade was easy enough to see-they were alone in the gloomy sky-so there was no danger of getting lost. He rode the Darkling winds again, accepting their steady push against his back while he abandoned himself to aimless musings. He dreamed strange waking dreams of Jaan and Garse, of iron bonds and whisperjewels, of Guinevere and Lancelot, who had– he realized suddenly-been pledge-breakers both.

The river vanished. The quiet lakes came and went, and the patch of white fungus that lay like a scab upon the forest. He heard the baying of Lorimaar's pack once, far behind him, the thin noises carried to him on the wind. He was not worried.

They angled south. Janacek was a small dot, black, flashing silver when a shaft of sun caught the raft on which he rode. Smaller and smaller. Dirk came after, a limp bird. Finally Janacek began to spiral down to treetop level.

It was a wild region. Rockier than most, with a few rolling hills and outcroppings of black rock streaked with silver-gold. Chokers were everywhere, chokers and only chokers. Dirk's eyes cast this way and that searching for a single tall silverwood, for a blue widower or a gaunt dark ghost tree. A maze of yellow stretched away unbroken to both horizons. Dirk heard the frantic noises of the tree-spooks and saw them under his feet flying short