Dying of the Light

flights on tiny wings.

The air around him shuddered to the sound of a banshee wail, and a cold tingle brushed Dirk's spine for no reason he could name. He looked up quickly, into the distance, and saw a pulse of light.

Brief, throbbing against his weary eyes, and too intense, this sudden finger of brightness did not belong, not here, not in this gray dusk world. It did not belong, but it was there. Stabbing up once from below, a savage thin fire soon lost in the sky.

Janacek was a small rag doll ahead of him, near the light. The slender thread of scarlet brushed him, touched the silver sled he stood on, slightly, quickly. The image lingered in Dirk's eyes. Absurdly Janacek began to tumble, flailing his arms. A black stick went spinning from his grasp and he disappeared down among the chokers, crashing through their interlocking branches.

Noises. Dirk heard noises. Music on this endless winter's wind. Wood snapping, followed by screams of pain and rage, animal and human, human and animal, both and neither. The towers of Kryne Lamiya shimmered above the horizon, smokelike and transparent, and sang to him a song of endings.

The screaming ceased suddenly; the white towers melted, and the gale that swept him forward blew away the shards. Dirk swung down and raised his laser.

There was a dark hole in the high foliage where Garse Janacek had fallen through: yellow limbs twisted down and broken, a gap big enough for a man's body.

Dark. Dirk hovered above it and could not see Janacek or the forest floor, so thick were the shadows. But on the topmost limb he saw a torn strip of cloth flapping in the wind and changing colors. Above it a little ghost stood solemn guard.

'Garse!' he shouted, not caring about the enemy below, the man with the laser. The tree-spooks answered in a chorus of chittering.

He heard crashing under the trees; the laser light flamed again, brightly. Not up this time, but horizontal, a shaft of impossible sun in the gloom below. Dirk hovered indecisive. A tree-spook appeared on the limb just below him, oddly fearless, liquid eyes gazing up, wings spread apart and thrumming in the wind. Dirk pointed his laser and fired, until the little beast was nothing but a soot stain on the yellow bark.

Then he moved again, circling out in a spiral until he saw a slanting gap among the chokers, wide enough for him to descend. The forest floor was murky; the chokers, joining overhead, screened out nine-tenths of the Helleye's meager light. Huge trunks loomed all around him, gnarled yellow fingers twisting every which way, stiff and arthritic. He bent-the moss along the ground was decomposing-and pulled his boots free of the silver grid, so the metal went limp. Then the shadows parted between the chokers, and Jaan Vikary came out to stand above him. Dirk looked up.

Jaan's face was lined and empty. He was covered with blood, and in his arms was a mangled red thing that he carried the way a mother might carry a sick child. Garse had one eye closed and one eye missing, torn from his face. Only half of his face was there at all. His head lay gently against Jaan's chest.

'Jaan-'

Vikary flinched. 'I shot him,' he said. Trembling, he dropped the body.

Chapter 14

There was no sound in the wilderness but Vikary's labored breathing and the faint skittering noises of the tree-spooks.

Dirk went to Janacek and rolled him over. Bits of moss clung to the body, soaking up the blood like sponges. The tree-spooks had torn out his throat, so Garse's head lolled obscenely when Dirk moved him. His heavy clothing had been no protection; they had bitten through everywhere, leaving the chameleon cloth in wet red tatters. Janacek's legs, still joined together by the useless silver-metal square of the sky-scoot, had been cracked in the fall; jagged bone fragments protruded from both calves, almost identical compound fractures. The face was the worst-gnawed. The right eye was gone. The socket welled with blood that dripped slowly down his cheek into the ground.

There was nothing to be done. Dirk stared helplessly. He slipped a quiet hand into a pocket of Janacek's battered jacket and took the glowstone in his fist, then rose to face Vikary again. 'You said-'

'That I could never fire at him,' Vikary finished. 'I know what I said, Dirk t'Larien. And I know what I did.' He spoke very slowly; each word dropped from his lips with a leaden thud. 'I did not intend this. Never. I sought only to stop him, to knock out the sky-scoot. He fell into a tree-spook nest. A tree-spook nest.'

Dirk's fist was clenched tightly around the glow-stone. He said nothing.

Vikary shook; his voice took on animation, and there was a desperate edge in his tone. 'He was hunting me. Arkin Ruark warned me when I spoke to him by viewscreen in Larteyn. He said that Garse had joined the Braiths, had sworn to bring me down. I did not believe.' He trembled. 'I did not believe! Yet it was truth. He came after me, came hunting with them, just as Ruark said he would. Ruark… Ruark is not with me… we never… the Braiths came instead. I do not know if he… Ruark… perhaps they have slain him. I do not know.'

He seemed weary and confused. 'I had to stop Garse, t'Larien. He knew of the cave. Gwen to think of too. Ruark said that Garse in his madness had promised to hand her over to Lorimaar, and I called him a liar until I glimpsed Garse behind me. Gwen is my betheyn, and you are korariel. My responsibility. I had to live. Do you understand? I never meant to do this. I went to him, burned my way through… The grubs in the nest-heart were all over him, white things, the adults too… burned them, I burned them, brought him out.'

Vikary's body shook with dry sobs, but no tears came; he would not permit it. 'Look. He was wearing empty iron. He came hunting me. I loved him and he came hunting me!'

The glowstone was a hard nugget of indecision within Dirk's fist. He looked down once more at Garse Janacek, whose garments had faded to the colors of old blood and rotting moss, and then up at Jaan Vikary, so very close to breaking, who stood pale-faced with his massive shoulders twitching. Give a thing a name, Dirk thought; and now he must give a name to Jaantony high-Ironjade.

He slid his fist into the darkness of his pocket. 'You had to do it,' he lied. 'He would have killed you, and Gwen later. He said so. I'm glad that Arkin got to you with a warning.'

The words seemed to steady Vikary. He nodded wordlessly.

'I came looking for you,' Dirk continued, 'when you didn't return in time. Gwen was concerned. I was going to help you. Garse caught me and disarmed me and delivered me to Lorimaar and Pyr. He said I was a blood- gift.'

'A blood-gift,' Vikary repeated. 'He was insane, t'Larien. It is truth. Garse Ironjade Janacek was not like that; he was no Braith, no giver of blood-gifts. You must believe that.'

'Yes,' Dirk said. 'He was deranged. You're right. I could tell from the way he talked. Yes.' He felt very close to tears and wondered if it showed. It was as if he had taken all of Jaan's fear and anguish into himself; the Ironjade seemed stronger and more resolute with every passing second, while grief came unbidden to Dirk's eyes.

Vikary looked down at the still body sprawled beneath the trees. 'I would mourn for him, for the things that he was and the things that we had, but there is no time. The hunters come after us with their hounds. We must press on.' He knelt by Janacek's corpse for an instant and held a limp bloody hand within his own. Then he kissed the ruin of the dead man's face, full on the lips, and with his free hand stroked the matted hair.

But when he rose again, he had a black iron bracelet in his grasp, and Dirk saw that Janacek's arm was naked and felt a sudden pain. Vikary put the empty iron into his pocket. Dirk held back his tears and his tongue, saying nothing.

'We must go.'

'Are we just going to leave him here?' Dirk asked.

'Leave him?' Vikary frowned. 'Ah, I see. Burial is no Kavalar custom, t'Larien. We abandon our dead in the wild, traditionally, and if the beasts consume what we leave, we do not feel shame. Life should nourish life. Is it not more fitting that his strong flesh should give strength to some swift clean predator rather than a mass of vile