Dying of the Light

Chapter 4

"It's unfortunate that you had to stumble into Lorimaar this morning," Gwen said after Jaan had gone. "There was no reason for you to get involved, and I had hoped to spare you all the grisly details. I hope you will keep this confidential after you leave Worlorn. Let Jaan and Garse take care of the Braiths. No one else will do anything anyway, except talk about it and slander innocent people on High Kavalaan. Above all, don't tell Arkin! He despises Kavalars, and he'd be off to Kimdiss in a shot." She stood up. "For the present, I'd suggest we talk of more pleasant things. We have a short time together; I can only be your tour guide so long before I have to return to my work. There is no reason to let those Braith butchers spoil the few days we have."

"Whatever you say," Dirk answered, anxious to please but still shaken by the whole business with Lorimaar and his mockmen. "You have something planned?"

"I could take you back to the forests," Gwen told him. "They go on and on forever, and there are hundreds of fascinating things to see in the wild: lakes full of fish larger than either of us, insect mounds bigger than this building erected by insects smaller than your fingernail, an incredible cave system that Jaan discovered beyond the mountainwall– He's a born caver, Jaan. Still, today I think we should play it safe. We don't want to pour too much salt into Lorimaar's wound, or he and his fat teyn might hunt us both and Jaan be damned. Today I'll show you the cities. They have a fascination too, and a kind of macabre beauty. As Jaan said, Lorimaar has not yet thought to hunt there."

"All right," Dirk said, with little enthusiasm.

Gwen dressed quickly and took him up to the roof. The sky-scoots still lay where they had discarded them a day earlier. Dirk bent to retrieve them, but Gwen took the silver-metal tissues from his hands and tossed them into the back of the gray manta air-car. Then she got the flight boots and controls and chucked them in afterwards. "No scoots today," she said. "We'll be covering too much ground."

Dirk nodded, and both of them vaulted over the car's wings into the front seat. Worlorn's sky made him feel as if he should be coming in from an expedition instead of just setting out on one.

The wind shrieked around the aircar wildly, and Dirk briefly took the stick so Gwen could tie back her long black hair. His own gray-brown mop whipped around in mad convulsions as they raced across the sky, but thought had him too abstracted to notice, much less be annoyed.

Gwen kept them high over the mountainwall and bore south. The placid Common with its gentle grassy hills and meandering rivers stretched far away to their right, until the sky came down to meet it. On the distant left, when the mountains dropped off, they could glimpse the edge of the wilderness. The choker-infested areas were obvious even from this altitude – yellow cancers spreading through the darker green.

For nearly an hour they rode in silence, Dirk lost in his thoughts, trying to put one thing together with the next and failing. Until finally Gwen looked at him with a smile. "I like flying an aircar," she said. "Even this one. It makes me feel free and clean, cut off from all the problems down there. You know what I mean?"

Dirk nodded. "Yes. You're not the first one to say that. Lots of people feel that way. Myself included."

"Yes," she said. "I used to take you flying, remember? On Avalon? I'd fly for hours and hours, from dawn until dark that one time, and you'd just sit with an arm out the window, staring far and away with that dreamy look on your face." She smiled again.

He did remember. Those trips had been very special. They never spoke much, just looked at each other from time to time, and whenever their eyes met they'd grin. It was inevitable; no matter how hard he fought it, that grin had always come. But now it all seemed terribly far off, and lost.

"What made you think of that?" he asked her.

"You," she said, and gestured. "Sitting there, slouched, with one hand hanging over the side. Ah, Dirk. You cheat, you know. I think you did it deliberately, to make me think of Avalon, and smile, and want to hug you again. Bah."

And they laughed together.

And Dirk, almost unthinking, slid over in his seat and put his arm around her. She looked briefly into his face, then gave a small shrug, and her frown melted into a sigh of resignation and finally a reluctant smile. And she did not pull away.

They went to see the cities.

The city of the morning was a soft pastel vision set in a wide green valley. Gwen put the aircar down in the center of one of its terraced squares, and they strolled the broad boulevards for an hour. It was a gracious city, carved from delicately veined pink marble and pale stone. The streets were wide and sinuously curved, the buildings low and seemingly fragile structures of polished wood and stained glass. Everywhere they found small parks and wide malls, and everywhere art: statues, paintings, murals on sidewalks and along the sides of buildings, rock gardens, and living tree-sculptures.

But now the parks were desolate and overgrown, the blue-green grass gone wild. Black creepers snaked across the sidewalks, the parkside plinths were empty more often than not, and the sturdier tree-sculptures had grown into grotesque shapes that their shapers never dreamed of.

A slow-moving blue river divided and subdivided the city, wandering this way and that in a course as meandering and tortuous as the streets along its bank. Gwen and Dirk sat near the water for a while, beneath the shadow of an ornate wooden footbridge, and watched the reflection of Fat Satan float red and sluggish on the water. And while they sat, she told him of how the city once had been, in the days of the Festival, before either of them had come to Worlorn. The people of Kimdiss had built it, she said, and they called it the Twelfth Dream.

Perhaps the city was dreaming now. If so, its sleep was the final one. Its vaulted halls all echoed empty, its gardens were grim jungles, soon to be graveyards. Where laughter had once filled the streets, now the only sound was the rustling whisper of dead leaves blown by the wind. If Larteyn was a dying city, Dirk reflected while he sat beneath the bridge, then Twelfth Dream was a dead one.

"This is where Arkin wanted to set up our base of operations," Gwen said. "We vetoed him, though. If he and I were going to work together, it was clearly best that we live in the same city, and Arkin wanted it to be Twelfth Dream. I wouldn't go along, and I don't know if he's ever forgiven me. If the Kavalars built Larteyn as a fortress, the Kimdissi crafted this city as a work of art. It was even more beautiful in the old days, I understand. They dismantled the best buildings and took the finest sculpture from the squares when the Festival ended."

"You voted for Larteyn?" Dirk said. "To live in?"

She shook her head. Her hair, unbound now, tossed gently, and touched Dirk with a smile. "No," she said. "Jaan wanted that, and Garse. Me-well, I didn't vote for Twelfth Dream either, I'm afraid. I could never have lived here. The scent of decay is too strong. I agree with Keats, you know. Nothing is quite so melancholy as the death of beauty. There was more beauty here than ever in Larteyn, though Jaan would growl to hear me say it. So this is the sadder place. Besides, in Larteyn there is some company, at least, if only Lorimaar and his sort. Here there's no one left but ghosts."

Dirk looked out over the water, where the great red sun, drained and captured, bobbed eerily up and down in the slow roll of the waves. And he could almost see the ghosts she spoke of then, phantoms who pressed the riverbank on both sides and sang laments for things long lost. And another too, a ghost uniquely his: a Braque bargeman, advancing down the river, pushing a long black pole. He was coming for Dirk, that bargeman, coming on and on. And the black boat that he rode was low in the water, very full of emptiness.

So he stood up and pulled Gwen up with him, saying nothing except he wanted to move on. And they ran from the ghosts, back to the terrace where the gray aircar waited.

Then it took them up again, for a second interlude of wind and sky and silent thought. Gwen flew them farther south and then east, and Dirk watched and brooded and was quiet, and at intervals she would look over at him and, never meaning to, she would smile.

They came at last to the sea.

The city of the afternoon was built along the shore of a jagged bay where dark green waves crested to break against rotting wharfs. Once it was called Musquel-by-the-Sea, Gwen said as they circled above it in low, looping spirals. Though it had risen with the other cities of Worlorn, there was an air of the ancient about it. The streets of Musquel were broken-backed snakes, twisting cobbled alleys between leaning towers of multicolored bricks. It was a brick city. Blue bricks, red bricks, yellow, green, orange, bricks painted and striped and speckled, bricks slammed together with mortar as black as obsidian or as red as Satan above, slammed together in crazy clashing patterns. Even more gaudy were the painted canvas awnings of the merchant stalls that still lined the rambling streets and sat deserted on the abandoned wooden piers.

They landed on a pier that looked stronger than most, listened to the breakers for a time, and then strolled into the city. All empty-all dust. The streets were windswept and vacant, the domes and onion towers deserted, and the fat red sun above washed out all the once-gay colors. The bricks crumbled as well; dust was everywhere, multicolored and choking. Musquel was not a well-built city, and now it was as dead as Twelfth Dream.

"It's primitive," Dirk said, amid the remains. They stood at the juncture of two alleys where a deep well had been sunk and ringed with stone. Black water splashed below. "The whole feel is pre-space, and the signs say the same thing about the culture. Braque is like this, but not to this degree. They have a little of the old technology, bits and pieces where they aren't forbidden by religion. Musquel looks as if it had nothing."

She nodded, running her hand lightly along the top of the well, sending a stream of dust and pebbles to tumble into darkness. The jade-and-silver shone dull red on her left arm, catching Dirk's eye and making him wince and wonder once again. What was it? A slave's mark, or a token of love, what? But he pushed the thought aside, reluctant to consider it.

"The people who built Musquel had very little," she was saying. "They came from the Forgotten Colony, which is sometimes called Letheland by the other outworlders, and is always called Earth by its own people. On High Kavalaan the people themselves are called the Lostfolk. Who they are, how they got to their world, where they came from…" She smiled and shrugged. "No one knows. They were here before the Kavalars, though, and possibly before the Mao Tse-tung, which history records as the first human starship to breach the Tempter's Veil. The traditional Kavalars are certain all the Lostfolk are mockmen and Hrangan demons, but they have proved that they can interbreed with other human stocks from better-known worlds. But mostly the Forgotten Colony is a solitary globe, with not much interest in the rest of space. They have a Bronze Age culture, fisherfolk mostly, and they keep to themselves."

"I'm surprised they even came here at all then," Dirk said, "or bothered to build a city."

"Ah," she said, smiling and brushing loose more crumbling stone to fall into the well with tiny splashes. "But everyone had to build a city, all fourteen out-world cultures. That was the idea. Wolfheim had found the Forgotten Colony a few centuries ago, and so Wolfheim and Tober between them dragged the Lostfolk here. They had no starships of their own. Fisherfolk back on their homeworld so were they made fisherfolk here. Again it was Wolfheim, with the World of the Blackwine Ocean, who stocked the seas for them. They fished with woven nets from little boats, small black men and women bare to the waist, and they fried the catch in open pits for the visitors. They had bards and street singers to bring their alleys joy. Everyone stopped at Musquel during the Festival to listen to their odd myths and eat the fried fish and rent boats. But I don't think the Lostfolk loved the city much. Within a month of the Festival's end, every one of them was gone. They didn't even take down their awnings, and you can still find fish knives and clothing and a bone or two if you prowl through the buildings."

"Have you?"

"No. But I hear stories. Kirak Redsteel Cavis, the poet who lives in Larteyn, stayed here once and wandered and wrote some songs."

Dirk looked around, but there was nothing to see. Fading bricks and empty streets, unglassed windows like the sockets of a thousand blind eyes, painted awnings flapping loudly in the wind. Nothing. "Another city of ghosts," he commented.

"No," Gwen said. "No, I don't think so. The Lost-folk never gave their souls to Musquel, or to Worlorn. Their ghosts all went home with them."

Dirk shivered, and the city felt suddenly even emptier than it had a moment before. Emptier than empty. It was a strange idea. "Is Larteyn the only city that has any life at all?" he asked.

"No," she said, turning from the wall. They walked down the alley together, back in the direction of the waterfront. "No, I'll show you life now, if you'd like. Come on."

Airborne again, they were on another ride through the gathering gloom. They had consumed most of the afternoon reaching Musquel and wandering through it; Fat Satan was low on the western horizon, and one of the four yellow attendants had already sunk out of sight. It was twilight again, in fact as well as in appearance.

Very restless, Dirk took the controls this time, while Gwen sat at his side with her arm resting very lightly on his, giving curt directions. Most of the day was gone already, and he had so much to say, so much to ask, so many things to decide. Yet he had done none of it. Soon, though, he promised himself as he flew. Soon.

The aircar purred very softly, almost inaudibly, beneath his gentle touch. The ground grew dark below, and the kilometers raced by. Life, Gwen told him, would be found ahead, west, due west, toward the sunset.

The city of the evening was a single silver building with its feet in the rolling hills far beneath them and its head in the clouds two kilometers up. It was a city of light, its flanks metallic and windowless and shimmering with white-hot brilliance. Coruscating, flashing, the light climbed the vaulting shaft in waves, beginning at the far bottom where the city was anchored deep into the primal rock, then climbing and climbing and growing steadily brighter as the city rose and narrowed like the vast needle it was. Faster and higher the wave of light would ascend, up all that incredible climb, until it reached that cloud-crusted silver spire in a burst of blinding glory. And by then, three later waves had already begun to follow it up.

"Challenge," Gwen named the city as they approached. Its name and its intent. It was built by the urbanites of ai-Emerel, whose home cities are black steel towers set amid rolling plains. Each Emereli city was a nation-state, all in a single tower, and most Emereli never left the building they were born in (although those that did, Gwen said, often became the greatest wanderers in all of space). Challenge was all those Emereli towers in one, silver-white instead of black, twice as haughty and three times as tall-ai-Emerel's arcological philosophy embodied in metal and plastic-fusion-powered, automatic, computerized, and self-repairing. The Emereli boasted that it was immortal, a final proof that the glories of Fringe technology (or Emereli technology, at any rate) gleamed no less bright than that of Newholme or Avalon or even Old Earth itself.

There were dark horizontal slashes in the body of the city-airlot landing decks, each ten levels from the last. Dirk homed in on one, and when he reached it the black slit blazed into light for his approach. The opening was easily ten meters high; he had no trouble setting them down in the vast airlot on the hundredth level.

As they climbed out, a deep bass voice spoke to them from nowhere. "Welcome," it said. "I am the Voice of Challenge. May I entertain you?"

Dirk glanced back over his shoulder, and Gwen laughed at him. "The city brain," she explained. "A supercomputer. I told you this city still lived."

"May I entertain you?" the Voice repeated. It came from the walls.

"Maybe," Dirk said tentatively. "I think we're probably hungry. Can you feed us?"

The Voice did not answer, but a wall panel rolled back several meters away and a silent cushioned vehicle moved out and stopped before them. They got in and the vehicle moved off through another obliging wall.

They rolled on soft balloon tires through a succession of spotless white corridors, past countless rows of numbered doors, while music played soothingly around them. Dirk remarked briefly that the white lights were a harsh contrast to the dun evening sky of Worlorn, and instantly the corridors became a soft, muted blue.

The fat-tired car let them off at a restaurant, and a robowaiter who sounded much like the Voice offered them menus and wine lists. Both selections were extensive, not limited to cuisine from ai-Emerel or even to the outworlds, but including famous dishes and vintage wines from all the scattered worlds of the manrealm, including a few that Dirk had never heard of. Each dish had its world of origin printed in small type beneath it on the menu. They mulled the selection for a long time. Finally Dirk chose sand dragon broiled in butter, from Jamison's World, and Gwen ordered bluespawn-in-cheese, from Old Poseidon.

The wine they picked was clear and white. The robot brought it frozen in a cube of ice and cracked it free, and somehow it was still liquid and quite cold.

That, the Voice insisted, was the way it should be served. Dinner came on warm plates of silver and bone. Dirk pulled a clawed leg from his entree, peeled back the shell, and tasted the white, buttery meat.

"This is incredible," he said, nodding down at his plate. "I lived on Jamison's World for a while, and those Jamies do love their fresh-broiled sand dragon, and this is as good as any I had. Frozen? Frozen and shipped here? Hell, the Emereli must have needed a fleet to move all the food they'd need for this place."

"Not frozen," came the reply. It wasn't Gwen, though she stared at him with a bemused grin. The Voice answered him. "Before the Festival, the trading ship Blue Plate Special from ai-Emerel visited as many worlds as it could reach, collecting and preserving samples of their finest foodstuffs. The voyage, long planned, took some forty-three standard years, under four captains and as many crews. Finally the ship came to Worlorn, and in the kitchens and bio-tanks of Challenge the collected samples were cloned and recloned to feed the multitudes. Thus were the fishes and loaves multiplied by no false prophet but by the scientists of ai-Emerel."

"It sounds very smug," Gwen said with a giggle.

"It sounds like a set speech," Dirk said. Then he shrugged and went back to his dinner, as did Gwen. The two of them ate alone, except for their robowaiter and the Voice, in the center of the restaurant built to hold hundreds. All around them, empty but immaculate, other tables sat waiting with dark red tablecloths and bright silver dinnerware. The customers were gone a decade ago; but the Voice and the city had infinite patience.

Afterwards, over coffee (black and thick with cream and spices, a blend from Avalon of fond memory), Dirk felt mellow and relaxed, perhaps more at ease than he had been since coming to Worlorn. Jaan Vikary and the jade-and-silver-it gleamed dark and beautiful in the dim lights of the restaurant, exquisitely wrought yet oddly drained of menace and meaning-had shrank somehow in importance now that he was back with Gwen. Across from him, sipping from a white china mug and smiling her dreamy faraway smile, she looked very approachable, very like the Jenny that he had known and loved once, the lady of the whisperjewel.

"Nice," he said, nodding, meaning everything around them.

And Gwen nodded back at him. "Nice," she agreed, smiling, and Dirk ached for her, Guinevere of the wide green eyes and the endless black hair, she who had cared, his lost soulmate.

He leaned forward and stared down into his cup. There were no omens in the coffee. He had to talk to her. "It's all been nice tonight," he said. "Like Avalon."

When she murmured, agreeing yet again, he continued. "Is there anything left, Gwen?"

She regarded him levelly and sipped at her coffee. "Not a fair question, Dirk, you know that. There is always something left. If what you had was real to begin with. If not, well, then it doesn't matter. But if it was real, then something, a chunk of love, a cup of hate, despair, resentment, lust. Whatever. But something."

"I don't know," Dirk t'Larien said, sighing. His eyes looked down and inward. "Maybe you're the only reality I've had, then."

"Sad," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I guess." His eyes came up. "I've got a lot left, Gwen. Love, hate, resentment, all of that. Like you said. Lust." He laughed.

She only smiled. "Sad," she said again.

He was not willing to let it go. "And you? Something, Gwen?"

"Yes. Can't deny it. Something. And it's been growing, off and on." "Love?" "You're pressing," she said gently, setting down her cup. The robowaiter at her elbow filled it again, already creamed and spiced. "I asked you not to."

"I have to," he said. "Hard enough to be so close to you, and talk about Worlorn or Kavalar customs or even hunters. That's not what I want to talk about!"

"I know. Two old lovers standing together talking. That's a common situation and a common strain. Both of them afraid, not knowing whether to try to open old gates again, not knowing if the other one wants them to reawaken those sleeping thoughts or let them go. Every time I think a thought of Avalon and almost say it, I wonder, Does he want me to talk about it or is he praying that I won't?"

"I suppose that depends on what you were going to say. Once I tried to start it all again. Remember? Just afterwards. I sent you my whisperjewel. You never answered, never came." His voice was even, with a faint tinge of reproach and regret, but no anger. Somehow he had lost his anger, just for now.

"Did you ever think why?", Gwen said. "I got the jewel and cried. I was still alone then, hadn't met Jaan yet, and I wanted someone so badly. I would have gone back to you if you'd called me."

"I did call you. You didn't come."

A grim smile. "Ah, Dirk. The whisperjewel came in a small box, and taped to it was a note. 'Please,' the note said, 'come back to me now. I need you, Jenny.' That was what it said. I cried and cried. If you'd only written 'Gwen,' if you'd only loved Gwen, me. But no, it was always Jenny, even afterwards, even then."

Dirk remembered, and winced. "Yes," he admitted after a short silence. "I guess I did write that. I'm sorry. I never understood. But I do now. Is it too late?"

"I said so. In the woods. Too late, Dirk, it's all dead. You'll hurt us if you press."

"All dead? You said something was left, and growing. Just now you said it. Make up your mind, Gwen. I don't want to hurt you, or me. But I want-" "I know what you want. It can't be. It's gone."

"Why?" he asked. He pointed across the table at her bracelet. "Because of that? Jade-and-silver forever and ever, is that it?"

"Maybe," she said. Her voice faltered, uncertain. "I don't know. We… that is, I…"

Dirk remembered all the things that Ruark had told him. "I know it's not easy to talk about," he said carefully, gently. "And I promised to wait. But some things can't wait. You said Jaan is your husband, right? What is Garse? What does betheyn mean?"

"Heldwife," she said. "But you don't understand. Jaan is different than other Kavalars, stronger and wiser and more decent. He is changing things, he alone. The old ties, of betheyn to highbond, our ties are not like that. Jaan doesn't believe that, no more than he believes in hunting mockmen."

"He believes in High Kavalaan," Dirk said, "and in code duello. Maybe he's atypical, but he's still a Kavalar."

It was the wrong thing to say. Gwen only grinned at him and rallied. "Pfui," she said. "Now you sound like Arkin."

"Do I? Maybe Arkin is right, though. One other thing. You say Jaan doesn't believe in many of the old ways, right?" Gwen nodded.

"Fine. What about Garse, then? I haven't had as much a chance to talk to him. Garse is equally enlightened, no doubt?"

That stopped her. "Garse…" she began. She stopped and shook her head dubiously. "Well, Garse is more conservative."

"Yes," said Dirk. Suddenly he seemed to have it all. "Yes, I think he is, and that's a big part of your problem, isn't it? On High Kavalaan it's not man and woman. No, it's man and man and maybe woman, but even then she's not so terribly important. You may love Jaan, but you don't care for Garse Janacek all that damn much, do you?" "I feel a lot of affection for-"

"Do you?"

Gwen's face went hard. "Stop it," she said.

Her voice frightened him. He drew back, suddenly and sickeningly aware of the way he had been leaning across the table, pressing, pushing, jabbing, attacking, and taunting her, he who had come to care and to help. "I'm sorry," he blurted.

Silence. She was staring at him, her lower lip trembling, while she drew herself together and gathered strength. "You're right," she finally said. "Partly, anyway. I'm not… well… not entirely happy with my lot." She gave a forced ironic chuckle. "I guess I fool myself a lot. A bad idea, fooling yourself. Everyone does it, though, everyone. I wear the jade-and-silver and tell myself I'm more than a heldwife, more than other Kavalar women. Why? Just because Jaan says so? Jaan Vikary is a good man, Dirk, really he is, in many ways the best man I have ever known. I did love him, maybe I still do. I don't know. I'm very confused right now. But whether I love him or not, I owe him. Debt and obligation, those are the Kavalar bonds. Love is only something Jaan picked up on Avalon, and I'm not quite sure he's mastered it yet, either. I would have been his teyn, if I could. But he already had a teyn. Besides, not even Jaan would go that far against the customs of his world. You heard what he said about the duels-and all because he searched some old computer banks and found out one of their Kavalar folk heroes had tits." She smiled grimly. "Imagine what would happen if he took me to teyn! He would lose everything, just everything. Ironjade is relatively tolerant, yes, but it will be centuries before any holdfast is ready for that. No woman has ever worn the iron-and-glowstone."

"Why?" Dirk said. "I don't understand. All of you keep making these comments-about breeding women and heldwives and women hiding in caves afraid to come out, all that stuff. And I keep not quite believing it. How did High Kavalaan get so twisted up anyway? What do they have against women? Why is it so critical that the founder of Ironjade was female? Lots of people are, you know."

Gwen gave him a wan smile and rubbed her temples gently with her fingertips, as if she had a headache she was hoping to massage away. "You should have let Jaan finish," she said. "Then you'd know as much as we do. He was only warming up. He hadn't even gotten to the Sorrowing Plague." She sighed. "It is all a very long story, Dirk, and right now I don't have the goddamn energy. Wait till we get back to Larteyn. I'll hunt up a copy of Jaan's thesis and you can read it all for yourself."

"All right," Dirk said. "But there are a few things I'm not going to be able to read in any thesis. A few minutes ago you said you weren't sure if you loved Jaan anymore. You certainly don't love High Kavalaan. I think you hate Garse. So why are you doing all this to yourself?"

"You have a way of asking nasty questions," she said sourly. "But before I answer, let me correct you on a few points. I may hate Garse, as you say. Sometimes I'm quite sure that I hate Garse, though it would kill Jaan to hear me say that. At other times, however– I wasn't lying before when I told you that I feel considerable affection for him. When I first arrived on High Kavalaan, I was as dewy-eyed and innocent and vulnerable as I could be. Jaan had explained everything to me beforehand, of course, very patiently, very thoroughly, and I had accepted it. I was from Avalon, after all, and you can't get more sophisticated than Avalon, can you? Not unless you're an Earther. I'd studied all the weird cultures humanity has spread among the stars, and I knew that anyone who steps into a starship has got to be prepared to adapt to widely different social systems and moralities. I knew that sexual-familial customs vary and that Avalon was not necessarily wiser than High Kavalaan in that area. I was very wise, I thought.

"But I wasn't ready for the Kavalars, oh no. As long as I live I will never forget a second of the fear and the trauma of my first day and night in the holdfasts of Ironjade, as Jaan Vikary's betheyn. Especially the first night." She laughed. "Jaan had warned me, of course, and– Hell, I just wasn't ready to be shared. What can I say? It was bad, but I lived. Garse helped. He was honestly concerned for me, and very much for Jaan. You might even say he was tender. I confided in him; he listened and cared. And the next morning the verbal abuse started. I was frightened and hurt; Jaan was baffled and gloriously angry. He threw Garse halfway across the room the first time he called me betheyn-bitch. Garse was quiet for a little while after that. He rests fairly often, but he never stops. He is truly remarkable, in a way. He would challenge and kill any Kavalar who insulted me half so badly as he does. He knows that his jokes enrage Jaan and provoke terrible quarrels-or at least they did. By now Jaan has become dulled to it all. Yet he persists. Maybe he can't help himself, or maybe he honestly loathes me, or maybe he just enjoys inflicting pain. If so, I haven't given him much joy these past few years. One of the first things I decided was that I wasn't going to let him make me cry anymore. I haven't. Even when he comes out and says something that makes me want to split his head with an axe, I just smile and grit my teeth and try to think of something unpleasant to say back to him. Once or twice I've managed to throw him off his stride. Usually he leaves me feeling like a crushed bug.

"Yet, in spite of everything, there are other moments as well. Truces, little ceasefires in our never-ending war, times of surprising warmth and compassion. Many of them at night. They always shock me when they come. They're too intense. Once, believe it or not, I told Garse I loved him. He laughed at me. He did not love me, he said loudly, rather I was cro-betheyn to him and he treated me as he was obliged to treat me by the bond that existed between us. That was the last time I even came close to crying. I fought and I fought, and I won. I did not cry. I just shouted something at him and rushed out into the corridor. We lived underground, you know. Everyone lives underground on High Kavalaan. I wasn't wearing much except my bracelet, and I ran around crazy, and finally this man tried to stop me-a drunk, an idiot, a blind man who could not see the jade-and-silver, I don't know. I was so furious I pulled his sidearm out of its holster and smashed him across the face with it, the first time I'd ever hit another human being in anger, and just then Jaan and Garse arrived. Jaan seemed calm, but he was very upset. Garse was almost happy, and spoiling for a fight. As if the man I'd overpowered hadn't been insulted enough, Garse had to tell me that I should pick up all the teeth I'd knocked out and hand them back, that I had quite enough already. They were lucky to avoid a duel over that comment."

"How the hell did you ever get involved in a situation like this, Gwen?" Dirk demanded. He was struggling to keep his voice from breaking. He was angry with her, hurt for her, and yet oddly-or perhaps not so oddly-elated. It was all true, everything Ruark had told him. The Kimdissi was her good friend and her confidant; no wonder she had sent for him. Her life was a misery, she was a slave, and he could set it right, him. "You must have had some idea what it would be like."

She shrugged. "I lied to myself," she said, "and I let Jaan lie to me, although I think he honestly believes all the lovely falsehoods he tells me. If I had it to do. over– But I don't. I was ready for him, Dirk, and I needed him, and I loved him. And he had no iron-and-fire to give me. That he had given already, so he gave me jade-and-silver, and I took it just to be near him, with only the vaguest knowledge of what it meant. I'd lost you not long before. I didn't want Jaan to go as well. So I put on the pretty little bracelet and said very loudly, 'I am more than betheyn,' as if that made a difference. Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be. To Garse, I am Jaan's betheyn and his cro-betheyn, and that is all. The names define the bonds and duties. What more could there possibly be? To every other Kavalar it is the same. When I try to grow, to step beyond the name, Garse is there, angry, shouting betheyn! at me. Jaan is different, only Jaan, and sometimes I can't help myself and I begin to wonder how he really feels."

Her hands came up on the tablecloth and became two small fists, side by side. "The same damn thing, Dirk. You wanted to make me into Jenny, and I saved myself by rejecting the name. But like a fool I took the jade-and-silver, and now I am heldwife and all the denials I can utter won't change that. The same damn thing!" Her voice was shrill, her fists clutched so tightly the knuckles were turning white.

"We can change it," Dirk said quickly. "Come back to me." He sounded inane, hopeful, despairing, triumphant, concerned; his tone was everything at once.

At first Gwen did not answer. Finger by finger, very slowly, she unclenched her fists and stared at her hands solemnly, breathing deeply, turning her hands over and over again as if they were some strange artifacts that had been set before her for inspection. Then she put them flat on the table and pushed, rising to her feet. "Why?" she said, and the calm control had come back to her voice. "Why, Dirk? So you can make me Jenny again? Is that why? Because I loved you once, because something may be left?"

"Yes! No, I mean. You confuse me." He rose too.

She smiled. "Ah, but I loved Jaan once also, more recently than you. And with him now there are other ties, all the obligations of jade-and-silver. With you, well, only memories, Dirk." When he did not reply– he stood and waited-Gwen started toward the door. He followed her.

The robowaiter intercepted them and blocked the way, its face a featureless metal ovoid. "The charge," it said. "I require the number of your Festival accounts."

Gwen frowned. "Larteyn billing, Ironjade 797-742-677," she snapped. "Register both meals to that number."

"Registered," the robot said as it moved out of their way. Behind them the restaurant went dark.

The Voice had their car waiting for them. Gwen told it to take them back to the airlot, and it set off through corridors that suddenly swam with cheerful colors and happy music. "The damn computer registered tension in our voices," she said, a little angrily. "Now it's trying to cheer us up."

"It's not doing a very good job," Dirk said, but he smiled as he said it. Then, "Thank you for the meal. I converted my standards to Festival scrip before I arrived, but it didn't come to much, I'm afraid."

"Ironjade is not poor," Gwen said. "And there isn't much to pay for on Worlorn, in any case."

"Hmm. Yes. I never thought there would be, until now."

"Festival programming," Gwen said. "This is the only city that still runs that way. The others are all shut down. Once a year ai-Emerel sends a man to clear all charges from the banks. Although soon it will reach the point where the trip will cost more than he picks up."

"I'm surprised that it doesn't already."

"Voice!" she said. "How many people live in Challenge today?"

The walls answered. "Presently I have three hundred and nine legal residents and forty-two guests, including yourselves. You may, if you wish, become residents. The charge is quite reasonable."

"Three hundred nine?" Dirk said. "Where?"

"Challenge was built to hold twenty million," Gwen said. "You can hardly expect to run into them, but they're here. In the other cities as well, though not as many as in Challenge. The living is easiest here. The dying will be easy too, if the highbonds of Braith ever think to begin hunting the cities instead of the wild. That has always been Jaan's great fear."

"Who are they?" Dirk demanded, curious. "How do they live? I don't understand at all. Doesn't Challenge lose a fortune every day?"

"Yes. A fortune in energy, wasted, squandered. But that was the point of Challenge and Larteyn and the whole Festival. Waste, defiant waste, to prove that the Fringe was rich and strong, waste on a grand scale such as the manrealm had never before known, a whole planet shaped and then abandoned. You see? As for Challenge, well, if truth be known, its life is all empty motion now. It powers itself from fusion reactors and throws off the energy in fireworks no one sees. It harvests tons of food every day with its huge farming mechs, but no one eats except the handful– hermits, religious cultists, lost children turned savage, whatever dregs remain from the Festival. It still sends a boat to Musquel every day to pick up fish. There are never any fish, of course."

"The Voice doesn't rewrite the program?"

"Ah, the crux of the matter! The Voice is an idiot. It can't really think, can't program itself. Oh, yes, the Emereli wanted to impress people, and the Voice is big, to be sure. But really it's very primitive compared to the Academy computers on Avalon or the Artificial Intelligences of Old Earth. It can't think, or change very well. It does what it was told, and the Emereli told it to go on, to withstand the cold as long as it could. It will."

She looked at Dirk. "Like you," she said, "it keeps on long after its persistence has lost point and meaning, it keeps on pushing-for nothing-after everything is dead."

"Oh?" said Dirk. "But, until everything is dead, you have to push. That's the point, Gwen. There is no other way, is there? I rather admire the city, even if it is an overgrown idiot like you say."

She shook her head. "You would."

"There's more," he said. "You bury everything too soon, Gwen. Worlorn may be dying, but it isn't dead yet. And us, well, we don't have to be dead either. What you said back at the restaurant, about Jaan and me, I think you should think about it. Decide what's left, for me, for him. How heavy that bracelet weighs on your arm"-he pointed-'"and what name you like best, or rather who is more likely to give you your own name. You see? Then tell me what's dead and what's alive!"

He felt very "satisfied with the little speech. Surely, he thought, she could see that he could give up Jenny and let her be Gwen far more easily than Jaantony Vikary could make her a female teyn instead of a mere betheyn. It seemed very clear. But she only looked at him, saying nothing, until they reached the airlot.

Then she got out of the vehicle. "When the four of us chose where we would live on Worlorn, Garse and Jaan voted for Larteyn and Arkin for Twelfth Dream," she said. "I voted for neither. Nor for Challenge, for all its life. I don't like living in a warren. You want to know what's dead and what's alive? Come, then, I'll show you my city."

Then they were outside once more, Gwen tight-lipped and silent behind the controls, the sudden cold of the night air all around them, Challenge's shining shaft vanishing behind. Now it was deep darkness again, as it had been on the night when the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies had brought Dirk t'Larien to Worlorn. Only a dozen lonely stars swung through the sky, and half of those were hidden by the churning clouds. The suns had all set.

The city of the night was vast and intricate, with only a few scattered lights to pierce the darkness it was set in, as a pale jewel is set on soft black felt. Alone among the cities it stood in the wild beyond the mountainwall, and it belonged there, in the forests of chokers and ghost trees and blue widowers. From the dark of the wood, its slim white towers rose wraithlike toward the stars, linked by graceful spun bridges that glittered like frozen spiderwebs. Low domes stood lonely vigils amid a network of canals whose waters caught the tower lights and the twinkle of infrequent far-off stars, and ringing the city were a number of strange buildings that looked like thin-fleshed angular hands clutching up at the sky. The trees, such as there were, were outworld trees; there was no grass, only thick carpets of dimly glowing phosphorescent moss.

And the city had a song.

It was like no music Dirk had ever heard. It was eerie and wild and almost inhuman, and it rose and fell and shifted constantly. It was a dark symphony of the void, of starless nights and troubled dreams. It was made of moans and whispers and howls, and a strange low note that could only be the sound of sadness. For all of this, it was music.

Dirk looked at Gwen, wonder in his eyes. "How?"

She was listening as she flew, but his question tore her loose from the drifting strains, and she smiled faintly. "Darkdawn built this city, and the Darklings are a strange people. There is a gap in the mountains. Their weather wardens made the winds blow through it. Then they built the spires, and in the crest of each there is an aperture. The wind plays the city like an instrument. The same song, over and over. The weather control devices shift the winds, and with each shift, some towers sound their notes while others fall silent.

"The music-the symphony was written on Dark-dawn, centuries ago, by a composer named Lamiya-Bailis. A computer plays it, they say, by running the wind machines. The odd thing about it is that the Darklings never used computers much and have very little of the technology. Another story was popular during the days of the Festival. A legend, say. It claimed that Darkdawn was a world always perilously close to the edge of sanity, and that the music of Lamiya-Bailis, the greatest of the Darkling dreamers, pushed the whole culture over into madness and despair. In punishment, they say, her brain was kept alive, and can now be found deep under the mountains of Worlorn, hooked up to the wind machines and playing her own masterpiece over and over, forever." She shivered. "Or at least until the atmosphere freezes. Even the weather wardens of Darkdawn can't stop that."

"It's…" Dirk, lost in the song, could find no words. "It fits, somehow," he finally said. "A song for Worlorn."

"It fits now," Gwen said. "It's a song of twilight and the coming of night, with no dawn again, ever. A song of endings. In the high day of the Festival the song was out of place. Kryne Lamiya-that was this city's name, Kryne Lamiya, although it was often called the Siren City, in much the same way that Larteyn was called the Firefort-well, it was never a popular place. It looks big, but it isn't really. It was built to house only a hundred thousand, and it was never more than a quarter full. Like Darkdawn itself, I suppose. How many travelers ever go to Darkdawn, right on the edge of the Great Black Sea? And how many go in whiter, when the Darkdawn sky is almost totally empty, with nothing to see by but the light of a few far galaxies? Not many. It takes a peculiar sort of person for that. Here too, to love Kryne Lamiya. People said the song disturbed them. And it never stopped. The Darklings didn't even soundproof the sleeping rooms."

Dirk said nothing. He was looking at the fairy spires and listening to them sing.

"Do you want to land?" Gwen asked.

He nodded, and she spiraled down. They found an open landing slit in the side of one of the towers. Unlike the airlots in Challenge and Twelfth Dream, this one was not completely empty. Two other aircars rested there, a stub-winged red sportster and a tiny black-and-silver teardrop, both of them long abandoned. The windblown dust was thick on their hoods and canopies, and the cushions inside the sportster had gone to rot. Out of curiosity, Dirk tried them both. The sportster was dead, burned-out, its power vanished years ago. But the little teardrop still warmed under his touch, and the control panel lit up and flickered, showing that a small reserve of power was left. The huge gray manta from High Kavalaan was bigger and heavier than the two derelicts combined.

From the airlot they went out into a long gallery where gray-and-white light-murals swirled and spun in dim patterns that matched the echoing music. Then they climbed to a balcony they had spied when coming in.

Outside, the music was all around them, calling to them with unearthly voices, touching them and playing with their hair, booming and beckoning like passion-thunder. Dirk took Gwen's hand in his own and listened as he stared blindly out across the towers and domes and canals toward the forests and the mountains beyond. The music-wind seemed to pull at him as he stood there. It spoke to him softly, urging him to jump, it seemed-to end it all, all the silly and undignified and ultimately meaningless futility that he called his life.

Gwen saw it in his eyes. She squeezed his hand, and when he looked at her she said, "During the Festival, more than two hundred people committed suicide in Kryne Lamiya. Ten times the number of any other city. Despite the fact that this city had the smallest population of all."

Dirk nodded. "Yes. I can feel it. The music."

"A celebration of death," Gwen said. "Yet, you know, the Siren City itself is not dead, not like Musquel or Twelfth Dream at all. It still lives, stubbornly, if only to exalt despair and glorify the emptiness of the very life it clings to. Strange, eh?"

"Why would they build such a place? It's beautiful, but-"

"I have a theory," Gwen said. "The Darklings are black-humored nihilists, chiefly, and I think that Kryne Lamiya is their bitter joke on High Kavalaan and Wolfheim and Tober and the other worlds that pushed so hard for the Festival of the Fringe. The Darklings came, all right, and they built a city that said it was all worthless. All worthless-the Festival, human civilization, life itself. Think of it! What a trap for a smug tourist to walk into!" She threw back her head and began to laugh wildly, and Dirk briefly felt a sudden irrational fear, as if his Gwen had gone mad.

"And you wanted to live here?" he said.

Her laughter faded as abruptly as it had begun; the wind snatched it from her. Away on their right, a needle-tower sounded a brief piercing note that wavered like the wail of an animal in pain. Their own tower answered with the low mournful moan of a foghorn, lingering, lingering. The music swirled around them. Far off, Dirk thought he could hear the pounding of a single drum, short dull booms, evenly spaced.

"Yes," Gwen said. "I wanted to live here." The foghorn faded; four reedy spires across the canal, tied together by drooping bridges, began to ululate wildly, each note higher than the one preceding, until they finally climbed up into the inaudible. The drum persisted, unchanging: boom, boom, boom.

Dirk sighed. "I understand," he said, in a voice very tired. "I would live here too, I suppose, though I wonder how long I'd live if I did. Braque was a little like this, the faintest echo, mostly at night. Maybe that was why I lived there. I had gotten very weary, Gwen. Very. I guess I'd given up. In the old days, you know, I was always searching-for love, for fairy gold, for the secrets of the universe, whatever. But after you left me… I don't know, everything went wrong, turned sour in my mouth. And when something did go right, I'd find it didn't matter, didn't make any difference. It was all empty. I tried and tried, but all I got was tired and apathetic and cynical. Maybe that was why I came here. You… well, I was better then, when I was with you. I hadn't given up on quite so many things. I thought that maybe, if I found you again, maybe I could find me again as well. It hasn't worked quite that way. I don't know that it's working at all."

"Listen to Lamiya-Bailis," Gwen said, "and her music will tell you that nothing works, that nothing means anything. I did want to live here', you know. I voted

… well, I didn't plan to vote this way, but we were talking it over when we first landed, and it just came out. It scared me. Maybe you and I are still a lot alike, Dirk. I've gotten tired too. Mostly it doesn't show. I have my work to keep me busy, and Arkin is my friend, and Jaan loves me. But then I come here… or sometimes I just slow down and think a bit too long, and then I wonder. It's not enough, the things I have. Not what I wanted."

She turned toward him and took his hand in both of hers. "Yes, I've thought of you. I've thought that things were better when you and I were together back on Avalon, and I've thought that maybe it was still you I loved and not Jaan, and I've thought that you and I could bring the magic back, make it all make sense again. But don't you see? It isn't so, Dirk, and all your pushing won't make it so. Listen to the city, listen to Kryne Lamiya. There's your truth. You think about me, and I sometimes about you, only because it's dead between us. That's the only reason it seems better. Happiness yesterday and happiness tomorrow, but never today, Dirk. It can't be, because it's only an illusion after all, and illusions only look real from a distance. We're over, my dreamy lost love, over, and that's the best thing of all, because it's the only thing that makes it good."

She was weeping; slow tears moved trembling down her cheeks. Kryne Lamiya wept with her, the towers crying their lament. But it mocked her too, as if to say, Yes, I see your grief, but grief has no more meaning than anything else, pain is as empty as pleasure. The spires wailed, thin gratings laughed insanely, and the low far-off drum went: boom, boom, boom.

Again, more strongly this time, Dirk wanted to jump -off the balcony toward the pale stone and dark canals below. A dizzy fall, and then rest at last. But the city sang him for a fool: Rest? it sang, there is no rest in death. Only nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The drum, the winds, the wailings. He trembled, still holding

Gwen's hands. He looked down toward the ground below.

Something was moving down the canal. Bobbing and floating, drifting easily, coming toward him. A black barge, with a solitary pole-man. "No," he said.

Gwen blinked. "No?" she repeated.

And suddenly the words came, the words that the other Dirk t'Larien would have said to his Jenny, and the words were in his mouth, and though he was no longer quite sure that he could believe them, he found himself saying them all the same. "No!" he said, all but shouting it at the city, throwing a sudden rage back at the mocking music of Kryne Lamiya. "Damn it, Gwen, all of us have something of this city in us, yes. The test is how we meet it. All this is frightening"-he let loose of her hands and gestured out at the darkness, the sweep of his hand taking in everything-"what it says is frightening, and worse is the fear you get when part of you agrees, when you feel that it's all true, that you belong here. But what do you do about it? If you're weak, you ignore it. Pretend it doesn't exist, you know, and maybe it'll go away. Busy yourself in the daylight with trivial tasks, and never think about the darkness outside. That's the way you let it win, Gwen. In the end it swallows you and all your trivia, and you and the other fools lie to each other blithely and welcome it. You can't be like that, Gwen, you can't be. You have to try. You're an ecologist, right? What's ecology all about? Life! You have to be on the side of life, everything you are says so. This city, this damn bone-white city with its death hymn, denies everything you believe in, everything you are. If you're strong, you'll face it and fight it and call it by name. Defy it."

Gwen had stopped weeping. "It is no use," she said, shaking her head.

"You're wrong," he answered. "About this city, and about us. It's all tied up, you see? You say you want to live here? Fine! Live here! To live in this city would be a victory all in itself, a philosophical victory. But live here because you know that life itself refutes

Lamiya-Bailis, live here and laugh at this absurd music of hers, don't live here and agree with this damn wailing lie." He took her hand again.

"I don't know," she said.

"I do," he said, lying.

"Do you really think that… that we could make it work again? Better than before?"

"You won't be Jenny," he promised. "Never again."

"I don't know," she repeated in a low whisper.

He took her face in both hands and raised it so her eyes looked at his. He kissed her, very lightly, the barest driest touching of their lips. Kryne Lamiya moaned. The foghorn sounded deep and sorrowing around them, the distant towers screamed and keened, and the solitary drum kept up its dull, meaningless booming.

After the kiss they stood amid the music and stared at each other. "Gwen," he finally said, in a voice not one half as strong and sure as it had been just a moment before. "I don't know either, I guess. But maybe it would be worth it just to try…"

"Maybe," she said, and her wide green eyes looked away and down again. "It would be hard, Dirk. And there's Jaan to think of, and Garse, so many problems. And we don't even know if it would be worth it. We don't know if it will make the slightest bit of difference."

"No, we don't," he said. "Lots of times in these last few years I've decided that it doesn't matter, that it's not worth trying. I don't feel good then, just tired, endlessly tired. Gwen, if we don't try, we'll never know."

She nodded. "Maybe," she said, and nothing more. The wind blew cold and strong; the music of the Darkling madness rose and fell. They went inside, then down the stairs from the balcony, past the fading, flickering walls of gray-white light, to where the solid sanity of their aircar rested, waiting to carry them back to Larteyn.