Dying of the Light

Chapter 13

The run from the hunters' camp to the wrecked aircar had covered less than a kilometer, and it had seemed to Dirk to take forever. The walk back took twice as long. He was certain, afterwards, that he was not entirely conscious as he walked. What memories he retained were only pieces. Stumbling and falling, tearing his pants open at the knee. A swift-running cold stream where he stopped and washed the crusted blood from his face and took off his boots and plunged his feet into the icy rushing water until they had gone numb on him. Climbing over the tilted ridge of slate where he had fallen previously. A dark cave mouth staring at him, a promise of sleep and rest he did not heed. Losing his way, searching for the sun, finding it and following it, losing his way again. Tree-spooks flitting from branch to branch among the chokers, chittering in little voices. Dead white husks peering down at him from waxy limbs. Far off, the banshee wail, lingering, haunting. Stumbling again, half in clumsiness and half in fear. The baton rolling away from him, down a short sharp incline, lost among thick bushes that he did not bother to search. Walking, walking, putting one foot in front of the other, leaning on the baton and on the laser after the baton was gone, his feet aching, aching. The banshee again, closer, almost overhead. Looking up through a tapestry of branches into the gloomy sky, trying to spot it, failing. Walking, hurting. He remembered all those things, and knew that surely there were other things between them, connecting them one with the other, but those he did not remember. Perhaps he slept as he walked. But he did not stop walking.

It was late afternoon when he reached the small sandy area near the green lake. The aircars were still there, one twisted and lying deep in the water, the other three on the sand. The camp was deserted.

One of the cars-Lorimaar's huge domed vehicle– had a hound guarding it, bound to the door on a long black chain. The creature was lying down, but it rose at Dirk's approach and bared its teeth and growled at him. He found himself laughing wildly, insanely. He had walked all this long way, walked and walked and walked, and here was a dog chained to an aircar growling at him. He could have had that without ever moving half a meter.

He detoured carefully around the perimeter of the dog's chain and went to Janacek's car and climbed in and sealed the heavy door behind him. The cabin was dark and stuffy and cramped. After freezing for so long, he felt almost uncomfortably hot. He wanted to lie down, to sleep. But first he made himself search the supply locker, and he found a medical kit and pulled it out and opened it. It was full of pills and bandages and sprays. He wished he had thought to tell Janacek to drop the kit near the wreck, along with his laser. He knew that he should go outside and wash methodically in the lake and clean all the filth out of his wounds before trying to bandage them up, but the massive armored door looked too heavy to move again just now.

He pulled off his boots and stripped away his jacket and shirt and sprayed his swollen feet and his left arm with a powder that was supposed to prevent infection, or fight it, or something. He was too tired to read the instructions all the way through. Then he looked at the pills. He took two fever pills and four painkillers and two antibiotics, swallowing them dry because he had no water on hand.

Afterwards he lay down on the metal floorplates between the seats. Sleep came instantly.

He woke dry-mouthed and trembling and very nervous, some aftereffect of the pills. But he was thinking again, and his brow was cool (though covered with a clammy sweat) when he touched it with the back of his hand, and his feet were less painful than before. The swelling in his arm had subsided a bit also, although it was still bigger than normal and quite stiff. He put on his burned, blood-crusted shirt again and his jacket over it, gathered up the medkit, and went outside.

It was dusk; the western sky was all red and orange, and two small yellow suns burned intensely against the clouds of sunset. The Braiths had not returned. Jaan Vikary, armed and clothed and experienced, clearly knew how to run a good deal better than Dirk.

He walked across the sand to the lake. The water was frigid, but he got used to it soon enough, and the mud squished soothingly between his toes. He stripped and ducked his head and washed, then took out the medkit and did everything he should have done earlier, cleaning and bandaging his feet before slipping back into Pyr's boots, scrubbing out the worst of his wounds with disinfectant, dabbing at the inflamed bite marks on his arm with a salve that claimed to minimize allergic reactions. He swallowed another handful of painkillers as well, this time washing them down with fresh water scooped from the lake.

Night was settling quickly by the time he was dressed again. The Braith hound was lying by Lorimaar's aircar, gnawing at a chunk of meat, but there was no sign of its masters. Dirk walked carefully around the beast to the third aircar, the one belonging to Pyr and his teyn. He had decided that he could help himself to their supplies with relative impunity; the other Braiths, returning to an empty camp, would never know that anything had been taken.

Inside he found a whole rack of weapons: four laser rifles emblazoned with the familiar white wolf's head, a brace of dueling swords, knives, a silver throwing-blade two and a half meters long and an empty bracket beside it. And two pistols thrown carelessly onto a seat. He also found a locker of fresh clothing, and changed eagerly, stuffing his torn garments out of sight. The clothes fit badly, but felt very good. He helped himself to a mesh-steel belt, one of the side-arms, and a knee-length chameleon cloth greatcoat.

When he lifted the coat from where it had been hanging, it revealed another storage locker. Dirk yanked it open. Inside were four familiar boots and Gwen's sky-scoots. Pyr and his teyn had seemingly claimed them as booty.

Dirk smiled. He had never intended to take an air-car; the chances were too good that the hunters would see him at once, particularly if he overtook them by day. But he had not been thrilled by the prospect of walking, either. The scoots were the perfect answer. He wasted no time changing into the larger pair of boots, though he had to leave them unlaced after he got his bandaged feet inside.

Food was stored in the same locker as the scoots; protein bars, sticks of dried meat, a small chunk of crusty cheese. Dirk ate the cheese and shoved the rest into a backpack along with the second sky-scoot. He strapped a compass around his right wrist, slung the pack between his shoulder blades, and climbed outside to spread the silver-metal tissue on the sand.

It was full dark. His beacon of the night before, High Kavalaar's star, burned bright and red and lonely above the forest. Dirk saw it and smiled. Tonight it would be no guidepost; he had guessed that Jaan Vikary would make straight for Kryne Lamiya, in the opposite direction. But the star still seemed a friend.

He took up a fresh-charged laser rifle and touched the wafer in his palm and lifted. Behind him the Braith hound stood and set to howling.

He flew all night, keeping several meters above the treetops, consulting his compass from time to time and studying the stars. There was very little to see. Beneath him the forest rolled unending, black and hidden, with no fires or lights to break its darkness. At times it seemed that he was standing still, and he was reminded of his last trip by sky-scoot, through Worlorn's abandoned subways.

The wind was his constant companion; it came from behind him, strong to his back, and he gratefully accepted the extra speed it lent him. It whipped the tail of his coat between his legs as he flew, and pushed his long hair time and time again into his eyes, and he heard it moving in the forest beneath him, making the more pliant trees bend and rustle, shaking the sterner ones with cold savage hands until their last leaves fell away. Only the chokers seemed impervious, but there were a lot of chokers. The wind made a thin wild sound as it fought through those tangled limbs. The sound fit; this was the wind of Kryne Lamiya, Dirk knew, born within the mountains and controlled by the Darkdawn weather machines, moving toward its destiny. Ahead the white towers were waiting, and the frozen hands beckoned it onward.

There were other noises as well: bounding movements in the woods below, the hoots of nocturnal hunters, the rushing of a small thin river, the thunder of a rapids. Several times Dirk heard the high squeaking chitters of tree-spooks and saw small forms darting from limb to limb. His eyes and his ears became strangely sensitive. He passed over a wide lake and heard something splashing in the black waters, then several somethings. Far off, on the shore, a short honking bellow rattled the night. And behind him an answering challenge; a long, ululating wail. The banshee.

That noise chilled him, the first time he heard it. But the fear soon passed. When he was naked in the forest, the banshee was a terrible threat, death incarnate on the wing. Now he had a rifle and a sidearm, and the creature was scarcely any threat at all. In fact, he reflected, perhaps it was an ally. It had saved his life once. Perhaps it would do so again.

The second time the banshee wailed its shuddering wail-still behind him, but higher now, gaining altitude-Dirk only smiled. He climbed, to keep the beast below him, and did one slow loop to try to glimpse the creature. But it was still far away, and black as his own chameleon cloth, and all he saw was a vague ripple of motion against the forest, perhaps nothing but branches moving in the wind.

Keeping high, he consulted his compass again and circled to resume his flight toward Kryne Lamiya. Twice more that night he thought he heard the banshee crying out to him, but the sounds were far apart and faint and he could not be sure.

The eastern sky had just begun to lighten when he first heard drifting music, scattered snatches of despair, too familiar for his liking. The Darkdawn city was near at hand.

He slowed and hovered, scowling. He had flown the course he thought Jaan Vikary would run; he had seen nothing. Possibly his guess had been dead wrong. Possibly Vikary had led his hunters in some other direction entirely. But Dirk did not think so. More likely he had passed over them, unseeing and unseen, in the dark of night.

He began to retrace his course, flying into the wind now, feeling the cold ghostly fingers of Lamiya-Bailis on his cheeks. In the light his task would be easier, he hoped.

The Helleye rose, and one by one the Trojan Suns. Thin wisps of gray-white cloud scuttled across a forlorn sky while morning mists moved on the forest floor. The woods beneath him turned from black to yellow-brown; chokers everywhere entwined like awkward lovers, and red light gleamed dimly from their waxy limbs. Dirk climbed and his horizons expanded. He saw rivers, the flash of sun on water. And overgrown lakes with no flash at all, dark, covered by a floating greenish film. And snowfall, or what looked like snowfall until he was above it and saw that it was an area of dirty white fungus blanketing the wild.

He saw a fault line, a rocky slash running through the woods north to south, as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler. And mud flats, black and brown and smelly, on either side of a wide slow waterway. And a cliff of weathered gray stone that rose unexpected from the forest, chokers sloping right up to its foot and chokers leaning out at crazy angles from its crown, but nothing on the vertical rock face itself but a few white lichens and the carcass of some large bird dead in its nest.

He saw nothing of Jaan Vikary or the hunters who pursued him.

By midmorning Dirk's muscles ached with fatigue, his arm had begun to throb again, and his hope was fading. The wild went on forever, kilometer after kilometer, a vast yellow carpet which he was searching for a mite, a silent world shrouded by twilight. He turned back toward Kryne Lamiya again, convinced that he had come too far. He began to wander, covering the route in a drifting sine wave instead of a straight line, searching, always searching He was very tired. Near noon he decided to fly in circles over the most likely area, spiraling in to try to cover it all.

And he heard the banshee screaming.

He saw it this time as well. It was flying low, near tree level, far beneath him. It seemed impossibly slow and still. The black triangular body scarcely seemed to move; the wings were held very rigidly, and the creature appeared to float on the Darkdawn wind.

When it wanted to turn it caught an updraft and wheeled about in a wide circle before descending again. Dirk, having nothing better to do, found himself following it.

It screamed again. The sound lingered.

And then he heard an answer.

He touched the wafer in the palm of his hand and began to descend rapidly, listening, suddenly alert again. The sound had been faint but unmistakable: a pack of Braith hounds, barking wildly in anger and fear. He lost sight of the banshee-no matter now– and chased the fast-fading sound. It had come from the north, he thought. He flew north.

Somewhere close, a hound let loose a howl.

Dirk grew briefly alarmed. It was possible that if he flew too low the hounds would start barking at him instead of the banshee. It was a dangerous situation in any event. His coat was doing its best to take on the colors of Worlorn's sky, but the silver of the sky-scoot could flash brilliantly if anyone chanced to look up. And with a banshee in tike vicinity they would look up.

But if he were to help Jaan Vikary and his Jenny, no real choices remained to him. He gripped his weapon lightly and continued to descend. Below him, cutting through the forest like a knife, was a swift-running blue-green river. He looped toward it, his eyes scanning back and forth restlessly. He heard the sound of rapids, traced the sound, found them. They looked fast and dangerous from above. Naked rocks strung out like rotten teeth, brown and misshapen, the water boiling white and angry around them, the chokers pressing close on either side. Downstream the river widened and grew more gentle. He glanced that way briefly, then back at the rapids. He crossed the water, circled, recrossed.

A dog barked loudly. Others took up the sound.

His attention jerked back downstream. Black dots in the water, wading in where the flow looked reasonable. He flew toward it.

The dots grew, taking on shape and human form. A square little man in yellow-brown, fighting the current to wade across. Another man nearby on the shore, with six of the huge hounds.

The man in the water retreated. He had a rifle in his hand, Dirk saw. He was a very wide little man. A pale face, a thick torso, heavy arms and legs-Saanel Larteyn, Lorimaar's fat teyn. And Lorimaar on the shore, holding the pack. Neither of them was looking up. Dirk slowed to keep his distance.

Saanel climbed out of the water. He was on the wrong side of the river still, the side with Lorimaar, the side away from Kryne Lamiya. He was trying to cross, though. But not here. Now the two hunters began to move away, heading farther downstream, moving clumsily among the weeds and rocks and chokers that lined the riverbank.

Dirk did not follow. He had the sky-scoot and he knew where they were going; he could always find them later, if he had to. But where were the others? Roseph and his teyn? Garse Janacek? He turned and went back upstream, feeling a bit more confident. If the hunting party had broken up, they would be easier for him to deal with. He flew low above the river, quickly, the water churning two meters below his feet while his eyes raked the banks for another group trying to cross.

About two kilometers northeast of the rapids-the channel was narrow and swift here-he found Janacek standing above the water with a puzzled expression on his face.

He seemed to be alone. Dirk yelled at him. Janacek looked up startled, and then waved.

Dirk came down beside him. It was a bad landing. The hump of rock Janacek was standing on was covered with a slick green moss, and the underside of Dirk's sky-scoot slid right across it, and he almost went pitching into the river. Janacek caught him by the arm. Dirk killed his gravity grid. "Thank you," he muttered. "It doesn't look like easy swimming down there."

"That was precisely the thought that I was thinking as I stood here," Janacek replied. He looked haggard. His face and clothes were dirty, and the red beard was damp with sweat. A long strand of hair hung down across his forehead, limp and greasy. "I was attempting to decide if I should risk this sort of current or waste time by continuing upstream, in the vague hopes of finding a place I could safely ford." A weak smile broke across his face. "But you have solved that problem with Gwen's toy. Where-?"

"Pyr," Dirk said. He started to tell Janacek about his flight to the wrecked aircar.

"You are alive," the Ironjade said quickly. "I can do without the tedious details, t'Larien. Much has happened since yesterday dawn. Did you see the Braiths?"

"Lorimaar and his teyn were going downstream," said Dirk.

"I know that," Janacek snapped. "Had they crossed?"

"No, not yet."

"Good. Jaan is very close now, perhaps only a half-hour ahead of us. They must not reach him first." His eyes swept the far bank of the river, and he sighed. "Do you have the other scoot, or must I take yours?"

Dirk set down his rifle on the rock and began to unsling his backpack. "I've got the other," he said. "Where is Roseph? What's going on?"

"Jaan has run magnificently," Janacek said. "No one could have expected him to cover so much ground so fast. The Braiths did not, in truth. And he has done more than simply run. He has set traps." He brushed back his fallen hair with the back of his hand. "He camped last night. He was far enough ahead of us. We found the ashes of bis fire. Roseph stepped into a concealed pit and impaled his foot on a buried stake." Janacek smiled. "He has turned back, his teyn helping him. And you say Pyr and Arris are dead?"

Dirk nodded. He had pulled the boots and the second scoot from his pack.

Janacek accepted them without comment. "The hunters grow few. I think we have won, t'Larien. Jaan Vikary will be weary. He has run without sleep for a day and two nights. Yet we know he is not hurt, and he is armed, and he is of Ironjade. Lorimaar and that slug he keeps as teyn will find no easy prey."

He knelt and began to unlace his boots, talking all the while. "Their mad conceit of a new holdfast here will be stillborn. Lorimaar is berserk to even dream of it. I think his mind snapped loose of its anchor when Jaan's laser burned him back in Challenge." He pulled off one boot. "Do you know why Chell and Bretan were not among them, t'Larien? Because that pair had too much sanity for this high-Larteyn scheme! Roseph told me all about it as we hunted. The truth, he said, is this: Lorimaar announced the madness when the Braiths returned to Larteyn after Myrik had been killed. The six we encountered in the woods were there, plus old Raymaar. Bretan Braith Lantry and Chell fre-Braith were not. They had tried to pursue you and Jaantony, and later passed through some of the cities where they thought it likely you had taken refuge. So Lorimaar was essentially without opposition. He has always cowed the others, except perhaps for Pyr, and Pyr was never interested in anything save the taking of mockman heads."

Janacek was having difficulty fitting into Gwen's narrow boots. He scowled and yanked hard, forcing his foot in where it did not want to go. "When Chell returned, he was furious. He would not go along. He would not even listen. Bretan tried to calm him, Roseph claimed, but to no avail. Old Chell is a Braith, and Lorimaar's new holdfast was treason to him. He issued a challenge. Lorimaar was immune to challenge, in truth, since he was wounded, but he accepted nonetheless. Chell was very old. As challenged, Lorimaar made the first of the four choices, the choice of numbers."

Janacek stood up, and stamped down hard on the slick rock to jam his foot into the boot more tightly. "Need I tell you that he chose to fight single? It would have been quite a different duel had Bretan Braith confronted him as well as Chell Empty-Arms. Lorimaar, even wounded, disposed of the old man rather easily. It was death-square, and blades. Chell took many cuts, too many perhaps. Roseph believes he lies dying back in Larteyn. Bretan Braith remains with him and, more important still, remains Bretan Braith." Janacek spread out his sky-scoot.

"Did you find out anything about Ruark?" Dirk asked him.

The Kavalar shrugged. "It is all much as we suspected. Ruark contacted Lorimaar high-Braith by viewscreen-no one seems to know where the Kimdissi is presently-and offered to reveal where Jaan was hiding if Lorimaar would name him korariel and thus grant him protection. This Lorimaar did willingly. Jaan was fortunate in that he was within his aircar when they came. He simply took off and ran. They pursued him and finally Raymaar overtook him just beyond the mountains, but he was yet another old man and not nearly the flyer that Jaan Vikary is." There was a note of gleeful pride in Janacek's voice, like a parent boasting of a child. "The Braith went down in combat, but Jaan's car was damaged as well, so he was forced to land and run. He was already gone when the high-bonds of Larteyn found where he had crashed. They had wasted time trying to assist Raymaar." He waved an impatient hand.

"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 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.