Dying of the Light

Chapter 5

They flew from the white towers of Kryne Lamiya to the fading fires of Larteyn in a lonely silence, not touching, both thinking their own thoughts. Gwen left the aircar in its usual place on the roof, and Dirk followed her downstairs to her door. "Wait," she said in a quick whisper, when he had expected her to say good night. She vanished inside; he waited, puzzled. There were noises from the other side of the door -voices-then abruptly Gwen was back, pressing a thick manuscript into his hand, an impressively heavy mass of paper hand-bound in black leather. Jaan's thesis. He had almost forgotten. "Read it," she whispered, leaning out the door. "Come up tomorrow morning, and we'll talk some more." She kissed him lightly on the cheek and closed the heavy door with a small click. Dirk stood for a moment turning the bound manuscript over in his hands, then turned toward the tubes.

He was only a few steps down the hall when he heard the first shout. Then, somehow, he could not continue; the sounds drew him back, and he stood listening at Gwen's door.

The walls were thick, and very little of what was said came through. The words and the meanings he lost entirely, but the voices themselves carried, and the tones. Gwen's voice dominated: loud, sharp-edged– at times she was shouting-close to the edge of hysteria. In his mind Dirk could see her pacing the living room before the gargoyles, the way she always paced when she was angry. Both of the Kavalars would be present, berating her-Dirk was sure he heard two other voices-one quiet and sure, without anger, questioning relentlessly. That had to be Jaan Vikary. His cadence gave him away, the rhythms of his speech distinctive even through the wall. The third voice, Garse Janacek, spoke infrequently at first, then more and more, with increasing volume and anger. After a time the quiet male voice was virtually silent, while Gwen and Garse screamed at one another. Then it said something, a sharp command. And Dirk heard a noise, a fleshy thud. A blow. Someone hitting someone, it could be nothing else.

Finally Vikary giving orders, followed by silence. The light went off inside the room.

Dirk stood quietly, holding Vikary's manuscript and wondering what to do. There did not seem to be anything he could do, except talk to Gwen the next morning and find out who had hit her, and why. It had to be Janacek, he thought.

Ignoring the tubes, he decided to walk downstairs to Ruark's rooms.

Once in bed, Dirk found he was immensely tired and badly shaken by the events of the day. So much all at once, he could hardly cope with it. The Kavalar hunters and their mockmen, the strange bitter life Gwen lived with Vikary and Janacek, the sudden dizzy possibility of her return. Unable to sleep, he thought about it all for a long time. Ruark was already asleep; there was no one to talk to. Finally Dirk picked up the thick manuscript Gwen had given him and began to leaf through the first few pages. There was nothing like a good chunk of scholarly writing to put a man to sleep, he reflected.

Four hours and a half-dozen cups of coffee later, he put down the manuscript, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. Then he shut off the light and stared at the darkness.

Jaan Vikary's thesis-Myth and History: Origins of Holdfast Society As Based on an Interpretation of the Demonsong Cycle of Jamis-Lion Taal-was a worse indictment of his people than anything that Arkin Ruark could possibly say, Dirk thought. He had laid it all out, with sources and documentation from the computer banks on Avalon, with lengthy quotations from the poetry of Jamis-Lion Taal and even lengthier dissertations on what Jamis Taal had meant. All of the things that he and Gwen had told Dirk that morning were there, in detail. Vikary supplied theories on theories, attempted to explain everything. He even explained the mockmen, more or less. He argued that during the Time of Fire and Demons some survivors from the cities had reached the mining camps and sought shelter. Once taken in, however, they proved dangerous. Some were victims of radiation sickness; they died slowly and horribly, and possibly passed the poison on to those who nursed them. Others, seemingly healthy, lived and became part of the proto-holdfast, until they married and produced children. Then the taint of radiation showed up. It was all conjecture on Vikary's part, with not even a line or two from Jamis-Lion to support it, yet it seemed a glib and plausible rationalization of the mockman myth.

Vikary also wrote at length of the event the Kavalars called the Sorrowing Plague-and what he carefully called "the shift to contemporary Kavalar sexual-familial patterns."

According to his hypothesis, the Hrangans had returned to High Kavalaan approximately a century after their first raid. The cities they had bombed were still slag; there was no sign of new building on the part of the humans. Yet the three slaveraces they had dropped to seed the planet were nowhere in evidence: decimated, extinct. Undoubtedly the Hrangan Mind commanding concluded that some of the humans still lived. To effect a final wiping up, the Hrangans dropped plague bombs. That was Vikary's theory.

Jamis-Lion's poems had no mention of Hrangans, but many mentions of sickness. All the surviving Kavalar accounts agreed on that. There was a Sorrowing Plague, a long period when one horrible epidemic after another swept through the holdfasts. Each turn of the season brought a new and more dreadful disease-the ultimate demon-enemy, one the Kavalars could not fight or kill.

Ninety men died out of every hundred. Ninety men, and ninety-nine women.

One of the many plagues, it seemed, was female-selective. The medical specialists Vikary had consulted on Avalon had told him that, based on the meager evidence he gave them-a few ancient poems and songs-it seemed likely that the female sex hormones acted as a catalyst for the disease. Jamis-Lion Taal had written that young maids were spared the bloody wasting because of their innocence, while the rutting eyn-kethi were struck down horribly and died in shuddering convulsions. Vikary interpreted this to mean that prepubescent girls were left untouched, while sexually mature women were devastated. An entire generation was wiped out. Worse, the disease lingered; no sooner did girl children reach puberty than the plague struck. Jamis-Lion made this a truth of vast religious significance.

Some women escaped-the naturally immune. Very few at first. More later; because they lived, producing sons and daughters, many of whom were also immune, while those who did not share the resistance died at puberty. Eventually all Kavalars were immune, with rare exceptions. The Sorrowing Plague ended.

But the damage had been done. Entire holdfasts had been wiped out; those that clung to life had seen their populations decline far below the numbers necessary to maintain a viable society. And the social structure and sexual roles had been warped irrevocably away from the monogamous egalitarianism of the early Taran colonists. Generations had grown to maturity in which men outnumbered women ten to one; little girls lived all through childhood with the knowledge that puberty might mean death. It was a grim time. On that both Jaan Vikary and Jamis-Lion Taal spoke with one voice.

Jamis-Lion wrote that sin had finally passed from High Kavalaan when the eyn-kethi were safely locked away from the daylight, back in the caves from which they had issued, where their shame could not be seen. Vikary wrote that the Kavalar survivors had fought back as best they could. They no longer had the technological skills to construct airtight sterilized chambers; but no doubt rumors of such places had drifted down the years to them, and they still hoped that such places could be proof against disease. So the surviving women were secured in prisonlike hospitals deep under the ground, in the safest part of the holdfast, the farthest from the contaminated wind and rain and water. Men who had once roamed and hunted and warred with their wives by their sides now teamed with other men, both grieving for lost partners. To relieve the sexual tensions-and maintain the gene pool as best they could, if they even understood such things-the men who lived through the Sorrowing Plague made their women sexual property of all. To insure as many children as possible, they made them perpetual breeders who lived their lives safe from danger and in constant pregnancy. The holdfasts that did not adopt such measures failed to survive; those that did passed on a cultural heritage.

Other changes took root as well. Tara had been a religious world, home of the Irish-Roman Reformed Catholic Church, and the urge to monogamy died hard. The patterns appeared in two mutated forms; the strong emotional attachments that grew up between male hunting partners became the basis for the intense total relationship of teyn-and-teyn, while those men who desired a semi-exclusive bond with a woman created betheyns by capturing females from other holdfasts. The leaders encouraged such raidings, Jaan Vikary said; new women meant new blood, more children, a larger population, and thus a better chance of survival. It was unthinkable that any man take exclusive possession of one of the eyn-kethi; but a man who could bring a woman in from outside was rewarded with honors and a seat in the councils of leadership and, perhaps most importantly, the woman herself.

These were the likely events, Vikary argued, self-evident truths that produced modern Kavalar society. Jamis-Lion Taal, wandering the face of the world many generations later, had been so much a child of his culture that he was unable to conceive of a world in which women held any status other than what he saw; and when he was forced to think otherwise by the folklore he collected, he thought the idea intolerably wicked. Thus he rewrote all the oral literature as he cast his Demonsong cycle. He transformed Kay Iron-Smith into a thundering giant of a man, made the Sorrowing Plague a ballad of eyn-kethi wickedness, and generally created the Impression that the world had always been the way he found it. Later poets built on the foundations he had laid.

The forces that had produced the holdfast society of High Kavalaan had long ago, vanished. Today, women and men numbered roughly the same, the epidemics were only grisly fables, most of the dangers of the planet's surface had been conquered. Nonetheless the holdfast-coalitions continued. The men fought duels and studied the new technology and worked on the farms and in the factories and sailed the Kavalar starships, while the eyn-kethi lived in vast subterranean barracks as sexual partners for all the men of the holdfast, laboring at whatever tasks the high-bond councils deemed safe and suitable, and having babies, though fewer now. Kavalar population was strictly controlled. Other women lived slightly freer lives under the protection of jade-and-silver, but not many. A betheyn had to come from outside the holdfast, which in practice meant that an ambitious youngster had to challenge and kill a highbond of another coalition, or lay claim to one of the eyn-kethi in an enemy holdfast and face a defender chosen in council. The second route was rarely successful; highbond councils invariably chose the holdfast's most accomplished duelist to champion the eyn-kethi. In fact, the designation was a singular honor. A man who did succeed in winning a betheyn immediately took his highnames and his place among the rulers. It was said that he had given his kethi the gift of the two bloods-the blood of death, a slain enemy, and the blood of life, a new woman. The woman enjoyed the status of jade-and-silver until such time as her highbond was killed. If he was slain by one of his own holdfast, she became an eyn-kethi; if the killer was an outsider, she passed to him.

Such was the status that Gwen Delvano had taken when she clasped Jaan's bracelet around her wrist.

Dirk lay awake for a long time, thinking of everything he had read and staring up at the ceiling, growing more and more angry the more he thought. By the time the first dawn light began to filter slowly through the window above his head, he had decided. In a sense it no longer mattered if Gwen returned to him or not, so long as she left Vikary and Janacek and the whole sick society of High Kavalaan. But alone she could not make the break, much as she might wish to. Very well then, Arkin Ruark was right; he would help her. He would help her to be free. And afterwards there would be time to consider their own relationship.

Finally, his resolve fixed firmly in his mind, Dirk slept.

It was midday when he awoke, suddenly, with a snap of guilt. He sat up and blinked and remembered he had promised Gwen that he would come up that morning, and here the morning was gone and he had overslept. Hurriedly he rose and dressed, looked around briefly for Ruark-the Kimdissi was gone, no clue as to where or for how long-and then went up to Gwen's apartment, Vikary's thesis tucked firmly under his arm.

Garse Janacek answered his knock.

"Yes?" the red-bearded Kavalar said, frowning. He was bare to the waist, dressed only in snug-fitting black trousers and the eternal bracelet of iron-and-glowstone on his right arm. Dirk saw at a glance why Janacek did not wear the sort of V-necked shirts that Vikary seemed to favor; the left side of his chest, from his armpit to his breast, bore a long crooked scar, slick and hard.

Janacek saw his stare. "A duel that went wrong," he snapped. "I was too young. It will not happen again. Now, what do you require?"

Dirk flushed. "I want to see Gwen," he said.

"She is not here," Janacek said, his ice eyes hard and unfriendly. He started to shut the door.

"Wait." Dirk stopped the door with his hand.

"More? What is it?"

"Gwen. I was supposed to see her. Where is she?"

"In the wilderness, t'Larien. I would be pleased if you would remember that she is an ecologist, sent here by the highbonds of Ironjade to do important work. She has neglected that work for two full days to guide you hither and yon. Now, as is proper, she has returned to it. She and Arkin Ruark took their instruments and went off into the forests."

"She didn't say anything last night," Dirk insisted.

"She is not required to inform you of her plans," Janacek said. "Nor must she secure your permission for anything. There is no bond between you."

Remembering the argument he had overheard the night before, Dirk was suddenly suspicious. "Can I come in?" he said. "I want to give this back to Jaan, talk to him about it," he added, showing Garse the leather-bound thesis. Actually he hoped to look for Gwen, to find out if she was being kept from him. But it would hardly have been polite to say this; Janecek was dripping hostility, and an attempt to push past him would be very unwise.

"Jaan is not presently at home. No one is here but me. I am about to leave." He reached out and snatched the thesis from Dirk's hands. "I will take this, however. Gwen should never have given it to you."

"Hey!" Dirk said. He had an impulse. "The history was very interesting," he said suddenly. "Can I come in and talk to you about it? A second or two-I won't keep you."

Abruptly Janacek seemed to change. He smiled and gave way, beckoning Dirk into the apartment.

Dirk looked around quickly. The living room was deserted, the fireplace cold; nothing seemed amiss or out of place. The dining room, visible through an open archway, was also empty. The whole apartment was very quiet. No sign of Gwen or Jaan. From what he could see, it appeared Janacek had been telling the truth.

Uncertain, Dirk wandered across the room, pausing before the mantel and its gargoyles. Janacek watched him wordlessly, then turned and left, returning shortly. He had strapped on his mesh-steel belt with its heavy holster and was buttoning up the front of a faded black shirt when he re-entered.

"Where are you going?" Dirk asked.

"Out," Janacek replied with a brief grin. He undid the latch flap of his holster and drew out the laser pistol within, checked the power reading on the side of its butt, then reholstered and drew again-a smooth flowing motion with his right hand-and sighted down on Dirk. "Do I alarm you?" he asked.

"Yes," Dirk said. He moved away from the mantel.

Janacek's grin came back again. He slid the laser into its holster. "I am quite good with a dueling laser," he said, "though in truth my teyn is better.

Of course, I must use only my right arm. The left still pains me. The scar tissue pulls, so the chest muscles on that side cannot move so far or so easily as those on my right. Yet it matters little. I am chiefly right-handed. The right arm is always more than the left, you know." His right hand rested on the laser pistol as he spoke, and the glowstones in their black iron setting shone like dim red eyes along his forearm.

"Too bad about your injury."

"I made a mistake, t'Larien. I was too young, perhaps, but my mistake was none the less serious for my age. Such mistakes can be very grave matters, and in some ways I escaped easily." He was staring very fixedly at Dirk. "One should be careful that one does not make mistakes."

"Oh?" Dirk affected an innocent smile.

For a time Janacek did not reply. Then, finally, he said, "I think you know what I am speaking about."

"Do I?"

"Yes. You are not an unintelligent man, t'Larien. Nor am I. Your childish ruses do not amuse me. You have nothing to discuss with me, for example. You simply wanted to gain admittance to this chamber for some reasons of your own."

Dirk's smile vanished. He nodded. "All right. A lousy trick, clearly, since you saw right through it. I wanted to look for Gwen."

"I told you that she was out in the wild, at work."

"I don't believe you," Dirk said. "She would have said something to me yesterday. You're keeping me from her. Why? What's going on?"

"Nothing that need concern you," said Janacek. "Understand me, t'Larien, if you will. Perhaps to you, as to Arkin Ruark, I seem an evil man. You may think that of me. I care very little. I am not an evil man. That is why I warn you against mistakes. That is why I admitted you, though I know full well that you have nothing to say to me. For I have things to say to you."

Dirk leaned against the back of the couch and nodded. "All right, Janacek. Go ahead."

Janacek frowned. "Your problem, t'Larien, is that you know little and understand less of Jaan and myself and our world."

"I know more than you think."

"Do you? You have read Jaan's writings on the Demonsong, and no doubt people have told you things. Yet what is that? You are no Kavalar. You do not understand Kavalars, I would guess, yet you stand here and I see judgment in your eyes. By what right? Who are you to judge us? You scarcely know us. I will give you an instance. Just a second ago you called me Janacek."

"That's your name, isn't it?"

"That is part of my name, the last part, the least and smallest part of who I am. It is my chosen-name, the name of an ancient hero of the Ironjade Gathering who lived a long and fruitful life, many times honorably defending his holdfast and his kethi in highwar. I know why you use it, of course. On your world and in your naming system it is customary to address those toward whom you feel distance or hostility by the final component of their names-an intimate you would call by his first name, would you not?"

Dirk nodded. "More or less. It's not quite that simple, but you're close enough."

Janacek smiled thinly; the blue eyes seemed to sparkle. "You see, I do understand your people, only too well. I give you the benefit of your own ways-I call you t'Larien because I am hostile to you, and that is correct. You do not reciprocate, however. You address me as Janacek, without an instant of thought or concern, quite deliberately imposing your own naming system on me."

"What should I call you then? Garse?"

Janacek made a sharp, impatient gesture. "Garse is my true name, but it is not proper from you. In Kavalar custom, use of that name alone would indicate a relationship that does not in fact exist between us.

Garse is a name for my teyn and my cro-betheyn and my kethi, not for an offworlder. Properly you should call me Garse Ironjade, and my teyn Jaantony high-Ironjade. Those are traditional and correct from an equal, a Kavalar of another house with whom I am on speaking terms. I give you the benefit of many doubts." He smiled. "Now understand, t'Larien, that I tell you this as illustration only. I care precious little whether you call me Garse or Garse Ironjade or Mister Janacek. Call me whatever makes your heart happiest, and I will take no insult. The Kimdissi Arkin Ruark has even been known to call me Garsey, yet I have resisted the urge to prick him and see if he pops.

"These matters of courtesy and address– I do not need Jaan to tell me that they are old things, legacies of days both more elaborate and more primitive, dying in this modern time. Today Kavalars sail ships from star to star, talk and trade with creatures we would once have exterminated as demons, even shape planets as we have shaped Worlorn. Old Kavalar, the language of the holdfasts for thousands of your standard years, is scarcely spoken anymore, though a few terms linger on and will continue to linger, since they name realities that can be named only clumsily or not at all in the tongues of the star travelers-realities that would soon vanish if we gave up their names, the Old Kavalar terms. Everything has changed, even we of High Kavalaan, and Jaan says that we must change still more if we are to fulfill our destiny in the histories of man. Thus the old rules of names and namebonds break down, and even highbonds grow lax in their speech, and Jaantony high-Ironjade goes about calling himself Jaan Vikary."

"If it doesn't matter," Dirk said, "then what's your point?"

"The point was illustration, t'Larien, a simple and elegant illustration of how much of your own culture you wrongly presume to be part of ours, of how you press your judgments and your values on us with every word and action. That was the point. There are more important matters in question, but the pattern is the same; you make the same mistake, a mistake you ought not make. The price might be greater than you can afford. Do you think I do not know what you are trying to do?"

"What am I trying to do?"

Janacek smiled again, his eyes small and hard, tiny wrinkles creasing the skin at their corners. "You try to take Gwen Delvano away from my teyn. Truth?" Dirk said nothing.

"It is truth," Janacek said. "And it is wrong. Understand that it will never be permitted. I will not permit it. I am bonded by iron-and-fire to Jaantony high-Ironjade, and I do not forget that. We are teyn-and-teyn, we two. No bond that you have ever known is as strong."

Dirk found himself thinking of Gwen and of a deep red teardrop full of memories and promises. He thought it a pity that he could not give the whisper-jewel to Janacek to hold for a moment, so the arrogant Kavalar could taste just how strong a bond Dirk had had with his Jenny. But such a gesture would be useless. Janacek's mind would have no resonances with the patterns esper-etched in the stone; it would be only a gem to him. "I loved Gwen," he said sharply. "I doubt that any bond of yours is more than that."

"Do you? Well, you are no Kavalar, no more than Gwen is, you do not understand the iron-and-fire. I first encountered Jaantony when each of us was quite young. I was even younger than he, in truth. He was fond of play with children younger than himself rather than his agemates, and he came frequently to our creche. I held him in great esteem from the first, as only a boy can, because he was older than me and thus closer to being a highbond, and because he led me on adventures into strange corridors and caves, and because he told fascinating stories. When I was older, I learned why he came among the younger children so often, and I was shocked and shamed. He was afraid of those as old as he, because they taunted him and often beat him. Yet by the time I learned that, a bond existed between us. You might call it friendship, but you would be wrong to do so; you would be imposing your own concepts on our lives once more. It was more than your offworlder friendship, there was iron between us already, although we were not yet teyn-and-teyn.

"The next time that Jaan and I went exploring together-we were far beyond our holdfast, in a cavern he knew well-I surprised him and beat him until every part of his flesh was bruised and swollen. He did not visit my age-barracks for the entire winter, yet at last he returned. We had no bitterness between us. We began to roam and hunt together once more, and he told me more stories, tales of myth and history. For my part, I would assault him randomly, always catching him unready and overwhelming him. In time he began to fight back, and well. In time it became impossible for me to surprise him with my fists. One day I smuggled a knife out from Ironjade beneath my shirt, and bared it on Jaan and cut him. Then we both began to carry knives. When he reached his adolescence, the age where he would pick his chosen-names and become subject to the code duello, Jaantony was no longer a subject of easy taunt.

"He was always unpopular. You must understand that he was ever a questioning sort, given to uncomfortable inquiries and unorthodox opinions, a lover of history but openly contemptuous of religion, with much too much unhealthy interest in the offworlders who moved among us. As such, he was challenged again and again that first year he attained dueling age. He always won. When I reached adolescence a few years later, and we became teyn-and-teyn, I had scarcely anyone to fight. Jaantony had put fear in all of them, so they would not challenge us. I was very disappointed.

"Since that time we have dueled together often. We are bonded for life, and we have been through much, and I do not care to hear you spout comparisons with this meaningless 'love' you offworlders are so enchanted by, this mockman bond that comes and goes with the whim of a moment. Jaantony himself was badly corrupted by the concept during his years on Avalon, and that was in some measure my responsibility because I let him go alone. It was true that on Avalon I would have had no function and no place, yet I should have been there. I failed Jaan in that. I will never fail him again. I am his teyn and always his teyn, and I will permit no one to kill him or wound him, or twist his mind, or steal his name. These things are my bond and my duty.

"Too often these days Jaan lets his very name be threatened by such as you and Ruark. Jaan is in many ways a perverse and dangerous man, and the quirks of his mind often bring us into peril. Even his heroes– I remembered, one day, some of the stories he had told me in childhood, and was struck by the fact that all of Jaan's favorite heroes were solitary men who suffered ultimate defeat. Aryn high-Glowstone, as an instance, who dominated an entire epoch of history. He ruled by force of personality the most powerful holdfast High Kavalaan ever knew, the Glowstone Mountain; and when his enemies leagued against him in highwar, all hands raised against his, he put swords and shields on the arms of his eyn-kethi and took them to battle to swell the size of his army. His foes were broken and humiliated, and so Jaan would tell me the story. Yet later I learned that Aryn high-Glowstone won no victory at all. So many of his holdfast's eyn-kethi were slain that day that few remained to birth new warriors. Glowstone Mountain declined steadily in power and in population, and forty years after Aryn's bold stroke the Glowstones fell and highbonds from Taal and Ironjade and Bronzefist took their women and children, leaving the halls abandoned. The truth of Aryn high-Glowstone is that he was a failure and a fool, one of history's pariahs, and such are all Jaan's mad heroes."

"Aryn sounds heroic enough to me," Dirk said

sharply. "On Avalon we'd probably credit him with freeing the slaves, even if he didn't win."

Janacek glowered at him, his eyes like blue sparks set in his narrow skull. He tugged at his red beard in annoyance. "T'Larien, that comment is precisely what I warned you of. Eyn-kethi are not slaves, they are eyn-kethi. You judge wrongly and your translations are false."

"According to you," Dirk said. "According to Ruark-"

"Ruark." Janacek's tone was contemptuous. "Is the Kimdissi the source of all your information about High Kavalaan? I see that I have wasted time and words on you, t'Larien. You are already poisoned and you have no interest in understanding. You are a tool of the manipulators of Kimdiss. I will lecture you no more."

"Fine," Dirk said. "Just tell me where Gwen is."

"I told you."

"When will she be back, then?"

"Late, and then she will be tired. I am certain that she will not wish to see you."

"You are keeping her from me!"

Janacek was silent for a moment. "Yes," he said finally, his mouth grim. "It is the best course, t'Larien, for you as well as her, although I do not expect you to believe that."

"You have no right."

"In your culture. I have every right in mine. You will not be alone with her again."

"Gwen is not part of your damned sick Kavalar culture," Dirk said.

"She was not born into it, yet she took the jade-and-silver, and the name betheyn. Now she is Kavalar."

Dirk was trembling, his control gone, "What does she say to that?" he demanded, stepping closer to Janacek. "What did she say last night? Did she threaten to leave?" He jabbed the Kavalar with his finger. "Did she say she was coming with me, was that it? And you hit her and carried her off?"

Janacek frowned and brushed Dirk's hand away forcefully. "So you spy on us too. You do it poorly, t'Larien, but it is offensive nonetheless. A second mistake. The first was Jaan's, in telling you the things he did, in trusting you and lending you his protection."

"I don't need anyone's protection!"

"So you say. An idiot's misplaced pride. Only those who are strong should reject the protections given the weak; those who are truly weak need them." He turned away. "I will waste no more time with you," he said, walking toward the dining chamber. There was a thin black carrying case lying on the table. Janacek opened it, clicking back both locks simultaneously and flipping up the lid. Inside Dirk saw five rows of the black iron banshee pins on red felt. Janacek held one up. "Are you quite certain that you do not want one of these? Korariel?" He grinned.

Dirk crossed his arms and did not dignify the question with an answer.

Janacek waited a moment for a reply. When none came, he slipped the banshee pin back into its place and closed the case. "The jelly children are not so choosy as you are," he said. "Now I must bring these to Jaan. Get out of here."

It was early afternoon. The Hub burned dimly in the center of the sky, with the scattered small lights of the four visible Trojan Suns arrayed unevenly around it. A strong wind was blowing from the east, building into a gale, it seemed. Dust swirled through the gray and scarlet alleys.

Dirk sat on one corner of the roof, his legs hanging out over the street, mulling his possibilities.

He had followed Garse Janacek up to the airlot and had seen him depart, carrying the case of banshees and flying his massive squared-off military relic in its olive-green armor. The other two aircars, the gray manta-wing and the bright yellow teardrop, were gone as well. He was stranded here in Larteyn, with no idea of where Gwen was or what they were doing to her. He wished briefly that Ruark was somewhere around.

He wished he had an aircar of his own. No doubt he could have rented one in Challenge, if he had thought of it, or even at the spacefield the night he had come in. Instead he was alone and helpless; even the sky-scoots were missing. The world was red and gray and pointless. He wondered what to do.

Abruptly it came to him as he sat and thought about arrears. The Festival cities he had seen were all very different, but they had one thing in common: none of them had nearly enough landing space to accommodate an aircar population equal to their human population. Which meant the cities had to be linked "by some other kind of transportation network. Which meant that maybe he had some freedom of action after all.

He got up and went to the tubes and then down to Ruark's quarters in the base of the tower. Between two black-barked ceiling-high plants in earthenware pots, a wallscreen waited, just as he remembered seeing it, dark and unlit, as it had been since Dirk arrived; there were very few people left on Worlorn to call or be called. But no doubt there was an information circuit. He studied the double row of buttons beneath the screen, selected one, and punched. The darkness gave way to a soft blue light, and Dirk breathed a little easier; the communications grid, at least, was still operational.

One of the buttons was marked with a question mark. He tried it and was rewarded. The blue light cleared and suddenly the screen was full of small script, a hundred numbers for a hundred basic services, everything from medical aid and religious information to offplanet news.

He punched the sequence for "visitor transport." Figures flowed across the screen, and one by one Dirk's hopes withered. There were aircar rental facilities at the spacefield and at ten of the fourteen cities. All closed. The functional arrears had left Worlorn with the Festival crowds. Other cities had provided hovercraft and hydrofoil boats. No longer. At Musquel-by-the-Sea, visitors could sail upcoast and down in a genuine wind-powered ship from the Forgotten Colony. Service terminated. The intercity airbus line was closed down, the nuclear-powered stratoliners of Tober and the helium dirigibles of Eshellin were all grounded and gone. The wallscreen showed him a map of the high-speed subways that had run from beneath the spacefield out to each of the cities, but the map was drawn all in red, and the legend below it explained that red meant "Depowered-No Longer Operational."

There was no transportation left on Worlorn except walking, it seemed. Plus whatever late visitors had brought with them.

Dirk scowled and killed the readout. He was about to turn off the screen when another thought hit him. He punched for "Library" and got a query sign and instructions. Then he coded in "jelly children" and "define." He waited.

It was a short wait and he hardly needed the vast bulk of information the library threw at him, the details of history and geography and philosophy. The critical information he took in quickly, the rest he disregarded. "Jelly children," it seemed, was a popular nickname for the followers of a pseudo-religious drug cult on the World of the Blackwine Ocean. They were so called because they spent years at a time living in the cavernous inner dampness of kilometer-long gelatinous slugs that crept with infinite slowness along the bottom of their seas. The cultists called the creatures Mothers. The Mothers fed their children with sweet hallucinogenic secretions and were believed to be semi-sentient. The belief, Dirk noted, did not stop the jelly children from killing their host when the quality of her dream secretions began to decline, which invariably happened as the slugs aged. Free of one Mother, the jelly children would then seek another.

Quickly Dirk cleared the screen of that data and consulted the library again. The World of the Black-wine Ocean had a city on Worlorn. It lay beneath an artificial lake fifty kilometers around, under the same dark, teeming waters that covered the surface of the Blackwiners' homeworld. It was called the City in the Starless Pool, and the surrounding lake was full of lifeforms brought in for the Festival of the Fringe. Including Mothers, no doubt.

Out of curiosity, Dirk found the city on a map of Worlorn. He had no way of getting there, of course. He killed the wallscreen and walked into the kitchen to mix himself a drink. As he tossed it down-it was a thick off-white milk from some Kimdissi animal, very cold, bitter but refreshing-he drummed bis fingers very impatiently on the bar. The restlessness was growing in him, the urge to do something. He felt trapped here, waiting for one of the others to return, not knowing which it would be or what would happen then. It seemed as though he had been moved back and forth at the whim of others ever since he had first come down on the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies. He had not even come of his own volition; Gwen had called him with her whisperjewel, although she had hardly seemed to welcome him when he arrived. That, at least, he had begun to understand. She was trapped in a very complex web, a web that was political and emotional at the same time; and he seemingly had been pulled in with her, to stand helpless while half-understood storms of psychosexual and cultural tension swirled all around them. He was very tired of standing helpless.

Abruptly, he thought of Kryne Lamiya. In a windswept landing deck two arrears sat abandoned. Dirk put his glass down thoughtfully, wiped his lip with the back of his hand, and went back to the wallscreen.

It was a simple matter to find the location of all aircar landing facilities in Larteyn. There were airlots atop all of the larger residential towers, and a big public garage deep within the rock beneath the city. The garage, the city directory informed him, could be reached from any of twelve undertubes spaced evenly through Larteyn; its concealed doors opened in the middle of the plunging cliff that loomed above the Common. If the Kavalars had left any aircars at all in the shell of their city, that was where he would find them.

He took the tubes down to ground level and the street. Fat Satan had climbed past zenith and was sinking toward the horizon. The glowstone streets were faded and black where the red gloom fell, but when Dirk walked through the shadows between the square ebon towers he could still see the cold fires of the city beneath his feet, the soft red glow of the rock, fading yet still persisting. In the open, he himself threw shadows, dim dark wraiths that piled clumsily atop one another-almost but not quite coinciding-and scuttled too swiftly at his heels to wake the sleeping glow-stone into life. He saw no one else during his walk, although he wondered uneasily about the Braiths, and once he passed what must have been a dwelling. It was a square building with a domed roof and black iron pillars at its door, and chained to one of those pillars was a hound that stood taller than Dirk, with bright red eyes and a long hairless face that reminded him somehow of a rat's. The creature was worrying a bone, but it stood when he walked past and growled deep in its throat. Whoever lived in that building clearly did not relish the idea of visitors.

The undertubes still functioned. He fell and daylight vanished, and he got out again in the lower passages, where Larteyn had the greatest resemblance to the holdfasts of High Kavalaan itself: echoing stone halls with wrought-iron hangings, metal doors everywhere, chambers within chambers. A fastness in stone, Ruark had said once. A fortress, no part of which could be taken easily. But now abandoned.

The garage was multileveled and dimly lit, with space enough for a thousand aircars on each of its ten levels. Dirk wandered through the dust for a half-hour before he found even one. It was useless to him. Another beast-car, fashioned of blue-black metal in the grotesque likeness of a giant bat, it was more realistic and frightening than Jaan Vikary's rather stylized manta-banshee. But it was also a burned-out hulk. One of the ornamental batwings was twisted and half melted, and of the aircar itself only the body remained. The interior appointments, the power plant, and the weaponry were all gone, and Dirk suspected the gravity grid would be missing as well, though he could not see the underside of the derelict. He walked around it once and passed on.

The second aircar he found was in even worse shape. In fact, it could hardly be called a car at all. Nothing remained but a bare metal frame and four rotting seats squatting in the midst of the tubing-a skeleton gutted of even its skin. Dirk passed by that one too.

The next two wrecks he came to were both intact, but ghosts. He could only guess that their owners had died here on Worlorn, and the arrears had waited in the depths of the city long after they had been forgotten, until all power was gone. He tried both of them, and neither responded to his touch and his tinkerings.

The fifth car-by then a full hour had passed– responded much too quickly.

Thoroughly Kavalar, the car was a stubby two-seater with short triangular wings that looked even more useless than the wings on other aircars of High Kavalaan manufacture. It was all silver and white enamel, and the metal canopy was shaped to resemble a wolf's head. Lasercannon were mounted on both sides of the fuselage. The car was not locked; Dirk pushed up on the canopy, and it swung open easily. He climbed in, snapped it shut, and looked out of the wolf's great eyes with a wry smile on his face. Then he tried the controls. The aircar still had full power.

Frowning, he killed that power again and sat back to think. He had found the transportation he was looking for, if he dared to take it. But he could not fool himself; this car was not a derelict like the others he had discovered. Its condition was too good. No doubt it belonged to one of the other Kavalars still in Larteyn. If colors meant anything-he wasn't sure about that-then it probably belonged to Lorimaar or one of the other Braiths. Taking it was not the safest course he could choose, not by a long margin.

Dirk recognized the danger and considered it. Waiting did not appeal to him, but neither did the prospect of danger. Jaan Vikary or no Jaan Vikary, stealing an aircar might just provoke the Braiths into action.

Reluctantly, he swung back the canopy and climbed out, but no sooner had he emerged than he heard the voices. He eased the aircar canopy down and it closed with a faint but audible click. Dirk crouched and made for the safety of the shadows a few meters beyond the wolf-car.

He could hear the Kavalars talking, and their footsteps noisily echoing, long before he saw them; there were only two, but they sounded like ten. By the time they had moved into the light near the aircar, Dirk was pressed flat against a niche in the garage wall, a small cavity full of hooks where tools had once been hung. He was not quite sure why he was hiding, but he was very glad of it. The things that Gwen and Jaan had told him of the other residents of Larteyn had not reassured him.

"Are you sure of all this, Bretan?" one of them, the taller, was saying as they came into sight. He was not Lorimaar, but the resemblance was striking; this man had the same imposing height, the same tan and wrinkled face. But he ran more to fat than Lorimaar high-Braith, and his hair was pure white where the other's had been mostly gray, and he had a small toothbrush of a mustache. Both he and his companion wore short white jackets over pants and shirt of chameleon cloth that had darkened to near-black in the dimness of the garage. And they both had lasers.

"Roseph would not jape me," the second Kavalar said in a voice that rasped like sandpaper. He was much shorter than the other man, close to Dirk's own height, and younger as well, very lean. His jacket had the sleeves cut off to display powerful brown arms and a thick iron-and-glowstone armlet. As he moved to the aircar, he came full into the light for an instant and seemed to stare at the darkness where Dirk was hidden. He had only half a face; the rest was all twitching scar tissue. His left "eye" moved restlessly as his face turned, and Dirk saw the telltale fire: a glowstone set in an empty socket.

"How do you know this?" the older man said as the two paused briefly by the side of the wolf-car. "Roseph is fond of japes."

"I am not fond of japes," said the other, the one who had been called Bretan. "Roseph might jape you, or Lorimaar, or even Pyr, but he dare not jape me." His voice was horribly unpleasant; there was a grating rawness to it that offended the ear, but with the scars as thick as they were up and down his neck, Dirk found it surprising that the man could talk at all.

The taller Kavalar pushed up against the side of the wolf's head, but the canopy did not lift. "Well, if this is truth, then we must hurry," he said querulously. "The lock, Bretan, the lock!"

One-eyed Bretan made an odd noise partway between a grunt and a growl. He tried the canopy himself. "My teyn," he rasped. "I left the head slightly ajar… I… it only took a moment to come up and find you."

In the shadows Dirk pressed back hard against the wall, and the hooks dug painfully into his back between the shoulder blades. Bretan frowned and knelt, while his older companion stood and looked puzzled.

Then suddenly the Braith was standing again, and his laser pistol was snug in his right hand, trained on Dirk. His glowstone eye smoldered faintly. "Come out and let us discover what you are," he announced. "The trail you left in the dust is very plain to see."

Dirk, silent, raised his hands above his head and emerged.

"A mockman!" the taller Kavalar said. "Down here!"

"No," Dirk said carefully. "Dirk t'Larien."

The tall one ignored him. "This is rare good fortune," he said to his companion with the laser. "Those jelly men of Roseph's would have been poor prey at best. This one looks fit."

His young teyn made the odd noise again, and the left side of his face twitched. But his laser hand was quite steady. "No," he told the other Braith. "Sadly, I do not think he is ours to hunt. This can only be the one that Lorimaar spoke of." He slid his laser pistol back into his holster and nodded at Dirk, a very slight and deliberate motion, more a shifting of his shoulders than of his head. "You are grossly careless. The canopy locks automatically when full-closed. It may be opened from the inside, but-"

"I realize that now," Dirk said. He lowered his hands. "I was only looking for an abandoned car. I needed transportation."

"So you sought to steal our aircar."

"No."

"Yes." The Kavalar's voice made every word a painful effort. "You are korariel of Ironjade?"

Dirk hesitated, his denial caught in his throat. Either answer seemed likely to get him in trouble.

"You have no answer to that?" said the scarred one.

"Bretan," the other cautioned. "The mockman's words are no matter to us. If Jaantony high-Ironjade names him korariel, then such is truth. Such animals have no voice about their status. Whatever he might say cannot lift the name, so the reality is the same regardless. If we slay him, we have stolen Ironjade property and they will surely issue challenge."

"I urge you to consider the possibilities, Chell," Bretan said. "This one, this Dirk t'Larien, he can be man or mockman, korariel of Ironjade or not. Truth?"

"Truth. But he is no true man. Listen to me, my teyn. You are young, but I know of these things from kethi long dead."

"Consider nonetheless. If he is mockman and the Ironjades name him korariel, then he is korariel whether he admits it or no. But if that is truth, Chell, then you and I must go against the Ironjades in duel. He was trying to steal from us, remember. If he is Ironjade property, then that is an Ironjade theft."

The big white-haired man nodded slowly, reluctantly.

"If he is mockman but not korariel then we have no problem," Bretan continued, "since then he may be hunted. And what if he is a true man, human as a highbond, and no mockman at all?"

Chell was much slower than his teyn. The older Kavalar frowned thoughtfully and said, "Well, he is no female, so he cannot be owned. But if he is human, he must have a man's rights and a man's name."

"Truth," Bretan agreed. "But he cannot be korariel, so his crime would be his alone. I would duel him, not Jaantony high-Ironjade." The Braith gave his strange grunt-growl again.

Chell was nodding, and Dirk was almost numb. The younger of the two hunters seemed to have worked things out with a nasty precision. Dirk had told both Vikary and Janacek in no uncertain terms that he rejected the tainted shield of their protection. At the time, it had been an easy enough thing to do. On sane worlds like Avalon it would unquestionably have been the right thing as well. On Worlorn, things were not quite so clear.

"Where shall we take him?" Chell said. The two Braiths spoke as if Dirk had no more volition than their aircar.

"We must take him to Jaantony high-Ironjade and his teyn," Bretan said in his sandpaper growl. "I know their tower by sight."

Briefly Dirk considered running. It did not seem feasible. There were two of them, with sidearms and even an aircar. He would not get far.

"I'll come," he said when they started toward him. "I can show you the way." It seemed that he would be given some time to think, in any event; the Braiths did not seem to know that Vikary and Janacek were already out at the City of the Starless Pool, no doubt trying to protect the hapless jelly children from the other hunters. "Show us, then," Chell said. And Dirk, not knowing what else to do, led them toward the undertubes. On the way up he reflected bitterly that all this had come about because he was tired of waiting. And now, it seemed, he would wait after all.