Dying of the Light

by George R. R. Martin

  “Yet he never reproached me. The first time I was with him after the duel, when he was still recovering from his wounds, he said to me, ‘You were right, Jaantony, they did aim for empty air. A pity that they missed.’ ” Vikary laughed, but Dirk looked at him and saw that his eyes were full of tears, his mouth set grimly. He did not cry, though; as if by some immense effort of will, he kept the tears from falling.

  Abruptly Jaan turned and walked back inside, leaving Dirk alone on the balcony with the wind and the white twilight city and the music of Lamiya-Bailis. Off in the far distance the straining white hands rose, holding back the encroaching wilderness. Dirk studied them, thoughtful, reflecting on Vikary’s words.

  Minutes later the Kavalar returned, dry-eyed and blank-faced. “I am sorry,” he began.

  “No need to—”

  “We must get to the crux, t’Larien. Whether Garse hunts us or not, we face formidable odds. We have weapons, should we have to fight, but no one to use them. Gwen is a good marksman, and fearless enough, but she is injured and unsteady. And you—can I trust you? I put it to you bluntly. I trusted you once, and you betrayed me.”

  “How can I answer that question?” Dirk said. “You don’t have to believe any promise I give you. But the Braiths want to kill me too, remember? And Gwen as well. Or do you think I’d betray her as easily as I . . .” He stopped in horror of his own words.

  “. . . as easily as you did me,” Vikary finished for him with a hard smile. “You are blunt enough. No, t’Larien, I do not think you would betray Gwen. Yet I did not think you would desert us either when we had named you keth and you had taken the name. We would not have dueled except for you.”

  Dirk nodded. “I know that. Maybe I made a mistake. I don’t know. I would have died, though, if I’d kept faith with you.”

  “Died a keth of Ironjade, with honor.”

  Dirk smiled. “Gwen appealed to me more than death. That much I expect you to understand.”

  “I do. She is still between us, ultimately. Face that, and know it for a truth. Sooner or later she will choose.”

  “She did choose, Jaan, when she left with me. You should face that.” Dirk said it quickly, stubbornly; he wondered how much he believed it.

  “She did not remove the jade-and-silver,” Vikary answered. He gestured impatiently. “This is no matter. I will trust you, for now.”

  “Good. What do you want me to do?”

  “Someone must fly to Larteyn.”

  Dirk frowned. “Why are you always trying to talk me into suicide, Jaan?”

  “I did not say that you must make the flight, t’Larien,” Vikary said. “I will do that myself. It will be dangerous, yes, but it must be done.”

  “Why?”

  “The Kimdissi.”

  “Ruark?” Dirk had almost forgotten about his erstwhile host and co-conspirator.

  Vikary nodded. “He has been a friend to Gwen since our days on Avalon. Though he has never liked me, nor I him, I cannot abandon him entirely. The Braiths . . .”

  “I understand. But how will you get to him?”

  “Should I reach Larteyn safely, I can summon him by viewscreen. That is my hope, at least.” He gave a vaguely fatalistic shrug.

  “And me?”

  “Remain here with Gwen. Nurse her, guard her. I will leave you one of Roseph’s laser rifles. If she recovers sufficiently, let Gwen use it. She is probably more skillful than you. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. It doesn’t sound very difficult.”

  “No,” said Vikary. “I expect that you will remain safely hidden, that I will return with the Kimdissi and find you as I leave you. Should it become necessary for you to flee, you will have this other aircar close at hand. There is a cave nearby that Gwen knows of. She can show you the way. Go to that cave if you must leave Kryne Lamiya.”

  “What if you don’t come back? That is a possibility, you know.”

  “In that case you will be on your own again, as you were when you first fled Larteyn. You had plans then. Follow them, if you can.” He smiled a humorless smile. “I expect to return, however. Remember that, t’Larien. Remember that.”

  There was an undertone of edged iron in Vikary’s voice, an echo that called back another conversation in the same chill wind. With startling clarity, Jaan’s old words came back to Dirk: But I do exist. Remember that . . . This is not Avalon now, t’Larien, and today is not yesterday. It is a dying Festival world, a world without a code, so each of us must cling tightly to whatever codes we bring with us. But Jaan Vikary, Dirk thought wildly, had brought two codes with him when he came to Worlorn.

  While Dirk himself had brought none at all, had brought nothing but his love of Gwen Delvano.

  Gwen was still sleeping when the two men went from the balcony. Leaving her undisturbed, they walked together to the airlot. Vikary had unpacked the Braith aircar thoroughly. Roseph and his teyn had obviously been planning for a short hunting sojourn in the wild when everything had broken loose. Dirk thought it unfortunate that they had not intended a longer trip.

  As it was, Vikary had found only four hard protein bars in the way of food, plus the two hunting lasers and some clothing that had been slung over the seats. Dirk ate one of the bars immediately—he was famished—and slid the other three into the pocket of the heavy jacket he chose. It hung slightly loose on him, but the fit wasn’t too bad; Roseph’s teyn had approximated Dirk in size. And it was warm—thick leather, dyed a deep purple, with a collar, cuffs, and lining of soiled white fur. Both sleeves of the jacket were painted in intricate swirling patterns; the right was red and black, the left silver and green. A smaller matching jacket was also found (Roseph’s, no doubt), and Dirk appropriated that one for Gwen.

  Vikary took out the two laser rifles, long tubes of jet-black plastic with snarling wolves embossed upon the stocks in white. The first he strapped around his own shoulders; the second he gave to Dirk, along with curt instructions on its operation. The weapon was very light and slightly oily to the touch. Dirk held it awkwardly in one hand.

  The farewells were brief and overly formal. Then Vikary sealed himself into the big Braith aircar, lifted it from the floor, and shot forward into empty air. Dust rose in great clouds at his departure, and Dirk retreated from the backwash choking, with one hand over his mouth and the other on the rifle.

  When he returned to the suite, Gwen was just stirring. “Jaan?” she said, raising her head from the leather mattress to see who had just entered. She groaned and lay back again quickly and began to massage her temples with both hands. “My head,” she said in a whimpering whisper.

  Dirk stood the laser up against the wall just inside the door and sat by the side of the sunken bed. “Jaan just left,” he said. “He’s flying back to Larteyn to get Ruark.”

  Gwen’s only reply was another groan.

  “Can I get you anything?” Dirk asked. “Water? Food? We’ve got a couple of these.” He took the protein bars out of the pocket of his jacket and handed them down for her inspection.

  Gwen gave them a brief glance and grimaced in disgust. “No,” she said. “Get them away. I’m not that hungry.”

  “You should eat something.”

  “Did,” she said. “Last night. Jaan crushed up a couple of those bars in water, made a sort of paste.” She lowered her hands from her temples and turned on her side to face him. “I didn’t keep it down very well,” she said. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “I gathered that,” Dirk said. “You can’t expect to feel well after what happened. You’ve probably got a concussion, and you’re lucky you’re not dead.”

  “Jaan told me,” she said, a little sharply. “About afterwards, too—what he did to Myrik.” She frowned. “I thought I hit him pretty good when we fell. You saw, didn’t you? It felt like I broke his jaw, either that or my fingers. But he didn’t even notice.”

  “No,” said Dirk.

  “Tell me about—you know, about afterwards. Jaan just sort of sketched it out. I want to
know.” Her voice was weary and full of pain, but not to be denied.

  So Dirk told her.

  “He pointed his gun at Garse?” she said at one point. Dirk nodded, and she subsided again.

  When he had finished, Gwen was very silent. Her eyes closed briefly, opened again, then closed and did not reopen. She lay quietly on her side, curled up into a sort of fetal ball, her hands clenched into small fists beneath her chin. Watching her, Dirk felt his eyes drawn to her left forearm, to the cold reminder of the jade-and-silver she still wore.

  “Gwen,” he said, softly. Her eyes opened again—for a very short time—and she shook her head violently, a silent shouted no! “Hey,” he said, but by then her lids were shut tight once more, and she was lost within herself, and Dirk was alone with her jewelry and his fears.

  The room was soaked in sunlight, or what passed for sunlight here on Worlorn; the sunset tones of high noon were slanting through the window, and dust motes drifted lazily through the broad beam. The light fell so that only one side of the mattress was illuminated; Gwen lay half in and half out of shadow.

  Dirk—he did not speak again to Gwen, or look at her—found himself watching the patterns the light made on the floor.

  In the center of the chamber everything was warm and red, and it was here the dust danced, drifting in from the darkness and turning briefly crimson, briefly golden, throwing tiny shadows, until it drifted out of the light again and was gone. He raised his hand, held it out for—minutes? hours?—for a time. It grew warm and warmer; dust swirled around it; shadows fell away like water when he twitched and turned his fingers; the sun was friendly and familiar. But suddenly he became aware that the movements of his hand, like the endless whirling of dust, had no purpose, no pattern, and no meaning. It was the music that told him so; the music of Lamiya-Bailis.

  He pulled his hand in and frowned.

  Around the great center of light and life was a thin twisting border where the sun shone through the window’s rim of black and blood stained glass. Or fought through. It was only a small border, but it sealed the land of the stirring dust on every side.

  Beyond it were the black corners, the sections of the room that the Hub and the Trojan Suns never reached, where fat demons and the shapes of Dirk’s fears hunched obscurely, forever safe from scrutiny.

  Smiling and rubbing his chin—stubble covered his cheeks and jaw, and he was starting to itch—Dirk studied those corners and let the Darkdawn music back into his soul. How he had ever tuned it out he was not sure, but now it was back and all around him.

  The tower they were in—their home—sounded its long low note. Years away, or centuries, a chorus answered in ringing widows’ wails. He heard shuddering throbs, and the screams of abandoned babies, and the slippery sliding sound of knives slicing warm flesh. And the drum. How could the wind beat a drum? he thought. He didn’t know. Perhaps it was something else. But it sounded like a drum. So terribly far off, though, and so alone.

  So horribly endlessly alone.

  The mists and the shadows gathered in the farthest, dimmest corner of their room, and then began to clear. Dirk saw a table and a low chair, growing from the walls and floor like strange plastic vegetables. He wondered briefly what he was seeing them by; the sun had moved a little, and only a thin beam of light was trickling through the window now, and finally that snapped off too, and the world was gray.

  When the world was gray, he noted, the dust did not dance. No. Not at all. He felt the air to be sure; there was no dust, no warmth, no sunlight. He nodded sagely. It seemed that he had discovered some great truth.

  Dim lights were stirring in the walls, ghosts waking for another night. Phantoms and husks of old dreams. All of them were gray and white; color was only for the living, and had no place here.

  The ghosts began to move. They were locked into the walls, each of them; from time to time, Dirk thought he could see one stop its furious dancing and beat helplessly and hopelessly against the glass walls that kept it from the room. Wraith hands pounding, pounding, yet the room shook not at all. Stillness was a part of these things, the phantoms were just that, all insubstantial, and pound though they might, finally they must return to dancing.

  The dance—the dance macabre—shapeless shadows—Oh, but it was beautiful! Moving, dipping, writhing. Walls of gray flame. So much better than the dust motes, these dancers; they had a pattern, and their music was the song of the Siren City.

  Desolation. Emptiness. Decay. A single drum, beaten slow. Alone. Alone. Alone. Nothing has meaning.

  “Dirk!”

  It was Gwen’s voice. He shook his head, looked away from the walls, down to where she lay in darkness. It was night. Night. Somehow the day had gone.

  Gwen—she had not been sleeping—was looking up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was telling him something. But he knew it already, knew it from her silence, knew it from—from the drum perhaps. From Kryne Lamiya.

  He smiled. “You never forgot, did you? It wasn’t a question of forgetting. There was a reason why you never removed the . . .” He pointed.

  “Yes,” she said. She sat up in the bed, the coverlet falling down around her waist. Jaan had unsealed the front of her suit, so it hung on her loosely, and the soft curves of her breasts were visible. In the flickering light the flesh was pale and gray. Dirk felt no stirrings. Her hand went to the jade-and-silver. She touched it, stroked it, sighed. “I never thought—I don’t know—I said what I had to say, Dirk. Bretan Braith would have killed you.”

  “Maybe that would have been better,” he answered. Not bitterly, but in a bemused, faintly distracted sort of way. “So you never meant to leave him?”

  “I don’t know. How do I know what I meant? I was going to try, Dirk, really I was. I never really believed, though. I told you that. I was honest. This isn’t Avalon, and we’ve changed. I’m not your Jenny. I never was, and now less than ever.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I remember you driving. The way you gripped the stick. Your face. Your eyes. You have jade eyes, Gwen. Jade eyes and a silver smile. You frighten me.” He glanced away from her, back to the walls. Light-murals moved in chaotic patterns, along with the thin wild music. Somehow the ghosts had gone away. He had only taken his eyes from them for an instant, yet all of them had melted and left. Like his old dreams, he thought.

  “Jade eyes?” Gwen was saying.

  “Like Garse.”

  “Garse has blue eyes,” she said.

  “Still. Like Garse.”

  She chuckled, and groaned. “It hurts when I laugh,” she said. “But it’s funny. Me like Garse. No wonder Jaan—”

  “You’ll go back to him?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. It would be very hard to leave him now. Do you understand? He’s finally chosen. When he pointed his laser at Garse. After that, after he turned against teyn and holdfast and world, I can’t just—you know. But I won’t go back to being a betheyn to him, not ever. It will have to be more than jade-and-silver.”

  Dirk felt empty. He shrugged. “And me?”

  “You know it wasn’t working. Surely. You had to feel it. You never stopped calling me Jenny.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t? Maybe not. Maybe not.”

  “Never,” she said. She rubbed her head. “I’m feeling a little better now,” she said. “You still have those protein bars?”

  Dirk took one from his pocket and flipped it at her. She snatched it from the air with her left hand, smiled at him, unwrapped it, and began to eat.

  He stood up abruptly, jamming his hands deep into his jacket pockets, and walked to the high window. The tops of the bone-white towers still wore a faint, waning reddish tinge—perhaps the Helleye and its attendants were not entirely gone from the western sky. But below, in the streets, the Darkdawn city drank of night. The canals were black ribbons, and the landscape dripped with the dim purple radiance of phosphorescent moss. Through that lambent gloom Dirk glimpsed his solitary bargeman, as he had glimpsed him once
before upon those same dark waters. He was leaning on his pole, as ever, letting the current take him, coming on and on, easily, inexorably. Dirk smiled. “Welcome,” he muttered, “welcome.”

  “Dirk?” Gwen had finished eating. She was fastening her jumpsuit tight again, framed in the murky light. Behind her the walls were alive with gray-white dancers. Dirk heard drums, and whispers, and promises. And he knew the last were lies.

  “One question, Gwen,” he said heavily.

  She stared at him.

  “Why did you call me back?” he said. “Why? If you thought we were so dead, you and me, why couldn’t you leave me alone?”

  Her face was pale and blank. “Call you back?”

  “You know,” he said. “The whisperjewel.”

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “It’s back in Larteyn.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “In my luggage. You sent it to me.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “You met me!”

  “You lasered us from your ship. I never—believe me, that was the first I knew that you were coming. I didn’t know what to think of it. I thought you’d get around to telling me, though, so I never pressed.”

  Dirk said something, but the tower moaned its low note and took his words away from him. He shook his head. “You didn’t call me?”

  “No.”

  “But I got the whisperjewel. On Braque. The same one, esper-etched. You can’t fake that.” He remembered something else. “And Arkin said—”

  “Yes,” she said. She bit her lip. “I don’t understand. He must have sent it. But he was my friend. I had to have someone to talk to. I don’t understand.” She whimpered.

  “Your head?” Dirk asked quickly.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  He watched her face. “Arkin sent it?”