Dying of the Light

Dirk spun and began sprinting for the edge of the wood.

It was a run out of nightmare.

They had taken his boots; no sooner had he gone three meters into the trees than he cut his foot on a sharp rock in the dark and began to limp. There were other rocks. Ru

They had taken his clothes; it was better in the shelter of the trees, where the wind was not so bad, but he was still cold. Very cold. He had gooseflesh for a time, then it passed. Other pains came, and the cold seemed less important.

The outworld wilderness was too dark and too light. Too dark to see where he was going. He stumbled over roots, ski

It was less than a kilometer to run, less than a kilometer. But a kilometer is a long way to go through a wilderness, naked, close to lost. He had been ru

After that, he neither thought nor worried. He ran.

He ran in animal panic, breathing hard, bleeding, his whole body trembling and aching. The run became an endless thing, a thing outside of time, a fever dream of frantic pumping feet and snatches of vivid sensation and the noises behind him of the hounds, growing ever closer-or so it seemed. He ran and ran, and got nowhere, and ran and ran, and did not move. He crashed through a thick wall of firebriars, and the red-tipped thorns cut his flesh in a hundred places, and he did not cry; he ran, he ran. He reached an area of smooth gray slate and tried to scramble over it quickly and fell and smashed his chin with a crack against the stone and his mouth was full of blood and he spat it out. Blood on the rock, as well, no wonder he had fallen; his blood, all of it, from the cuts on his feet.

He crawled over the smooth stone and reached the trees again and ran some more, wild, until he remembered that he was not looking for his beacon. And when he found it again, it was back behind him and to the side, very faint, a small shining dot in a scarlet sky, and he turned and went to it and across the stone once more, tripping over unseen roots, tearing the foliage away with wild hands, ru

And then suddenly-he did not know when, he did not know how long he had been ru

The hounds were in front of him.

One of them, at least. It came slinking out of thex trees snarling, its little eyes deadly, its hairless snout drawn back to flash its ugly fangs. He tried to run around it and it was on him, knocking him over, slashing at him and rolling with him, then jumping up. Dirk struggled to his knees; the hound circled him and snapped savagely whenever he tried to rise to his feet. It had bitten his left arm and drawn more blood. But it had not killed him, had not torn out his throat. Trained, he thought, it was trained. It circled him, circled, its eyes never leaving him. Pyr had sent it out ahead and was coming behind with his teyn and his other dogs. This one would keep him trapped here until they arrived.

He jumped to his feet suddenly, lunged toward the trees. The dog leaped, knocked him over again, wrestled him to the ground, and almost tore loose his arm. This time he did not get up. The hound backed off again, stood waiting, poised, its mouth wet with blood and slaver. Dirk tried to push himself up with his good arm. He crawled a half-meter. The hound growled. The others were near. He heard the baying.

Then, from above, he heard something else. He looked up weakly into the small slice of cloud-streaked sky, dim with the dawning rays of the Hell-eye and its attendants. The Braith hound, backing off from him a meter, was looking up too. And the sound came again. It was a wail and a war yell, a lingering ululating shriek, a death hoot that was almost musical in its intensity. Dirk wondered if he were dying and hearing the sounds of Kryne Lamiya in his mind. But the hound heard it too. It was squatting, paralyzed, looking up.

A dark shape dropped from the sky. Dirk saw it fall. It was huge, very black, pitch almost, and its underside was puckered with a thousand small red mouths, and they were all open, all singing, all sounding that terrible shuddering wail. It had no head that he could see; it was triangular, a wide dark sail, a wind-borne manta ray, a leather cloak someone had cast loose in the sky. A leather cloak with mouths, though, and a long thin tail.

He saw the tail whip around once, suddenly, and snap at the Braith hound's face. The dog blinked and stepped back. The flying creature hovered for an instant, beating its vast wings with exquisite rippling slowness, then settled down over the hound and wrapped itself around it. Both animals were silent. The hound-the huge muscular rat-faced dog that stood as tall as a man-the hound was gone. The other covered it completely, and lay in the grass and the dirt like a black leather sausage of immense proportions.

Everything was silent. The hunter's wail had stilled the entire forest. He did not hear the other hounds. Carefully he rose to his feet and walked, limping, around the torpid killer-cloak. It scarcely seemed to stir. In the dawn half-light, it might have been a big misshapen log.

In his mind, Dirk saw it still as it had looked in the sky: a black shape, howling, falling, all wing and mouth. For an instant, glimpsing only the silhouette, he had thought that Jaan Vikary had come to rescue him, flying the gray manta aircar.

The far side of the clearing was a choker tangle, thick and yellow-brown and very dense. But the smoke came from beyond it. Wearily Dirk dodged and squeezed and pushed the waxy limbs aside, breaking them when he had to, and forced his way through.

The wreck had ceased to burn, but a thin pall of smoke still hung above it. One wing had scraped along the ground, tearing a great gouge in the earth and felling several trees before snapping; the other jabbed up into the air, its bat shape distorted by fused ru