by Holly Lisle
Lauren raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
"According to Qawar, who keeps track of such things, the dark gods of the Night Watch are gathering. They can sense your gates, and they know something is afoot. Qawar claims there has never been such a gathering of them in this district. They have come from all over this world, and all over your world, and from downworld as well. He believes that the dark gods have gathered to wage war against you and your sister, and that they will not rest until they have destroyed you both, or until they are destroyed instead. He further believes that the dark gods are not in league with Baanraak—that in some fashion he betrayed them, and that they hope to destroy him, too."
Lauren took a long swallow of her hot chocolate, burning her tongue and the roof of her mouth in the process. It never ended, did it? One solution just bred half a dozen more problems, all of which ended up being worse than the original problem.
Dark gods and war.
She took another sip, and wondered if the old gods that were leaving Earth were really old gods—or if they were dark gods who'd been soaking in all the disharmony.
Who could tell? The Sentinels? She didn't think so.
She bet Molly would have known. But that didn't do Lauren a bit of good.
"The hell with it," she muttered, and took another huge swallow of her drink.
He looked at her over the rim of his mug as he sipped. He put the mug down, and after a moment said, "You are thinking…what?"
"I'm thinking this is for the birds."
His forehead furrowed.
She sighed. Metaphor and simile translated poorly sometimes. "I'm thinking I don't want to take my little boy into a war zone, and I'm terrified to leave him behind. I'm thinking maybe I ought to just spend whatever time my world has left with my son, and then either emigrate here or die with everyone else and go on to whatever waits beyond this. I'm thinking that no matter how good I am at magic, I'm not going to be able to stand up to Baanraak and an army of dark gods and rescue Molly—if I can even find her. I'm going to end up getting killed, and it will all be for nothing."
"When you go to rescue Molly, you won't go alone."
"Your guards are good guys. But they have no magic."
"That's true. Here. But if they go through with you to whichever world Baanraak and Molly are on, they will no longer be just men. They will become old gods, too. And war is a form of magic they know well." Seolar shrugged and took another sip. "Qawar said he would accompany you, as well—though in an advisory capacity. I will go with you. If you lead us, you will lead the best army we can gather."
"And look how well that worked out for Joan of Arc." Lauren looked at her son, now sleeping alone. Doggie had gotten up and crept into her own bunk at some point, and Lauren hadn't even noticed. She looked down and found Rue at her side. "We will go with you if you wish," he said. "All of us. In the next worlds, we will have magic, and we will fight with you—or we will guard the little god with our lives. We are all agreed—nothing will touch him. Stay or go, you have only to tell us."
Lauren smiled just a little. "No cowards in Oria but me, huh?"
Seolar returned her smile. "Oh, no. In all my life I have never been so frightened. But I am more frightened of what might happen if we do not go than of what will happen if we do."
Dalchi
Baanraak watched his mound with interest. The head had formed just at the dirt line sometime ago, a blobby bit of pink soft flesh—and gradually it took on shape and grew hair and developed clear features.
He had never seen the process before; he found it surprisingly repulsive. And yet, now that the girl had almost reformed, she had a beauty that shone clearly even across the barrier of species. She had not taken breath yet, nor opened her eyes, but Baanraak waited, still save for the tip of his tail, which twitched nervously. He wanted to do this right. He'd run over a hundred alternatives since he'd dropped the necklace into the dirt and covered it; a hundred different ways of saying what he needed to say, or of showing what he needed to show—he'd considered, too, the possibility of saying and showing nothing, of just being quick about it. He could not decide which way was best, and he now almost understood Fherghass's decision to just leave him buried until he'd run through all the buried meat and half a hundred lives and deaths. By doing that, Fherghass had spared himself any messy decisions at all. And if it had been a hell for Baanraak, it had been, nonetheless, a hell that ended eventually.
And Baanraak had eventually emerged, ready to be trained into a breathtaking killing machine.
His tail twitched faster. Her skin wore a faint sheen of light in the darkness now, and suddenly she looked every bit the goddess. Soon, he thought. Soon.
The light faded, and as it did, her eyes opened, and he could see the faint movements that suggested she was struggling to free herself. Then she saw him and froze. She looked him up and down, and something in her stilled and he felt her mind touch his. You, she said directly into his thoughts.
Me, he agreed.
In the time he thought that single syllable, she'd ripped through his thoughts to discover his plans for her, and had begun to cast a spell against him. He had never seen any response so fast, or so furious.
With a single downward stroke of his forefoot, he smashed in her skull.
"One," he whispered, his tail now still.
He felt less satisfaction in her first death under his tutelage than he had expected.
CHAPTER 18
Copper House
HOT CHOCOLATE FINISHED and conversation basically done, Lauren and Seolar were just rising from the table when the alarm went off again. This time it didn't just ding politely, however. This time it screamed.
Lauren raced for the mirror, her chair clattering to the floor behind her in her haste. She pressed hands to the glass and, already connected by her search spell to the world in which the alarm had gone off, had to do nothing more than widen the gate so she could see what she'd caught.
The alarm fell silent as her fingers touched the glass, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She'd set it to be loud if the spell contacted Molly, rather than traces of Molly's passages; she hadn't realized how loud, though, until it went off.
The image blossomed from a pinpoint in the center of the mirror to a full picture, that would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. She got a clear side-shot of Molly, buried in a mound of dirt up to her neck, staring at a giant rrôn with an expression on her face of pure rage. In the next instant, the rrôn brought down his massive foreleg and smashed Molly's skull.
Lauren turned away from the scene. She felt light-headed, both hot and cold. She broke out in a sweat. She fought the wave of nausea, but it won; she ran to the bathroom and held on to the cool porcelain of the toilet and threw up. Behind her, she heard Seolar begin a high-pitched keening shriek that made her skin crawl.
Jake started crying. Lauren rinsed out her mouth in the sink and made her way to his side; she felt like she was walking on the deck of a tossing ship. She had never been witness to anything that hit her so hard. She lay on the bed, pulled Jake into her arms, stroked his hair, and cried soundlessly.
Behind her, she could hear Seolar opening the door, shouting into the corridor beyond. The goroths were yelling things, and she thought they might be at her, but she couldn't be sure. Guards ran, and the little room erupted into riot—but it was a riot far away from Lauren, as if she lay at the bottom of the seafloor, listening to unclear, watery voices a long way away. Her world grayed around the edges and narrowed down to her and Jake.
This is the way the world ends, she thought. A blink, a flash, and silence. She was going to go up against not one, but a multitude of those things? She was going to take her child into that danger, or leave him behind so that dark gods could break into this place and find him the way the monster had found Molly?
He's already in danger, something inside her whispered. He's yours—therefore he's a target. For that monster, for the other monsters, for every dark g
od who sees you as standing between him and the deaths of worlds that feed him.
She stroked the soft hair, the soft cheek. She felt Jake relax and, in spite of the noise in the room, felt him go limp and heavy as he fell back to sleep. He trusted her to make his world safe. She was the only one who could.
She sat up, and her mission had expanded—she could no longer look at working with Molly to bring the upworlds back to life as her destiny. "Hunter" now took on a whole new meaning in her mind, because she needed to destroy the dark gods. In order for Jake to be safe, in order for him ever to know a moment's peace, she was going to have to hunt down the monsters. That wasn't what her parents had planned for her; nowhere in their notes did it say "Kill Night Watch."
Jobs change, she told herself.
And the first job is to get Molly back before that monster kills her again.
She brushed Jake's hair away from his forehead and looked at the guards, the goroths, the old gods, Seolar and Birra, all of whom were looking at her with expressions ranging from horror to grief to dismay.
"We're going after her," Lauren said. "We're going in there fast, we're going to kill him, we're going to get Molly or the Vodi necklace back. It doesn't matter which one, and it doesn't matter whether she's alive or dead when we get there; we're still going to get her back. We know where she is, we know where he is. With luck, we're the only ones who know that, but we have to assume we aren't. We'll have to assume that we're going to war."
She stared at the guards who would be stepping into a situation for the first time in which they would be magic users. She thought about the effects waging war in a downworld would have on the upworlds, and she cringed. "We're going to cause problems here with anything we do there—you have to know that, and we have to be prepared for it. If we go into battle against Baanraak, or against Baanraak and a whole host of dark gods, we're going to spawn civil unrest, wars and possibly even natural disasters all the way up the worldchain. And that means we're likely to go from trouble downworld right into trouble at home. But we can't help that. This evil cannot be permitted to stand."
She crossed her arms over her chest, wishing she wasn't standing there in flannel teddy-bear-print jammies and a terry-cloth bathrobe. She doubted that any military leader exhorting the troops to war had been so dressed. "We have three objectives," she told them. "One—we have to kill Baanraak and whichever dark gods show up on Dalchi. Two—we have to gather up any jewelry worn by our enemies, and we have to destroy that jewelry utterly. And—three—we have to get either Molly or her Vodi necklace and we have to bring one or both back here safely."
"Lauren, you cannot go into battle," Seolar said. "You have to remain safe, because if we save Molly and lose you, our cause is just as lost as it is if we have lost you but not her."
Lauren considered this, then nodded agreement. "I'll have to be there, but perhaps I can coordinate everything from a position of relative safety." She closed her eyes, thinking. "I can gate us all through straight into Dalchi, and drop us right on top of Baanraak. But you veyâr have no experience with using magic, and we could end up in real trouble if you get crazy with it."
From behind a mob of veyâr guards, Lauren heard Qawar's voice. "Especially since the beginning magic user becomes more powerful as he moves downworld. I hit my power peak back on Jerr. Everything since then has been downhill. I become more vulnerable with every new world I pass. However, the veyâr will have a great deal of power, four worlds down from their own, and no experience in using it. The Hunter makes a good point. She and I need to create safe weapons for them; if possible, we need to give them kill-proof—"
"No," Lauren said.
All eyes turned to her.
Qawar said, "I was going to recommend kill-proof weapons, which would minimize the upflow damage—"
"I know what you were going to recommend," Lauren said. "This is not a situation where we can settle for stunning Baanraak or the other dark gods. We have to kill them, and when we're done, we have to destroy them."
Qawar was shaking his head. "You're giving them terrible advice—you're young. You don't understand. You can't realize that there is no way to rid the worldchain of the dark gods. We have to work around them. Sometimes we have to give them a bone, sometimes we have to pretend they aren't there. But to aim to go in and actually destroy them—you'll bring the whole of the worldchain down in rubble if you try such a fool stunt."
"Give them a bone?" Lauren asked. "What sort of bone can you give to creatures who feed on the death of worlds? What? You just let a world fall from time to time to keep them from coming after you?"
"They're immortal," Qawar said. "We aren't."
"We are," Lauren said. "I have proof. I've been to the afterlife, and I guarantee you beyond this death, we go on."
"It's not the same," Qawar said.
"Nothing is the same." Lauren studied him, wondering if she would dislike anyone of his species, or if his personality was something completely separate from whatever he was. "Knowing that my world is the next 'bone' you'd be willing to throw to the dark gods to keep them from coming after you, or that the lives of more than six billion people mean nothing to you at least lets me know how useful your advice is going to be."
"That's not how I feel at all. I grieve for the death of each world. But you haven't been dealing with them for ten thousand years. I have."
"Then maybe you've been hiding for so long you've forgotten what really matters. You can't 'throw a bone' to anything that has already sworn it will kill you to have the whole cow. You can't appease anyone whose continued existence calls for your destruction. You might buy yourself some time at the cost of everyone else, but sooner or later the monsters will come for you."
Seolar said, "Qawar has negotiated with the dark gods to protect the veyâr."
"At what cost?" Lauren asked.
"We've had to make concessions," Seolar said, but did not go into detail. "Nevertheless, there have been times when Qawar is all that stood between us and destruction. We had no Vodi to bargain for us…and even the Vodian before Molly gave the dark gods land and privileges in exchange for peace."
"Deals with the devil rarely end well," Lauren said, and left it to Seolar to decide whether she meant the deals with the dark gods or the deals with Qawar. She said, "In any case, we will be making no such deals. Our goal is not just the death, but the utter annihilation, of the dark gods. They are killing our worldchain, and their destruction is our only self-defense. The question now is, are you with me?"
Qawar said, "I think you're making a mistake that will destroy everything you hope to save. But with that said, on your head be it. I'll follow, but I will not lead."
"We're with you," the veyâr guards said. And Birra and Seolar said, "All the veyâr are with you."
The goroths bowed until their heads hit the floor, and said, "You know we are with you, Hunter. To the ends of all the worlds."
Lauren looked at them and smiled, and nodded just a little. "Let's hope we don't get there today."
She pointed to the goroths. "You will be staying here. Your jobs will be to keep Jake safe when I take everyone else through. One of you will have to stay here to shut down the gate if a dark god tries to come through."
She turned to Seolar. "You and your people will have lethal weapons. I can design them so they will only kill dark gods. That way if you shoot through any of your allies you won't kill them."
She turned to Qawar. "No matter what has happened in the past, we have to face the truth about what must happen now. We have to defeat them. We cannot wait for someone bigger than we are or braver than we are or stronger than we are to stand up to them. We cannot hope someone else will save us and end this destruction. The weight of worlds rests in our hands; the lives of those now living and those who wait to be born depend on us. We cannot turn away from this burden, because no one else will pick it up if we let it drop."
Dalchi
Baanraak studied the mound, now all clean dirt a
gain, since he'd buried the little bit of mess. The first purification round had gone well…and yet, it hadn't.
He cocked an eye heavenward and stilled his mind. Something had seen him. He'd felt the shock of recognition, he'd felt the surge of a gate opening wide, then snapping down to nothing again, and he'd felt magic. Small, surreptitious—but powerful nonetheless. Whatever had been watching him was either gone or made so small even he could not sense it, but he doubted neither senses nor experience. Both of those had kept his hide intact for longer than he could tell.
He had no doubt, either, that whatever had found him had been looking for him. Now the question was, who lay behind the gate and the spell? Rr'garn and the rrôn branch of the Night Watch? Baanraak doubted they had the subtlety for such a delicate little spell. They were bludgeoners, not surgeons. Some old god suddenly overcome by a rash of foolish courage and derring-do? Not likely—after years of persecuting any who crossed him, Baanraak feared little from any old gods save the few remaining immortals. And even they had not crossed paths with him in ages beyond reckoning.