wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

  Someone related to his little Vodi?

  If this hidden watcher shared a link with the Vodi, Baanraak might have more of a challenge facing him than he'd expected.

  He looked at his mound of dirt and said, "Who do you number among your friends and champions, my Molly? Who would dare me to save you? I think there must be someone…and I wonder if I might not gather this hero of yours in and mold him as I'll mold you."

  Baanraak had the clean, unspelled gold. He could not claim the artistry of the great resurrection masters of ages past, but he knew the resurrection spells well enough to create something simple and lasting.

  Then, in the distance but from another direction, a different gate opened. This one announced itself by a soft, discordant click, followed by a rush of the death-spawned energy that characterized the dark gods. Click followed click followed click.

  The incoming dark gods were some way off, but that wouldn't last. They were coming. Heroes and villains, and him with his Vodi in the middle. Interesting times, Baanraak thought.

  Copper House

  Viewing the terrain surrounding Baanraak's hideaway on Dalchi, Lauren found out that Qawar had been right. An army of dark gods—rrôn and keth and a mix of other creatures from a string of murdered worlds—poured out of conjoined gates, one after another after another.

  No chance of getting in, getting Molly, slaughtering Baanraak, and leaving—but then, much as she had hoped, she hadn't thought there would be.

  There would be war. Lauren had never been in a war before.

  She studied Qawar, who looked hugely unhappy at the idea of being involved with this. She bet he'd be even unhappier at the idea of going first into a fire zone. She didn't blame him, but she also wasn't going to send inexperienced magic users through to stand against God-only-knew what. "You any good at casting tough shields?"

  Qawar nodded. "Anything that will keep me alive I've learned to excel at."

  "Good," Lauren said. "When we get ready to go through, you'll go first. You can cast and maintain the shields—I'm guessing you aren't much of a fighter."

  "I'm more of a flee-er. But I don't need to go through to cast shields. I can shield them as they go through the gates—good, tight individual shields. I'm a master at those. And the shields will just get stronger four worlds down."

  "Right."

  Lauren turned to Seolar. "You can see the dark gods down there. Anything about the terrain work for you?"

  Seolar and Birra studied the view through the gate; then Seolar said, "Can you change the angle a bit?"

  "What do you need?"

  "A…map view. From above."

  Lauren complied, and Birra and Seolar studied the ground, then grinned at each other. "They were thinking about defending against this point," Seolar said, pointing to Baanraak's high ground. "If we could approach them from here…and here…"

  "We could catch them between crossfire," Birra said. "They picked their ground with the idea of attack, not defense."

  "So you need gates to two points that will open at the same time," Lauren said. "I'm going to need to line the wall with mirrors in here. I'll create enough gates that you'll be able to send through a dozen men in a wave, six at a time to each of your two destination points." That would be tough—holding that many big gates open across that much distance for the amount of time she would need was going to be exhausting. But sending men through one at a time seemed like a bad idea to her.

  Seolar said, "If we could bring our people through here, and here—" he indicated ground behind two rises—"we might be able to take them."

  "I can do that," Lauren said.

  He said, "I have 260 men to send, plus eighteen captains. And Birra. And me."

  Lauren looked at the mirror. "So we're outnumbered."

  Birra and Seolar studied her, matching expressions of surprise. "I'd estimate we have them to the good by nearly a hundred men—though they may continue to bring people through."

  Lauren looked at the future battlefield crowded with immortal evil and wondered at men who could see the monsters, figure an accurate count, and sound even remotely optimistic about the outcome. Of course, with good strategy and better weapons, the veyâr could at least level out the odds a bit.

  She told Qawar, "You and I need to make weapons. I want enhanced non-magical weapons to use against Baanraak and other dark gods," she said. "Something they won't be ready for. The dark god I killed died when I used real bullets on him, not magic."

  She noticed a funny expression on Qawar's face. "What's wrong?" she asked him.

  "You killed a dark god?"

  "Yeah. One of the rrôn."

  His level stare evaluated her without revealing his thoughts. Finally, Qawar said, "Perhaps you will get us through this after all. I don't know anyone who has killed a dark god in—oh—thousands of years. Except for other dark gods, of course—but we can hardly hope for help from that quarter."

  Lauren shrugged. "Pray they suffer a lot of friendly fire. That would help us."

  She stared right back at him. "We want something simple. Same concept as the machine gun, the automatic rifle—just aim and pull the trigger. We'll use magic to produce and load ammo so the weapons will never run out, and use magic to augment the aim. Put some sort of 'friendly fire' safety on each weapon so that our guys can't shoot anyone on our side. The only things we're going to kill are dark gods—they emit death-fed magic. You've felt that death-magic. Tune the weapons in on that if you can, to make sure the weapons will only hit them."

  Qawar was still staring at her.

  "What?"

  "You're too good at this."

  Lauren still didn't like Qawar. "What do you mean by that?"

  He shrugged. "Not once have you said, "Perhaps we can negotiate with them. Why not? Why did you leap straight to planning for war? Why are you not tender and timid and hungry for peace?"

  "Women aren't always tender and timid," Lauren said. "Human mothers share characteristics with other mothers. If you threaten our young, we'll rip your goddamned head off. Think mother bear separated from her young. Mother eagle with an intruder threatening her nest. Each human being is born fierce, desperate for survival and willing to fight for it. Some of us stay that way."

  CHAPTER 19

  Copper House to Dalchi

  LAUREN HUGGED JAKE CLOSE, then released him and sent him with Doggie.

  "Everything's ready," she said to Seolar. She rested fingertips on the mirror she'd chosen as the master and linked it to all the others.

  "What if Baanraak is no longer there?" Seolar asked. "What if he's not in that cave?"

  "The Vodi necklace is still there," Lauren said. "I can feel it. Do you think he'd go without it?"

  "Maybe," Seolar said softly. "We have no idea why he wanted the Vodi necklace in the first place. Perhaps just to bring the old gods and the veyâr together on a battlefield, where we could wipe each other out without requiring any effort on his part."

  Lauren nodded. "Maybe. But we still have to go in after it. We can't let him keep it. We can't let him do what he did to her again."

  Veyâr captains formed their men into ranks, giving them instructions on where to deploy and what to do when they broke through the gate. Lauren hoped the magic that would move them from one place to the other wouldn't prove too disorienting—she'd experienced it often enough that she should be used to it, but its wonder never seemed to wear off.

  The veyâr were queuing up. Lauren personally spun a protective shield around each of the goroths, then around Jake. She crouched and told Rue, "Make sure Doggie keeps Jake here and keeps him safe. He has to stay in this room—if he doesn't, the shield will break and anything could hurt him. But don't let him near the gate. You watch what's going on through the gate. I have to leave it open so that we can retreat as soon as we get Molly, but I'm going to make a kill-switch for you. If you see a rrôn, or any of the dark gods coming for it—and you'll be able to see them before they can reach it, I think—hit the ki
ll switch."

  Rue looked worried. "The kill switch…it will kill you?"

  Lauren winced. Metaphor. "No. Kill switch is just a name. The switch will just shut down the gate before anything can get in here. I want to leave it open if I can, because if we have to do a quick retreat, I don't want to have to stop to put a gate together. But I don't want anything awful getting in here again, either."

  Rue nodded. "I will…hit the kill switch."

  Lauren created it as a button on the master gate, high enough up that the long-armed goroth ought to be able to reach it, but Jake wouldn't.

  Qawar finished shielding the veyâr in the room. He moved to the doorway and said, "I can't get any more of them until this lot goes through—and we can't send them out in the halls to wait. That will break the shields.

  It was time, then. The veyâr started marching through. Lauren hugged Jake again, feeling the tears sliding down her cheeks, unable to stop them, hating the fact that she was leaving him, and that once again leaving him behind was the best of all her bad alternatives. At that moment, she hated her parents for not having been normal people living normal lives.

  The veyâr moved through fast—leaping in at a half-run while she used her strength and her focus to keep the gates all open.

  Seolar was already coming up on the gate—he would be the last of the veyâr, and then it would be her turn. She swallowed hard, turned away from her beautiful son, and caught up with Seolar as he reached the gate. She could see fighting going on already on the other side. She didn't hesitate, though—because if she did not put her hand on the mirror and push through in that instant, she feared she never would. And she was the one who could sense Molly—the one most likely to find where Baanraak had hidden her. Seolar kept right with her, mirroring her movements. Neither of them said anything.

  For one glorious timeless instant, she merged with infinity; she knew her immortality and touched eternity. The universe sang for her as if the whole of it existed for her alone. And then the path between the worlds spat her out onto hard ground, into hot air, beneath a glowing dome of blue light that held back splashes and smears of black fire. She heard screaming, she saw bodies on the ground, some moving, some not. In death, all the dark gods and mortals seemed indistinguishable—lumps of bloody flesh and gleaming bone ends.

  She breathed acrid smoke and swore, and tightened the shield around herself so that it cleared the air before she breathed it. She willed her voice loud—loud enough to carry to every veyâr on her side, and said, "If you want the air to be breathable and clean, will it to be so and it will be."

  Seolar, standing next to her, said, "I can't see the damned field."

  She nodded. "We'll get up above it. First, though, I'd like to figure out where Baanraak is and what he's doing."

  "Even on the other side, you said you could feel Molly here. Can you still?"

  "Yes," Lauren said. "He hasn't taken her away from this area yet. They're nearby." She closed her eyes and reached for the bond that existed between her and Molly. "She's already a long way back from Baanraak killing her," Lauren told Seolar after a moment. "She isn't breathing, and she isn't aware, but when I focus on her, I can feel—life. I don't know why she's resurrecting so quickly, though—she needed more than mere days the first time."

  "I don't know why. All I know is, at least we have not yet lost."

  "Not yet," Lauren said. Another moment and she added, "We're meant to think that she and the necklace are still in the mound, though. He's set a trap there—don't let anyone touch the mound." Lauren got images of coldness, of calculating evil that drew pleasure from pain, of deception carefully plotted. She might have been reading all of that from whatever waited in the mound; she might have been getting it from Baanraak himself. She could feel him, even though she could tell he was doing his best to hide his presence.

  "Baanraak is down in the caves somewhere—the opening goes way in, and I have the feeling that he has done a bit of work in there to make it meet his needs. He's below us, and below the dark gods coming this way." Lauren shook her head. "He's ready for us. He doesn't know who'll be coming, but he's waiting for whoever does. He figures he'll let his enemies do his work for him—kill each other off, save him the trouble and the risk. And then he'll mop up whoever is left."

  "One of him, all of us."

  Lauren nodded. "Baanraak has some special talents. He's very good at magic, but it's more than that. I can't quite figure out why he's so confident—he's hard as hell to read." She turned to Seolar, uncertain if she should tell him what else she'd discovered, then decided that at the moment it might help more than hurt, since Seolar knew the myths and history of his world, and Lauren didn't. "He's very possessive of her," she said.

  Seolar—who had been nervously watching the splashes of flame and magic that hit their shield, as well as flares of light as the dark gods' bullets struck it—now turned his full attention to Lauren.

  "Baanraak…the rrôn. He's possessive of…Molly?"

  Lauren nodded. With her eyes closed, she dug beneath Baanraak's shields and into his mind. "He's shielding himself and his thoughts—it's only my connection with Molly that's letting me get through to him, because for some reason he doesn't have her blocked off. He's tuned into her. He…" She rubbed her temples and opened her eyes. "He truly believes that if he repeatedly kills her and brings her back, he'll be doing her a favor."

  Seolar looked as lost as Lauren felt. "I don't understand. He doesn't want to destroy the Vodi necklace, or Molly?"

  Lauren closed her eyes and let herself connect to the tenuous thread that bound her to Molly—and through that link, to connect to Baanraak, as well. Images and feelings flooded through her. A great dark egg; hanging in the sky and then falling like a rock toward some pinpoint moving far below; the sensations of sun on hide, wind racing past; ravenous hunger; the thrill of the clean kill.

  Lauren couldn't put the images into any coherent order, any more than she could make sense of a darker thread in the monster's mind. That thread wound its way through entombment, death and death and more death, pain and suffering so intense Lauren could not comprehend anything surviving it and coming out sane on the other side.

  Through the predator fantasies and the nightmares, Lauren found images of Molly—and those, too, bewildered her. In his mind, Baanraak equated Molly to a huge black sphere that glowed from within. This visual metaphor meant something to him that was almost holy, but Lauren could not figure out why. And Baanraak saw Molly with wings, dropping from the sky like Death's avenging angel.

  "I can't tell what he wants, but though he plans to kill her, he doesn't seem to want to…destroy…her." Lauren looked at the battlefield all around her. She realized that this was not the real battle. Not for her, anyway. "He's not human—not anything like human. I can get inside his thoughts thanks to Molly and the Vodi necklace, but a lot of things moving around inside his head don't mean anything to me. I'm not a rrôn. He doesn't think the way that I think. You see?"

  Seolar nodded. "That you can read his thoughts at all…"

  Lauren put a finger to Seolar's lips and said, "Don't think it. Don't say it. I'm keeping myself out of his sight, but he'll be able to read you. You run the battle, and think about keeping your people alive—and maybe luring the dark gods to that mound—but only if you are in a position to get everyone out of the way quickly. Don't let your mind wander beyond that. Okay?"

  "I can do that," Seolar said, "though I'd prefer to know why."

  "If I told you, I'd be telling him. You're shielded, you have one of the gates open to you." Lauren did a careful piece of magic, then said, "The gate will stay with you now. It's anchored to you, which means you have to be the last to leave—but as long as you're here you can get everyone else out."

  "We were going to link it to you and keep you safe."

  "We were. But if we're going to get Molly back, there's something I am going to have to do. And I'll have to do it alone."

  "You can't."


  "It's win or lose time, Seo. Either I do this, and we have a chance to win. Or I don't, and every one of your men lying dead on this alien world just died for nothing."

  Seolar looked sick, but he nodded. "Go then. Go with the grace of the gods; I'll hold you in my thoughts and prayers."

  Lauren shook her head and said, "Thanks. I'll take all the help I can get."

  "I can give you some men."

  "I know you can. But I couldn't get them past Baanraak—they would only give me away." She took his hand in hers and said, "Good luck, and be well. I hope we both survive to meet again."

  He started to protest. Lauren could see the words forming as clearly as she could see the look in his eyes. And then he simply nodded, squeezed her hand, and said, "Good luck."