Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  The Wilds of Southern Oria—and a Band of Silver and Gold

  …and Baanraak woke, hungry, in darkness and cold, with the stars glittering in a cloudless sky. There would be frost before morning. But the clear sky did not confer clear thoughts, nor did the sharp cold offer the sharpness of irrefutable logic. The weight of doubt and the sprawling tangle of choices that made little sense or less sense or no sense at all lay before him, and he closed his eyes against them and despaired.

  Copper House, Ballahara, Nuue, Oria

  Molly stepped out of the gate she'd created and into the safe room in the subbasement of Copper House. She locked down the gate-mirror she'd used to come in, rekeying it to accept only her magic or Lauren's. She showered in the modern shower that Lauren had created there when she was stuck in the subbasement running a small war to rescue Molly. Molly let herself enjoy the endless hot water and great pressure—hot showers were not among the luxuries Oria had yet discovered—and when she had finished and dried herself with a wonderful, thick, soft bath towel the size of a carpet, she created for herself a simple court gown. Green silk with a fitted bodice and a floor-length skirt. She did not worry herself with overskirts or underlayers or the trappings of insignia; on Oria she was an old god, and the rules of court hierarchy did not apply to her. She was above them.

  She wanted to look nice, but she wanted, also, to look like one apart. She dried her hair with the focusing of her will, and twisted it quickly into a simple braid that hung down the middle of her back nearly to her knees. On her feet, she put shoes with good traction and good support, covered in green silk to make them look acceptable. Goddess in green sneakers, she thought—but a goddess who could fight and run if she needed to.

  She strapped her dagger around her hips and surveyed herself in the mirror. She tested the skirt to make sure that it did not bind her movement, and checked that she could tuck the material quickly out of her way at need. Satisfied, she turned away from the mirrors. She'd do. She needed to get going, though, before she lost her nerve.

  She moved through the subbasement, noticing that it was insufficiently guarded—she'd need to let Seolar know about that. And up the ramps, and into the main hallways of the vast house, where suddenly the veyâr were everywhere, and excited to see her, and clearly anxious to know what had happened to her. But she sought Seolar. Everything else would wait. She told that to the people who greeted her with such plain relief, and watched them fade out of her way, bowing.

  Seolar, when she finally found him, was in his day office, meeting with veyâr from the village. When she stepped to the door he rose and excused himself, telling them he would have to meet with them again on the morrow.

  They rose and left, and she stepped into the office.

  Seolar came to her and wrapped his arms around her. She could see the anguish in his eyes, and feel it in his body. "A week, and you did not come. What happened?"

  "I went for a walk," she said.

  "For a week?"

  "No. I found a nest of Night Watch. Was killed destroying them. Resurrected, went to talk to my sister, took a walk. The walk only lasted a few hours, but during it I found Baanraak, and caught him off guard. So I followed him, and when the time was right, I killed him."

  Seolar leaned back to look her full in the face, hope clear and bright in his eyes. "The monster who hunts you and who killed you—he is dead? Destroyed?"

  Molly took a deep breath. "He killed me in the process of my killing him. The last days, I've been…coming back. I woke up some distance from here, shortly before he resurrected. I killed him again, this time when he was weak and helpless. I destroyed both of his resurrection rings. He's gone for good."

  "But in the process I have lost a little more of you." Seolar pushed away from her, and when he was free of her embrace, turned his back to her. "We have lost a little more of us."

  "We have," Molly said.

  "Do you still love me?"

  "Yes," Molly said. But already she did not mean, when she said it, what he meant when he said the same thing. She cared about him—cared what happened to him, wanted him to be happy, wanted him to find joy. Her passion, though, was gone. Her excitement about them, her breathless anticipation of the next moment when the two of them could steal time together alone—all gone. Nothing she could do would bring them back. "I still love you," she said.

  "How many more deaths until you don't, beloved? How much more of this until you look at me one day and I mean no more to you than the chair I sit upon or the floor I stand on? How much longer do we have?" His voice broke, and he walked to his bookcase and rested his face against the volumes there.

  "I don't know. I can feel that there is less of me, but I cannot begin to tell you where I am less or where I am unchanged. I sense my…my diminishment. But it's a vague thing, not measurable, not steady. I cannot look at what I've lost and say, 'I'll only be able to die ten more times before I'm not me anymore.' It doesn't work that way."

  "Well, I'm dying from the dread. Each time this happens, I die a little more."

  She walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around. "Do you still love me?"

  "With all my heart and soul. Otherwise it would not matter to me that you are going away from me and that one day you will be here but will no longer be you. And that day will come in my lifetime, I think. Because you are not being careful." He gripped her shoulders. "You are not staying clear of trouble."

  "If the universe is to live, Seo, I cannot. I am not what you thought I was, nor what I'd come to hope I was. I am not the healer of all things good." She pulled his hands from her shoulders and clasped them, and held them. She stared into his bottomless black eyes and said, "I am, instead, the destroyer of evil. But evil has teeth, and sometimes I'm going to fail. Sometimes I am going to die. For the worldchain to survive, I must. No one else can do what I can do. No one else can find the Night Watch by feel, can annihilate them without spawning awful rebound magic that would bounce upworld and smash innocents; no one else can do all that and die in the process and come back to do it again. No one else. If I give up, if I fail, no one else will step in to take my place."

  "Does that matter? The world above us is poised to die. I have heard from many that there is little about it worth saving. So. Let it die. Bring those you love, and those they love, and come here. Stay with me. Be safe. Heal the veyâr, do as the other Vodian did, be careful of yourself and cherish the love we share."

  "I cannot do that."

  He shoved her hands away from him and shouted, "Why not? The other Vodian did. They healed the sick and kept the dark gods from our doors—"

  "They sold you down the river a piece at a time, making concessions that cost you your lands and your people and that will cost you the very existence of the veyâr if you stay on that path. You cannot negotiate with those whose only wish is to see you dead. All you can do is destroy them first. And that is what I intend to do."

  "And there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of them, and only one of you."

  "There are less of them now than there were a week ago. There will be less of them in two weeks than there are today. I have eternity, and they are not infinite. I will come to the end of them, Seolar. And the veyâr will live, and thrive, and expand again. And the worldchain will revive." She did not tell him of the darkness within her, of her growing yearning toward all the flavors of destruction, of her doubts about her role. She was uncertain—but he would have read her uncertainty as a sign that she could walk away from what she was doing and hide with him in Copper House. About that path she had no doubts whatsoever; she would not be hiding out of the way of things.

  He spoke with a voice ragged with pain. "If you would continue on this path of yours, then, kill me. Here…now…quickly. You will be doing me a kindness. For I would rather die right now sure of your love than a piece at a time watching you fade away." He met her eyes—she realized he meant every word he'd just said.

  Molly pulled
him into her arms and held him and stroked his head. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry—that I am not the person you hoped I would be, that times are so dark and so hard. That you and I…"

  A chill passed over her then. She felt, as if from a distance, that her heart was breaking. But she was standing a little apart from that pain. And she realized that once she would have wept. That she should be crying. That she wanted to cry, as he was crying, for the death of dreams and hopes and desire. For the death of love.

  But she had no tears. And even her horror at realizing how much of herself she had already lost was not enough to bring them.

  CHAPTER 11

  Hendricks, Tucker County, West Virginia—Baanraak of Silver and Gold

  BAANRAAK LOOKED NORTH at the tiny town and inhaled, long and deep, wondering if this had been the right direction to take. The magic was nearby—live magic, downworld magic shifted upworld, the source of the Night Watch's discomfort and his amusement. But its source still lay southward, just a bit farther. He was close to locating the first and smallest of Lauren's siphons, but already he could tell it wasn't as small as he'd hoped. It was pumping out a lot of magic. More than he would have expected.

  Molly's sister had done something strong here, something scary. He'd thought two people taking on the whole of the Night Watch had been ludicrous—but Molly was a terrifying creature, and would be even more awe-inspiring when she came into her full power. She wasn't even close yet. And the sister came from that same stock—ferocious and strong and passionate. He could feel the passion in the magic that surrounded him. He could taste the sister, and that taste shook him to his core. He tasted love, love that moved even him, fierce and certain that it could change a world or a worldchain.

  Love was the spell she had cast, Baanraak realized. Love born of loss, and hope, and fear, and determination to survive. Love of life itself, love of the world and the creatures that lived on it and in it. Love of blue skies and thunderheads and the sweet smell of rain on the grass; love of bright lights and city streets and the people who walked through every day oblivious to the wonder of their own existence—and love of those who knew, and who cherished every breath.

  Every bit of this came through in the magic that he breathed in, clear as pictures, sharp as edged steel. The magic urged him to hang on, to keep fighting for good, to live with everything in him, to share love through action. To protect, to preserve, to defend.

  He was a dead thing animated, a creature without love or passion or compassion…or hope…and still the power of this plea shook him, and ripped into him with invisible talons, and dragged him weeping to his knees who had not wept in an eon, nor wanted to.

  It was not the human form he had taken that was doing this. Flesh he could cast aside or remake at will—his flesh was under his control. It could not be his soul that this plea—this command—reached, for he had no soul. Millennia dead, he had been for millennia free of the pain of grief and tears. This was betrayal by silver yet again—betrayal of the Baanraak he had known for all of his existence by the Baanraak that had hidden within him, waiting for something to bring him forth. He felt the silver now, felt it burying its talons deep in his heart and blood. It was as if the silver had been sleeping, but was now awake and fighting everything he had been to remake him into something new. Something he feared and did not desire.

  Sobbing, Baanraak pulled himself to his feet. He shuddered, and blocked the magic away from himself as best he could, but it had wormed its way inside him and had filled empty places with itself. Nature, which abhorred a vacuum, had never found the vacuum within him. But a few careless moments in the presence of one human's magic had done something that a millennia with Nature could not.

  He only wished he could tell what that something was.

  He turned his back on the little town of Hendricks and headed south on WV 72, walking on the berm, watching out for cars. There were a few, but not many. He was heading into the heart of the magic.

  He would not taste it again, he promised himself. He did not dare. But this would be, he thought, his best hope of a good hiding place. Everyone knew live magic could not feed the dark gods. So this would be the last place anyone would look for him.

  He needed time to think. To re-figure. His encounter with Molly, which had ended with him dead but not destroyed, had shaken him badly. He didn't know how she'd beaten him. He'd had her. But then she'd done something and he'd found himself in the forest, some little time later, rebuilt of humus and moss and rock, sun and water, and with some of his resurrection rings missing. The main one, the traitorous one that carried the silver channel in its vile heart, still animated him. But of the others he had found no sign. They were lesser rings, made only in supplement to his main one, or stolen from enemies he'd admired—and he'd added them to his wearable trove of immortality simply as a form of backup. He would not be lost without them, but he did not like the fact that he had lost them. And he did not like the fact that he did not know what had become of them.

  He walked for a mile, and then another, and then off to his right he saw a trail sign. He turned onto the trail, feeling the magic becoming stronger with every step.

  Here, the magic had had plenty of time to start soaking into the ground, the trees, and the water. Before long, uncanny things would begin happening in the wilderness near Hendricks. Hikers on the Otter Creek trail would have some fairy sightings, though they probably would not report them—people had gotten wary of reporting things like fairies. But before long the wee folk would be all over the area. They were like mosquitoes that way; give them running water, appropriate terrain, and live magic, and not even DDT would get rid of them.

  He glanced up at the canopy of green over his head—summer leaves on their last legs before autumn came. It was a beautiful place. And it felt alive now. Any world's natives were by nature almost blind to their own world's magic, but the stuff Molly's sister had brought in here had an unmistakable flavor. People would notice, even if they didn't know what they were noticing. This area would get a reputation with the New Agers, and even though the area had bears along with its deer and its pheasants and its pretty rhododendrons, they'd start coming in search of the magic. And here they would actually find it.

  Hikers walking along this path would be imbued with that same ferocious love that Baanraak felt, and they would be moved. They would become…heroic. Self-sacrificing. Men and women who had never before thought of anyone but themselves would start taking chances to protect others. This was going to be a dangerous stretch of woods—it was going to change people's lives.

  The surviving flora and fauna of Earth's magical ecology would find their way here, too. Baanraak wondered how many of the wee folk and the weyrd folk had managed to hang on this long on this planet with things so bad. The pookas, the black dogs, the werewolves and whisperers—in spite of all their strength, they were delicate creatures. When the magic started going, most of them had died off. If any survived, this place would be a little bit of heaven to them—if they could just get here. And their being here would add to the magic, make the place stronger.

  Eventually, the trees would wake up, he thought, and start guarding the place themselves. Wouldn't the tree-huggers be surprised when the trees hugged back. And wouldn't let go. These were all second-growth trees—they'd never known rich magic and wouldn't know how to handle themselves. They'd be wild or stupid unless someone trained them. Still, that would be a long time from now.

  And then, hiking deeper into the forest, Baanraak caught one of the trees watching him. His skin twitched, and inwardly he swore. There was already an old god here, then, using this magic, accelerating the area's recovery. In no other way could the trees have woken up so fast. And these were canny—they had given no sign to him of what they were as he'd walked forward. So they had been trained already. If he had not been thinking about trees, he would not have noticed them watching him. If he had not stopped and stared when he caught the tree watching, he would have been fin
e, perhaps. But now his cover was blown. He would have to leave; trees were not taken in by form. They could see him for what he really was, and they would tell the old god. Killing the old god wouldn't help his situation, either. He wanted to keep a low profile, not draw attention to his presence. If Molly and her sister had enlisted old gods in the effort to restore this world, those old gods would be watching out for each other. If the trees had been quick about it—and he could hear their leaves rustling and their branches rattling even as he stood there—the odds were that the old gods, and perhaps even Molly, already knew he was here.

  And the only thing he wanted—the only thing—was to stay out of sight for a while in a place where no one would think to look for him.

  He turned and started out of the forest, back toward Hendricks. He could find a mirror there, make a gate. Go someplace else. He'd thought Molly would not look for him on Earth, but now he needed someplace even more unlikely than Earth.

  He was careful not to think until he was well clear of the forest, well free of the watching trees. He was careful not to think until he'd found a public rest room with a big mirror at a gas station. He would have to make himself smaller to fit through it. But now he had the means—he only needed the destination.