Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  Eric asked Lauren, "Do you have any questions before we begin?"

  "Yes," Lauren said. She didn't say anything else.

  Eric waited for a moment, then said, "Well?"

  "Have you looked into any of this before my arrival, or is questioning me your first step?"

  "Questioning you is our first step," Eric said.

  "No, it isn't," June Bug said. "I've done some work on this on my own time. I'll have results to present at the appropriate moment."

  Lauren glanced at Eric and caught a faint expression of irritation on his face, quickly erased. Well, he couldn't be seen to be partial, could he? She suspected that he wanted her and Jake removed from town—at the very least banished to a city, where they would not be able to make gates work. She thought he was a good man, but he had little tolerance for people who worked outside the confines of authority. He saw the universe full of clear-cut good guys and bad guys—the good guys followed the law and listened to authority, and the bad guys didn't.

  And when he'd been attracted to her, Lauren hadn't wanted him; and she was working way outside of any authority's supervision or approval; and her parents had been judged traitors by the Sentinels. The fact that she had saved his life once—that wasn't going to be allowed to figure into his equation. The fact that her parents had been working outside of their mandate, though—that he'd hang on to. There were times when Lauren found it easy not to like Eric very much.

  Eric cleared his throat. "I'm opening the floor for questions," he said.

  Raymond Smetty, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, had the first one. "Your actions are responsible for almost getting all of us killed yesterday—yours and your sister's, and I notice that she isn't here. How can you say you're doing something good when you're like to get us all killed?" To Eric he said, "We already know she's guilty. Why are we even wasting time with this?"

  Lauren stood up. The chair was killing her butt anyway, and the feeling of having Eric standing above her was getting on her nerves.

  "I'm going to show you," she said. She put a hand on the mirror and began to feel for the live magic now pouring into Earth. She wanted proof that what she had already done had mattered. She said, "Working between this world and a number of downworlds, I've created live magic siphons that pull live magic up to us from the worlds below us. I have that magic anchored to low-population regions for now, and have managed to locate old gods who were hiding or simply living on various downworlds, but who wanted to get involved in bringing the worldchain back. They are stationed around these siphons I've made, and they're using the energy that is coming in to do magic."

  She took a deep breath. "Live magic hasn't worked well here for a long time."

  "Barely at all," Heyr interrupted. "The old gods have found themselves relegated to near-mortal status here by the scarcity of live energy—meanwhile, the dark gods have become more and more powerful. With nothing to work with, the old gods become targets and leave, and magic dies further. Magic breeds magic as like breeds like."

  "You're an old god," Eric said, sounding peeved.

  "I'm an immortal," Heyr told him. "The difference is immense."

  Lauren took her presentation back. She found what she wanted in Porth yr Ogof, in Fforest Fawr, Wales, in the siphon that she'd buried under a cave. Live energy had first permeated the cave, making a nice home for the old god who'd agreed to live there and work with the magic.

  "Which old god?" Eric wanted to know.

  "Tam Lin. He knew the area and was happy to go back."

  "Tam Lin? Population start rising there yet?" Heyr asked. His expression, when Lauren turned to look at him, was droll.

  "There are a lot of…er…wee folk in the area now. Some fairies."

  "I meant the human population."

  "Why?"

  "Tam Lin was big on fertility. Seeded his place with wild roses, waited for pretty maidens to come along and pick them, then weaseled a lay in exchange for his stolen property. He's like your sister, you know."

  "Like her? I don't think so—Molly hasn't been seducing young women to the best of my knowledge."

  "Like her the other way—he's half of this world, half of one well up the line. He has a lot of magic in him, but this place really is his home."

  "I didn't know that."

  "He wouldn't tell you. He always preferred to keep his origins mysterious. But I'd bet a third of the Celts in the region can attribute their second sight to a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's dalliance in the middle of Tam Lin's roses."

  Lauren sighed. There weren't any hiring forms for old gods, and references were hard to come by. And the old gods weren't exactly standing in line waiting to help her. She had to hunt them out and beg them for their assistance.

  She looked back to her mirror. In it, everyone could see a couple of wee folk as they ran across a rock with something they'd "borrowed," no doubt. They'd be into the milk again in a few years, as the magic spread into populated areas. People were going to have to relearn the old ways—the things they had brushed off for years as superstition were once again going to be very real.

  "Wee folk," she said, and linked to the next siphon, the one in West Virginia.

  A white deer strolled through the forest, a tiny, slender woman—not human—dressed in green sitting astride him.

  "Hey!" Heyr said. "A wood elf! I thought they'd died out."

  "They're making a comeback," Lauren said. "They're a bit rarer than the spotted owl and the snail darter, and equally as endangered. But I think they'll make it…if I can keep doing what I'm doing."

  Lauren said, "The Nunnehi are back, too. They're the old gods who inhabited the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the Cherokee. And there's more." She lay a hand on the surface of the glass and found her siphon in Georgia. She'd linked it beneath the lakebed, under the long south arm of Blue Ridge Lake, outside of Blue Ridge, Georgia.

  "Mermaids?" Pete blurted.

  Lauren turned and looked. There were, in fact, three mermaids playing along the bank. She'd linked into the strongest magic in the section; she hadn't been sure what any of them were going to see.

  "I thought mermaids were a saltwater thing," Betty Kay Nye said, but Lauren had to give her credit—Betty Kay was looking puzzled because they weren't where she would have expected them. Which implied that at some level Betty Kay had been expecting them. Which made Betty Kay much more interesting than Lauren would have imagined.

  Eric turned to her. "How many more places like this are there?"

  "I've done twenty-three siphons so far."

  "And you have an old god stationed at each one, using magic to create magical things?"

  "No. I've managed to find five old gods so far who were willing to work with me. Three of them insisted on staying in one place. Tam Lin was one of those."

  "Technically—from your perspective, anyway—he isn't precisely an old god," Heyr said, proving to be a bit of a stickler about terminology, but Lauren waved that off.

  "He can do the work. Anyway…two of the old gods are moving from place to place among the unclaimed territories, working with magic as it builds up, then moving on. I need more help, but old gods make themselves hard to find—and they're good at it."

  "If they weren't, most of them would be dead," Heyr said.

  Lauren said, "This is about more than just here, and it's about more than just us." Hand on glass, she reached farther. She followed her lines and threads upward, where the magic turned ugly and foul, where all she could feel was death and destruction and horror and pain, and on the other side of the glass she could feel Kerras, and her connection to it. Eyes closed, seeking the one clear thread that was hers, the one bit of live magic, she said, "This is also about restoring our worldchain. Bringing the upworlds back to life so that we are not the next world to die. It's about stopping the Night Watch—even destroying the Night Watch—so that those worlds can live." She felt her connection, the live magic brighter and stronger than she had expected, and looke
d into the faces in the chairs. "This is Kerras," she said. "There's nothing to see here yet, because I have not yet found an old god who would dare the wrath of the Night Watch to go there and use the magic, but even in its raw form, the magic comes back to us down the chain."

  "What are you talking about?" June Bug asked. She was the Sentinel Lauren thought she would be most likely to win over, but June Bug looked annoyed.

  "I created a live magic siphon on Kerras. The same sort of connection that I've created from the downworlds to Earth—well, I created one to our first upworld. I can go higher, too, but it's hard right now. I can't skip a world."

  "That's not what I mean," June Bug said. "If that's Kerras and you haven't found an upworlder to move in and use the magic, why are you showing us images of a field and a lake and dinosaurs. What are you showing us?"

  Lauren turned and stared at the image beneath her hand. She looked, not at a blackened cinder covered with patches of ice, but at a world full of life and beauty. It was no world she had ever seen—tall grasses, vibrant blue-green so rich they looked fake; a herd of little striped dinosaurish grass-eaters moving across the plain; a great gleaming lake, blue with a black center, deep and as clear as good crystal; huge insects, small birds, ancient-looking trees. And on a tall rock, asleep with nose on rump and wings tucked in tight, lay a huge creature, opalescent black, that looked very much like a dragon. Or a rrôn.

  Lauren backed out fast, the image in the glass receding until the live world on Kerras began to show edges, and then receded to a perfect circle, and then to a glowing dot on the black cinder. The only rrôn she had ever encountered were dark gods. The dark gods would not have created a live spot on Kerras—but she had to assume that an old-god rrôn would be as dangerous as a dark-god rrôn. At least if disturbed.

  She turned to look at the Sentinels. "I don't know who—or what—that was. I do not want to wake it."

  "You got a volunteer," Pete said. He gave her an encouraging little grin.

  Lauren was less sure. "I got something that was going to Kerras anyway, and that found live magic when it got there and decided to use it."

  "A dark god would have destroyed your siphon."

  Lauren nodded. "Or would have tried, anyway. I made them tough and I hid them well. But I'm not saying a dark god found the magic. I'm just saying that whatever found it and is using it isn't necessarily…good. I was looking for an old god who would restore Kerras as it had been—same terrain, same wildlife, same everything. We have to give the world back to the surviving Kerrans."

  Eric said, "That would seem to be the Kerrans' problem, wouldn't it?"

  "Why?" Lauren said. "They could no more rebuild their world with magic than we could rebuild ours. The rules haven't changed—this isn't some new sort of magic. What I'm having to do is find old gods with an altruistic streak—those willing to work on a world not their own, knowing that even if they revive worlds, incurring terrible danger as they do, we may never be able to revive their worlds. It's not been an easy task."

  "There are other options," Heyr muttered.

  And Raymond said, "There are. We have all the proof we need that Lauren is working against the orders of the Council and the Sentinels' rules. We have sure proof that she's a traitor. So I say we're done—that we vote to charge her, and we lock her up, and we send her to be tried by the Council."

  "There's life on Kerras," Lauren said. "It might not be the right kind of life, but I suspect that can be fixed. Right now, though, for the first time since Kerras went up in flames, Earth is getting a natural flow of live energy coming to us from our upworld. It may not be much yet, but it's there, and it's real, and it will add to everything I'm bringing in the hard way from downworld. Only I don't have to do anything to get it here."

  Most of them looked at her differently than they had before. Lauren would guess that June Bug would be firmly on her side. Louisa—no. Nothing Lauren could do would change Louisa's mind about her. The same went for Raymond, whose distaste for her was blatant enough to be unmissable, even by the most oblivious. George looked like he might be won over. Darlene looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. Terry…well, if Terry would ever stop staring at Betty Kay's breasts, Lauren might be able to guess which way he would go. Betty Kay seemed excited. Pete didn't count—she already knew where he stood, and so did everyone else.

  She had to turn to look at Eric. His face gave away nothing—but then, it almost never did.

  She stood there looking at him for what seemed like a very long time.

  "Do you have anything else you want to show us?" Eric asked.

  "No."

  "Do you have anything else you need to say about this, then, before we resume our questions?"

  Lauren took a deep breath. "Yes. My parents died for this. This was their work, their idea, their struggle. If you decide that I'm not a traitor to the Sentinels and their goals for doing this, then I want an acknowledgment that my mother and father weren't traitors, either. That the Sentinels were wrong when they killed them."

  "Any formal declaration of that sort would have to come through the Council," Eric said. "And I'm not sure how the Council is going to feel about this, no matter what we decide."

  "I'm not asking to have them formally cleared. I'm asking you people in this room right now to acknowledge that if what I'm doing is right, then what they were doing was right, too. I don't care about the Council. But your father, Eric, was directly involved in my parents' deaths. Some of the rest of your relatives were, too. It matters to me that their names are cleared, at least among the people I work with."

  Lauren heard Raymond mutter, "It won't be an issue." But he didn't say it loudly, and none of the other Sentinels seemed to notice.

  Eric nodded after a moment. "We'll keep it in mind," he said. He turned to the Sentinels. "The floor is reopened for questions."

  She hadn't won them over yet—she could see that in their eyes. But she thought she had a fighting chance.

  White Hold, Ayem, Oria

  Molly stepped through a mirror into the High Palace in White Hold in the middle of delicate negotiations. She knew precisely how delicate the situation was because she'd been spying on the negotiators for quite some time. The Tradona people of White Hold were about to make a deal with a devil they did not know. But Molly knew him—if she did not know him personally, at least she knew what he was.

  She stepped through green fire into a room of white marble, sword already drawn, and with one swing cut off the head of the creature sitting across the table from The Bright, who was the official voice of the Tradona people in White Hold. The Bright leapt from his chair, screeching—a small, furry creature with a mad thing's monkey howl—as blood spattered him and his desk, and began to sizzle on the paper.

  The body in the chair toppled to the floor to join the head, while The Bright backed into a corner and, still screeching, tried to disappear into a solid marble wall—without success.

  Molly waited for a moment, and the body, which had in life been disguised to look like one of the faolshe—the gray-skinned, knuckle-dragging fourth major native sentient species of Oria—seemed to melt.

  The thing on the floor was nothing from Oria, a fact that was becoming clear to the panicked Speaker for the People. The corpse twisted and changed, unfolding as it did, until it was nearly seven feet tall, and massively muscled.

  "Dark god," Molly said to The Bright, pointing her blade at the corpse. "You were about to sign a deal that would have traded your people's lives for mechanical contrivances."

  "I've known him for years," The Bright whispered, his eyes huge and round.

  "Not as well as you thought you did. You've already signed away a great deal to him, haven't you?"

  "He was…clever. He created things—a globe that lights with the pulling of a chain, with its fire enclosed so that it does not create a burning threat. A very fine steam engine with which we could create conveyances that would travel faster than horses on land, and faster than sail-p
owered ships in the sea. A mechanical thresher that would tirelessly separate wheat from chaff, sparing our people to do other and better things." He looked frightened. "These things are evil?"

  Molly looked at him and took a deep breath. "No. Technology isn't evil. It isn't good, either. It just is—like fire. You can use fire to warm yourself or burn your house down." She knelt on the floor and held her hands over the body of the dark god, using magic to search for resurrection rings. She hated this part of her duty. Though, if she chose to be honest with herself, she didn't care much for any part of her duty. Killing things, burning the bodies, destroying the resurrection rings, trying not to die. It wasn't the sort of job description that would get a lot of applicants.