Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  Lauren looked at Molly and wanted to cry. She cuddled Jake and said, "Oh, God, I'm so sorry, Molly."

  Molly shrugged. "That's the thing. I'm not. This is like…it's like…alcoholism, maybe, or Alzheimer's—the biggest symptom is that the worse you get the less you care that it's killing you."

  Lauren remembered the Molly she had first met only a handful of months before—a woman with her whole life ahead of her, with joy in her eyes and hope in her heart for a future she wanted, who held on to the belief that she had something worth fighting for.

  Mere months, and that was all gone. In its place, what remained of Molly? Some notion of duty, come at emotionlessly and out of cold logic? Some shreds of the woman she had once been, perhaps, but the Molly who sat before her bore little resemblance to the woman she had once been.

  "I have a decision to make. No good choices offered, but—but before I decide anything, I wanted to ask you something," Molly said, and Lauren realized they'd been standing there looking at each other without saying anything for an uncomfortably long time.

  "Make her go away," Jake whispered in her ear, and Lauren could feel his heart pounding against her, and could feel his muscles trembling as he clung to her.

  She stood, rocking him, stroking his hair, and she told Molly, "Sure. Ask away." And she thought, What the hell are you, that you're scaring my kid like this?

  "When you talked to…the mind of the universe…the creative force…" Molly shrugged and laughed a little, and for that instant she looked and sounded like her old self. "God…he really mentioned me? Not my soul, already elsewhere and doing fine, but me."

  "Yes," Lauren said. "He said you had the chance to be a person if you chose to be, that you could create your own soul." She sighed. "He didn't tell me how or give me any clues. He said that there were people who had souls who chose to throw them away, but that you could grow one. Not get one back, but grow one."

  Molly nibbled her bottom lip and stared at the floor. She looked young and vulnerable. And then she straightened and the vulnerability fell away, and the emptiness in her eyes made her look a hundred years old. "Doesn't seem too likely," she said. "I'm losing ground faster than I ever thought possible. When I discovered what was happening to me, I believed it would take years for me to lose myself. I really believed that I would be able to hang on to Seolar and my feelings for him at least through his lifetime." She looked up at Lauren. "I thought I would care about you, about what we were doing…." She shook her head and went back to staring at the floor. "I don't. I don't even care about hunting the Night Watch. It's an amusing mental exercise, something to fill up the time. You'd be amazed at how much time there is when you don't sleep and you won't die—at least, not permanently. Lots of hours, Lauren." Molly looked out the back window. "You know what's funny?"

  "What?"

  "When I first stopped sleeping, after I came back the first time, I told myself that at least I had all sorts of time to paint and write songs, learn some new pieces on the guitar—lots of time." Molly shook her head. "I never realized that I would lose all of those things, too. I haven't forgotten how to draw, or how to rhyme words, or how to find the notes on the guitar. But painting and poetry and music are all emotion-driven. You can have technical skills, but if you can't look at the world and wonder, and if you can't feel pain, or loss, or hope, or love, all art dies." She looked sidelong at Lauren. "So I have all the time in the world and nothing to fill it with but eating and killing. I don't see my growing a new soul out of it, that's for sure."

  Lauren sat there, aching for what Molly had lost, and also what she had lost in Molly.

  Then Heyr slammed through the kitchen door, and Lauren jumped and clutched Jake, who screamed, and saw that Heyr's war hammer was in his hand and he was getting ready to throw it.

  "My sister!" Lauren shrieked, and Heyr froze.

  Molly and Heyr squared off against each other, and Heyr said, "This is a dark god."

  "She's my sister."

  "Perhaps she is a dark god wearing your sister's skin."

  "She's my sister."

  Lauren could see the muscles in Heyr's arms bunching and flexing. "I need to touch her," he said.

  Molly hooked her thumbs into her pockets and lifted her chin. "If you do, I'll make sure you regret it."

  Heyr shook his head. "I swear on Odin's eye and my own soul I will not harm you so long as you do not attempt harm against those who are mine." He nodded at Lauren and Jake, and Lauren was tempted to protest the "mine" designation, but kept her mouth shut instead. "I will touch only your forehead, and only for a moment. You are not what you first seem to be, but I do not know what you are."

  Molly studied Heyr. It felt like watching two big dogs squaring off, sniffing each other to decide if they should rip each other apart or come to a truce.

  Molly nodded. "You may touch me." She stepped within his reach, her eyes on the hammer, still in his hand, and he noticed and slid it into the loop in his belt, and it looked like a normal claw hammer again.

  Heyr rested two fingers on Molly's forehead and half closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth, panting a little. Almost immediately, his brow beaded with sweat and his skin grayed. Lauren could see the muscles in his shoulders tighten; cords stood out on his neck. He held the pose, though, for what could only have been a minute or two, but felt like a week.

  And then he pulled away, and still gray and sweating, walked without a word to Lauren's kitchen table, and pulled out a chair and dropped into it. He propped his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. He said nothing.

  Lauren looked at Molly, bewildered, and found an expression of clear curiosity in her sister's eyes. Both of them shrugged at each other at the same time, and Lauren turned to the old god.

  "Heyr? Are you all right?"

  Heyr raised a trembling index finger—a "One minute" gesture—and sat there until Lauren said, "Do you need a glass of water? Something for a headache? Anything?"

  Heyr dropped his hands to the table and looked from her to Molly with blue eyes washed gray. "I don't know how you bear it," he told Molly. "I carry the weight of the world, and I have for time uncounted, and yet I do not know how you can find the strength to breathe."

  Molly cocked her head. "Bear what?"

  "The weight of that thing inside of you. I've touched the resurrection rings of many a dark god, in my father's hall before the fall of Asgard when I was a child, as a mortal man, and as I am now." He nodded toward Molly. "But not like that one. A tale I offer, if you would accept it—for it speaks to both what you are and, perhaps, to where you will go."

  "I have time for a short story, I suppose." Molly walked to the table and took a seat, and Lauren, with Jake still clinging to her, settled into the chair beside Heyr's, on the side opposite her sister.

  Heyr said, "Thank you." He took a deep breath, and looking directly at Molly, began. "I was as you once were—in my own world I was born half a god. My father Odin came from upworld and found my mother, who was of Asgard, and took her as his goddess, and raised her to hold in Asgard the powers of the gods. And he taught her the path to immortality, so that they should have each other forever. But I was born before he did that, and so in Asgard I was for a little while mortal and only half a god. Yet because I was the son of a god, I was bigger and stronger than the men of Asgard, and because I was me, I yearned for the fight. A dark god, one of the giants of Jotunheim and my enemy, came one night into my father's hall to kill me while I slept. And though I was not yet a god, or immortal, I ripped his gold band from him and slew him with my hammer, Mjollnir, and with the strength of my belt, Megingjard, which doubled my power, and when he was dead I lifted the gold he had worn from the ground—and it no longer was bound to him. It was free, and it wanted a wearer, and it sang to me. It reveled in death and destruction, and it begged me to wear it and let it bind itself to me, that I might forever embrace the battle it sought, and that I might feed its hunger as it fed mine."

&nb
sp; He sighed. "I will not lie—I yearned for it as many yearn for the power of gold and listen to the song that spelled gold can sing. I knew I had within me that which would make me great. I was little more than a boy, but already I had fought as a man, and I could sing the songs of men. To fight forever and to feel the mad rush always within my veins…"

  He said, "I knew it was wrong. I knew it was a thing of great evil, and so, though I suffered mightily, I at last put it aside without donning it. Then my father came and took it and destroyed it, and that day, because he knew what I had resisted and knew that I was his true son, he gave me the powers of a god in my own world, and named me with the god-name Thor, which name I bore through all the kennings of men, until I came to the last days of this world and believed I should die here. When I felt the powers of godhood falling away from me I took back my child-name, my mortal name."

  Lauren said, "I wondered why you called yourself Heyr."

  "I had chosen to die with this world when I could not save it rather than to go on, and did not wish to wear a god's name to my death. It seemed like…hubris. When I know this world will live, I will take back my god-name." He smiled a little looking at Lauren and Jake, but then he turned to Molly, and the smile fell away. His color had returned to his face, and his eyes seemed bluer, but he still looked shaken.

  "You stand on the sharp edge of a knife blade," he told Molly. "On one side, you fight for what is right even though rightness no longer matters to you. Deep within you is a core of goodness that has not yet been destroyed—that is bound not to trinkets nor to the silver that marks you, but to something within you that repeated deaths have not touched. On the surface, you are a dark god. Beneath the surface lies something else, and in that something else there may be hope, if you choose to pursue it. I can feel this—that you are who you say you are, that you have done much to fight the evil that besets us. You have been a hero, and still you walk that path. But the pathway has narrowed, and a cold wind blows through you, and on the other side of the blade lies the call that I once felt—the call to death and destruction, to the power that comes from oblivion. And you falter."

  Molly studied him with steady eyes, emerald green and cold as winter. "I feel the call," she said. "It has become almost the only thing I can feel."

  Heyr nodded. "It's a powerful thing. That you have not fallen to it yet and have continued to fight though you are so sorely wounded—you would have been held in high esteem in my father's house, raised to a warrior goddess, and given a place at his table. That you have not drunk of death, when it calls to you so strongly that I can feel the call through you and can once again taste that hunger…for that, I would welcome you into my hall and name you hero and call you sister and friend. I could make you a true god here. I could show you the path to immortality, though no dark god has ever been a true immortal." Heyr looked bleak. "But you have begun to listen to the darkness, and to creep toward it—to hold your hands over it as if warming them at a fire. And then you pull away and think of oblivion, and see only those two directions, as if you believe yourself at the point of the knife, where you must jump, and where only darkness lies to either side."

  "Yes," Molly said. "That is why I came here today. I can't hold on any longer. I have to choose—oblivion's short fall, or death's long one."

  "I see a third way in you, though its voice has faded."

  "I see no third choice. I don't have the strength to fight anymore."

  "I think I could give you strength, though it would bring its own pain with it. But if I gave you the strength you need and then you decided to step away from the thin, hard path you now walk, in you I would have created the worst of all possible enemies for us. In my long life, I have known two others who fill my heart with the dread I feel in your presence, and one I have slain but failed to kill, and the other will one day kill me. The latter is the Midgard serpent, a dark god of great strength and great cunning who moves through the worlds, waiting for the end days. The former…you know. His mark is upon you."

  Molly said, "Baanraak."

  Heyr nodded. "Who is a son of the Midgard serpent, and nearly his equal in cunning and evil and power." Heyr said, "And you have killed Baanraak, hunted him down when he did not wish to be found and killed him, which not even I have done. Perhaps you could destroy the Midgard serpent and change the ends of days. If you turn against us, I fear you." Heyr shrugged. "If I am honest, I must confess I fear you now."

  "You're better off letting me destroy myself. In oblivion there's nothing for me, and at least nothing bad for you."

  Lauren had been listening quietly, but now she shook her head. "Without you, the world ends."

  "The me that could fight is almost all gone, Lauren. Without me, you're no worse off than you are right now. With me…" She made a face. "I'm not betting on me. I've seen the odds, and the smart money is all going the other way."

  Heyr said, "Lauren is right, though—you bring things to this that none of the immortals have. You can find the dark gods anywhere—you can feel them where they hide, which I cannot do. You could hunt the dark gods like no old god ever could. If you could just find your way out of this…this place you're in…if you could only find it within yourself to fight with us…"

  "I can barely find myself, Heyr. One more death and anything within me that gives a shit about Lauren or this world or anything but feeding that screaming maw that has opened up inside of me may be gone. I've never been a quitter. Never. But I'm just about to the end of me, and the thing that's going to be left when I'm gone isn't a quitter, either. It just isn't anything you'd want to save. And if I don't walk away from this now…No. Let's be blunt. If I don't get the damned Vodi necklace out of me and get myself killed or kill myself while I'm not wearing it, I may not get another chance. And then the thing you fear is going to be all that's left." Molly turned and looked at Lauren. "Mostly, I just came to say good-bye."

  Fearing her words, fearing Molly, fearing for Jake, Lauren reached across the table and took her sister's hand. "Don't quit yet. Hang on to it as an option if you have to, but don't quit yet."

  CHAPTER 19

  Upworld to Cat Creek—Baanraak of Beginner's Gold

  BAANRAAK SNIFFED HIS WAY up the worldchain, hunting for Molly. By sheer force of will he gained some control of his anger, enough that he could think about the steps he needed to take to find her. It took him one full world to figure out that he was bound to her by shared blood—for surely when he exploded he had gotten his blood on her. And she had gotten her blood on him more than once. He could call on the connections woven by this blood to find her.

  It took him a second world to figure out how to shield himself well enough that locals did not notice him. He could not bend light, he could not summon invisibility, and the inner silence he had once so prized eluded him. But with a shield, at least he might hope to get close to her in moments when she was distracted, and so destroy her.

  By the time he reached Earth, he did not feel so helpless or so vulnerable, but he still could not understand why he was so crippled or what she had done to him to cause him such terrible damage. Never before had he felt so…fragmented.

  Blood called to blood, and she wore his beneath her skin. He felt the faint tug that connected them for the first time on Earth. He stood in a cold place, with snow blowing around him in fierce gales, and darkness that felt like it would last half a season, and turned his nose to the south. Yes. She waited for him in the south.

  Baanraak spun a gate and stepped through it, and on the other side found tall, thin pines and rolling sand hills and humans with weapons, dressed in mottled green-and-brown clothes as if to offer some little disguise. He was hungry, so when they turned their weapons against him, screaming in rage and terror, he stopped up their weapons with a spell, then ate them. Humans were dreadfully unsatisfying as a meal, but better than nothing, he supposed.

  Then, with his stomachs full of lumpish bone ends and a great weariness fallen upon him, he found a good sand
hillock and settled himself atop it and shielded himself. He could rest and watch all that passed him and refine his sense of where Molly was, and what she was doing, and what stood between him and her. When he was sure he would not step into a trap, he would go and gather her in.

  FBI Office, Charlotte, North Carolina

  Raymond and Louisa found the place just short of eleven in the morning, after swearing with frustration and looping in circles on one-way streets and ending up in residential neighborhoods. But that was all right. The guy was there, and when they knocked on the door, he came and opened it for them, and he didn't look anything like the way he'd sounded.

  He was lean and not much more than about six feet tall, and he wore his hair in a buzz cut, and he had a kind face. Raymond figured he outweighed the guy by about forty pounds, and he was younger, too. Bad knee or not, he figured he could take the FBI agent if he had to.