Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  Memory of Fire

  Book One of the World Gates

  Holly Lisle

  For Matthew

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  MOLLY MCCOLL WOKE to darkness—and to men dragging her from…

  CHAPTER 2

  THE DEAD LAY SCATTERED along the road like mangled toys flung…

  CHAPTER 3

  THROUGH THE WINDOW GRILLE of her lovely prison, Molly watched…

  CHAPTER 4

  BIRRA ANNOUNCED his presence in the green chamber with a soft…

  CHAPTER 5

  TERRY MAYHEW SHOULDN'T even have been watching the nexus. He was…

  CHAPTER 6

  THE OLD HOTCHKISS GATE is open and in perfect order," Eric…

  CHAPTER 7

  MOLLY YAWNED and stretched and burrowed out from beneath thick…

  CHAPTER 8

  ERIC, HEADING INTO the tiny renovated storefront that served as…

  CHAPTER 9

  THE MOST PLAINLY attired veyâr Molly had yet seen stood…

  CHAPTER 10

  MOLLY WENT TO DINNER in the center of a column of…

  CHAPTER 11

  THE PICNIC LUNCH, if such a repast could be called…

  CHAPTER 12

  RESTLESS DREAMS—she was bathed in green fire; a delicate, winged…

  CHAPTER 13

  THEY HID OUT in the cafeteria until shortly after Pete…

  CHAPTER 14

  SEOLAR FINISHED QUOTING and looked over at Molly, his eyes…

  CHAPTER 15

  ERIC, LAUREN, AND PETE gathered around Lauren's kitchen table. With…

  CHAPTER 16

  LAUREN'S FIRST ACT as they stepped into her crowded foyer…

  CHAPTER 17

  "…for a message from the president of the United States…

  CHAPTER 18

  MOLLY SAT CROSS-LEGGED on a stone bench in the center…

  CHAPTER 19

  LAUREN CUDDLED JAKE against her chest and crouched behind a…

  CHAPTER 20

  LAUREN BURIED HER SISTER, Molly, on a bright North Carolina…

  Author's Endnote

  Eos Spotlight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  Ballahara, Nuue, Oria

  MOLLY MCCOLL WOKE to darkness—and to men dragging her from her bed toward her bedroom door. The door glowed with a terrifying green light.

  She didn't waste her breath screaming; she attacked. She kicked upward, and felt like she'd kicked a rock—but she heard the satisfying crack of bone under foot, and the resulting shriek of pain. She snapped her right elbow back into ribs and gut, and her hand broke free from the thin, hot, strong fingers that clutched at it. She twisted and bit down on the fingers holding her left wrist, and was rewarded with a scream. She clawed at eyes, she kneed groins, she bit and kicked and fought with every trick at her disposal, with every ounce of her strength and every bit of her fear and rage.

  But they had her outnumbered, and even though she could make out the outlines of the ones she'd hurt curled on the floor, the rest of her assailants still dragged her into that wall of fire. She screamed, but as the cluster of tall men around her forced her into the flames, her scream—and all other sounds—died.

  No pain. No heat. The flames that brushed against her didn't hurt at all—instead, the cold fire felt wonderful, energizing, life-giving; as her kidnappers dragged her clawing and kicking onto the curving, pulsing tunnel, something in her mind whispered "yes." For the instant—or the eternity—in which she hung suspended in that place, no one held her, no one was trying to hurt her, and for the first time in a long time, all the pain in her body fell away.

  She had no idea what was going on; on the one hand she felt like she was fighting for her life, and on the other hand like she was moving into something wonderful.

  And then, out of the tunnel of green fire, she erupted into a world of ice and snow and darkness, and all doubts vanished. The men still held her captive, and one of them shouted, "Get ropes and a wagon—she hurt Paith and Kevrad and Tajaro. We're going to have to tie her." She was in trouble—nothing good would come of this.

  "It's only two leagues to Copper House."

  "She'll kill one of us in that distance. Tie her."

  "But the Imallin said she's not to be hurt."

  Other hands were grabbing her now—catching at her feet, locking on to her elbows and wrists, knees and calves.

  "Don't hurt her," said the one closest to her head. "Just tie her so she can't hurt us, damnall. And where's that useless Gateman the Imallin found to make the gate? We still have people back there! Send someone to get them out before he closes it!"

  Molly fought as hard as she could, but the men—thin and tall, but strong—forced her forward, adding hands to hands on her arms and legs until she simply couldn't move.

  When she couldn't fight, Molly relaxed her body completely. First, she wasn't going to waste energy uselessly. Second, if she stopped fighting, she might catch them off guard and be able to escape.

  "Gateman—can you hold it?" someone was shouting behind her. "We're going back for the others!"

  "He's worthless," one of her captors muttered. "This was as close to the city as he could get us—a good Gateman could have put the thing almost in the courtyard."

  "I don't like the feel of the forest tonight, either," the one closest to her said. "Keep the guards in tight."

  Molly's bare feet stood on packed snow, and she wore nothing but flannel pajamas—when she stopped fighting, that fact plunged into her consciousness with shocking speed.

  "If you don't get me some boots, and a coat, and maybe a hat and some gloves, you aren't going to have to worry about getting me where you're going—because I'm going to freeze to death right here."

  Someone dragged a big, snorting animal through the dark toward her, and rattling behind the animal was a big wooden farm-type wagon. But what the hell was the thing pulling it? It wasn't a horse and it wasn't any variety of cow—it had a bit of a moose shape to it, and a hint of caribou, and some angles that suggested bones where bones didn't belong in any beast of burden Molly had ever seen. And its eyes glowed hell-red in the darkness.

  "You can do without the shoes and the coat," the one who had done most of the talking said to her. "You'll ride in the back of the hay-wagon, covered with a few blankets—if you decide you want to try to escape, you can do it in your bare feet in the snow."

  "You can't talk to the Vodi like that," one of the other men said.

  "No one knows if she's the Vodi yet. Right now, she's the creature who crushed Byarriall's chest and snapped Loein's leg in two. What sort of Vodi would do things like that?"

  Molly didn't know what a Vodi was. She didn't care. "How about one that got kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night?" she said, but they no longer seemed to be listening to her. The mob picked her up and shoved her into the back of the wagon, and most of them clambered up there with her—bending down to twist soft rope around her ankles, and then around her wrists. When they had her bound, they wrapped blankets around her, and tucked her deep into bales of straw. Instantly, she was warmer. Hell, she was warm. But as the wagon lurched and creaked and began to rattle forward, she heard lines of marching feet forming on either side of the wagon. She knew the creak of boots and pack straps, the soft bitching, the sound of feet moving in rhythm while weighted down by gear and weapons. She remembered basic training all too well—and if Air Force basic was pretty easy compared to the Army or the Marines, she'd still got enough of marching to know the drill. She had a military escort.

  What the he
ll was going on?

  But the people who had come to get her weren't soldiers. They were too unprepared for resistance, too sure of themselves. Soldiers knew that trouble could be anywhere, and took precautions. More than that, though, she couldn't get over the feel of those hands on her—hot, thin, dry hands.

  She decided she wasn't going to just wait for them to haul her where they were going and then…do things to her. She'd learned in the Air Force that the best way to survive a hostage situation was to not be a hostage. She started to work on the rope on her wrists, and managed by dint of persistence and a high pain tolerance to free her hands. She'd done some damage—she could feel rope burns and scratches from metal embedded beneath the soft outer strands, and the heat and wetness where a bit of her own blood trickled down her hand—but she wasn't worried about any of that.

  Fold and wrap a blanket around each foot and bind it in place with the rope, she thought. It won't make great boots, but it will get me home. Turn the other blankets into a poncho, get the hell out of this place and back home. She could follow the tracks in the snow.

  Except there were the niggling details she hadn't let herself think about while she was fighting, while she was getting her hands and then her feet untied, while she was folding boots out of blankets and tying them in place. She hadn't heard an engine since she came out of the tunnel of fire; she hadn't heard a car pass, or seen anything that might even be mistaken for an electric light; nor had she heard a plane fly over. In the darkness, she could make out the vague outlines of trees overhead, but not much else—not a star shone in the sky, which felt close and pregnant with more snow.

  She suspected that if she managed to escape the soldiers that marched to either side of the wagon and succeeded in tracing the wagon tracks back to the place where she'd come through the tunnel of fire, that tunnel wouldn't be there any-more. And she was very, very afraid that there would be no other way to get home.

  She listened to the speech of the men who drove the wagons, and she could understand it flawlessly—but if she forced herself to listen to the words, they were vowel-rich and liquid, and they didn't have the shape of English. The hands on her arms had felt wrong in ways besides their heat, their dryness, their thinness. When she closed her eyes and stilled her breath and forced herself to remember, those hands had gripped her with too many fingers. And when she'd been fighting, her elbows had jammed into ribs where ribs weren't supposed to be.

  When the sun came up or they got to a place with lights, Molly had a feeling that she wasn't going to like getting her first clear look at her kidnappers. Because when she let herself really think about it, she had the feeling that she wasn't on Earth anymore—and that her captors weren't human.

  She had her makeshift boots in place, her blanket poncho wrapped and knotted. But she wasn't going anywhere. Not yet. She was ready to run when she got the chance—but not into a cold, dark, trackless forest with a snowstorm going on and no signs of civilization anywhere.

  She leaned back into the straw, and let the warmth and the rocking of the cart and the voices all around her lull her into a near-sleep.

  * * *

  The sound of someone running and voices raised in anger snapped her out of her half-doze. An argument—she wished she had someplace to run because an argument would make perfect cover for her to slip away into darkness. But then someone jumped into the back of the cart with her.

  Someone pulled the covers away from her face. Darkness unrelieved by moon, by stars, or by any form of man-made light offered her nothing that she hadn't been able to see under the blanket. Snow blew into her face and her hair with a steadiness that suggested a pending blizzard.

  "Vodi—oh Vodi—I bring you my child," he said. He knelt in the straw by Molly's side, and she made out the outline of a white-wrapped bundle in his arms. Small. Still. Silent.

  He laid this bundle beside Molly, and pressed his forehead to the straw-covered floor of the cart. "She dies, Vodi," he said. "You can save her with a word. With a single touch."

  Molly could have said nothing. She could have turned her face away. But sudden fury enveloped her, and she shouted, "You people have kidnapped me; bound me; kept me prisoner in the back of this cold cart without food or water all day and part of the night! And you ask me to help you? Who's going to help me?"

  The man said nothing. Instead, he reached out to her and with trembling fingers touched her hand. "My other four children are dead these last three days. Ewilla is my last. A word from you is all I ask. A single word to heal her, to save her, that my mate and I will not lose everything we love. Curse me and I will bear the weight of your curse gladly—even if it be death. But spare a single word for a dying child."

  Molly's gut twisted. One side of her raged with her own fear and fury, but on the other side lay the knowledge that this was what she did, that this was who she was.

  She held out her hand, and the man passed the unmoving child to her. Molly touched the dry skin of Ewilla's face and felt terrible fever and an unyielding tightness of flesh over bone that felt already dead. What she did not feel—what she had always felt before in the presence of the sick, the dying, the tortured—was the pain of the sufferer. She felt only her own cheek pressed close to the child's nose and mouth, and the rapid hot breaths that blew against her skin that convinced her Ewilla still lived.

  "I can't feel her sickness," Molly said.

  "She is sick. She is very near death."

  "You don't understand. I can't feel her pain. If I can't feel what she feels, I don't know that I can help her."

  "Please. Oh, please. She's all that her mother and I have left."

  Molly closed her eyes, and her fingers, still pressed to Ewilla's cheek, trembled. Since childhood, Molly had helped the sick by taking the razor blades and jagged glass of their sickness and pending death into her own body, and feeling their terror as it flowed through her. Now she felt nothing; some empathy for the father, yes. Some fury at her own situation, yes. But no pain. No fear. No…no poison.

  "Be well," she whispered, without any real hope, any real expectation that what she did would do any good; with only a vague determination that if she could help, she would. She touched the child's face.

  At the point where her fingers touched Ewilla's skin, green-white fire glowed in a tiny point that quickly spread. It was the fire of the tunnel that had carried her to this place, and it both shocked and scared her. Molly yanked her hand back, but the connection remained; she could feel the cool, energizing rush of a current powerful as a river at flood pouring through both her and the child, washing around them, and then driving into the child and changing her. Changing Ewilla, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, replacing sick with well, weak with strong, dying with healthy; rinsing her free of death as if death were nothing more than a loosely attached surface stain, and filling the child with life as pure and vibrant and electric as the moment of creation. Molly, riveted by this impossible power, this insane magic, couldn't catch her breath. She felt that out of thin air she had summoned a whirlwind, had called forth both gods and devils and told them to dance, and had seen them obey her. Intoxicated, she basked in the power that embraced and caressed her. And then she looked, truly looked, at the child who lay in her arms, bathed in green fire, illuminated like the heart of an alien sun.

  And all her fears were made reality by the sight of that face.

  It wasn't just sickness, and it wasn't deformity; Molly could not look at the little creature and think that she had been twisted in the womb. She was a beautiful creature. But she was not, and had never been, human. Her eyes, slanted like a Siamese cat's and large as lemons, were emerald-green from corner to corner, without sclerae, without pupils, without irises. They were two cabochon gems set into a high-cheekboned, feather-browed face, lovely and terrifying. The child's tiny hand, poking free of the soft blanket that swaddled her, had too many fingers, and each finger had too many joints. When Molly looked up at the face of the father, those same eyes, those
same pointed, off-angled, alien features stared back at her.

  Then the last of the poison washed out of the little girl, and the fire that flowed through Molly, no longer needed, flowed back to the heart of the universe that had spawned it, and the light died.

  The child sat up, looked around, and in the liquid sounds that Molly's mind knew, uttered a stream of protests at incredible speed. She struggled away from Molly and held out her arms to her father.

  Molly could hear the father weeping. His voice sounded reedy, and had she heard a human sobbing that way, she might have mistaken the sound for choking. But Molly understood. The child's father wrapped his daughter in his arms, clutching her to him as if to pull her through his chest and into his heart. Through his sobs, he said, "I have to get her home—out of this cold." He pulled back from his daughter for just an instant, and said, "When you need me most, I will be here for you. I swear it."