Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  CHAPTER 4

  Copper House, Ballahara

  BIRRA ANNOUNCED his presence in the green chamber with a soft clearing of his throat. The Great High Imallin Seolar, master of Copper House, had been sitting at his desk, poring over one of the massive tomes from his library with pen and notepaper in hand; he glanced up, saw that it was Birra, and shoved notes, writing supplies, and book to the side. His smile was tentative. "How goes it?"

  "Where the healing is concerned, she is everything you had hoped she would be, Imallin. Her slightest touch is magic; the sick, the dying, the crippled, the mad—all regain their health at her word. Given time enough and access, she could heal everyone this new god-poison touches."

  Seolar nodded. "But any human could give us that."

  "I have seen no signs yet that she is anything but human." Birra shrugged. "But, then, I don't know what signs to look for."

  "Nor do I." Seolar rose, his heavy silk beya rustling. "Is she happy here?"

  Birra cleared his throat. "She is…difficult. Aside from getting free of the manacles the night we brought her here, and her attack on me that, had I not been truly willing to die at that moment, would have succeeded, she…ah…she eyes each of us as if she were determining the quickest way to break our necks, steal our weapons, and escape. It is most unnerving. All records of past Vodian indicate that they were reasonable people—compassionate, tremendously kind and patient, and…well, tractable. Your Gloriousness. She's rather more like a caged and hungry tiger."

  "She has not found her accommodations to her liking?"

  "She hasn't found anything to her liking, at least not that we've been able to tell. She paces the room, measures the bars and the thickness of the doors, plans traps to capture us as we enter the room—were it not for the spy-eye you installed in the ceiling above the door, we would not have seen the very clever trap that she built from portions of her bed, the covers, and some of the garment hangers in her wardrobe. She has a remarkable talent for taking things apart, Your Gloriousness; we're rather afraid that talent will extend to us in the near future if you don't, ah, talk to her."

  "The instrument? The wools and silks? The paints? She has not amused herself with any of those?"

  "Well, she was testing combinations of paints and other things to see if she could make an explosion, I think, but she hasn't used them properly yet. Except for the candies."

  "Dove chocolate. Our spies were very specific about that. Well…" Seolar sighed. "…put more chocolate in the room. Have the cooks prepare something that she likes. Entertain her. Make her like this place."

  "As long as we keep her in the Copper Suite against her will, I don't believe she'll ever come around. She does not have a personality that gladly accepts cages."

  "Yet once she is no longer in the Copper Suite, nothing I do can keep her here." He sighed. "Birra…lie to her. Tell her that I am away—that until I return, you have been ordered on penalty of your life to keep her safe from those who would destroy her, and the Copper Suite is the only truly safe place in this house. Remind her of the rrôn. Tell her she is behind copper because only copper is guaranteed to keep them from her. It isn't that much of a lie—if the rrôn knew she'd survived and was here, they would be at us day and night. Tell her that when I return, I will be eager to meet with her, and that she will surely be given the freedom of the entire imal—from forest to sea—but that she must be patient until then."

  Birra nodded. "And when will you return from your…trip?"

  Seolar sighed and walked to the window. He stared down at the courtyard and shook his head. "When she can see her future in Oria."

  Natta Cottage, Ballahara

  "You want to watch this sort of thing, Lauren," Embar said, waving an arm to encompass all the changes she had made. "The feedback can be a bitch. Or have you forgotten? And what the hell took you so long to get back here?"

  Jake reached out, grabbed one of Embar's enormous ears, and said, "Ear." He poked a finger toward Embar's face, and the creature flinched backward. "Eye!" He made a grab for the enormous lower lip, unfazed by the protruding canines, and shouted, "Mout'!" To Jake, apparently, Embar looked like the perfect toy. Lauren seemed to remember feeling that way about him once herself.

  "I don't remember half of what I'm supposed to," Lauren confessed, walking over and picking up Jake before he damaged the poor creature. Goroth, her mind insisted. Embar is a goroth. And she couldn't help but be annoyed that she could remember what Embar was but couldn't remember what had been so important that she'd let her parents remove her memories to hide them from whoever might come looking through her mind to find them.

  "Oh," she whispered. Because suddenly she'd remembered that. There was someone who could read her mind—someone very bad—and that someone couldn't know that she could create gates.

  "Oh, what?"

  Lauren sat in one of the rocking chairs with Jake on her lap and began to rock. He'd sit with her for a while before he got impatient. Or maybe he'd take a nap. "I just remembered that my parents were hiding my gateweaving from someone who could read my mind. Someone who wanted to kill me. But I can't remember who it was."

  "Your parents never knew," Embar said. "But gateweavers were dying like flies back then. Cat Creek had two when everything started going wrong. The Cat Creek sister nexus in Hope Mills had three. Now Hope Mills hasn't had a gateweaver in twenty-five years, and Cat Creek's last one is getting old with no replacement in sight. They told me about it when they asked me to look out for you."

  Lauren said, "They did what?"

  The little creature across from her rested his head in his cupped hands, his expression mournful. "They asked me to look out for you. When they were thrown out of the Sentinels, they worried that something might happen to them and that you would become vulnerable. And it did. And you did, I suppose, though you seem to have survived well enough without me. I did a terrible job of doing what they asked—I lost track of you when you quit your university and moved."

  "Right after they died?"

  "Right after…? Yes. I tried for years to find you, but every time I'd get close, I'd discover that you'd just moved again. Finally, I came back here to wait. I hoped you would find your way back through the gate; your parents said you would."

  Lauren felt completely at sea. "Okay, you're going to have to go through this slowly for me. Start from the beginning and tell me everything—Why are you shaking your head like that?"

  "I can't tell you everything. I can't tell you much of anything. Your parents were Sentinels. Around here, that's like…like gods. I was just this little nuisance that they befriended because I hung around them hoping some of their magic would rub off on me; they told me the fact that they treated me and others like me as friends is the reason the Sentinels ousted them and closed down their main gate. Gods aren't supposed to hobnob with the mortals, I suppose. Bad for business."

  "They weren't gods."

  Embar winked at her. "But if they hadn't hobnobbed with me, I wouldn't have known that, would I? The Sentinels lose some of their mystique when we begin to understand who and what they are."

  "Well, fine. Then tell me who and what the Sentinels are."

  Embar chuckled. "I don't exactly know that, either. I began to understand. That's different, beginning is. I know the Sentinels work to protect your world from the magic of this world. I know they aren't gods or immortals—they're just people. That—all by itself—is more than anyone from my world is supposed to know. As for your parents, I know they were working on something important, but I don't know what. I don't know who was after gateweavers; I don't know why your parents did what they did instead of just moving away; I don't know how to fill in what you don't know."

  Lauren leaned her head against the back of the rocker and closed her eyes. "Right. Wonderful. Then how am I supposed to find out what's going on, and what's so important that I gave up most of my life so far for it without even knowing what I was doing?"

  "Well, your parent
s hid their notebooks in your house. All you have to do is find them."

  Lauren stared at him in disbelief. "Why didn't you just tell me that?"

  "You didn't ask."

  Cat Creek & Sentinel Circle, Ballahara

  The phone rang, and rang, and rang, and rang, and finally Eric opened his eyes. Five minutes, he thought. I haven't been asleep more than five minutes. He picked up the phone. "What?"

  "We have a level five rebound breakthrough. We need you here now."

  He hung up the phone without saying another word. He pulled on jeans only because they were lying right by the bed. He didn't bother with a shirt or socks. He managed to kick his shoes on his feet because they were beside the door and he had to slow down anyway to grab his keys from the hook—if the shoes hadn't been there, he would have left the house in bare feet.

  The cold slapped him awake, and all he could think was level five…level five…I couldn't have heard that correctly. He considered putting the flashing lights on as he drove, but this wasn't sheriff's business, and he didn't want bystanders.

  Level five.

  Holy shit.

  The really useful people were already up in the workroom when he got there. Ernest and Nancine Tubbs, June Bug Tate, Willie Locklear, Debora Bathingsgate, Granger Baldwin, and Deever Duncan were prepping the gate and gathering tools.

  "Level five?" he asked.

  June Bug didn't even look up from the handheld mirror-gate she was using to trace the source of the rebound. "Yes. I put the rebound effect at 180 million deaths in the U.S., three billion worldwide. Best guess from the early read."

  "Three billion? People?" His words sounded strangled even to his own ears.

  "Give or take a few hundred million in either direction."

  "God have mercy," he whispered. "Time frame?"

  "About three months to full expression. Give or take a few days. The read gets pretty foggy at the outside perimeters—the best information I can give you on this is a kill-rate planet wide of about fifty percent, about two to two and a half months until half of everyone who is going to die from the primary effect is dead, mammoth acceleration within the next fifteen days as the other half of those susceptible to the primary cause die,…and I get no read at all on what secondary deaths are going to be."

  Eric bit his lip. "But this is going to wipe out the planetary infrastructure. If half the people on the planet die of the primary effect, you have to figure fifty percent of the survivors dead within a year from secondary effects. There will be kids who survive their parents' deaths but can't get by on their own, whole industries collapsed because of lack of manpower, people trapped by circumstances who can't get food or water, deaths from violence…" He shook his head as if to clear the dark future from his thoughts. "And whatever's left is going to be very different from what we have now."

  Now June Bug did look up from her mirror. Her gaze met his for an instant, and he was shocked by the bleakness he found there. She said, "I think you're being optimistic."

  "Maybe." He didn't have June Bug's statistical background. He could concede that things might be even worse than he envisioned them, though he couldn't imagine worse. He discovered that he couldn't wrap his mind around the magnitude of what he knew for certain. "Why is this mess ours?"

  "Because the rebound punched through in Rockingham."

  He rubbed his forehead. "That's ours, all right."

  Willie said, "I've put the call through to the Hope Mills Sentinels. They don't have a gateweaver yet, so they're limited in the help they can give us, but Richard said they'll have their people down this way as soon as possible. I talked to Carolina in Ellerbe, and she says she'll come down herself, and then bring in whoever we need. I had Deever get in touch with the Vass group."

  "So we'll have backup soon."

  Willie nodded.

  Eric spread his arms, hands turned palm up. "What the hell happened? Who did this? You locate the trigger?"

  June Bug said, "No. But the rest of the bad news is that this has already had time to start building. I read that we've missed the initial breakthrough—first effects are already starting. It might have been that big shake that Tom Watson didn't get a bead on that started this. Might have been something a whole lot more subtle. The breakthrough itself doesn't look like it was all that much, but it has an acceleration factor like nothing I've ever seen."

  "Do we have any idea how the rebound is going to manifest yet? Terrorists with nuclear weapons? Black Death? Altered cometary trajectory; meteor strike; shift in the Earth's axis? What?"

  "We have no idea," Willie said. His voice was as grim and flat as Eric had ever heard it. "All we know is, it's big and fast and ugly."

  "And there's going to be hell to pay if we can't get it stopped."

  Willie nodded to him, and for the first time in Eric's memory, the old man looked shaken. Willie said, "Gate's ready."

  Eric looked at the other Sentinels. "Where's everybody else?"

  "We had to leave messages," June Bug said. "Both of my sisters are out of town visiting, Tom's girlfriend said he went fishing…things like that."

  Things like that. They had to stop a level five disaster and half of his team was missing. "Well, this can't wait. Willie, make sure you leave the gate clear for anyone else who shows up."

  Willie nodded. "You better put a coat on," he said. "Colder in Oria than here, and now isn't the time to be playing with heat spells."

  Eric shrugged. "Don't have one with me."

  "I have an extra coat out in the trunk," Ernest said. "My work coat. Smells like a backed-up septic tank, but…"

  "I'll take it. Thanks."

  They went through in a rush, the way they'd done in a hundred drills, and formed a tight circle with all of them facing outward as soon as they hit the other side. Those who used tools or objects to focus their magic set them up. Ernest jammed a four-inch piece of lead pipe soldered to a tripod into the ground in front of him; June Bug gripped her hand mirror; Granger put the silver chain of a large medallion over his head—the medallion itself was a three-inch brass plate on which he'd had empty flowchart boxes and arrows engraved; Nancine pulled out a scruffy plastic digital watch that on Earth hadn't worked in years. Debora held a bulky old Texas Instruments calculator—the kind that had once had glowing red numbers and had run on batteries. The battery cover was missing and the compartment empty of batteries. Eric clutched his sheriff's star in his left hand. Willie used neither tools nor focus, and Deever, his student, followed his mentor's example.

  The Sentinels occupied a clearing ringed around by a wall of massive, ancient trees, and in the center of their clearing stood their gate mirror, a rectangular mirror eight feet tall and six feet wide that earlier Sentinels had built into a stone arch and protected from the weather with a small, slate-roofed pavilion. The clearing ran out about thirty yards in all directions. The Cat Creek Sentinels' primary gate lay in the heart of Mourning Forest. No roads or paths led out of the clearing; no footprints marred the smooth surface of the snow in any direction. Not even wild animals entered the spelled circle.

  Eric tightened his fingers around the star and narrowed his thoughts to his single immediate need. He said, "Shield," and a bubble of green fire sprang to life around them. Deever said, "Ward," and the green fire paled and shimmered and suddenly looked more solid. Debora said, "Patrol." Tiny bits of light peeled off from Eric's shield and shot out in all directions, looking for anything that might be trouble. Willie stayed beside the gate. "Gate's steady," he reported.

  Nancine stared at the broken watch that lay across her palm. She said, "Clock." A digital display appeared on the curve of the bubble that shielded them, its red glow eerie in the green-tinted light. It split into seven identical displays, and each display dropped in front of a Sentinel, so that no one had to turn to see the amount of time they'd spent in Oria. The clock timer started at 0:00.00, but the tenths of seconds were a blur and the seconds began to add up quickly, too. Ernest said, "Light feet."
His spell seemed to do nothing, but was, perhaps, the most important spell of all. While they were in Oria, Ernest would control the Sentinels' magic expenditure—he'd channel all their spells through a very narrow magical pipeline so that they didn't create the same sort of rebound back on Earth that they were trying to reverse.

  June Bug, still holding her mirror, said, "Show me our source," and a blaze of white light erupted from her mirror. The rest of the team waited.

  "This is muddy as hell," she said after a moment.

  No one said anything. They all held their positions and their spells, and kept waiting.

  "Find the fresh magic," June Bug said. A short pause, then, "Due east of here—pretty close. A big spellburst, very recent."

  "How fresh?"

  "A couple of hours at the outside."

  "That's too new," Eric said.