by Holly Lisle
"Have poopies," Jake, from his position on the floor, announced suddenly and loudly.
"And we have to get some diapers and diaper wipes and winter clothes and food and other supplies if we're going to work from here. Or are we going to work from Cat Creek?"
"That would be awkward," Eric said. "Considering the last anyone heard of me, I was dying. We'll have to deal with the fact that I'm alive and unscathed eventually, but I'd rather not deal with it now. That will just get in the way of our real problems."
"But you don't just want to create the supplies, or make them appear from somewhere over there, do you?" Lauren asked.
Eric shook his head. "I want to keep our presence here as light and low-magic as possible, if for no other reason than that the traitors could pick up large magic signatures and trace them back to us. I don't want to tip them off that I'm alive, or that we're coming after them."
"Agreed. Then we need to go back and get some supplies."
"I'm staying with the two of you and helping out," Pete said.
Eric looked at him, then sighed. "Yes. We'll need you. But you're going to have to be careful; this place is a lot more dangerous than Earth. I'll have to figure out how to protect you from magic and keep you from inadvertently setting off any spells of your own." He frowned off into space for a moment, then nodded sharply. "I'll figure out something that will work. Meantime, let's go back and get what we need. Lauren—the gate leads into your house, doesn't it?"
She nodded. "It does, but I can use the mirror to take us someplace else if you don't want to go there first."
"Let's head to the office. The notebook is locked up in the safe, and I definitely want to get hold of that before anyone else beats us to it."
Lauren sniffed the air. "Second stop is going to have to be my house, though. Jake's diaper definitely needs to be changed."
Lauren got as far as the second step in creating the gate—she'd summoned the magic and focused the view in the mirror on the inside of the sheriff's station. But the place was full of men in uniforms.
"Trouble," she told Eric.
He walked over behind her, looked at what she was seeing, and said, "That's County. Hell's bells. They're all over the place."
"Had to kind of figure that," Pete drawled.
"Oh?"
"Town sheriff is shot and rushed to the hospital. His deputy and putative fiancée and son appear at his deathbed, and only minutes later, deputy, fiancée, child, and man in coma vanish into thin air from behind a locked door. That's bound to raise some eyebrows. But by this time, somebody has probably noticed the other people missing from town, too. County boys could be checking up on that."
"Well, we can't go back to the office."
"I'd say not."
Lauren said, "I don't want to leave that notebook."
"County boys won't be able to get into the safe. Only Pete and I have the combination, and it isn't written down. They'd need to have something pretty extraordinary to get an order to break it open."
Both Lauren and Pete simply looked at him.
"They probably already have a guy with a drill there," Eric conceded.
"Got poopies NOW," Jake complained.
"Home," Lauren said. She refocused the view in the mirror, and when she was looking out her own foyer—which was not full of men in uniforms, to her infinite relief—she opened the gate, and everyone stepped through.
She felt Brian encouraging her and touching Jake, and then she was through, strengthened and relieved. For a few minutes, while she busied herself with getting Jake cleaned up and, when that was finished, putting together supplies for the trip back to Oria, she let herself simply enjoy the cozy domesticity of the place. But she felt pressure, too. The people who had tried to kill Eric, and who had, perhaps, had something to do with her parents' murder, were somewhere in Oria; they had prisoners; the clock to an as-yet-unlocated Doomsday bomb ticked ever closer to explosion; and the world could never again be the sane, explicable place she'd believed it to be when she and Brian had made all their hopeful plans. As much as she wanted to pretend she was safe in the old house, she didn't let herself. Instead, she packed with the quick, ruthless efficiency of a military wife faced with an abrupt change of orders. She knew the drill and let old practices and old ways of thinking return to act as guides.
Warm layers of clothing, weapons and ammunition, light dried foods, matches and snares. Brian's personal survival kit, packed at the time of his death, remained. She took that.
She worried about the things she had for Jake; North Carolina winters couldn't begin to compare to the brutal cold that she'd witnessed in Oria. But she decided that, Eric's moratorium on magic or not, if they ran into trouble she would do whatever she had to do to keep Jake safe and warm and dry. And she and Eric and Pete—and the world—would simply have to live with the consequences.
When she went downstairs, she found Pete sitting on the floor crashing cars with Jake, while Eric stared into her mirror. He was looking at the men in his office again. "Not gone yet, I see," she said.
"Not yet. And they're digging through the files. And the guy with the drill has just arrived. The only thing in the safe that could cause us any problems is that notebook. Think you can get it?"
"What do you want me to do—walk up to them and say, 'Excuse me, nice officers, but when Sheriff MacAvery took me in for questioning, he impounded my notebook, and I'd like to have it back?'"
Eric shook his head. "Of course not. I want you to steal it."
Lauren laughed.
"I'm serious. You can see the safe from here." He pointed to an in-wall safe behind his desk. "Just create a little gate into the side or the back of the safe that isn't visible from the front, and pull the notebook out."
Lauren looked at him, realization dawning on her in one wild rush. "The temptation just to take whatever you want must get to be overwhelming sometimes."
"That particular temptation only exists for gateweavers," he said blandly. "Most of us can't create gates, we can just use and maintain ones that have already been created."
"Ah. And I'm a gateweaver. And Willie Locklear is a gateweaver. Why did he turn traitor?"
Eric shook his head, his expression bleak. "I don't know. I can't stop wondering about that. He saved my life a few times; he's a genuine hero. And yet he shot me in the back. How did he do that? He's been my friend all my life."
"Not anymore, I guess," Pete said.
"No. Not anymore." Eric watched the men moving around his office, sitting at his desk, rummaging through his papers, reading a newspaper, eating doughnuts and drinking the coffee from his machine, laughing and talking with each other as if they owned the place and had a right to be there, and Lauren saw his face darken. "Just make yourself at home, why don't you?"
"Let me get the notebook, why don't I?" she said.
She kept the operation neat and quick, only adding one opportunistic little frill. While the gate was open, the officer who'd been reading the newspaper put it down. Lauren, overwhelmed by curiosity and a puckish sense of revenge, created a tiny secondary gate beneath the newspaper, and snatched the newspaper into it. From her vantage point, it looked like the paper had blinked into thin air. Since none of the men had been watching it, the magical disappearance didn't matter. But the momentary confusion and sharp annoyance of the man who'd been reading it gave her and Eric a good laugh. They could see him accusing the men with him of taking it, and could see all of the genuinely innocent cops denying having any part in its disappearance—and looking at each other to see which man had secretly played the prank.
"You have a wicked streak," Eric told her, grinning.
"I do. But mostly I wanted to see if there was anything about you in here."
"Ah. Hadn't really thought about reading my reviews."
"Want to take a look?"
He nodded and skimmed the front page of the stolen Laurinburg Exchange. "Just below the fold. Wounded Sheriff, Deputy, Mystery Woman Vanish."
<
br /> "That's below the fold? Wow. What was the really big news?" Lauren asked.
"Two stories. The first is 11 Missing from Cat Creek, Abandoned Cars Offer First Clue.
"I can see that," Lauren agreed. "Big news day for Laurinburg." She laughed. "What's the second?"
"Local Flu Death Toll Mounts as Bodies Found."
"Wow. Really? I didn't realize it was bad enough this year to make the news."
Eric didn't answer her. He was reading the article. She watched as his lips pursed and his face paled. "Oh, my God, this is it," he whispered as he turned the page. And a moment later, "Well, I guess this time he didn't go out of town." He put the paper down.
"What? Who?"
"More than a hundred people have died of influenza in Scotland County in the last twenty-four hours. In the same time period, several thousand new cases have been reported. Tens of thousands of cases are cropping up all over the U.S., and apparently in foreign countries, too. The names of those known dead in the county are listed in a separate sidebar, because in a couple of instances entire families have died and no next of kin are known. Granger Baldwin is listed as one of the dead.
The note next to his name guesses him as dead for the last few days."
"You didn't notice he was missing?"
"Granger went off on his own a lot. He never quite fit in with the good old boys, and he didn't want to pretend. So he made friends up in Fayetteville or somewhere, and spent most of his free time up that way."
Lauren said, "So you think that the thing that is going to destroy the world as we know it is…the flu?"
"It won't actually be the flu. I'd bet anything the CDC is completely bewildered that they can't culture out any viruses from the bodies of the dead and dying."
"But it looks like the flu."
"Lots of things look like the flu. This is of magical origin, though, and not all the vaccines and antibiotics in the world will cure it. If we cannot find the spell that will reverse it, more than half the world will die at its first blow."
CHAPTER 14
Mourning Forest, Ballahara
Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways—and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.
SEOLAR FINISHED QUOTING and looked over at Molly, his eyes curiously devoid of emotion.
"Well, that's a grim thought," Molly said. The two of them and the guards rode back to Copper House beneath sunny skies, through rapidly melting snow. "Who said it?"
"The warrior Tarmin. He led the army of the Wind Veyâr against the Iron Veyâr, during the War of Three Fish. In all of our history, there has never been another battle so bloody, or with such high prices paid by both sides."
"Because both sides were right?"
"Yes. Sadly. Each side fought for its own freedom, for its own right of passage through necessary terrain, for access to vital fields, fisheries, and forests—and because of this, for its own survival. Each side had every right to want the limited resources that would give its people sustenance in a brutal environment. Both sides knew that the resources of the area could not sustain everyone, and that the group which lost would surely perish—man, woman, and child. There could be no truce, no sharing, and no surrender. The side that won the war would survive, the side that lost would perish either at home or in exile, hounded by the hostile forces that ringed the area."
"Oh, God, how awful. Who won? What happened?"
"No one won. Or rather, both sides lost equally and completely. The warriors fought a series of terrible battles, first one side winning, then the other side making up for their loss, until the strength of both camps fell to nothing. The surviving generals threw old men, childless women, and children into the fray, resorted to desperate tactics, and slaughtered each other wholesale. At last, none remained to defend the land from outsiders but the wounded, the crippled, and mothers with babes in arms. Then the keshak, the greatest True Peoples enemies of the veyâr, swept down from the hills and scoured the land clean of life. Not a single survivor of the Winds Veyâr or the Iron Veyâr escaped from the killing fields. And the Three Fish territory fell to the keshak, who inhabit it to this day."
"God," Molly murmured.
"History is a dark and bloody place," Seolar said. "To avoid repeating it, we find ourselves doing things we do not like, and do not view with pride."
"You're trying to save your people, Seolar."
They rode in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then Seolar said, "My falcon reached me this morning bearing a message. The traitors await me at Copper House."
"You knew they would come."
"Yes. But I consort with the evil and harm the good for my own personal gain. These men I hired to perform this foul task for me have performed it brilliantly. For their services, I will reward them richly. But they are evil men, and by dealing with them, by rewarding them, I become like them and a part of what they have done."
Molly twisted her fingers through the long, coarse hair of her horse's mane and considered what he'd said. "You're a good person, Seolar. You're doing what you have to do—and maybe it isn't pretty, but if these Sentinels were any kind of people, they would have helped the veyâr long before this."
"Perhaps. And perhaps not. What if their cause is as just as mine? What if helping the veyâr will endanger the survival of their people, and their world?"
Molly laughed. "There are billions of humans, Seolar—and we…they…have technology and vast resources on their side. There's nothing the universe can throw at them that they can't take. Humankind isn't going anywhere."
Seolar glanced over at her and tried to smile. "Your reassurance is a blessing. I have fought with this dilemma for so long—and I still don't know if I can countenance my own choices. My people are dying, and my duty is to save them. I can die with my honor intact and my people will die with me—and I will have failed in my duty. Or I can shame myself and give them a chance to live. History is full of honorable dead men who failed to protect those under their care." He looked straight into her eyes this time and said, "I must choose dishonor. But I hate myself for being the kind of man who can do so."
Molly considered that for a moment. Then she said, "I don't hate you. And I'll join you in dishonor. You're doing the right thing. My parents believed in your cause. The man I thought was my father believed in it so much he let a man from another world father his wife's second child. I'm here—I was born to be here. And I belong here." She sighed. "I've never belonged anywhere before."
She could see the relief in Seolar's face, in his body, even in the way he breathed. "If I can have your willing aid in our cause, I will ask for nothing else."
Molly felt her heartbeat pick up. She smiled at him nervously, and said, "You could ask. I think I might say yes."
For a moment, he looked bewildered. Then his expression cleared as he realized she referred to some possible shared future for the two of them. "If I could have the honor of your love, what other honor would I ever need?" he said at last.
"We'll figure that out as we go."
Copper House, Ballahara
Seolar did not permit Molly to be present when he paid off the traitors. The traitors did not know why he wanted a host of captive Sentinels, and they didn't care—and he didn't want them to know about Molly, who would surely be a matter of some interest to them if they discovered her presence. Fortunately, the three humans focused entirely on their own desires; they wanted their castle, their servants, and their rights and privileges as landed masters of their own realm—and that they got.
"Are any of them injured?" Seolar asked.
The youngest of the three said, "No. Unconscious, at least for another few hours, but all healthy. We were careful."
"I will inspect them with you and make
sure each is confined adequately, and then you will receive your lands and titles."
"And the castle, right? Cold Starhold."
"You have already been using it," Seolar said. "I wouldn't think of changing the terms of our agreement at this late date."
He rose and signaled his guards, and the guards took up their places to the front, sides, and back of Seolar and the traitors. He might have allowed the massive amounts of copper that lined walls, ceiling, and floors of Copper House to serve as his protection, but with these humans, he did not think magic would be the only threat they might offer him should they decide to betray him, too.