wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

Molly's face held no expression. She turned away from the window and closed her eyes, but her body didn't relax in the slightest. "My love, you truly do not want to know."

  Seolar said, "My love, truly I do."

  Lauren sat in the middle of a conversation that felt like it was about to become a lovers' quarrel. She squirmed and looked at Jake, asleep on the couch—no reprieve there. She couldn't leave without him, and she couldn't very well use him as an excuse. So she sat, cringing inwardly. Molly didn't want to talk, and had grown quieter and more withdrawn the longer the rrôn circled Copper House, and as Lauren watched her sister watching them, she started to get the feeling that Molly knew something of what was going on.

  Now Molly stood and removed all doubt. "The one who left," she said, an edge on her voice and anger in every line of her body, "is named Rr'garn. His mind is cold and harsh, ugly and crowded with plans worse than the worst thing I've ever thought." She turned to Lauren and said, "He thinks he and his monsters up there need to kill both you and me as quickly as possible, because we're going to be a problem."

  Seolar stood with his mouth hanging open—no more attractive an expression on the face of a veyâr than on a human, Lauren noticed. "How do you know that?" he asked Molly after a moment.

  The anger seemed to drain from Molly's body, almost as if someone had pulled a plug and let it spill out. "I can hear him," she said. "I don't know how. I can hear bits and pieces of what all of them are thinking…or maybe feeling. I don't know which. But their minds echo in mine even now. It's almost as if they and I are strings tuned to the same note, and the finger that plucks them vibrates me."

  Lauren studied her sister. Molly looked sick, as if just admitting this was more than she could bear.

  "Molly?" Lauren stood and went to her sister's side. "Hey, it's okay. You tell us what they're thinking, we'll use that against them."

  Molly looked down into Lauren's eyes, and for a fleeting instant an expression of pure grief flashed across her face. Then it was gone, and Molly managed a smile. "But you see," she said, "they can hear me as clearly as I hear him. Or they could. I think I've managed to close them out now, but not before they found out more about me than I wanted them to know." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "And having seen inside me, they still think that I'm like them. Or that I will be, given enough time and enough deaths." Molly shuddered and wrapped her thin arms tightly around herself.

  Lauren hugged her. "You aren't evil, Molly. You aren't like those things. It's some weird trick that you can hear their thoughts."

  Molly took a deep breath, smiled at Lauren, and nodded. "You're probably right. I'm still kind of…shaken up after what happened. I'm feeling lost. And that monster knew it—knew that I was just back, that I was still under the effects of everything that happened to me. I hadn't even considered the possibility, but this probably will go away. In the meantime"—she turned to Seolar—"you need to make sure that no one and nothing that you can't recognize personally gets into Copper House. Rr'garn went off in search of a killer, one he expects to get past whatever you put up to keep the thing out. He had the image of a rrôn in his mind, but just one, and one with some sort of special skills."

  "They're dark gods," Seolar said quietly. "They all have special skills."

  Lauren said, "The Sentinels talk about old gods. You talk about dark gods. Is there any difference?"

  Seolar glanced at Molly—just a little twitch of the eyes left, then right and away from her—and he pressed his lips together and nodded. "There's a difference. Let me make sure that the guards are on high alert and all the gates are up and barred, and then I'll tell you the story of the Wreck of Heaven."

  He left.

  Lauren and Molly looked at each other. "The Wreck of Heaven?" Lauren asked.

  Molly shrugged. "I haven't heard this one, either."

  Lauren said, "It'll wait until he gets back, then. In the meantime, how are you? Really?"

  "Mostly, I'm okay," Molly said. She played with the folds of her full silk skirt and stared down at the floor. When she looked up at Lauren, she said, "I'm scared, though. I'm scared of this thing we're supposed to do, and the responsibility we have; I'm scared of what happens if we don't try it. I'm afraid of those bastards up there. I'm afraid of making some mistake that destroys home. Earth. I guess for me this is home now, but you know what I mean."

  "I know what you mean."

  "And I feel…wobbly inside." Molly tilted her head and frowned at Lauren. "That doesn't sound right. I feel like something is missing. I'm here, and as far as I can tell, I remember everything that I ever remembered before, but—you know that spot in your eyes where if you hold up a pencil and look at a fixed point and move the pencil around, the tip of it will disappear?"

  Lauren nodded. She'd done that little experiment; probably every kid who ever sat through biology had.

  "I feel like I have a blind spot like that somewhere inside of me, only I haven't got the pencil to the place yet where it disappears so that I can tell where it is. There's a hole in me somewhere, Lauren, and I can't find it, and I don't know that I can trust myself until I do."

  Lauren sighed and hugged her again. "I'm so sorry. Molly, I'm glad you're alive. But I feel so awful that you died."

  Molly laughed. "No shit. I'm not crazy about that myself. It doesn't seem to have done me too much damage, but…I'd rather not do it again."

  "What I can't figure out is how you came back. If you could, why couldn't Brian?"

  "Brian was your husband?"

  "Yeah."

  Molly nodded. "Probably because he wasn't wearing this necklace when he died." She put a hand on the gorgeous, sleek gold chain that she wore. "The Vodi necklace. My predecessors wore it, and every time they got killed, and apparently each of them got killed a lot, the necklace brought them back."

  "Until it didn't," Lauren noted.

  Molly raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

  "None of them is here now," Lauren noted. "So at some point, it looks like the magic wears off or…?"

  "No. Each of them eventually got tired of all the pain and dying and just quit. Took the necklace off, put it down where someone who knew what it was would find it, then walked away and died for good. If you aren't wearing the necklace when you die, it can't bring you back because it doesn't know you're gone."

  Lauren thought about that—about getting tired of being immortal and about choosing to die. She thought she could understand. She considered the necklace that Molly wore, and thought about Brian, and about monstrous hunters outside Copper House that were, at that moment, trying to find a way to kill her. She thought about Jake, asleep on the soft, plush chair, and how trusting and vulnerable he was, and about how he had no one in the world but her that he could truly count on.

  And she considered again the magic that she could do, and the limits placed on it by an uncaring universe.

  I need Brian, she thought. I need him here with me; he'd know how to fight those monsters outside. He'd be able to figure out Mom and Dad's notes and put them in some sort of order and tell me exactly what Molly and I are supposed to do. He'd be able to protect Jake far better than I can.

  But Brian had no magic necklace. And Brian was gone.

  "Where did you go?" Molly asked, and Lauren, startled, came out of her fugue.

  "Hell," she said. "I was considering the benefits of running away."

  Molly laughed a little. "You scared, too?"

  "For Jake more than for me, but yes. I'm petrified."

  "But we have to do this, don't we?" Molly asked.

  "We could walk away," Lauren said. "But when Earth died, I don't know that we could live with ourselves, knowing that we could have saved it."

  Molly looked like someone had punched her. Pain flashed across her face, and her eyes grew bright with unshed tears, and she swallowed hard. "I passed on a chance to save someone once. I thought I'd do it later—and I couldn't. I missed the window. And now I'll carry that stranger on my back as lon
g as I have breath and memory." She shook her head. "Never again. We take the chance we're offered, right?"

  Lauren looked at Jake. "Yeah. Yeah—we take our chances, and we do what we can." She held out her hand, and Molly took it, and smiling strangely at each other, they shook.

  "We're committed now," Molly said. "We have to save the world."

  "It's worse than that," Lauren said. "We have to save all of them."

  Copper House

  Molly heard Seolar coming back well before he arrived. She kept noticing little changes in herself—acuity of hearing, sight, and smell that caught her off guard, the ability to read the thoughts and intentions of the monsters outside Copper House—and those changes frightened her. Had she been the same as before, she could have pretended that nothing had happened. She couldn't pretend anything of the sort, though. Nor could she get past the question that all those little changes begged: What had changed inside of her that she couldn't see?

  Seolar looked tense when he came in. He didn't offer any explanations, and Molly didn't ask for any. Lauren was less polite. "What's wrong?"

  Seolar gave her a little bow and said, "Staffing difficulties. The situation within Copper House was uncharacteristically disorganized; I have Birra, my second, looking into it."

  Molly sensed evasion in that explanation, and one look at her sister told her that Lauren did, too. But Seolar forestalled any more questions by saying, "I told you I'd tell you about the rrôn and the Wreck of Heaven." He pointed to the chairs and both Lauren and Molly sat. Seolar took a seat across from them and angled his chair so that he could watch both the windows and the door. "This is myth, you understand—one of the stories of the old gods and the dark gods that the veyâr claim came from old gods passing through. It may be. It also may be nonsense, and I have no way of telling how much truth is in it, if any."

  He sighed and looked out the window. "Some truth, I think." He gave Molly a little smile, and she smiled back. "At the beginning, in the youth of our worldchain, all the worlds lived and none traveled between them—and because the people of each world stayed where they belonged, there were no gods; but magic flowed freely, available to anyone who chose to use it. So goes the story." Seolar shrugged. "And this was Heaven—when everything was right, and such evils as existed were little things that confined themselves to each individual world. Then a gate opened and swallowed the one who would become the first of the old gods and carried him to the world below, where this first old god discovered that he had more power than he could imagine. And the power sang to his heart and mind, and bent his soul into an ugly shape, and he chose to create more gates. Through those gates he brought a few of his friends, and gave them a world that they could exploit, and native people who could be made to bow down and serve."

  "Nice," Lauren said. "So the first gateweavers were assholes."

  Seolar's eyebrows went up, and Molly grinned and provided the translation. "Evil bad people."

  Seolar said, "But the…asshole…it is the ah…this is rather indelicate…"

  "Yes," Molly said, cutting him off. "That's it. Calling people assholes is a…mmmm…suggestion that they have many of the same characteristics."

  Seolar considered this thoughtfully for a moment. Then he smiled. "Oh. How appropriate. What a clever use of the word to imply meaning without long description." He looked at Lauren with admiration in his face and said, "That's most excellent."

  "It's hardly original," Lauren said, blushing. To Molly she added, "Tell me I didn't just invent profanity on Oria."

  "A modern-day Prometheus—that's you," Molly told her sister.

  "F—." Lauren stopped herself. "No. I've done enough damage for one day."

  Seolar frowned. "I thought that use of the word most clever of you."

  "Maybe," Lauren said, "but if I ever make it into the history books, I don't want it to be for introducing cussing to the veyâr. So what happened with the first of the old gods?"

  "They told their friends about the vast magics available through the gates, and those who could brought their friends, and those friends brought friends, until old gods overran the first world they found, depleted its magic, and caused problems in their own world from the effects of using magic for evil purposes in the world below. Their world suffered. So more people left it, moving downworld, and then downworld again. And at some point, these relatively soft and unsuspecting old gods came into contact with the rrôn."

  Seolar whispered the word, and Molly saw him glance out into the darkness beyond. She could have told him that the rrôn still circled out there, but she didn't. She doubted that he would want to know how closely they watched the place, or that they fantasized the destruction of everyone within its walls as they flew, or how much they resented the copper that shielded Copper House's inhabitants from their magic.

  He shook his head and continued. "The rrôn learned quickly. Before long, they understood the gates in a way that no one before them had. They understood going upworld against the natural tide, they understood the uses of magic, and they understood how magic flows between the worlds. And they discovered that worlds could feed them more magic if the rrôn killed those worlds. They brought others into their scheme over time—some of the most hellish of the old gods, like the keth and the shuminn, joined with them. They began intentionally pulling magic from the worlds they went to, feeding off of them, so the story goes, and draining them until they died. And when a world died, the magic from killing it made them stronger, so they could kill the next one faster."

  Lauren and Molly looked at each other. Molly nodded—this was something Lauren's parents had imprinted in her brain. Some of the old gods killed worlds intentionally.

  "That is the tale of the Wreck of Heaven," Seolar said. "That none of the old gods should travel the worldchain, but that some of the old gods feed upon the death of worlds; these are the dark gods, and they are merciless and relentless and evil beyond all comprehension. Without them, the storytellers say that no worlds would die."

  He stood. "It may be true. It may not. But whether the rrôn and the other dark gods drink the lives of worlds to feed their own immortality, or whether they are evil simply for the pleasure of being evil, or whether some other hunger drives them, they will stand between the two of you and what you hope to do. They are—and can be nothing but—your enemies. They are the enemies of all existence." He turned to Molly and said, "It has grown late. I'll have the servants bring a meal, and then they can show your sister to her suite. I think, considering our circumstances, that we would be best served not to have entertainment tonight."

  "Oh, definitely not for me," Lauren said. "I'll need to get some rest. I'm exhausted."

  Seolar bowed. "And tomorrow, the two of you can…begin your work, if you are both ready."

  Cat Creek

  Pete leaned against the bedroom doors in Lauren's house, studying the pattern of the mess. She had packed quickly, rummaging through the toy box for toys for Jake, and through her closet for something kept on the top shelf with the shoe boxes. The picture of the Sainted Dead Husband was gone from her nightstand. But her car was hidden in the back of the old workshop, tucked away under a tarp, and the ex-in-laws were still out in California and appalled by the very idea of having anything to do with their hick ex-daughter-in-law or her kid. Boy, he had really hated those people.

  And both Lauren's clothes and Jake's were virtually undisturbed.

  She'd gone voluntarily, and he was pretty sure she and Jake had gone alone. But not to Charlotte. He figured she'd slipped through to Oria during the Sentinels' shift change.

  Which meant she'd lied to him. Nice to know she wasn't very good at it. A man didn't want to plan a future around a good liar.

  So. Something had come up, and he figured since it wasn't something that she'd told the Sentinels, it had to be related to the secret plans she and her sister had shared.

  Technically he was supposed to throw in his lot with the Sentinels, be one of the guys, be trustworth
y. Lauren and Molly had had something going, though—and if it came right down to it, Pete would put his money on Lauren to be on the side of the angels over any position the Sentinels might take.

  He looked at the clock. It was way too late to call Eric with anything purporting to be casual information. Pete would just talk to him at the station come morning. Show Eric the note, say he'd checked out Lauren's story and the in-laws were major assholes, say he'd be staying at the house to keep an eye on things for her until she got back. And then slide right on into the gossip of the day, which looked to be how Mayhem had hit on one of the two new girls, Darlene, and gotten a face full of Pepsi for it.

  Pete nodded, liking the plan.

  He went down to Lauren's living room and kicked off his shoes, and sacked out on the couch. He saw a bit of difference between eating the stuff in Lauren's fridge and sleeping in her bed. He wasn't going to do the latter until he was invited. And she was there to share it.