by Holly Lisle
Lauren held the thing in one hand and stared at it. "This is the…reader?"
"I hope so," Molly said. "I didn't have a lot of time to concentrate on making it—I did it on the way to dinner. Want to help me test?"
"Of course." Lauren led the way to the bed; she'd hidden the books underneath it. She pulled them out and spread them on the floor, and picked one that had an attractive red moiré silk cover embroidered with pretty patterns. Lauren unfolded the reader, and whistled softly as the fold lines vanished and it became a perfectly smooth rectangle about nine inches wide by twelve inches high. "Oh, this is neat work, Molly," she said, admiring the perfect seamlessness. She folded the reader, and it creased along invisible lines, as smoothly as if it had hinges—then unfolded flawlessly again.
"If it works, then I'll get excited," Molly muttered. "I haven't had either the time or the inclination to experiment with anything but healing, so this may be a complete fiasco."
Lauren, standing, looked through the unfolded plastic at the cover of the book she'd chosen. It remained unchanged. "If it doesn't work, we'll go to that safe room tomorrow and try again."
Molly had dragged her huge choice of book over to the sitting room's overstuffed sofa, lit a lamp, and settled in with the book open on her lap. She put the reader down on a page, waited a moment, and looked up at Lauren and grinned.
"…and then they rode northward from the Battle of Badwater Sea—the heroes, the gallant veyâr—away from the war and the dead, both buried and burned, and toward the city of hope, Naarth, and the river rich with fish and the fields yielding to the plow and heavy with grasses for the beasts…"
Molly said, "Naarth is south of here, in the Imal of Dalieam. An ambassador from there is in permanent residence here; it's one of the last of the veyâr strongholds, and they trade a lot of their river and plains goods for Ballaharan forest goods." Molly closed the book and placed the reader on the cover. "Travels of the Veyâr from the Lost Homeland. I should have checked the cover first, but I didn't realize the decorations were actually words. I thought they were just patterned embroidery. At least I know the reader works." She reached down and hid the book under the couch and went to get another one. "What do you have?"
Lauren sat in her rocking chair with the book in her lap, closed, and laid the reader on the cover. Until the reader actually touched the cover, nothing happened, but the instant it did, the bright embroidered silk patterns resolved themselves into words. "Life of the Vodi Elspeth," she said.
"There are supposed to be some good ones in the pile," Molly said, heading over to the books spread across the floor. "I'm interested in the biographies, but only after I've had a chance to read the things that I think will really be useful." She knelt and put her reader on one of the covers. "Back of the book, I guess," she said, and flipped it over. "No. This one doesn't have a title. I suppose that makes it one of the diaries or journals." She tried another book. "The Recounting of Imallin Galorayne. I have no idea why this one was supposed to be useful, and it's pretty thick. Later, maybe." She picked up a thin volume covered in purple silk heavily embroidered with pretty flowers. "I'm betting diary," Molly said, and checked the cover. "I'll be damned. This is Those Whose Names Are Unspoken. I really want to read this one, but not now. I'm looking for a big, thick one. I wish I'd been paying more attention to what the cover looked like…Oh. Here it is. Imallin Merional's Conversations with the Dark Gods."
"Sounds cheerful," Lauren said. "Light, happy reading for the dead hours of the night."
Molly laughed just a little and looked away. "Should be loads of fun, I think." She shrugged, and watching her, Lauren got the feeling that Molly was hiding something. Maybe something big.
Lauren put down Life of the Vodi Elspeth and got the one with the interesting title—Those Whose Names Are Unspoken.
She started at the beginning, which was a list of those the author considered dark gods. Most of the rrôn, many of the keth, some of the anguawyr, all surviving triiga…the list went on for two pages, but nowhere did it just flatly list a species or race and say, "Here. These are dark gods." It always offered some qualifier. Was that, Lauren wondered, some form of veyâr political correctness, where they could not permit themselves to say, "Here. These are all bad people, from bad cultures on an evil world"? Or did their careful qualifiers map out the borders of some unsuspected reality?
But maybe it wasn't all that unsuspected. In the human Christian mythos, God and all the angels started out good, but Lucifer fell and took a good chunk of Heaven with him. The Greek gods had good guys and bad guys. So did the Indian gods, and the Norse gods—look at Loki. Clever, a prankster…but if you were going to point your finger at someone who was leaning to the wrong side of the fence, Loki would be your guy.
Was that the only difference between old gods, who got a lot of admiration, and dark gods, whose names literally were not spoken?
Lauren kept reading. She'd planned to sleep—to get past the day's horrors by embracing a few hours of unconsciousness, but she suspected she would just worry in bed, and maybe letting her mind play with something else for a while would let it relax.
"This is kind of interesting," she said after a while. "I haven't gotten anything specific about this, but every time it offers a little biography about a specific dark god, it mentions ways that particular god has already been killed. So nobody is claiming immortality for these guys."
Molly looked up from her reading, an odd expression on her face. "Give me an example."
Lauren nodded. "Here's one for one of the rrôn." From the little hidey-holes around the room, she heard breath being sucked in—the goroth evidently didn't care to hear the word "rrôn" spoken aloud.
Lauren grinned a little at Molly, who frowned at the source of the little noises. Lauren mouthed the word goroths, and after she'd done it twice, a look of comprehension crossed Molly's face, and she returned the grin.
Lauren started reading out loud:
Baanraak, when he rose to power as master of the rrôn, set out to destroy the veyâr, who would not tithe the dark rrôn or sacrifice to them. He came in a storm that he had summoned and with it destroyed the village of Tiethe Hamar, and slaughtered as many in it as he could hunt down. But the veyâr Nidral, son of Atharene, attacked him as Baanraak devoured women and children that he found hiding in one of the last of the standing houses of the village, and Nidral attacked Baanraak with a silver knife blessed by the old gods, and the knife's name was Thice. And Nidral drove the knife into Baanraak's throat, driving it into his blood-channel, and when the blood gouted out and covered Nidral, Baanraak died, and did not return to hunt the veyâr for ten years and a day. And when he returned, he sought out Nidral first, and devoured the champion, for Baanraak's memory was long and his hunger for vengeance burned ceaselessly.
Throughout that whole reading, the muffled yips and gasps of the goroths created a steady undercurrent of noise, so that Lauren began to feel that she was reading the passage over the noise of a popcorn popper in another room. She didn't say anything to the goroths, but their reactions every single time she said either Baanraak or rrôn got on her nerves and stayed there.
Molly's reaction, however, wasn't the unemotional interest Lauren had expected. When she looked up from reading, she saw that Molly had gone pale.
"What's wrong?"
"Baanraak," Molly said. "That's the name of the hired killer that the rrôn Rr'garn went off to find. The one he wanted to bring in to kill us."
An ice-cold worm of dread crawled into Lauren's gut and knotted everything it touched. She looked at her sister and said, "You don't suppose it's the same one?"
"It probably is," Molly said. "I don't want to be an alarmist, but the thoughts I managed to gather from Rr'garn suggested that this Baanraak was once leader of them all."
The goroth Rue popped out of whatever hiding place he'd chosen for himself and said, "Please, oh, please, Hunter…Vodi. Do not speak of them. You say their names and evil things will hap
pen—you must not speak of the dark gods, not by what they are nor by who they are. They are wicked, and have paid the winds to carry every mention of them to their ears, and they seek out those who summon them."
Lauren felt bad for the little creature. He looked like he was about to have a coronary—he was grayer than Molly, and sweat beaded on his skin and runneled into all his wrinkles; he breathed like he'd just run ten miles at top speed, and his previously yellow eyes had taken on an alarming orange hue.
Lauren said, "I'm sorry, Rue. We don't mean to upset you—but if we're going to defeat our enemies, we first have to know who they are, and how they operate, and what their weaknesses are. We can't allow superstition to scare us away." She smiled at him and said, "But we're in Copper House. This is a good place; you don't have to worry for us, or for yourselves. If the rrôn had been able to get in here, they would have already done so. The fact is, they've done nothing but circle. They can't reach us here. Don't worry."
But Molly was watching the goroth, her head cocked to one side, an intent look on her face. "You know them? You've met them?"
"Oh, no!" Rue said, horrified by the very suggestion. "They ignore my kind as often as not, and if they do notice us, it's only to eat us. They have no regard for…for thinkers and minds. Anything that moves is food, they think. They are wicked. Wicked—and if you talk of them, they will hear you."
Lauren wanted to thump Rue, but he had sworn himself to her service. Compared to Embar, he seemed flighty and silly and excitable, but she supposed she couldn't expect every goroth to be like Embar. That would be like expecting every human to be like Brian. It just didn't work that way.
When Lauren looked back to Molly, Molly was sitting there with her eyes closed, and from the expression on her face Lauren could only guess that she had a migraine coming on.
"Molly, you okay?" she asked, but Molly held up a hand to silence her. Lauren sat watching her, puzzling at Molly's pallor, the way her brows knit into a frown, and the way her spine straightened and seemed to go stiff. Lauren closed the book on her lap with the reader in place like a bookmark and lowered it silently to the floor beside the rocker. She leaned forward, ready to get up to offer her sister comfort or help. But the instant she started to get up, Molly's eyes flew open, her head snapped around to face the copper grille of the east window of the suite, and she shrieked.
Lauren looked where Molly was looking, and saw—and felt—a monster hovering outside her window, one hellish yellow eye the size of a basketball staring in at her. And at the same moment, she felt the presence of something behind her, and turned, and saw another equally huge eye, at the north window glowing like a ruby cat's eye in headlights.
"They're here!" Molly shrieked, and leapt to her feet. "We have to get out of here."
Lauren ran into the bedroom and grabbed Jake, and heard the ponderous flapping of the monsters' wings outside the windows, and the horrible scratching of claws on glass.
And then a crash, and a piercing scream.
She tucked her groggy son under her arm like a football and ran like hell.
CHAPTER 7
Copper House
MOLLY HELPED LAUREN and the goroths and the guards move Jake, the books, and Lauren's few belongings into safe—if windowless—quarters in the core of Copper House. The guards took up their positions outside the room. The goroths went through the inside of the smaller suite with paranoid efficiency, located what they determined were its weaknesses—a secret servants' door into the sitting room and a narrow blind passage between the dressing room and the bedchamber—and set themselves to guard them.
Seolar arrived, sent guards against the too-close rrôn, and then made sure Molly was safe. He left when she told him she needed to stay with her sister and her sister's son for a while—at least until they could calm down.
So finally the sisters were as alone as they were going to get.
"What the hell are we going to do?" Lauren asked. She rocked Jake in her arms and stared woefully at the bed as if it might turn into something terrible that could devour her.
"About the…about them?" Suddenly Molly felt a bit more respectful of the superstitions regarding the mention of the dark gods.
"Yes." With a sigh, Lauren tucked Jake into the bed. Oblivious as only a child could be, he blinked a couple of times, smiled sleepily, and curled into a ball. Within seconds he was asleep as if nothing had happened.
Molly said, "The veyâr are taking care of them for now. They can shoot them from concealment and at least get them to back off. Long-term…? Long-term, you and I are going to have to find a solution."
Lauren looked sick. "We caused that, Molly. We brought them down on us and put everyone in danger."
Molly bit her bottom lip and fidgeted with the ties of her bodice. "I know. We have to know the rules, Lauren. We have to know what we can do and what we can't. We have to understand who we are, and to do that, we're—or at least I'm—going to have to do some reading."
"I don't know that this is going to work," Lauren said. She sat on the edge of the bed. Molly saw her glance at her son. "Putting Jake into danger is driving me crazy. I can't think, I can't focus. I should be reading Mom and Dad's notebook, but all I can think about is that if I get killed, he has no one."
Lauren hid her face in her hands. Molly heard her muffled voice saying, "This morning he told me he wanted his daddy back, and just a little later he almost lost me, too."
Molly said, "We'll be more careful."
"Careful isn't going to matter. You and I are targets for something big and terrifying and evil. My kid is caught in the middle. And I don't…I don't even know who to see to hand in my resignation. This isn't duty, Molly. This is captivity, and it stinks. What were our parents thinking?"
"They thought they were doing the right thing," Molly said. "And it isn't like they weren't taking some risks."
"They could have risked me." Lauren rose and walked over to look at her sleeping son. "But they had no right to risk him." She looked over at Molly. "Maybe we could find a way to get him a necklace like yours. Something that will keep him safe and whole. I know we have things we have to do, but if Jake isn't safe, I don't think I'll be of use to anyone."
"A necklace to keep him safe and whole, like me," Molly echoed. She didn't feel whole. She couldn't tell Lauren about the empty place inside of herself. She couldn't tell Lauren that since she'd returned from death, she no longer needed to sleep—that at that moment she had been awake for several days, and not once in that time had she felt the faintest impulse to lie down and rest. She spent time in bed with Seolar—but once he was asleep, she got up and stared out into the darkness.
Darkness spoke her name now, in a way it never had before.
"So—you don't have anything to say about the idea? You think I'm crazy, or that the whole thing sounds stupid, or…anything?"
Molly shrugged. "We'll go down to the safe room tomorrow, and see what we can do. I don't know that it's a good idea. It might even be a really bad idea. But he's your kid, and you have every right to do what you can to protect him. If I were you, I think I'd be doing the same thing." She patted the corner of the bed.
"Thanks, Molly. I appreciate it."
Molly thought for a long moment. Finally she said, "Why don't you get some sleep, then? I'll stay here and read and keep watch—I don't really want to go to sleep, and I don't really want to be away from you right now. Sleep on the problem, try to figure out a solution, and I'll see if I can get some research done on our problem. We have a lot of work to do—but you're right. Until you can concentrate, we aren't going to be able to do it."
Lauren gave her a wan smile.
"And be a little happier," Molly said, forcing cheer. "If you're successful, Jake will be safe."
Lauren stood, smiled a little, and came over to hug her. "I wish we'd been kids together. You're exactly the sister I would have chosen, even if you are too pretty and you have huge alien eyes."
Molly laughed—a ge
nuine laugh. "I know exactly what you mean. You would have been the perfect older sister to have around when I was little." She grinned. "Anyway, get some sleep, cuddle your little guy. I'm going out to the sitting room to read for a while."
"If you get tired…"
Molly waved her off. "If I get tired I'll sack out on the couch. I know how to do that, and this dress is a lot more comfortable than it looks."
As Lauren got into bed, Molly headed out to the sitting room and the long couch. "Leave the door open a crack, would you?" Lauren called after her.
This time Molly went straight to Those Whose Names Are Unspoken. Lauren had left her reader in the page from which she'd been reading, and Molly wanted to know more about the rrôn, and the dark gods, and what made a dark god.
She read more about Baanraak, who had died a dozen times but who always came back, and about the hated keth god Aril, for whom the veyâr had only been able to count five deaths and returns at the time of the writing, and finally about a god named Cisgig, whom the veyâr destroyed—to all appearances—permanently.
