by Holly Lisle
It was while reading about Cisgig's final destruction that her heart began to pound and a creeping sense of horror overran her.
Then the champion Val Vâryn brought the body of dead Cisgig to the pyre and before he was burned, stripped off all his gold. And the goldsmith said, "Give the gold to me, for we will not succumb to greed and harbor our enemies in our belly as our slaughtered brethren did." And he prised the stones from necklace and armbands and earcuffs, and ground them to dust, and when he'd finished that, grated the gold into a fine powder and mixed it with quicksilver and took it to the river and poured it in a drop at a time. And the dust from the gemstones he scattered to the four winds, and when he was done, they lit the pyre beneath Cisgig's corpse, and burned him until even his bones were ash, and scattered them to the wind as well. The soulless monster rose no more, nor will he ever.
Molly ran her fingers over the sleek gold chain that she wore and touched the heavy gold pendant, and ran her index finger slowly over the sapphires around the edge of the medallion. The necklace hummed and purred beneath her fingertips, a thing alive. It was the reason she had come back; she knew it. It told her things sometimes—not in words but in pictures in the back of her mind, or when her eyes were closed. Through it, she had known of both Rr'garn and Baanraak; through it, she could feel the rrôn circling high above Copper House, once again out of the reach of the guard and its silver-tipped crossbow points.
Soulless, the book had called Cisgig—and as she thought about it, every other dark god. She flipped to the back of the book, hoping to find an index in which she could look up "soul," but it had none. However, she had better luck in the front, where the writer or writers offered a wordy table of contents without any page numbers.
Toward the front of the book was a section called, "The marks of the dark gods, and their curses and characteristics, as well as their powers."
She moved slowly from page to page, using the reader to identify the first few words in every paragraph—for besides not having page numbers, the book didn't have anything she could recognize as chapter headers. No changes in the handwriting, no special indentation, no little pictures or lines. Nothing.
But she found it soon enough, and started to read.
Though most of the dark gods, like the old gods, can change their forms to resemble the veyâr or natural creatures of the world, they carry with them always an aura of menace that they cannot dispel. They are creatures dead and risen, who with their first deaths lose their souls and never after regain them. They are the lost, dispossessed of the afterlife that would have been theirs, and though in their first reincarnations they of- ten hold much of the memory of who they were, with each death more of what was living about them washes away, and more of what is dead remains. They become evil, but immortal evil, passed from rebirth to dark rebirth by the god-tainted gold that remembers and re-forms them.
Molly closed the book and closed her eyes. This was the truth Birra and Seolar had hoped to keep from her; that she was a thing, a construct, a soulless monster that would live forever, but would shed more and more of herself as time went on. She felt the rrôn outside Copper House because she was kin to them; she was the same thing that they were, only younger. Fresher.
Soulless, dead, with the magic of a gold necklace to reanimate the corpse and make it think that it was a real person, and let it have hopes and dreams and aspirations, but let it have them in vain.
Her soul had abandoned her—gone wherever souls go, to do whatever souls did. And she remained behind, a child abandoned by its parent in a hellish bus station filled with devouring monsters and sadistic men and left to fend for itself. And she could never follow. She was cast off.
How could Seolar love her? He knew what she was. Did he pretend love just because his people needed her help? If she were a cynic, that would be the easiest explanation. But she was not a cynic—at least not yet. She thought she could read his touch, his voice, his care and compassion well enough to tell that she was not being deceived.
So she believed he loved her. But how could he?
And how could she live with herself? She'd wanted to live with him, grow old with him, and in the end die with him. But that wasn't the way it would work. Sadly she closed her eyes and pictured him, filled with her love for him and her anguish at the future she saw spreading out before her. She would live now until she chose to die—until she found the courage and the strength to remove the necklace and walk away from it for good. In the meantime, she would watch Seolar grow old and die while time left her untouched—and after him, she would, perhaps, find some other beautiful young man, and perhaps after him another. The echoes of the lost Vodian, whispering to her in the silent room, mourned not their own lost youth, for they had never lost it, but the lives of every creature they had ever dared to care about.
She could go through their biographies to find out the details of their lives, but she now knew the key piece to the puzzle, and knowing it, she could see already the most important fact in each of their lives. Each of them had held in her hand the chance to be immortal, and had eventually chosen—chosen—oblivion. That truth terrified Molly. For her there would be nothing after death. She was real; she felt, she yearned, she hoped, she loved—but her soul was gone, and when she died she would simply blink out like a snuffed candle. And all around her would go on to the afterlife. To infinity, to wherever souls went, to do whatever they did.
Molly had never felt so alone or so adrift.
Or so angry—at Seolar for hiding the truth from her; at herself for being stupid and not getting Jake to safety in time; at Lauren for having put her into a position where she had to make two decisions she didn't want to make—first, to leave Oria when she wanted to stay, and second, to save Jake when she knew she would die if she did. She was angry at the world and her life and the soul that she no longer had and the dark gods who hung in the air above, waiting for something…something…that would permit them to destroy her—and at the knowledge she was more like them than either the sister or the man she loved.
She put her hand on the necklace. She could save herself a lot of time, a lot of pain and heartache. She could take the necklace off, walk out onto the balcony, and call the rrôn down to her. They would end it quickly—she'd suffer one more death, probably faster than the last one, and no new awakening. If her life was a nightmare waiting to get worse, then death would be freedom, wouldn't it? Or at least surcease from horror.
Pity she sat in a room with no windows, no balconies, no outside access. She could have been outside and the deed done before anyone could stop her—before she had a chance for second thoughts.
But.
The easy path was almost always the wrong one. Lauren needed her. So did the veyâr.
Molly had not chosen the duties placed on her shoulders, but if she did not carry the burden, no one else would. No one else could. Without her, her world would likely end quickly and horribly.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. With her chin on her knees, she began rocking back and forth. Live and suffer and fight, or die forever?
Back and forth. Back and forth. She was a coward. She could see what was coming, and she didn't want it. She wanted quick and clean and done once. She wanted life and love and Seolar. She wanted to fight beside her sister. She wanted to run away. She wanted everything—and nothing. Finally, she wanted a solution, an escape, a happy ending, and that was the only thing she knew she could never have.
Molly closed her eyes tightly, and rocked and wept, and waited for morning.
Cat Creek
Pete got himself out of bed well before dawn, and was just driving into Charlotte as the sun rose behind him. No problem in looking eager to Eric—that could only work in his favor. And getting into the city early allowed Pete to figure out how he was going to set up a meeting—something that was going to be damned difficult to do.
He couldn't use the usual protocols—scrambled lines, secure phone
s, code phrases. He was breaking new ground this time, and he had to admit it had him scared shitless.
Copper House
Molly still occupied the couch in the sitting room when Lauren and Jake, trailing goroths, headed out of their bedroom in search of breakfast. And Molly looked like refried hell.
"Molly, what's the matter?"
"I found out how this all works." Molly sniffled and wiped at her face as if just at that instant realizing it was streaked with tears. "I came back, but my soul went on without me. I'm—I'm a dark god. Kept in check by the necklace I wear, apparently—there was a great deal of information in several of the Vodi biographies on how the necklace helps me hang on to my memories and personality, and keeps me from going dark too soon. But I am a soulless immortal, and I'll keep coming back less and less me, and more and more…nothing. More and more an empty shell. Only nature abhors a vacuum, and the rrôn are like me. They're things—soulless, immortal monsters. That's why I can hear them, Lauren. That's why something in them calls to me. It's because we're the same, or we will be if I'm around long enough."
Lauren started to protest that this wasn't true, but Molly hadn't finished speaking yet.
"They all killed themselves, Lauren. All the Vodian before me—they all eventually took off the necklace and walked out into the midst of whoever was hunting them at the time, and got themselves ripped to pieces. That was better than living as what they had become. And…that's what I am."
Lauren looked at her, wordless, and pulled her into a hug. "You have people who love you," Lauren said after a while. She patted Molly on the back and rocked her back and forth a little, the way she would comfort Jake. "Seolar, me…all the veyâr…"
"I have you now," Molly said. She pulled away and looked at her sister. "But you're getting older every day. I'm not. I'll look like this when you're ninety—I'll look like this when you've been dead a hundred years, and a thousand. I am going to watch everything I love die—all the people, maybe all the worlds." She whispered, "One night of knowing the truth, and already I understand a little why the rrôn are the way they are, and the keth, and the rest of the old gods who somehow ended up dark gods. They have become their universe—everything is temporary but them. They have forever—but they don't have Heaven. No karma, Lauren. No repercussions for evil; no rewards for good. And no way of stopping time for anyone whom they discover they care about. I can't make you live forever. Or Jake. Or Seolar. You're going to be gone someday soon, and I'm going to be here, and I'll be hollower than I was before."
She turned her face away from Lauren and said, "I'm not sure that I'm going to go through with any of the plan, Lauren. I'm not sure that I can live this way."
Lauren didn't know what to say. She couldn't imagine how she would feel if she found herself in Molly's place. She couldn't imagine what she would do. She just stood there, feeling lost, unable to come up with a single thing that might be comforting to Molly and still be true.
Jake had been watching Molly, frowning. When she fell silent, he took Bearish over to her and said, "Superman will save you. He saves mamas and daddies. He will give you a kiss and make it better."
He pressed Bearish's nose to Molly's cheek and made a kissing noise.
Lauren watched Molly's face crumple; she watched the tears start afresh. "And I will never have my own child," Molly sobbed. "Not ever." She scooped Jake into her lap, and Jake looked uncertainly at his mother. Then, without prompting, he wrapped his arms around Molly's neck and patted her gently. "It's okay," he murmured. "It's okay."
In Jake at that moment, Lauren saw a bit of herself and a bit of the man Jake would one day be—if she could keep him safe long enough to get him to adulthood.
She wouldn't be keeping him safe by giving him a necklace like Molly's.
She had no idea how she would protect him. But after she fed him breakfast, she figured she would go down to the safe room—either with Molly or without her, depending on how Molly was doing—and see what bright magical ideas she could come up with.
Once she had Jake protected, she could think about other things. Molly's nightmare discovery. The tasks their parents had left for the two of them. The problem of the rrôn, and other old gods, too. And not incidentally, the fate of countless worlds, no matter how grandiose that sounded to her when she thought it.
But Jake came first.
CHAPTER 8
Charlotte, North Carolina
PETE SAT on the green park bench, feeding a pair of fat mallards and trying to appear inconspicuous. He had a good day for sitting—a bright, breezy North Carolina spring morning, with pink dogwoods and daffodils and forsythia and azaleas ringing the lake and lining the paths, and the skyline of Charlotte rising over the top edge of the dogwoods like some Chamber of Commerce guy's postcard wet dream.
Pete kept expecting the brief, awful explosion of a bullet tearing into the back of his head, though, and that spoiled his enjoyment of the weather, the view, or the fact that he was away from the confines of Cat Creek for the day.
He pulled bread out of the paper bag he carried and tossed crumbs to the ducks. On the bench beside him lay a small, square hand mirror. He ignored the mirror.
A man in a gray suit sat down beside him, opened a bagged breakfast from Hardee's, and began to eat a ham biscuit. "This is a real pain in the ass, you know."
Pete did not look over. Fred had been both a good friend and Pete's secret boss for the last three years. Pete said, "I'm sorry about that. Can't be helped. Take the mirror."
Fred picked up the mirror without question. "All right. So what's the emergency?"
"I've made contact."
A short, pregnant pause. "Damn. That's not an emergency, Pete. That's success."
"It's an emergency. You know how we thought we were pretty close to understanding the technology? How we thought we were maybe five years from having things back under control again, whether they decided to make contact with us or not?"
Fred didn't say anything. They both knew it was a rhetorical question.
"Hold the mirror in the palm of your hand," Pete said. He got a mirror out of his own pocket, took a folded piece of paper from the same pocket, then rested his fingertips just above the surface of the mirror. It began to glow with a soft green light, as did the companion mirror in Fred's hand. Fred swore softly. Pete shook his head. "That's not the problem. Wait for it."
He shoved the paper into the surface of the mirror, which shimmered and distorted like smooth water disturbed by a pebble. The paper disappeared. An instant later, the glowing surface of the mirror in Fred's hand began to ripple, and the paper popped out onto the surface of the glass. The green glow in both mirrors died away almost instantly.
"Sweet Jesus H," Fred muttered. "What the hell…?"
Pete put his own mirror back in his pocket and began tossing crumbs to the ducks again. "You know the old saying about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic?"
Fred, staring at the mirror in his hand, nodded.
"Welcome to the brave new world."
Fred sat there for a moment, staring at the mirror lying in his trembling hand. "The mirror isn't everything, is it?"
"Secure lines are a problem, too. Basically…well, basically, secure lines don't exist anymore. These guys can send things through mirrors, and they can look into mirrors and see what anyone, anywhere, is doing at any time."
Fred's skin turned the color of week-old fireplace ashes. "Our ETs did this?"
Pete considered telling the truth, then shrugged. "I don't know who developed it. I know the ETs have it."
"What else is there? How bad does this get? Jesus Christ, this was a national security nightmare before. Now…how the hell do we secure a facility against this sort of technology?"
"Maybe we hire some of them to work for us. If they built it, they have to have ways to block it."
Fred turned the mirror over in his hand and studied the back. "How did you get this?"
; "I've had a breakthrough. I'm in contact with some of the ETs. My lead in England paid off, in spite of how long it took."
Fred looked directly at Pete for the first time since he sat down. "You're in contact? With a live one? And this is the first you've mentioned it?"
"Not one. Several. And they're watching me. For all I know, they're watching me now—but I don't think so. I got one of them to ask me to come to Charlotte on a few errands; they don't have any reason to think that I wanted to be here."
"All right." Fred put the mirror in his pocket, and said, "I'll have some of our guys analyze this."
"Don't," Pete said. "It's just a mirror. There's nothing to analyze. All the…technology, I guess…that makes it work is…" He rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. "It's somewhere else. I don't even know how to begin explaining that. I gave you the mirror because I can't call you, and I don't know when I'll be able to get back to Charlotte without raising anyone's curiosity. This way, at least I can send you reports regularly."
