wreck of heaven

by Holly Lisle

  "I know that," Seolar said. "My guards keep me apprised of their movements."

  "I don't need the guards," Molly hissed. "Those bastards are inside my head. And why is that, do you suppose? Because down at the very core of it all, I'm one of them. I'm a dark god, too, a monster, a thing." She turned away from him and dug her fingernails into her palms until they drew blood. Then she stared at her bleeding palms and thought, I'm real. And Shakespeare's Shylock whispered in her head: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

  Poisoned, she would die. She'd just come back again, bringing a bit less of the woman she had once been with her, and a bit more of the monster she would one day be.

  Revenge—she could have her revenge so easily it frightened her. She could have her revenge in a hundred ways, and the chain of worlds and everyone in it would pay for the hurt this one man had done her, and for this one bitter betrayal. She could take off the Vodi necklace and walk out of Copper House to embrace the murderous jaws of the rrôn. She could refuse to shoulder her duty. She could go back to Earth and await the end—well, maybe. She actually wasn't sure she could go back to Earth. She was pretty sure she would be able to travel downworld, though, so maybe she could await her end there.

  Or she could close Seolar out of her life. He'd earned that—he'd killed her as surely as if he'd thrown the fireball himself. No matter his noble talk of duty, he had betrayed her. He had murdered her. He had taken her soul away from her and consigned her to a slowly worsening hell from which the only exit was not-being.

  She bled. She breathed. She yearned and hungered and hoped—and it was all a sham.

  She turned away and walked off without another word. She couldn't look at Seolar, and didn't know that she would ever be able to again.

  Behind her, Seolar said nothing. Which was right. How could he have anything to say?

  Outside the door, Birra and a squad of guards waited.

  "I'm going to Lauren's room," she said. "I'm going to wait for her and Jake."

  They walked with her—point, flank and rear, watching and wary—and she thought, This is a gift of Seolar, this awful caution, this endless danger. He brought this on all of us when he gave me the necklace, because without it I would have been invisible to the enemy, and none of the awfulness that happened would have happened.

  The goroths welcomed her into the room, where they, too, waited.

  She went past the goroths and looked around Lauren's bedroom; she saw a thick black ring binder on the nightstand. The books she had swiped from the library, now neatly stacked on a table, could tell her a great deal about the past. But Lauren's binder was an enigma—something potentially interesting, if Lauren had brought it when she had brought so little else.

  Molly went over to the bedside, lifted the heavy binder. Behind it she saw the photo of a blue-eyed young man in a flight cap and dress blues seated in front of an American flag. So that was Brian. Molly picked up the photo; Lauren had framed it in simple, old-fashioned sterling silver. In the man's face, Molly could see a great deal of Jake, and a little of what Brian must have been like. He had intelligent eyes, a kind smile, a bit of presence even at what had to have been a trying time—the photo was the one taken during basic training. Molly had had one like it of herself. Brian's was better.

  She didn't recognize him. She might have crossed paths with him once or a dozen times, but there were a lot of good-looking young men in the Air Force, and she couldn't have noticed every one.

  He'd been between the worlds with her and Jake, though, when Jake was dying. Molly had felt him sacrifice a part of his animating force to keep his son alive. And prior to that, Brian had evaded the consequences of his own death for over a year just to be close—in spirit if not in body—to his wife and son.

  And his child had raced into the great unknown to save him, with the woman who loved him in fast pursuit, equally determined to bring him back.

  Molly wondered what it would have been like to love someone that much—and to have someone who loved her that much. She'd thought she knew…but the truth had no respect for foolish emotion.

  Molly put the picture down, and still clutching the notebook, turned away. She could read it out in the sitting room. That would be better, she thought. She found herself uncomfortable in the bedroom, even though Brian had never been in it; it still felt to her like shared space, as if he were there and watching her. As if she were invading Lauren's privacy.

  She settled into the rocking chair and started to read.

  Journal entries, starting in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s. Two separate hands, the neater of the two belonging, she realized, to her mother. The other to the man who'd stepped aside so her mother could conceive Molly with a man not of her world, or even of her species.

  She couldn't imagine what that relationship had been like, either. How did they do that? How did old Walt say to this woman he ostensibly loved, "Go on, Marian—go have a baby with that creature that isn't even human, and we'll figure out a way to raise it as ours." Because that had been their first intention, before things went wrong. She was skimming, finding little notes that she knew related to her because she knew how old she was, knew when she was born, knew the story.

  When Marian's writing disappeared for a whole long stretch, replaced by Walt's heavy, dark, angular script, Molly realized that Marian had gone off to someplace in western North Carolina to give birth to her. She read mentions of Lauren, and of problems, and of progress and setbacks on the great plan the two of them had hatched.

  "It's not going to end well, folks," she muttered. "It's not going to end well at all, and if you're smart, you'll give up on this idea and do whatever you can to live normal, meaningless lives."

  Skimming, skimming—looking for details of their plan and their expectations for their daughters. They were both careful. They hinted, and from their hints Molly could piece together a few details they hadn't included in the memories they'd implanted into her via magic.

  They felt she and Lauren could save the worldchain. That the two of them had special sorts of magic that would let them do what no one else had ever been able to do before—stop and maybe reverse the deaths of worlds. But how…

  Molly read the entries and just got more and more confused. Diagrams of thing to make, lists of spells to cast, weird connections to create between worlds—as she read through, she just kept thinking, Even with a dozen people, this would take years. And we don't have years.

  She closed the notebook, frowning. Why had they made it all so vague, so contradictory from one page to the next, so terribly baffling? It was so confusing, it almost seemed intentional.

  Something about that seemed right to her. But she had other things to think about, and she brushed the errant thought aside.

  Copper House

  The goroths held their positions in the room, waiting for their adored Hunter to return. Outside in the hallway, the guards murmured to each other—when Molly concentrated, she could hear that they talked about women and sex and gambling. Everything seemed the same. But something had changed. She put the notebook aside and stood, looking around, trying to get a feel for the direction of the change, and for its importance.

  Then she realized what was different. The rrôn who had been circling overhead had flown away. She still carried their darkness inside of her, but their thoughts had dwindled to nothing, and the ominous pressure they'd exerted on her had vanished completely.

  CHAPTER 12

  Outside Copper House

  AS BAANRAAK HAD PREDICTED, Rr'garn didn't see him coming, and didn't realize he'd arrived until Baanraak gave a couple of hard wingbeats and took himself up above the level of the trees.

  Rr'garn spiraled down to meet him. "You see," he said, looking smug and setting his wings to fly wingtip to wingtip with Baanraak, "I saw you coming."

  "Did you?" said Baanraak, who'd been watching the rrôn
circling Copper House while the sun moved halfway across the sky. "Well, I must have been mistaken then."

  Rr'garn looked like he was ready to agree—but at the last instant he held his tongue. So maybe, Baanraak thought, Rr'garn wouldn't die just today.

  "Are you ready to send them off?" he asked, his voice and manner so exactingly polite it was almost an insult.

  Rr'garn seemed oblivious. "I'm ready—but are you sure you won't need them as reinforcements?"

  "I'm certain. I work alone—always. I find that's the only way I have complete control of the outcome."

  "Well, then—I can have them make some sort of commotion while you get into position," Rr'garn offered. "Something that will draw all eyes away from you."

  "I'm…grateful," Baanraak said, trying not to laugh. The idea of those noisy clods soaring overhead trying to make a scene painted pictures in his mind entirely too funny to bear. "But really, you need do nothing special. Any staged drama will be sure to leave people wondering, and perhaps suspicious. If your lads will just file off in one direction—west, maybe—that should be enough to aid me, without it being too much."

  Baanraak didn't care for other rrôn—even those who had not chosen to follow the path of cycling death and immortality annoyed him. He detested the rest of the dark gods. He found Rr'garn execrable. By all rights, he should have still been basking on his rock in the sunshine, listening to the murmuring of water in the nearby brook, and the soft rattle of the wind through bud-heavy trees, and the incessant yammering of the birds building their nests and defending their territories. By all rights he should be nowhere near this place, for he had no interest in helping those who needed his help.

  Yet here he was.

  He gave Rr'garn a nod as the idiot flew up to tell his cronies and sycophants that it was time to go away.

  Why had he come here?

  Baanraak had no good explanation; he certainly couldn't be so bored with existence that the arrival of another human/veyâr hybrid wearing spelled gold could elicit genuine interest in him. Could he?

  He waited until Rr'garn flew level with the lowest of the circling rrôn. Then, with the patience and care he'd developed with thousands of years of practice, he curved light around himself until he made no more impression on the eye than the ripple of heat rising from sun-baked sand. He stilled his mind, curved his wings in such manner that the air made almost no noise as it rushed over and under them, and, giving loving attention to detail, he soared twice around the walls of the village of Copper House, and twice around Copper House itself. Then he banked off toward the closest edge of the forest and dropped to the ground in a clearing. He settled on the ground, adjusting rocks and branches until he found a comfortable position. He shook his wings out and tucked them into place, and slid his head under one and back to rest on his rump—his favorite pose when he had to stay still for long periods of time.

  He rested well away from traffic; yet close to the village wall and Copper House. He could not see anything with his eyes, but he had them closed. He didn't need to see anything with them. Practically invisible, safely away from anyone who might accidentally step on him, he stilled his thoughts until they flowed no faster than sap flows up the ancient hardwoods in the middle of winter. He slowed his heart, his lungs, the blood in his veins. And then he listened.

  At first, the sheer chaos of the minds within the village of Copper House made focusing on any one mind impossible. Baanraak, undeterred by impossibility, patiently sifted through minds, blocking them one at a time and shielding his thoughts against further intrusion from the thoughts of each mind that was not the one he wanted. He eliminated males quickly, and nonveyâr, and children. He had to pay more attention to the women, because he did not want to accidentally remove his target from view, which would force him to sift again. He preferred doing something right the first time, so he took time laying his groundwork. He had time. The hurrying, scuttling head of the rrôn branch of the Night Watch and all his many followers had never released the hurry that had characterized their mortal existence. They had never learned to take the long view—but then, Baanraak had already been taking the long view as a mortal. It was as a mortal that he'd mastered stillness. In the uncounted thousands of following years in which he enjoyed immortality, he had merely refined his techniques.

  One by one he pushed the women of the veyâr away, blocking them off. By the time it got down to a few dozens, he should have found it easy to pick out his target. But he could not. He could not find her among the minds, and he thought perhaps he had missed her. Blanking his own thoughts entirely, he let the thoughts of the strangers run through his mind like water over a streambed, and continued patiently removing them. One, and another, and a third. Curiosity began to tiptoe through his mind, a tiny itch that he dared not scratch. Still. He held to his stillness, and shielded off a dozen more. And then another dozen. He felt nothing but veyâr thoughts, no twinge of the darkness that characterized a once-dead Vodi. The water that ran through his mind babbled. He kept sifting. Kept removing, one by one by one by one. And at last he had removed every single set of thoughts within the village and within the House—and yet he did not wipe away the shields and start again. He knew he had not made a mistake. He knew that he had not let her slip into the common herd. Which meant one of two things. Either she had, in spite of the noisy surveillance of the rrôn, slipped away from the village—or she, too, had mastered stillness. He lay like the dead, no pulse moving in his veins, no air in his lungs, no thud of his heart, or thought in his forebrain.

  Patience.

  Waiting.

  Invisibility.

  And more patience.

  Then she jumped, and Baanraak felt her irritation; someone had come in and interrupted her, and she proceeded to give the interloper a sharp dressing-down, demanding that if she was still and did not seem to be doing anything that was not an invitation to interrupt her. She had been after something that lay outside Copper House, she said. Something big, something bad.

  Forcing stillness in a body that suddenly abhorred it, Baanraak carefully placed a tiny marker in her mind—something that would let him find her again quickly without all the irritating sifting. Then, before he could betray himself, he shielded her from him—and himself from her.

  Only when he had done that did he whip his head out from under his wing and leap to his feet and stretch his wings.

  By the Egg, she could have had him as easily as he had her! He paced in a circle, so excited he could barely contain his movements to walking—he wanted to bound into the air and pump his wings until he raced the light. He wanted to roar, to shriek, to do loop-the-loops around trees and he wanted to sing. He'd found in this new-hatched Vodi, in this veritable child when measured by geologic scale, a worthy opponent. Someone who could lie quietly and watch and wait and not blink and not breathe and not give herself away. Someone in whom his cautious, patient, surreptitious search had triggered alarms—and Baanraak couldn't think of anyone, ever, who'd caught on to him when he was being careful.

  Lovely, he thought. Oh, it was lovely. All of a sudden his existence had flavor again. All of a sudden, he was not alone. He was not the only one in the worldchain who knew how to watch, knew how to wait…to hunt. Suddenly, he had a worthy enemy. Rr'garn had been right: She was special. She might or might not be the Vodi, the much-mythologized warrior-goddess who would stand against the combined might of the dark gods and shatter their plans and scatter their evils to the four winds and bring life back to the whole worldchain, but by the Egg, by the Infinities, by his own lost and lately lamented soul, she sang in his blood like the fires of a murdered world.

  He would hunt her. He would kill her. Or perhaps she would kill him. The idea that she might kill him, as well as the potential that she could, thrilled him.

  Excitement so consumed him that he did not even bother to calm himself until nearly sunset. He had time. He had eternity. To the empty spaces with Rr'garn and the Night Watch and their premature hun
ger for Terra and all her lives. Baanraak had something wonderful in front of him, and he intended to savor it—and that meant letting himself feel the thrill that too many soulless years of existence had leached from him.

  When the sun dropped below the horizon, however, he began pulling himself back in, leashing emotions long-unused and now running rampant and tying down loose thoughts. He was going into battle, and somewhere within the walls of the village waited a warrior who had felt his silence and had answered it with silence of her own. She suspected his presence. She suspected his interest. He had no idea how he'd tipped his hand, but he had, and the fact that he had not been careless and had not made any mistakes and she knew he was out there anyway electrified him.