by Holly Lisle
June Bug sighed. "I did some tracking, and then I did some calling around. We aren't the only place to have our old gods pick up and leave. Old god gateweavers seem to be going door-to-door in a number of places."
"Rats," Pete muttered.
Eric looked at him sidelong. "I can think of harsher things to say than that."
"No. I mean—rats swarm off a sinking ship—take their chances with the seas, hope to catch a ride on some of the wreckage. They know."
June-Bug nodded. "The old gods have apparently heard something. This looks like an emergency evacuation to me. Obviously this is not good news."
Obviously not. Pete thought about Lauren, who was out of reach, and about the fact that if she'd been in reach, maybe he could get his parents and his brothers and sisters and their kids and maybe a few good friends down to Oria before everything went "splat"—which was probably against the Sentinel credo, too, but if his choice was between having a live family and upholding the ideals of what was looking more and more like the losing side, he was going to have to vote for family.
"Any idea where the problem originates?" Eric asked.
June Bug said, "I can't find anything. I have looked and looked, and I have talked to trackers all over the country, and not a one of us can find anything that would seem to make people who have been established in this area since…well, maybe since colonial times…just throw a few things into a bag and run."
"How do you know they've been here that long?" George asked. "Wouldn't we have noticed them?"
"We didn't. I suspect we haven't been noticing them for a very long time. One of them was Billy Mabry, out in the old Mabry place. You know how everyone commented how much Billy looked like that picture of his great-great-great-uncle Gideon, taken right before the fight at Monroe's Crossroads? And how those Mabrys managed to hang on to the uniforms and the diaries and the sabers and all? Billy might have been Gideon. I didn't know either of the other two personally, but I imagine they know us. I imagine they've had their bit of fun with us in the last century or so." She frowned and put down the unlit cigar.
Pete thought about people who'd lived in the same houses under a variety of names for a century or more, and all just up and moved on the same day, and got the chills.
"But nothing seems to be wrong," he said.
June Bug looked at him and tipped her head to one side and said, "Darlin', I know you read the newspapers, because I have seen you do it. You look at the headlines for the last ten years and tell me again that nothing seems to be wrong."
Pete felt the heat of embarrassment creeping up his neck and cheeks. "I meant nothing seems to be more wrong than usual."
"No," June Bug agreed. "It doesn't. But maybe the problem is with the part of the iceberg that we can't see. Maybe our Titanic is about to sink on something that's been building for the last thousand years, and that is below the surface of what we can see."
"You ought to know about the Titanic, you old bat," Raymond muttered, so low Pete almost missed it. "I'll bet you were on the last one."
Eric turned to Raymond and whispered, "We're going to have a talk," and June Bug, whose hearing was legendary, said, "I'm afraid the first Titanic was a bit before my time. But I don't think I'm going to be lucky enough to miss the second one."
And then Eric and June Bug both turned to Pete, and Eric said, "We need Lauren back here. Today. Right now. I'll cover the calls for you while you drive up to get her. Don't accept any excuses. We're going to need flexible access—to Oria, to who knows where else—while we figure out what's going on and how we can fight it."
"If nothing else," George said, "we need gates that will hold up for heavy traffic. If this is it and we've lost, I want to get my family out of here, and I'm sure the rest of you do, too. I'll stay and fight, but I have to know they're safe."
And Pete swallowed hard and nodded. "I'll do my best."
Oria
Baanraak, gleeful at his success, considered his options as he winged through the night sky over the Mourning Forest. He needed to revive Molly someplace with a lot of raw materials to contribute to the physical recreation the spell would require. The place would not require the volume of resources Fherghass had needed when he decided to create Baanraak as his successor—the Vodi's slight form was nothing like a rrôn's.
But Baanraak was going to have to kill her and revive her repeatedly until he managed to eliminate all her mortal patterns and tendencies, and repeated resurrection of even a low-mass creature demanded resources.
Baanraak considered, too, that he would have to deal with the rrôn of the Night Watch, who would certainly feel they had a say in what Baanraak was doing with the Vodi. They wanted her gone; when they discovered that, far from destroying her, Baanraak planned to temper her the way a blacksmith tempered a fine blade, they would demand blood. Hers first, then Baanraak's.
The idea of the Night Watch coming after Baanraak didn't bother him overmuch, but he did have some timing preferences—he wanted to be able to train his new colleague and eventual replacement without disturbance.
He could lie easily enough. He could claim he'd killed her in Copper House—true, and easily proven—and that he'd then taken the opportunity to destroy the necklace before she had the chance to reembody—false, but utterly impossible to disprove until such time as she reappeared wearing the necklace.
He could lie—but lying was the coward's path. He wouldn't take it. Instead, he would simply disappear, taking her with him. Downworld a bit, he thought. Dalchi, four worlds below Oria, had an excellent supply of flora and fauna to keep him well supplied, plenty of raw materials and magical energy to permit repeated resurrections for the Vodi without straining local resources, and the Night Watch mostly avoided it because it was, as yet, too deep in the layers of live worlds to get a good feed from the death energy of the upworlds.
He would, he thought, have as long as he needed there. He could do the job right, and when he was done, he would have a companion, and a colleague, and an eventual heir. And during the whole process, he would once again have a reason for living.
CHAPTER 15
Copper House
LAUREN AND JAKE fell through the mirror into the stone room they had left behind. Lauren got just a peek at the room she'd stepped into; then the green fire of the gate behind her died into complete darkness. For a moment ghost images offered a pretense of light, but when those faded, Lauren realized she could see nothing—and wouldn't be able to. The stone room buried in the depths of Copper House had no windows—and no one had thought to leave a light burning for her.
Jake hugged her neck so tightly she had to fight for air. "Easy, monkey-boy," she said, and conjured a room light. The room lay empty—but it felt more than merely empty. It felt abandoned.
How long had she and Jake been gone? Hours? Days? Years?
Lauren listened, but heard no sound save her breathing and her son's. Her heart began to race—she knew she shouldn't have expected Molly and the goroths to be there waiting for her when she arrived, and she knew arriving into darkness when no one knew when to expect her only made sense. Still, she couldn't quite fight off the feeling of dread that filled her.
"We're going to need a flashlight to get out of here," she told Jake.
She had several under her bed at home. The worldchain did better when magic moved things than when it either created or destroyed them—so she focused on the yellow rubber-coated flashlight with the fresh C cells in it, and pressed her nose against the mirror, staring into and through the glass, until on the other side she saw her bedroom and her bed, and beneath the bed on the left-hand side the flashlight, lying in front of the nightstand and within easy fumbling reach.
Looking at her bedroom and the implied safety that the house represented twisted a knot in her belly. With all her heart and soul, she wanted to take Jake and go back to the old house and find some way to build a normal life for the two of them. She wondered if she would ever get to go home…and if she got home
, if a normal life would ever be within reach.
She didn't let herself think any more about it. If things worked out, she would be happy then. If they didn't, ruining her life in advance wouldn't help anything. She made a tiny gate, reached through, and grabbed the flashlight, passing on the temptation to get other things or just to sneak herself and Jake across for a moment. If they went home he was not going to want to turn around and come back.
She shifted Jake to her other hip and went through the door, grateful that the last person out had at least thought to leave it unlocked. The maze of corridors beyond it spread out in all directions, eerie and intimidating when viewed with a single weak-beamed flashlight and a three-year-old who didn't like the dark. She stared at the hallway that ran left and right, and at the intersections she could see crossing at right angles. Beyond the range of her flashlight's beam, nothing but darkness in all directions. She leaned against the wall and swore softly and steadily. Obviously going up was the first priority. If she could find a way to change levels, maybe she'd come across a landmark.
Lauren had spent a lot of time in her past being lost. She had a firm rule of thumb for finding her way in situations where she had no idea where she was—go straight until something looks familiar or you run out of road. Then turn right and repeat.
She turned right out the door and went straight. At each intersection she turned off the flashlight, looking for light. Nothing. When she reached the stone foundation wall, she turned right, and started off again. She continued switching off the flashlight at intersections, getting nowhere. The air at one intersection stank with a smell that made her hair stand on end. Something had died down that way—a whole lot of little somethings, or one big one. She hurried past, not wanting to know, and suddenly wishing she had a couple of veyâr with spears guarding her back. She came at last to an arch that led into a tunnel. She considered this for a moment. Under the compass rule, she should continue straight. Using the "anything different is good" rule, however, the arching tunnel that curved away out of sight offered a distinct improvement from wandering around in the maze of the world's biggest basement looking for stairs. She switched the light off one more time and looked down the tunnel. No light from there, either. However, it might be night outside, the tunnel might curve enough to block the passage of light into the depths, or it could end in stairs and a door. Any of these three options offered a distinct improvement. And if she ended up in the wine cellar or a dungeon, she could always turn around and come back.
She took off up the tunnel. She could still hear no sounds but her own and Jake's breathing and the echoes of her footsteps. She tried not to imagine the worst—that she'd stepped back into the copper-free workroom a thousand years later than she'd left—that the world of Oria was only instants from destruction and that Earth had been dead for centuries….
The tunnel curved sharply and started up a gentle rise.
"Yes," she whispered.
From in front of her and behind, soft, drawn-out whispers of "yes."
She jumped and turned, flashing the beam of light in all directions. Nothing followed them.
"Echo," she said in a conversational tone.
"Echo," the corridor said back to her a dozen times, louder, but in what she could identify as her own voice.
"I don't like those voices," Jake said, and the echoes agreed with him. He shrieked. The corridor shrieked back.
"Shh," Lauren said, and the place sounded like a nest of snakes had just woken up.
Jake jammed his hands over his ears and buried his face against her. Lauren wished she could do the same thing with someone bigger and stronger than her.
Nothing like creeping herself out. Bad enough to think she and Jake were the last people on the planet. Worse to think that they were the last people on the planet and things were skulking up behind them while they walked on unawares.
Lauren walked a little faster. The incline of the corridor steepened and the curve tightened, and she realized she was heading up a spiral. She tried to imagine its purpose, then realized that wide, sloping corridors would be a lot more practical than stairs for moving crates, boxes, furniture, or anything else large and bulky and awkward. Someone moving supplies could get horses to pull a wagon down this thing, if the horses were well trained and the wagon wasn't too wide.
That raised the possibility that she was in a supply tunnel, and almost immediately after she raised that possibility, she reached the end of the corridor—a dead end closed off by a massive copper double door with inside hinges. She grabbed one of the metal handles and pulled.
Someone had locked it. From the outside.
She swore loudly, and all her many echoes down the tunnel behind her added their comments.
"I want out," Jake yelled.
"Me too."
Lauren gave the door a couple of hard pulls, hoping to work the lock loose or maybe put enough pressure on it to break it. Nothing popped free, so she put Jake down and told him "DON'T MOVE," tucked her flashlight into the waistband of her jeans, hung on to the right door handle, and started rocking back and forth. The copper doors began to boom as she fought with them, metal hitting metal as she built up some steam. She was, she thought, making one hell of a racket, but no one seemed to be running to help her.
Then, on one arc, she heard a satisfying crack from the other side, and the door whipped back when she pulled on it with much more force than she expected. "Move," she yelled as she lost her footing and crashed backward. She managed to keep from hitting her head when she fell, but slammed down hard enough that she feared she might have broken her tailbone.
The flashlight flew out of her pocket, and Jake dove for it and snagged it for her. But it didn't matter. Outside the doors, the sun lay on the horizon and pink scored the purple sky like claw marks. Silhouetted against that stunning sky stood half a dozen veyâr, all pointing crossbows at her.
"Aw, shit," she said. "Don't shoot the baby. It's me. Lauren."
She got to her feet slowly, and carefully bent down and picked up Jake. "Really. It's me. Put the bows down and call Molly or Seolar or something, all right?"
They backed slowly away from the door, but not one lowered his crossbow. This scared the shit out of her. One of them with an itchy trigger finger could kill Jake without meaning to. Free of copper, however, she used magic to cast an invisible shield around him; then, with her kidneys itching, she cast one around herself.
The veyâr leader, whom she didn't recognize, said, "Move forward slowly, out into the light. Keep your hands up where we can see them."
Lauren sighed and stepped forward. "My hands are full of little boy. Is that good enough?"
No answer.
"What happened?" she asked.
"To the front," one of them said. "If you move suddenly or do anything we don't like, we'll shoot you."
Again with the threats and the crossbows. She wondered if this was going to be the greeting she got every time she returned to Copper House.
She let them march her to the front gate; she worked out a spell and held it one thought from completion just in case things got ugly, but she wanted to have some answers and she didn't figure she'd be able to get any if she turned these guys into toads—which, considering they were threatening Jake, too, was minor compared to what she really wanted to do.
At the front gate, she got her first break since her return. Birra stood behind one of the two regular guards. He looked about the same—no older, maybe a bit grimmer, but with Birra it was hard to say.
Lauren said, "What's going on, Birra?"
He looked at her for a long moment like he had never seen her before. Then his eyes seemed to focus, and he said, "Oh." And for just an instant, she saw hope in his expression, but it vanished. He said, "Oh," again, and then glared at the veyâr behind Lauren with the crossbows. "She could have turned you into ashes for your impudence," he said. "Perhaps she should have." And to her, "Come with me. Seolar will surely want to see you immediately."
Finally, Lauren said, "Okay—let me get Molly—I have a message for her. And we can both talk to Seolar together."
She caught Birra's fast, sidelong look at her, then away, and her heart started to pound. She stopped walking.
"We need to see Seolar quickly," Birra told her.
"No. I have to talk to Molly. Everything else can wait."
Birra turned to face her. They stood in the magnificent front hallway, where the copper covered each stone arch in the form of a tree, with uncounted thousands of silver leaves hanging from the branches and tinkling with every slight breeze. In that corridor, with his tattooed cheeks and long, pale blue hair and emerald green eyes, Birra looked like some additional decoration. He stared at her, unblinking, unmoving, his skin waxy and his expression unreadable. He said nothing.
