by Holly Lisle
Or they could call a servant to bring something delicious. Lauren had a hard time with the whole servant concept. It grated. But when in Rome…
One of the goroths—she wished she could tell just by looking which one—suddenly bolted to the door, jammed his head against it, and after an instant announced, "Master of the House has arrived. He's in the outer room. He brought the old god."
Lauren sighed. So much for seeing if she could talk someone into getting her a big plate of seasonal fruit. "Thank you," she said. "I'll get dressed and go out."
Which meant hiding in the bathroom to change. She had already grown weary of the fishbowl in which she had to live her life when in Oria. "Come on, Jake," she said. "We have to brush teeth and get our clothes on, and then we'll go get something to eat."
By the time the two of them emerged from the bathroom, someone had made the bed, opened the door, and spread a small feast on the table in the outer room.
"Breakfast!" Jake shouted, and grabbed her hand and started dragging her. Not the most dignified way to enter a room in which a prince and a god waited, but if you wanted dignity, she thought, avoiding motherhood would be an essential first step.
"Good morning," she said to Seolar. She studied the stranger, who looked like a veyâr at first glance, but was not. "I'm Lauren," she said. "And you are…?"
"Impressed. I did not expect to get to meet you." He bowed. "My name is Qawar." Seolar sat in the rocking chair. Qawar stood against one wall.
"You were right," Seolar said, skipping any sort of greeting. "We cannot give up. So while you slept I talked with Qawar. He used his magic to divine what happened to Molly. He determined that the rrôn who entered this place was Baanraak—"
"Molly mentioned him," Lauren said.
"He's wicked," Qawar told her. "The worst of the dark gods by far."
"Figures," Lauren muttered.
Seolar said, "Qawar believes he divined the direction that Baanraak took, as well."
"I believe Baanraak dropped downworld, but farther than just one world. I can find a magic trail well enough, but I cannot create the gates to follow it. I do believe he still had the Vodi necklace in his possession when he left, however."
Seolar said, "Tell her what you found."
"He went to great pains to hide whatever he took with him. I could only tell that he had something he did not wish anyone else to know about or trace." Qawar frowned, and finally took a seat on the couch.
Lauren sat opposite him and let Jake get himself a pastry. Everyone else got something to eat, as well.
Qawar continued, "Baanraak had a contract with the Night Watch to kill Molly and turn over the necklace, but he seems to have left without collecting his money for the kill—and the dark gods are unhappy because he did not present them with the Vodi necklace so they could destroy it."
Lauren nodded, trying to put these pieces together. They didn't fit. "Why would he take the necklace and go downworld with it? Is there something he could do with it?"
Qawar shrugged. "She will come back," he said after a moment. He took a bite of the pastry and chewed it thoughtfully. "Perhaps her first death did not satisfy him. Perhaps he wants to kill her a few more times before he finally destroys her for good."
Lauren definitely did not like Qawar.
"But there's no reason why he couldn't have destroyed it here and made the…Night Watch?…happy with him, if he had been so inclined?"
"That seems the most reasonable course of action," Seolar said.
"If he's doing unreasonable things," she said, "that's not necessarily bad for us. Anything that keeps him from destroying the necklace works in our favor. If nothing else, it buys us time." She closed her eyes. She'd been able to feel Molly's presence when both of them were on the same planet. Even after Molly's death and resurrection, Lauren still felt the connection. Lauren wondered if she opened a series of gates downworld, one world at a time, would she be able to feel Molly's presence on the correct world?
That seemed to her an option worth trying.
After at least a few bites of breakfast. She discovered that she was famished and thirstier than she'd ever been in her life, and she realized abruptly that she hadn't eaten anything since she left for the afterlife.
"How long was I gone?" she asked Seolar suddenly.
"Two full days."
That explained a lot.
CHAPTER 16
Through Niiadaa to Dalchi
BAANRAAK MADE a neat escape, managing to avoid any confrontation at all with Rr'garn or his cronies. He felt quite pleased with this achievement; the pleasure he got from it, however, struck him as odd. Fherghass had burned emotion out of Baanraak when he began training Baanraak to be his heir. At least that had been the theory—that repeated deaths and resurrections would remove from Baanraak all the taint of his lost soul and his lost life, and make him into the perfect, emotionless hunter, capable of anything.
For centuries on end, that was the way it had worked. Baanraak devoured, hunted, slaughtered without guilt or pain or regret, and became in all ways Fherghass' perfect complement. Fherghass pointed him toward a goal, and Baanraak moved the world to accomplish the goal. Fherghass, on a whim, challenged the Master of the Night Watch, and killed her, and with himself in place as the new god of death, placed Baanraak at his right hand.
When Fherghass eventually grew weary and lost his taste for worlds and death, Baanraak destroyed him, as they had agreed he would if such a thing came to pass, and Baanraak ascended to the throne of the dark gods in Fherghass's place. In due time, Baanraak grew bored with the game. Unlike his predecessor, however, he had not grown bored with existence, so he did what no one had ever done before; he stepped down from the Mastery of the Night Watch, letting his underlings fight it out for the top spot. Then he dropped out of sight. He'd remained a mystery to the Night Watch, but one they respected—or at least feared—right up to the present.
He sighed, thinking his flagrant betrayal had surely ended their willingness to ignore his existence. Ah, well. If they pursued him, he would destroy them. Baanraak spotted a nice natural stone arch in a ravine beneath him and set his wings. He soared over the area, scouting it carefully. No one around—he didn't remember precisely what sort of intelligent life Niiadaa had, but he knew it was quadrupedal and smallish and mammalian—goddamned mammals were everywhere—and nothing of the sort waited below. He dropped to the ground and studied the stone arch. He liked it; worn by water through this barren patch of land where the brush hung on for dear life and even his sensitive nose had a hard time sniffing out a hint of moisture, it wouldn't draw attention to itself. It would absorb the energy traces from the gate he made and clear away most of them within a day or two. Someone of his caliber might be able to find his tracks if they knew where to look, but among the dark gods, none of his caliber existed.
Baanraak smiled a little. This was the last world he had to move out of—he thought that Cadwa, Povreack, and this world would prove to be sufficiently confusing to even the best tracker. And Dalchi was a ripe, lively world, still bubbling with untouched, un-tampered-with, unshielded natural energy. Locating him and anything he did against that sort of background would be next to impossible. He'd have the time he needed to train the Vodi. And to figure out what he wanted after he did so.
He cast the gate, using the arch as its boundaries, and when the green fire gleamed like a vertical sheet of water in front of him, he peered through to the other side. He needed a good, deep cave in a warm, sunny place—not too much rain, big slabs of flat rock, and all around him, terrain rich in life, in hot raw meat and good flesh. She would require the flesh and bone to rebuild not just one but a multitude of bodies; to feed the Vodi necklace and summon flesh to her contained will, he was going to have to do a lot of hunting. Nothing like what Fherghass had needed to do, of course. But Fherghass had been willing to expend years in reshaping Baanraak. Baanraak found himself impatient. And he didn't know why.
Boredom. Impatience.
Excitement. Pleasure.
Those should have only been words to him—concepts that he understood, but not that he experienced. Instead, those emotions moved through him like dark water through a swamp, stirring things below the surface where he could not see, and making subterranean changes in him. He could not point to the emotions' origins, nor trace their passage, but he could feel them—and the strange currents they set up inside of him, as well. He had lived long in the desert of emotion, and he had appreciated the purity and the austerity of the place. This verdant swamp of feeling in which he now soaked seemed a deadly betrayal.
He could not put a talon on the change—either on what it was or on when it had happened.
He wanted things now, though, and he had been free from want of any sort for time out of mind.
What did he want?
He stared into the green fire and his mind wandered. He caught visions of his home world—a world long since burned to cinders with no survivors except those who had fled—and their descendants. For just a moment he recalled the warmth of his own sun, and the shape of familiar rocks beneath his belly as he basked in air that smelled right—and the air on other worlds never smelled right—and for just a moment yearning tugged at him.
Silly, really; he hadn't been fresh out of the shell for so many thousands of years that he had long ago lost count. He'd lost count of the number of worlds he'd slid down, and he knew he should feel nothing for those old times. And yet he did, when at one point in his existence, he had been able to watch the destruction of his world and everything in it, and feel nothing but the temporary satiation as he fed off the deaths of innocents.
Strange. Baanraak shook it off and looked over the world on the other side of the gate until he found an ideal site: a fine rock outcropping with a sharp overhang that led into a wide-mouthed cave, and below it, plains dotted by beasts of all sorts and sizes. Good enough. He moved through the gate, hating the energy of the path between the worlds and the way it twanged against his skin. When he was young, before his first death, he had traversed the gates with elation; the green fire sang to him and revived him. Now, made of different stuff and kept breathing by an energy that was the antithesis of the green fire of life, he found each passage an ordeal.
Worth the price, however. He tumbled out the other end, grateful to be at last at his destination. He clambered to the top of the highest slab of rock and sprawled over it, spreading his wings beneath a sun that felt too cold and too distant. He had a bit of time to drowse and recuperate before he started hunting—he could cook the discomfort caused by passage through the green fire out of his system. He could clear any current occupants out of the cave beneath him later—better, he could kill them and throw them into the meat pile that would feed the Vodi.
And the Vodi…Baanraak sliced through the cord with which he'd bound the bag containing the Vodi necklace, and loosed it from his gold piercing-ring. He hooked a talon into the bag, pulled the necklace out, and studied it. An old god with both tremendous power and exquisite taste, something of a rarity, had given this particular piece full value, and a bit more. The chain itself was thick and smooth, with each link overlapping the next in such a fashion that the individual links almost disappeared. The result looked like a heavy strand of liquid gold. The medallion, not a feature of much resurrection work, used a ring of faceted sapphires around a central figure in high relief—a winged woman rising from a stormy sea.
He guessed that the piece originated during the Second Dathian School's primacy, which would have put it during his reign as Master of the Night Watch. That was the only school that worked gemstones into resurrection pieces, increasing both their potency and their fragility—an uneven trade-off in Baanraak's mind. It wasn't a Dathian piece, however. Their resurrection work had been characterized by a uniform darkness of mood—and emphasis on symbols of the impermanence of the physical form. They'd run to skulls, vipers, weapons, and dying figures on their medallions. This, with its figure springing unscathed from the heart of turmoil, offered an odd sort of hope.
He felt the hope within it, too. It had all the darkness that any resurrection work had; an inescapable taint of death accrued from creating immortality from the energy of destruction, and this used all the regular magic. But there was more. He held the necklace up to his chin, to the sensing pits there, and closed his eyes.
The hum of the thing ran through his body, and his sensing pits sorted out the various energies and categorized them. The difference lay partly in the sapphires, through which odd contrary energies ran. They gathered light and quickness and fire in them, and held on to passion the way large rocks held heat long after sunset.
If he prised the stones out, he would go far toward removing from the Vodi her yearning for the life she had lost. But in doing so, he could also damage her. He might end up destroying the thing about her that he found most useful.
He laid the necklace on the rock, tucked beneath his long jaw. He lay there with his eyes closed, and after a while he could feel her stirring inside.
Baanraak stilled mind and breath and shielded himself from sight, then he lay there, communing with a mind held in place by gold and gemstones and the magic of chaos. He felt keen intelligence, ferocity, rage, desire, hatred, passion, hope…and love. The shape of her mind washed over him, and he wound his way through it, careful in his slow movements not to disturb her thoughts in his passing or alert her to his presence.
She was more in the necklace than she had any business being. The resurrection spell brought back as much of what had been as it could salvage, but it wasn't supposed to permit any sort of awareness in the state between death and return. Artists and gods had spent breath and fury in heated arguments over the advantages or horrors of pursuing wakefulness within the gold; in the end, everyone had decided it was impossible to create such a state, and that had been, Baanraak had always believed, the end of the matter. The craftsmen made their things of beauty, the gods imbued them with power, and the necklaces, bands, and rings went out to the deserving, those who had curried favor, those who craved immortality at any price.
Molly, something said inside his head. I am Molly.
Baanraak opened one eye. Apparently not everyone had accepted the limitations of the medium. Apparently not everyone had let the matter lie.
He lifted his head from the necklace and tucked his long snout under his wing, to the hidden fold of skin just at the back of one wing where his own resurrection piece burrowed into his flesh. His was a large, heavy ring pierced through his skin, a ring that had been placed and then worked closed so that it no longer had a seam or opening. When last something had managed to kill him, he'd resurrected around the ring already embedded in his flesh.
He laid his chin atop the ring, feeling it through the sensing pits and trying to figure out the differences he felt.
The two summoning spells gave off only slightly different energies. They were, in fact, much more similar than he'd expected them to be. His own ring, he felt sure, had once been completely free of that upbeat taint that marked the Vodi's. Molly's. He would have sworn on it, had he been able to think of anything sufficiently sacred to bind his word. Yet the taint was there, clear in hers, clouded in his. Unmistakably present, however.
He wondered if he'd been the target of some long-distance spell, some clever joke, some trick. He wondered who might have carried out such a deed, or how they might have accomplished it, since once the dark gods cast their spells, nothing was supposed to be able to alter them in even the slightest degree. The wizards had guaranteed the quality of their products with their lives, and Baanraak had taken those oaths as bond.
Now that all the makers had died, he didn't think he could hope to collect on any oaths. Unfortunately. He wondered what had gone wrong, though.
He untucked head from wing and put his chin back on the Vodi necklace. Then he closed his eyes and tried to savor the warmth of the sun on his skin and the heat of the sun-baked rock beneath his belly. He focused on
the soothing smell of the sandstone. He blocked out the Vodi's thoughts—he did not want their disconcerting intrusion creeping into his own. Everything he thought he ought to be able to count on now shifted beneath his wings, as if the terrain of his reality were no more secure than gliding on updrafts on a cloudy day.
Smells—the scent of sandstone; and beneath it grassy plains, the scent of hot flesh and living blood everywhere, rich and delicious; his own scent, which he rarely noticed but did consider mildly earthy and slightly spicy; something not quite right about the scents. His nose over the Vodi necklace—Baanraak had never considered its scent, but now he laid one nostril along it and inhaled slowly and deeply, with his mouth half-open to make sure he caught all the different smells.
Metals gave off little to work with, but his nose could discern by scent the difference in a bit of pumice stone before and after dragging a bit of copper over it. He had a fine instrument and he put it to work. When he had the shape of the scent clearly in his mind, he went through the same procedure with his ring.
