by Holly Lisle
She needed a good shield before she headed into the cave after him—but it wasn't going to be the sort of shield that could protect her from attacks or reflect them back on her attackers. Sometimes she saw shields as bright and shiny and reflective, like the clear coat on new cars. But she didn't need that sort of shield now—from inside Baanraak's eyes, she could feel him watching for such things. What she needed now was something that would dull and muffle and hide her presence, blend her into her background, make her quiet and still and unobtrusive. In order for it to do that, she would have to forgo protection. She would be walking naked into the monster's lair, knowing that he'd been creating traps for anyone who dared follow him in.
She needed the magical equivalent of stealth paint—something that absorbed sound and smell and vibration and light and magic and any noise her thoughts might make, something that gave nothing back. She wanted something that made the eyes slide away, convinced they saw nothing.
She could imagine exactly what she needed. She imagined herself covered in it.
"Lauren?" Seolar asked, though she hadn't moved.
"I'm right here," she said.
"Lauren? Where did you go?"
Okay. It did absorb sound. Good. She gave Seolar no explanation; she had no idea how much longer the window of opportunity she had seen might hold.
She slipped through the shield and worked her way up the outcropping to the cave mouth. Keeping well clear of the mound to her left, she crossed the flat, open space. She felt naked. Nothing but the fact that she'd made herself hard to see protected her from the projectiles, both magical and mundane, that flew across the high ground and the plains below. One errant blast of magic would kill her before she had a chance to block it.
By the time she reached the cave mouth, her heart battered inside her chest like it was hoping to get out. She took a moment just to catch her breath and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The entry posed some problems—fallen rocks covered the floor so closely that Lauren doubted she would be able to step between them without disturbing one. Which might have been the point.
Dalchi
Deep in the darkness, coiled and still, with Molly's regenerating body tucked at his side and buried in a pile of stinking animal carcasses, Baanraak watched the progress of his enemies from behind closed eyes and spun spells into magnificent traps.
The Night Watch had the edge in armaments, but the veyâr fought from inside some of the best shields Baanraak had ever seen—and desperation fueled them in their forward charge. The dark gods, Baanraak decided, lacked both passion and conviction. The veyâr lacked neither.
He smiled. Either could win, and everything for him would remain the same. He had the Vodi necklace, he had the lairholder advantage, and he was him—which had been the best advantage of all for longer than anyone could remember.
They might suspect that he hid somewhere in the cave system, but he lay with body and mind held in perfect, waiting stillness, with himself and the Vodi—Molly—shielded together out of sight and reach of any searching magic. In the world above, he could hear the noisy minds and see the bright jackdaw magic flaring and swirling, endlessly energetic and completely lacking in subtlety, in reserve…and in stealth. He could feel nothing but disdain for those who had come to hunt him—their very might and fury would be their downfall.
He delighted in his traps. He'd done excellent work in the little time he had; they had come with might, but he fought with gentle, quiet strokes that would draw no attention yet would take any force offered and turn it against an attacker. Baanraak had been a Taoist at heart long before humans found their way down from the trees to give the path of yielding to conquer a name.
…Dalchi to…
The old gods had not gone to war with the dark gods in time out of mind. The worldchain had forgotten the price paid for wars between gods.
Abruptly, with huge spells of horror and death bursting on the Dalchi fields, rebound magic poured upworld, and…
…Niiadaa to…
…on Niiadaa, on a deliciously warm afternoon with the clouds towering like castles above the village of Iri, the earth rumbled without warning and ripped itself apart. Molten rock exploded upward. Fire rained up, spurted, gouted, and the village died in a breath, taking everyone with it. A hill bellied up out of the ground, red fire racing out in all directions, and a mountain shouldered its way onto the hill, shoving rivers of rock and crusts and scabs of lava before it. Poisons poured into the air, and the sky turned black, and still the earth kept shaking. The sun vanished, and the forests and the rivers all around with it—lakes sucked back into the earth as if they had never existed, and death spread out in all directions. Seas rose out of their beds and smashed shorelines, pounding them with forty-foot waves and tossing chunks of lava bigger than houses as if they were toys.
The sun would not shine again on Niiadaa for weeks—and the snow would start falling in mere days…
…Povreack to…
…while on Povreack, a hurricane that had been moving well off the shore of the most populated coastline suddenly turned inland. It crawled northward, strong and well-defined and vicious, and laid waste to whole peoples and the better part of a nation…
…Cadwa to…
…clouds. More clouds. The peoples of the drought-stricken flatlands of Central Hwyr on Cadwa looked up in startled gratitude. Thunder rumbled, which had not been heard in those parts in a dozen years, and moist air curled the dust along the ground and touched cheeks with the gentle promise of rain.
The first drops spattered, big as fists, and people cheered, and stood with arms outstretched and faces upturned. Then the skies let loose.
But the ground, too parched to drink the bounty it received, filled fast and flooded fast, and joy turned to horror as torrents ripped across the plains, taking topsoil and houses and livestock and people with them…
…Oria to…
…across Oria's northern forests, the sound of rattling wings, individually no louder than the crinkling of a sheet of paper, grew to a roar as millions of millions of cherik beetles hatched after a hibernation of twice a hundred years. Starving, they launched themselves into the sky and swarmed on everything green and growing. Tender plants, budding out, were stripped bare in minutes and the clouds of beetles ascended again and moved on.
The plague would last a month, and then the cheriks would dig back into the earth, so deep that men could never find them to destroy them, and lay their eggs, and die.
Behind them, much of the northern world would starve that year…
Earth
Across the globe, observatories went crazy as asteroids swarmed out of nowhere, ripping through satellites and exploding secret geosynchronous listening posts and smashing in toward Earth, trailing debris and fire and destruction.
Newscasters rocketed toward their chairs, unmade-up and in shirt-sleeves, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, to shout at the cameras in a thousand languages, "We have just been informed that Earth has moved into an unmarked asteroid belt, and we are being bombarded by meteors. Remain calm…most of these will burn up in the atmosphere—"
But many did not. Some of the meteorites hit like exploding bombs, taking skyscrapers and their inhabitants, hitting with freakish perversion on one person standing in line at a bus stop but missing the ones to either side, and slamming into the ground with such force that the earth shook and the people spared a direct hit were shattered by the shock.
Enemies eyed each other suspiciously across borders, suspecting foul play—but not one continent in the world escaped unscathed.
…and onward…
…and the magic moved upworld even farther, through Kerras and Frejandur and even Jerrits—but those worlds lay dead and empty, with no one to notice fresh disasters.
Cat Creek
Pete took a seat next to Mayhem, and watched the other Sentinels finding seats on the wood-slatted folding chairs. The Sentinels, called together in the middle of the crisis, gathered in
the upper room of the Daisies and Dahlias, faces grim.
June Bug didn't waste any time on preamble. "I've tracked it through three worlds, but I don't have the strength or the resources to go any farther. This is rebound—no doubting that—but we're a long way from getting the worst of it. Our disaster is relatively mild."
"Chicago looks like a war zone," Betty Kay Nye said. Pete glanced over at her, and saw the way her fingers interlaced, the way her knuckles were white, the way her eyes looked panicked. She might be too new, too untried, to be any good for anything. She might, he thought, be as much a disposable castoff as Raymond Smetty, who had not yet managed to get his ass into a seat, or even through the downstairs door.
Pete had the feeling Sentinels from other regions, responding to Cat Creek's cry for help, had answered not by sending their best and brightest, but by sending their biggest headaches.
"What do we do?" Pete asked.
Eric leaned against the wall, shaking his head. "Without a gateweaver, and without a practiced team of responders, we pray. And hope that other groups are more prepared than we are."
"Couldn't we go downworld and do something magical that is both positive and big?" Pete asked.
Everyone turned to look at him, with expressions ranging from annoyance that he'd asked a stupid question to suspicion that he might just be stupid. Eric said, "Why don't we try to put out the fire by throwing gasoline on it?"
"I thought perhaps positive and negative magics would balance each other out," Pete said. "That maybe we could lessen the damage."
"Don't think," Louisa Tate said. "You might hurt yourself."
That got a few chuckles, but they were thin and died out quickly.
Pete didn't say anything. He was still the outsider here—even more than the new kids who'd come in over the last week, he would always be the outsider, because he hadn't been born into this, and they had. He could never be a real Sentinel in their eyes. Maybe his kids could, if he survived, and had kids, and was willing to let them get involved in this ongoing nightmare.
He was an outsider. But he thought maybe an outsider could see things that the insiders had grown blind to. And he thought of Lauren, the other outsider in spite of the fact that her parents had been Sentinels. She was downworld fighting this thing, and he wished he could be with her instead of in Cat Creek sitting on his hands.
He wondered where she was, and what she was doing.
Dalchi
The sounds of battle died away quickly. Tons of stone absorbed them, and no more had she lost the last of the light than Lauren lost sound from the outside world, too. Darkness replaced it. Darkness, and dampness, and the scents of wet dog and ammonia, and occasional faint whiffs of a dank, unpleasantly rotten smell worse than anything else. She could hear water dripping nearby, and a steady trickle of it farther away.
She had no flashlight, and when she discovered that her eyes would not adjust to absolute darkness—that without a source of light of her own, she was blind, she panicked. She dared not use magic to summon light. And even if she were to step outside and create a flashlight or lantern for herself, she would not be able to use it. Baanraak would notice light.
Lauren stood, blind, motionless, focusing on the sounds and scents around her, and she waited. She had no idea how long she stood there, but when finally she closed her eyes to rub her temples with one hand, something interesting happened.
She discovered that with her eyes closed, she could see after a fashion. With her eyes closed and her mind stilled and receptive, she could follow a faint trail of light that led downward—traces of the magic Baanraak had left in his wake. Lauren moved slowly—the faster she tried to progress, the more the light faded, and once disturbed she lost that bit of Baanraak's path forever.
Moving with eyes closed, she could also feel the places where Baanraak had stopped in his downward journey to place surprises for those who dared the cave. These traps scared the shit out of her, but while some were triggered to quick movement and some to magical force or strong magical shields, none seemed to be set to catch someone stealthy.
Lauren opened her eyes from time to time as her nerves got to be too much for her; she couldn't convince the animal hindbrain that she wouldn't fall into a hole walking around with her eyes closed; and every step felt like moving over a cliff anyway. But when she opened her eyes, the darkness got darker. Baanraak's faint trail disappeared, and she lost all sense of where he was, where she was, and where the traps lay.
Lauren hated dark, damp places. She loathed the idea of being underground, which was entirely too close to death for her. She was fine with a roof over her head, but not the remains of a mountain. She shuddered at the idea of cave-dwelling animals brushing against her—she had no idea if this world had bats, or cave snakes, or giant spiders. Anything might live in the darkness, and from time to time she would hear cheeping, or creaking, or soft low moans that convinced her that anything probably did.
She wanted to turn around and get out. But she didn't. She fought down the panic and the disgust and the dread, closed her eyes, and once again found the faint trail of light and stepped where the monster Baanraak had stepped.
A step at a time, moving on nothing but faith and a faint connection through her dead-but-returning sister to the monster she hunted, she crept downward.
Dalchi
Seolar wished fervently that he could rise above the battle to see where his people made progress and where they lost ground. In his mind's eye, he could see the vantage point he wanted; in the air, high enough that he could look over everything before him and behind him, high enough that the rrôn Baanraak's outcropping lay just beneath him, but not so high that he could not make out detail.
With the gate behind him blazing its green fire and the shield Lauren had created for him holding off every attack, he felt safe enough to hold that vantage point—and abruptly the ground fell away beneath him and he found himself and the gate and the bubble of his shield high in the air, rising to the exact point where he thought he might get the best view of the battle.
The aerial view offered more than he'd imagined. He could see the shields that Qawar kept in place over each main group—though he could see no sign of Qawar himself. He saw instantly a place where some of his men were moving into a trap; he called out a warning to them, willing them to hear him, and they managed to get out of trouble before the enemy flanked them and killed them.
He saw a great opportunity to bring two units together at one point where heavy fire already had a cluster of dark gods pinned down, and directed the leaders of those two groups. The pincer was working better than he had hoped—his men gained ground against the dark gods, and might yet win the day.
Then one of the dark gods soared over his head. Seolar knew he was in a vulnerable position if his enemies could get through the shield; what he didn't know was whether they could get him through the shield.
He didn't need to wonder for long.
The rrôn circling over his head bellowed, and two more monsters materialized from out of the clouds. Seolar wondered what they'd been doing up there; he realized that he didn't know how to fight gods. All three rrôn angled their wings and dropped down at him, striking his shield from underneath with heads or bodies. They began bouncing and tossing him upward, flinging him through the air as if he were a toy. He lost his balance and fell with the first strike, and did not have the chance to regain his feet again.
They were forcing him into the clouds. He wondered why, and realized that he had to do something to keep from finding out. He needed to get back to the rise, close to his men, so he could keep the gate down where he could pull them through it as soon as Lauren appeared. And he needed to do it quickly.
He almost couldn't think. The rrôn had caught him off guard and were keeping him off balance, both literally and figuratively, and he couldn't hang on to any image long enough to will it into reality—and all the while, he bounced toward the clouds, and in particular one twisting black clou
d that was beginning to form a funnel at the bottom.
He needed to find a way to anchor himself, he thought as he flopped from his face to his back and from one side of the shield to the other. He barely missed falling into Lauren's gate—and he knew he did not want to do that.
Anchor.
Anchor.
That thought gave him a solid image to hold onto. He imagined his shield tethered to the stone outcropping by an invisible, indestructible rope—tethered so tightly that the rrôn would batter themselves against his shield the next time they hit it and tumble from the sky. He willed rope and mammoth anchor into being, and as quickly as that, he bobbled in the air but stopped ascending. One of the rrôn instinctively ducked underneath his shield and tried to hit it upward—but the invisible rope sliced through his wing right at the shoulder, and in two pieces, the monster tumbled, shrieking, to the ground.
