by Holly Lisle
Seolar started moving himself down to the ground, holding in his mind's eye an image of a big wooden reel that turned steadily, filling quickly with the invisible rope. He got to his feet and looked down, and saw the battlefield moving closer again.
He also saw that the dark gods no longer limited themselves to weapons—they were summoning the forces of nature and destruction as well. And because he made such an excellent target, they began focusing on him.
Balls of fire erupted from nothingness all around him, smashing into his shield. Tornadoes dropped from the clouds overhead and began ripping toward him. Lightning slammed into the tall rocks of the outcropping just below him, shattering them and sending stone shards everywhere. He began to doubt that his shield would hold. He knew he had to guard the gate—and he feared that he could not attack anything through the shield without damaging the shield's integrity. He had to let them shoot at him.
He stared at the mound of earth below him that had held Molly—and that Lauren said now held something else. Some sort of trap.
Maybe he didn't have to be helpless. Maybe he could lure his attackers to their doom. Mother animals pretended to be wounded in order to lure dangers to their offspring away from them. He might be able to do the same thing.
He tried to imagine what the shield might look like to his enemies if it were weakening. He saw it becoming misshapen, the light from it growing patchy and fading altogether in some places. He did not want to weaken the shield for real, but he thought if he concentrated on it, he might be able to make it look damaged.
He concentrated on being deceptive—on creating a visual lie. He wished he'd had a chance to practice with magic, so that he could see what was truly possible with it—but he felt sure that if he could deceive by nonmagical means, he could deceive by magic. Lauren said it was a matter of seeing what he wanted clearly—in precise, exact detail—and then wanting it enough to make it happen.
So he thought about the way wounded animals looked, and the way they acted. The ones trying to draw attention to themselves made noises, and moved erratically, and created a display that drew their enemies away from their nests.
When he could see just what he wanted, he focused his whole will on getting it—and when his shield took its next hit, the bubble of light in which he floated began to weave and rock. The walls wobbled, and the movement threw him from his feet.
He forced the bubble to dive and careen, and threw patterns of shadow across its surface.
Below, across the battlefield, veyâr and dark gods looked up, saw what was happening, and responded. All of them headed for the high ground—the dark gods to destroy the gate and all hope of retreat to safety, the veyâr to save the gate.
Stay back, Seolar thought. He willed his own people to hear him, and was relieved to see some of them falter and slow. But most kept coming.
I'm Seolar, he thought. Hear me, and stay back. Let the dark gods come—I'm ready for them. He fought for a clear line from him to them, for the tone of command that would convince his people that the sudden thoughts they heard came from him and not from their own frightened, weary minds.
Most of them continued moving forward, but doing so at a slower pace—they seemed to be pursuing, but he could tell they were only giving the impression of moving in to keep the dark gods from suspecting the trap.
Now the attack focused almost exclusively on him—endless streams of dark energy cast in his direction, fire and projectiles and torrents of rain and sleet and wind. In his thin bubble, shielded by something barely visible to his eye, he prayed to gods he had nearly forgotten—the benevolent, reassuring deities of his childhood who had promised rescue and protection to all who followed them. He prayed that they might notice him and hold him and the gate he guarded safe from the onrushing horde; and he prayed that Lauren might be successful in her mission to rescue Molly—and he prayed that he and his people would get to go home, safe and soon. Because now he could feel what Lauren had felt from the mound in front of the cave mouth. The thing that waited in there grew and fed—but it fed on the poisoned magic that poured at Seolar from all sides, and it grew powerful.
Then the first of the enemy reached the ground beneath him, and Seolar thought that for the rest of his life—however short that might be—he would remember the horror of what happened next.
CHAPTER 20
Earth
"…LATEST REPORTS just coming in on the stunning earthquake centered in south London, which registered 8.4 on the Richter scale…photos of the devastation…"
"…tornado clusters throughout the Blue Ridge Mountain area…"
"…They just came out of the clear blue sky—we didn't have no warning or nothing—just all of a sudden there were funnels everywhere, and houses started…started blowing apart…oh, I'm sorry, I just can't talk about it anymore…"
"…South Florida blanketed under three feet of snow, with more falling…Meteorologists are at a loss to explain this devastating freak storm, and while they suggest a possible tie-in to the meteor shower that pounded most of the planet, none has yet suggested what that connection might be…"
"…We have to assume the entire orange crop for the year is lost. Right now we're just doing what we can to save the trees, or we could be looking at completely starting over, with no crop for years…"
"…city of Melbourne was hit by balls of fire that chased each other through the atmosphere before slamming into the tops of skyscrapers. This strange firestorm preceded a hailstorm that left more than a meter of hail on the ground, with drifts as deep as three meters in some places. Damage is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, though fortunately so far estimates of loss of life have been small…"
Copper House
Doggie rocked Jake in her arms, but he refused to be comforted. He sobbed, "I WANT MY MAMA!" over and over. He would not sleep. He would not eat. Doggie's heart wept for him.
She pulled him close and whispered in his ear, "Be patient. We will watch the mirror and we will see your mama. But you must be a good boy."
Jake snuffled and wiped his tears on Doggie's outer robe. He looked at her, and said, "Okay. I am a good boy."
Doggie hugged him. "You are a good boy. It is hard to have the mama far away. But she is well—I will show you. But you cannot touch the mirror."
She'd kept him all the way away from them—had shoved the bed and his toys and things she'd asked women of the Copper House's veyâr staff to bring for him into the corner away from the mirrors. She'd requested decorative screens, and had erected them around the perimeter of her safe place, and neither she nor Jake had stepped out of it.
But he was terrified—he was a sensitive little boy, and he needed to know his mama was safe. She climbed the couch and stood on the back to look over the screen and said to Rue, "He must see her, just for a moment, just to know that she is well. I will take him over there, we will look at her, then we will come back."
Rue looked at Doggie. "He must not touch the gates."
"Of course not."
They came out from behind the screens, and the first thing Doggie saw was the view through the Hunter's magic window, which was terrifying—before their eyes wind ripped ancient trees into the air and tossed them about as if they were kindling. But sounds of the storm did not penetrate so deep into Copper House, so it seemed just a picture that had nothing to do with them.
But the line of green-glowing mirrors frightened Doggie. Nevertheless, she drew near enough to them that she could look into them. She held Jake's hand and kept him away from the glass, hoping that she would be able to point out his mama to him. But all she could see was war—horrible war, filled with monsters and death—and nowhere did she see the Hunter. What she could see terrified her—the viewpoint tossed and rocked as if she looked through the eyes of someone caught in bad seas. Doggie had been—once—on a ship. She had vowed never to have anything but solid ground under her feet again.
She realized that she was no longer holding his han
d, but she could not recall letting go of it. She turned to tell Jake that they would have to wait—that she could not see his mama, that they would go back behind the screens and look again later.
But Jake was gone.
She turned to Rue. "Where is he?"
Rue said, "He was right there." But from where she stood, Doggie could see all of the room but the area behind the screen and the little water closet. And Jake was not in it. She did not move; she sent Tarth the tracker and Wyngi the boatmaster and Herot the so-swift birdcatcher and even Rue—who led them all—racing about the little room to find him while she stood still, listening, thinking. He was not in the room. The goroths looked at each other with shared expressions of horror. He had not gone through the gate—they knew this. But where had he gone?
"You stay here in case he comes back," Rue told Doggie. Again he did not chastise her or blame her. In fact, he had not chastised her since she received her name. This revelation surprised her, as did what he said next. "I am at fault—I will take the rest of us, and we will find him."
One of the veyâr stayed with Doggie. The rest went off to search the passages with the goroths.
They would find him, Doggie thought. Surely they would find him. He was just a little boy, and not very fast—he could not have gotten far.
Doggie paced the floor of the safe room, looking from the war on the other side of the gate to the terrifying storm that raged in her own world, and she thought what a terrible time this was to be lost.
Dalchi
The faint trail of light that spun itself out before Lauren's closed eyes grew brighter. And the smell grew worse. As she moved across more or less level ground now, her progress slowed to a crawl. She did not hear breathing; she did not feel any movements of air that betrayed the presence of the monster she sought—but she nonetheless had the eerie sensation that Baanraak waited nearby.
Her knees felt like some jackass practical joker had swapped out the joints and inserted gelatin. She needed to pee. She wanted to run away. She thought of Jake, and wondered if she was going to die in this dark hole in the ground and never see him again. She kept moving forward, because this was what moms did. They fought for their kids, they protected their kids—if they could, they moved the world for their kids. She was just lucky she could.
Lucky. She kept telling herself that. She could do something. She wasn't helpless, passive, just waiting for the world to end and praying that it wouldn't. Active—bad as it was—was better.
Within Baanraak's mind, she caught a stirring of interest—a sudden short, sharp flare of presence, as if someone had lit a match, and she stopped. That brief, quick-to-stutter-out flare told her a couple of things. First, she stood almost within touching distance of the monster. Second, though he did not move, though he lay as still as the dead, he watched everything with a hunter's patience and a hunter's intensity.
At first she thought she might have done something to catch his attention. She knew she disturbed the air slightly as she moved forward, and she had crept downward slowly and cautiously as a result, hoping that he might mistake any slight breeze she sent past him as the natural movement of air in the cave. But when he concentrated for just an instant, she thought she had been too bold.
However, something up on the surface had his attention. Lauren caught just the trailing edge of his excitement before he stilled himself, and she eased through the quiet pool of his mind, seeking the reason.
His enemies were heading for the first of his traps, and they had spent a great deal of effort pouring magic into it, which had only served to feed it.
She backed out of his mind and shivered. He'd left a nightmare in wait; she'd sensed it and warned Seolar to keep everyone away from the spot, but she'd had no idea how terrible Baanraak's trap was. She could only hope Seolar had listened to her, and that those getting ready to spring the thing were dark gods.
Of course, whatever it was would still be out there waiting when she had to leave—and her retreat was unlikely to be as stealthy or as careful as her approach had been.
I'm doing this for Jake, she thought. For Jake.
Now that she knew where Baanraak lay, she realized that she could feel a faint warmth and dryness from that direction. Even with her eyes closed, she could not make out the faintest trace of light emanating from him, though she had followed the trail he left without difficulty.
A sudden horrifying thought occurred to her then, and she turned slowly, slowly, and with her eyes closed "looked" back the way she had come.
The bit she could make out before the curve of the tunnel occluded it glowed softly. She had not diverged from Baanraak's path at all, but she could see faint traces of her presence nonetheless. She left a narrower band of barely brighter light wherever she'd moved. In places where she'd stood for a moment, the brightness became noticeable.
But only if one were looking for it in the first place, and knew the trick of closing the eyes and stilling the mind and…
Right. He knew how to see her. The only likely reason that he hadn't paid attention to the little trail of presence she'd left behind her was because he assumed that anyone coming down into the tunnel would spring his traps.
She'd bypassed all of them. That, of course, was the easy part of her task. The hard part would be getting Molly and the Vodi necklace away from him. That, she thought, would be very hard indeed.
Lauren had a vague idea of how she might get the necklace away from Baanraak. She thought if she were very careful, she might slip close enough that she could put a hand on Molly. He had her buried within a pile of rotting carcasses, but from what Lauren could tell, these increased the speed with which Molly regenerated. When Baanraak killed Molly by crushing her skull, he hadn't removed the necklace; Lauren had been able to discover that Baanraak wanted Molly to reanimate as quickly as possible so that he could repeatedly kill her. Leaving most of the body intact and attached to the necklace had speeded the regeneration process.
It would be easier to get Molly out if she were alive. Dragging her body would be tough—but for Lauren, that was only the smallest part of the dilemma. The rest of it was how to get Molly away from Baanraak; how to avoid using any magic that would trigger the traps and bring God-only-knew-what screaming down on them, how to get out without triggering the traps, how to avoid whatever was about to happen topside. And once she and Molly got back to the surface, how to avoid the war until they got to the gate.
How to stay alive. That loomed pretty big. How the hell to stay alive.
I'm sorry, Jake, she thought. I'm sorry you have the wrong mom. You didn't need this—you needed someone who would stay home and make cookies with you and be the horsey and teach you how to read and tell you how great your dad was. I'm sorry you got me. Or chose me. Or however that worked. This can't have been what you planned for.
With her eyes closed, she could pretend that she was Baanraak. If she held herself very quietly in his mind, she could get a feel for the position of his body, the way he lay, the shape of him and the position of Molly and the pile of carcasses beside him. She couldn't get a feel for his position relative to her, though—she needed to move just a few steps while facing in the same direction to see if she could triangulate.
She took one very cautious step—praying that she wouldn't step on Baanraak, which would give away the whole game—and then a second.
And then Molly came to life in a roiling fury, still enraged from her previous death, the thought of her magical attack on Baanraak still foremost in her mind. Lauren felt like someone had switched on a field full of klieg lights in her brain. She crouched and something made her think of Seolar's dagger, still strapped to her hip, worn faithfully but not needed since the attack that had nearly killed her, and she grabbed that, and Molly slammed Baanraak with a spell that set him on fire, compressed the air around him with a thunderclap, crushed him and broke his wings, and twisted and mangled him. All up the tunnel to the surface, Lauren heard the traps, set to react to magic in
the tunnels, go off; in an instant the roars and grunts of Baanraak's surprises echoed through the caverns and chambers.
Molly rose out of the maggot-covered bone heap, illuminated by the fire that consumed her enemy, and with a scream of pure rage began throwing fireballs at the rrôn. Baanraak turned his long neck to stare at Molly, and Lauren saw her opportunity.
She rushed in and, willing her dagger into a deadly sword, slashed it into the flesh of his neck, powering the downstroke with an image of slicing clean through skin and muscle and bone and seeing his head come clean off. He hadn't guarded against her—hadn't suspected for an instant that Lauren was there. All his attention focused on Molly, and that fact was his death. Seolar's dagger, stretched by Lauren's will and magic to the dimensions of some thunder-the wed hero's bastard sword, severed Baanraak's neck as neatly as if she'd been slicing through pudding. Gouts of hot blood poured over Lauren, and Baanraak's upper body lurched forward and the gruesome, heavy neck and head crashed down on her, pinning her to the floor.
