by Holly Lisle
Home might be weeks or even mere days away from destruction. Everything rested on Molly, and thanks to Lauren's carelessness, Molly might not be coming back.
One of the servants saw her walking with Jake and approached her shyly. "Hunter, you have returned." Lauren nodded.
"And the others?"
"The survivors are back."
"And the Vodi?"
"I have her necklace," Lauren said. "Don't celebrate yet. We aren't sure how everything is going to go."
The servant looked at her with wide, worried eyes, then bowed deeply and hurried away. Lauren and Jake continued their walk. The corridors lay almost empty. Outside, a storm raged.
Lauren felt the exhaustion go all the way into her bones. She'd failed. She'd failed to get Brian back, she'd failed to get Molly back her soul, and in the end she'd failed to save Molly. She'd fought a good fight, she'd given it everything she had, and she'd failed.
Qawar approached her. "We aren't done yet, you know."
Lauren looked at him sidelong. "You think not?"
"We're getting reports from the downworld, from this world, from Earth. The fallout from our battle with the dark gods has had devastating consequences. In each world up from Dalchi, disasters tear at the fabric of the worlds, and the carnage is horrifying. The effects spread wide and become less intense as you move upworld, but even in your world, the skies are filled with portents and the ground is littered with tragedy." He sighed. "Here…well, here things are bad, and downworld they're worse."
Lauren shrugged. "It doesn't make a difference. Don't you realize that? We're done, all right. We lost, and we're done, and everything I ever knew and cared about, except for my son, is going to be gone in just a week or two. I don't get to go home."
"A lot of us don't get to go home," Qawar said.
Lauren turned and stared into his eyes. "If you gave a shit about that, why didn't you do something to fight the dark gods? You have magic. You have a hell of a lot more magic than I do. And you have for…how long? How old are you? A couple hundred years? A couple thousand? Didn't you say ten thousand or something like that? You people could have been fighting the dark gods all along, doing something that would limit the damage they're doing, but you didn't want to risk your precious skins, since all you had to do when things got nasty was hop downworld. You and all the rest of the old gods hid until you had people willing to go out and fight in front of you, and even then, you were the only one who showed up—and you held back and let the veyâr take the brunt of the thing. Anyone know how many veyâr died in that fight?"
Qawar shrugged. "They're still counting. Fifty, maybe."
"Fifty. Out of the couple hundred that were all the veyâr could spare. How about old gods? How many old gods died?"
Qawar said nothing.
"C'mon. How many?"
"None, of course."
"I rest my case." Lauren turned and started walking away.
Behind her, Qawar said, "We need your help—"
She felt Jake's hand in hers—small and soft and fragile. The only person in the world who needed her right at that moment was Jake. She turned back to the old god and said, "You need to grow a pair, pal. Handle it. I'm done."
She and Jake got to the suite they shared, and Lauren got the first glimpse of herself in a mirror, and almost choked. Baanraak's blood and Molly's blood coated her from head to foot. Now that she saw herself, she realized that she reeked of blood, that her skin itched and her hair was matted with it. Jake hadn't said anything about it, no one else had made any mention of it—but no one could look at Lauren and think anything but that she'd been in a war.
She shut her door, grabbed soft cotton pajamas for herself and Jake, peeled off her clothes and then his, and said, "Shower time, monkey-boy."
Jake liked showers, though Lauren wondered how she was ever going to get one once he was old enough that she couldn't take him in with her. She tried to imagine trusting Jake alone in a room by himself for more than a minute and her mind simply balked at the ensuing images of destruction.
She soaped him, then herself; got the flowery shampoo provided for her by the servant, and began trying to get the blood out of her hair. She fought with it for a long time, watching the water curling red around her feet, and watching Jake eyeing the blood warily. Finally, she realized her only hope was to cut most of her hair off and try again. The suite offered a complete supply of bathroom implements, including a gaudy pair of scissors that looked like the handles had been made of gold. The blades weren't terribly sharp, but they'd do.
She pulled Jake out of the shower, wrapped him in a towel, and sat him on the floor beside the sink. "Stay," she said, and he sat there watching her struggling to save as much of her hair as she could.
She cut away great long tangles of it, each a clotted mass, and as she did she cried—she cried for the sister she had watched die, for the world she couldn't save and all the people in it, for the husband she couldn't have back, for the son who would never get to go home.
With every snip of the scissors, her head got lighter, and a little bit of her grief wore away.
When she was done, she'd run out of tears, though her hair was about two inches long all over. Lauren could see that she had no future as a stylist. She looked a lot like her Barbie dolls used to after she got done "fixing" them.
She jumped back in the shower long enough to get the last traces of blood out, then dried off. Jake sat patiently waiting for her—out of character for him. But he'd had a rough day, too.
"You know, kiddo," she said, pulling his jammies on him, "the only thing this place really lacks is a phone to call for room service." She dropped her towel and pulled on jammies of her own. "I could use something yummy right now."
"Yummy?" He looked at her and managed a tired, hopeful little smile.
She picked him up and hugged him. "We'll find something yummy. We both need it. I could eat a moose."
"Why?"
She didn't answer. Jake didn't know a moose from Michelangelo, and wouldn't if she spent half an hour explaining. Instead, she rubbed noses with him and said, "This isn't going to make any sense to you until years from now, provided we live that long, but thank you for saving my ass out there today. My mind just went blank and I panicked. You really were a little Superman, weren't you?"
Now his face lit up. "I was Superman, and I flieded."
"Yeah, you did. And if I thought it would do any good, I'd make you promise that you would never do it again." Jake with magic, and yearning to be a superhero. When she was a little less exhausted, that one was going to give her the heebie-jeebies. The only world where Jake wouldn't have magic was his own…
Bad thoughts. She didn't need to go down that particular path anymore in one day.
With him swung onto her hip, she headed into the suite's main room. There she found Seolar and Birra and all of the goroths waiting for her.
"Shit," she said.
"Shit!" Jake echoed, with a bit more emphasis.
Everyone looked at her with expressions she couldn't read at all, until Seolar finally said, politely, "Your hair looks…interesting."
"Couldn't get the blood out," she told him shortly, then said, "I want to rest and spend some time with my kid and get something to eat. What do you all want?"
"The necklace," Seolar said. "Where is it?"
Lauren went to her jeans, picked them up and shook them until the Vodi necklace fell out on the bed. She didn't want to touch it. So she backed away, and, palm upward, said, "All yours."
Qawar made a point of not looking at her. Instead, he stared fixedly at Seolar and said, "We need to take it back to the safe room so that the magic can work and Molly can…return. Slowly, though. Clear everything from the room but the air itself—the slower she gathers material to rebuild, the more she will come back like herself."
"I'm guessing being buried in a pile of dead animal carcasses would have been bad, then," Lauren said.
Qawar nodded, though he
still wouldn't look at her. "Baanraak seems to have been trying to strip away everything about her that linked her to life. By repeatedly killing her and then reviving her very quickly after each death, he would be able to turn her into something like him in short order."
Lauren swallowed back the tears that kept trying to form, and said, "I don't think it's going to be an issue anymore, boys. Really, I don't."
Seolar said, "We need to be able to hope. At least for a while. At least until we know one way or the other. We need to be able to hold on to the possibility that she might come back. And you have no reason to think that she won't—at least no more than to think that she will…" His voice trailed off as he saw Lauren shaking her head.
"I wish that were true, Seo. More than you will ever know. But there's something I didn't tell you before, and it…well." She looked down at her feet. "I tried to save her, as fast as I could crawl out from under Baanraak's body. I gathered up the…pieces…" The tears got the better of her for a moment, and she closed her eyes and just breathed until she got herself under control again. "I put the necklace on her, and I used every bit of magic I could summon to put everything back together and to bring her back. It didn't work."
Again she faced terrible silence, and faces lined with pain. No one said a word. No one suggested that her experience might not matter. No one had so much as a flicker of hope in his eyes.
Lauren straightened and nodded a little. "So I don't think she's coming back this time. But you can sure have the necklace and take it down to the safe room and do whatever you can to give Molly the best chance she has to come back." The tears were working their way to the surface again, and Lauren didn't feel like she could face anyone but Jake. She said, "Please just leave now."
They filed out of the room without protest or comment. Seolar carried the necklace—but not in his hand. He picked it up with a fold of the cloth of his robe, and tucked it into the fancy silk-brocade cummerbund he wore. So he couldn't stand to touch it either.
He left last, and Lauren remembered him lying on the ground begging her to let him die. Lauren understood the way he felt, and now that she stood clear of the madness of the battle and her own fear, she wondered why she hadn't. Because if he died, he would be with Molly again, and she was jealous of that? Because she wanted him to suffer the way she suffered?
She found it easy to think of all sorts of cruel reasons why she hadn't let him go—but his eyes met hers, and they held no accusation.
That, she thought, would probably come later, after the shock wore off and he had a chance to think about everything he'd lost.
CHAPTER 21
Copper House
THREE DAYS PASSED in silence in Copper House. For three days, Lauren, Birra, Seolar, Qawar and the guards passed each other on the stairs going down to or coming up from the safe room, always checking the other faces as they passed for signs of good news, and always finding nothing.
Lauren considered packing up her few belongings and Jake and returning to Cat Creek. There she could keep Jake from flying around rooms; there she could talk about what had happened to someone (Pete, her mind suggested with a vehemence that surprised her), and there she could gather up her few friends and loved ones and gate them out of danger before the world imploded.
She knew she didn't have a lot of time—that the final fall of Earth could begin at any time, and that every day she delayed was another day of deterioration that could trigger the final, unstoppable collapse.
But she couldn't make herself admit Molly wasn't going to make it. She could not claim to harbor any hope, but neither could she take the final public step of saying, "It's over. Time for me to go home and make other arrangements."
By the time three days had passed, though, she had to face facts. Her stupid cry for help had cost the world and nearly everyone in it. She couldn't wait any longer, or she might be late. She and Jake would go back, she would make gates to evacuate any who wanted to leave, and then the two of them would flee to safety.
The radio guy—Art Bell—he could probably get the word out, she thought. Lauren figured he had the only audience anywhere in the world who would both believe what she had to say and be willing to act on it. That might save…what…a million people? Probably fewer than that, because Art had his share of skeptics in the audience. Five hundred thousand?
Out of six billion.
Shit.
She looked up at the dark sky and thought, This place is never going to feel like home. Then she tucked Jake into bed, curled up next to him, and tried to go to sleep.
Copper House
Seolar sat by the necklace that lay on the marble slab he and his men had carried into the safe room. He could see nothing about it that indicated Molly would ever be coming back. Still, because he had the room to himself except for the necklace, and because he didn't know what else to do, he talked to the metal as if Molly might be in there somewhere; as if she might be able to hear him.
"I have said things to you that I regret, my love. I have thought things about you that I wish I had not thought. I don't know if any part of you is still in there; I don't know if any part of you can still hear me. But I want you to know that I love you. If I cannot be with you in life, I will find my way to your side after death. This separation will not stand."
He rested his head in his hands and sobbed quietly.
Finally he stood. "We deserved better, you and I. We deserved a world where we could love each other without shadows between us. If you come back, the shadows may darken our days, but they will not put out our sun. I swear it. If you will have me, I will love you for as long as I live, and after."
He rose, studied the necklace. It lay there. What else had he expected. If he had hoped for a sign, none came to him.
After a moment of silence, he turned and left. The guards at the door looked at him with hopeful eyes, but he just shook his head.
Copper House
Lying in the dark after Jake went to sleep, Lauren discovered that her mind wouldn't quiet, and that all the calming meditative tricks she knew offered her neither stillness nor peace. She got up, found a lamp, and lit it. Instantly the goroths surrounded her, wanting to know what they could get for her or do for her.
She was going to tell them nothing, but they felt as useless as she did—she might as well make someone feel better. "I could really use a big mug of hot tea, and something good to eat."
Two of them scurried off to find her something.
Lauren paced for a bit, and the remaining goroths finally figured out that all this movement didn't mean she was going anywhere anytime soon, and settled in where they could watch her.
Something worried at the back of Lauren's mind. She paced, trying to knock whatever it was free by dint of constant restless movement. Something about her parents' notebook—a single line written in the margins in an off-colored ink. She'd just glimpsed it and had, for some reason, written it off as her father having a bad day, but now, in the dark of night and with all hope already lost, she couldn't let that line go.
Whose handwriting had it been in? Her father's? Her mother's? Something about that note had been…wrong.
She got the notebook out and started going through it, carefully, page by page. Everything was in there. Her father's neat diagrams for spellcasting equipment that she and Molly were supposed to create and power that would counter the constant downflow of poisoned energy from Kerras. Ideas for chains of stations connected together around each living downworld and linked together—years worth of work for two people, and only Molly could power the thing, and only Lauren could connect it. It all seemed so complicated, so fragile, so doomed to failure. Even had Molly survived, how could they manage the resources, the time, the effort and coordination for such a massive undertaking in time to save their dying world?
But the knot in her gut felt hopeful.
So what in hell had dragged her from bed with a sudden stupid feeling of hope?
Page by page she moved through t
he old notebook, and then, on the outer margin of a page in which her father was complaining bitterly of a failure in one of his experiments, the line she'd been seeking. "It's all bullshit, except for this."
But the marginal line was in her mother's handwriting. Her mother, who in Lauren's entire life had never uttered a word that might even be mistaken for a curse word. Marion did not even say, "Heck," for heck was simply a substitute for Hell. She did not say "darn." She did not say "jeez" or "sheesh." And she most assuredly had never uttered the word "bullshit" in anyone's hearing except, perhaps, for God.
This had been a woman who didn't fart.
It's all bullshit, except for this.
Her mother's handwriting, formed by the Palmer method and ingrained from years of teaching it to resistant fifth-and sixth-graders, could in no way be mistaken for her father's narrow, heavy-fisted scrawl. Lauren could tell whether her mother or father had written a passage in the dark, just by running her finger along the back side of the paper. If it felt like Braille, her father had written it. So the words were her mother's, and yet they weren't.
