by Holly Lisle
They offered a riddle.
It's all bullshit, except for this.
Except for what? Her father's weary ranting about something that had gone wrong? That was the truth?
Lauren looked over the passage, and on it suddenly noted one word in her father's narrative that he hadn't written. One word, in the same color ink as her mother's cryptic note, in her mother's Palmer handwriting. The word was notebook.
The middle of the back of Lauren's neck began to itch, and she stared at the diagram at the top of the page, and at the single word down in the right-hand corner, in the middle of a sentence, that fit perfectly with what her father was saying, but that her father had not written.
She turned back to the previous page, and scanned it.
Middle of the page, two words. Ignore the.
A handful of pages before that had been written by her mother, only in different-colored ink—Lauren looked over these carefully, but could find nothing out of place. Prior to these pages, in the older part of the notebook, nothing odd. When she went to the "bullshit" page again and started moving toward the back of the notebook, she found another word. It's
With rising excitement, she told Rue, "Bring me paper and something to write with. Quickly. I've just discovered something."
She started at the beginning. Her task took most of the night, but when she finished, she'd uncovered the following message.
Ignore the notebook; it's to draw attention away from you and Molly. The two of you are the secret. You're the answer.
Molly, you must become the Hunter. You alone can hunt down the Night Watch and use the magic that will kill and then undo them without your actions rebounding to our own world. It's a horrible task, but you will have immortality working for you. The veyâr will resist this; they have their own expectations of a Vodi, and you will not be able to live up to them once you change. And you will change. But you must, in order to survive and do what you have to do.
Lauren, you must be the rebuilder. You will have no magic necklace, no protection save that which your sister and those you can trust give you; nothing but your own talent and determination and character to see you through, and those alone will determine whether or not our world lives or dies. You do not get immortality, and if ever it is offered, you must resist. Use your gateweaving to open passages from healthy downworlds back up to Earth—passages that will stay open. Make them as small as you need to keep them stable; hide them well. Each one will be a lifeline to our world. Convince old gods to come into our world and use the fresh magic that these passages will provide to do good. Any positive magic will rebound positively. Good magic echoes good all the way up the worldchain, but as the upworlds die off, the energy that permits magic dies, too, until only drastic measures such as the ones we outline offer any hope of salvation.
Both of you—work from any world that offers you safety. Bring in fresh magic to our world, and to the worlds above. You can open gates to them, even if you can't do much in them yourself. Find the gods who can live in them. Avoid the Night Watch at all costs. Protect each other.
If neither of you was directed to this message by memory, be careful. Some of our imprinting might have gone awry. We didn't have anyone to practice on—nor much time to get anything right. We're being watched. We love you both, and always will, no matter where you are and where we are when you read this.
She read through the decoded note three times before it started to sink in.
"Son of a bitch," Lauren said, shaking her head. "You were a couple of sneaky people. Didn't do you a damned bit of good in the end, but you had the moves, anyway."
She considered the information in her hands.
First, the question. Had a memory left for her by her parents triggered her sudden hope and her curiosity about the notation in the margin? Or had she come across that without any help from them? Did she need to be uncertain about everything else she remembered, or thought she did?
Next, the hope. According to the hidden message, Lauren, not Molly, would be the source of the healing energy that would revive Earth and the worlds above it. Molly was supposed to protect her, and was supposed to do away with the Night Watch—but perhaps Lauren could do what she needed to do alone.
Until the Night Watch hunted her and Jake down and killed them both.
She groaned and tucked the paper into the book, and tucked the book back in her bag, and crawled into bed with Jake, who was still asleep. Suddenly she didn't feel like facing the day that already edged in through her east window. She didn't think she would ever be able to close her eyes.
But then somehow she did.
Copper House
In the darkness of the empty room, the Vodi necklace began to glow softly. And the tears shed by the Imallin gleamed briefly, then vanished.
Copper House
Someone pounded on her door. Lauren woke up groggily, remembering vaguely that she'd had a breakthrough, but she was so tired that she couldn't focus on what it was. She sat up, and noticed that Jake wasn't in the bed next to her. That woke her up more sharply than ice water would have. She lunged from the bed to the door, blew past whoever had been standing there, and saw Jake and Doggie sitting cross-legged on the floor, crashing Jake's cars together.
She turned to see whom she'd slammed behind the door.
One of the guards who had been on safe room duty. Lauren didn't know his name, but felt guilty about that; she felt especially guilty since from all appearances she'd given him what was going to be one hell of a shiner.
"The Imallin needs you downstairs," he said. Lauren saw panic in his eyes.
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know. Something. Everyone is in an uproar."
Uproar. Great. Lauren had something that might help—that might offer a ray of hope, if not a solution, and now something else had gone wrong.
She picked up Jake, balanced him on her hip, and said, "Okay—let's go."
The guard took off at a fast pace. Lauren followed, trailing goroths.
When they reached the subbasement and the safe room, however, Lauren found no uproar—only a lot of veyâr standing very still, faces toward the door, making no sound at all.
"You're to go in," the guard said. "The Imallin requested it."
Lauren and Jake went through the door she'd made, into a room that still had the bones of the apartment she'd made for herself. Along the right wall, the live image of the forest outside the village of Copper House remained. Qawar had removed all the carpet and all the furniture, though, as well as the kitchen and bathroom fixtures, and had placed the necklace on a raised black marble slab that seemed stark beneath the bright lights and the white walls.
The necklace still lay there. At first Lauren thought nothing had changed about it. Then she noticed a faint glow. She frowned. "Has it ever glowed before?"
"Not that I know of," Seolar told her.
Lauren said, "Does Qawar know what it's doing?"
"No."
"The glowing isn't part of the spell that activates it?"
"No one knows—but according to Qawar, it doesn't seem likely. The necklace is a dark god magic—under normal circumstances he thinks that it would absorb light rather than emit it when it is…ah…working."
"Then he thinks that the spell is broken?"
"He doesn't know. From what I could gather, he seems to think that if it were broken, it wouldn't do anything at all."
Lauren stared at him, and then looked at Jake, who was looking from Seolar to the necklace on the slab and back to Seolar, as if he were watching a high-speed tennis match.
"What is it, Jake?"
He pointed with his finger at the space between Seolar and the necklace, with his finger wavering back and forth.
Seolar looked at Jake, looked at the necklace, and turned to Birra. "Bring in Qawar—I want to know what he sees."
Birra came back a moment later with Qawar, who took one look at the necklace and said, "Get the baby out of the room. Quickly."
Lauren ran to the door and called Doggie over. "Take him, wait in the corridor. Jake, stay with Doggie and be a good boy."
"The necklace is drawing energy from life, and the little boy is…vulnerable. Birra, bring the veyâr in here. We need as many people in here as will fit."
As more of the veyâr crowded into the room, the nimbus of light around the Vodi necklace grew brighter, until it glowed like a small sun. Then a soft hum filled the room, and ribbons of white light crawled along the walls, ceiling, and floor, like lightning trapped inside the surfaces. Lauren noticed a soft, uneven rumbling like thunder. The only storm, of course, was the one building in the safe room.
Qawar started chasing veyâr from the room. "I was wrong! Out," he shouted. But Seolar commanded Birra to leave, while he stayed. Lauren, scared, stood her ground beside Seolar.
"She's in there," Seolar said. He stared at the necklace, and Lauren could see the tears running down his cheeks. She noticed that the floor around Seolar's feet glowed brighter than the rest of the room, and that every tear that landed on it lit up like a flare before sizzling away to nothing. "She's in there, and she's all alone, and I can't save her."
Lauren reached out and took his hand. "I can feel her presence, Seo. We're both here with her; that's the best we can do."
"Does she know that? Does she know we're here? I don't want her to think we've abandoned her."
"I think she knows." Lauren closed her eyes and tried to reach the place where Molly was. She sought her sister's voice, but all she got was fear.
Instinctively she reached out and touched the necklace, trying to make a connection and to touch and comfort her trapped and dying sister. Lauren wanted to let Molly know that at least the two people who loved her remained with her. But when she made physical connection with the necklace, she got more than that.
She was still holding Seolar's hand. She had only enough time to think, Maybe this wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been holding his hand, and certainly not enough time to stop what was happening with the shield she'd prepared. The storm moving through the room erupted inside her and Seolar. The crawling lightning sucked itself out of the walls and floor and ceiling and crackled over the marble slab that held the necklace, pouring from the necklace into Lauren and through Lauren into Seolar, and all in less time than it took to blink.
Fire filled Lauren from the inside out—she couldn't move, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't break her connection with either the necklace or Seolar. Everything went blinding, brilliant white, and she lost her sense of hearing and touch and smell and taste. For a moment she floated in the brilliance, alone and scared—this place bore no resemblance to the comforting green fire of the gates and their passages between worlds, and no resemblance to the realms of the afterlife.
This was hell inside her head, the pain of standing on the surface of the sun with no place to run or hide and no one to save her, with her eyelids seared off so that she couldn't even close her eyes. She stood in hell, and in the middle of it she heard her sister cry out, "Here, I'm here! I'm here!"
Lauren screamed, "MOLLY!" and tried to reach her sister. Lauren felt herself floating, racing toward something, and she thought this place might begin to make sense. Then she fell out of the blinding light, into the safe room, into the blessed coolness and dim light after the magic storm. She grabbed the edge of the marble slab to keep from falling; beside her Seolar, not so fortunately located, collapsed to his knees, sobbing. Lauren stood, shaking and weak, and stared at the place where the necklace had been, to discover it was gone.
What the hell happened, she wondered.
"She's gone," Seolar whispered. "That was it—she is gone and I did not reach her in time, though I tried."
"I'm not gone," Molly's voice said.
Lauren jumped, and still horribly weak from whatever she had just been through, grabbed the marble slab again, then lowered herself to the floor. She could not remember ever feeling so drained in her life.
Seolar looked up and past Lauren's shoulder, and Lauren saw his face change. Joy remade him into a man she had never seen before—joy, and perhaps love.
"Molly," he whispered, and tried to get to his feet. He got as far as having one foot on the ground, but he sagged back again. "I'm sorry. I don't know what happened to me. But…oh, Molly. You're here. You're alive. And you're…you!"
Movement beside her, and a naked Molly, still a clear mix of veyâr and human characteristics, dropped to hands and knees between Lauren and Seolar.
The first thing Lauren noticed was that Molly no longer wore the necklace. The second—with a bit of envy—that women in their twenties didn't have any of the sags or stretch marks or lumps that a woman of thirty-five with a pregnancy behind her had. Molly said, "You saved me. Both of you. Thank you—I would not have made it back without you."
"We didn't do anything," Lauren said, and Seolar agreed.
"You did. You loved me. Seolar wept for me, you touched me—and both of you were here when I needed you. The necklace took from you to make me—a lot of energy, and I suspect some matter, but not a lot. You both look thinner to me, but not horribly so."
Thinner? Lauren considered that, and brightened a bit. Thinner would be nice. Maybe the necklace just took fat deposits.
She leaned forward, made a bit awkward by the nakedness, and hugged Molly. "So—you're…yourself again? Body, soul, mortality, no necklace?"
Molly looked wistful. "No. I'm…I'm the same. I remember seeing the necklace go flying off me when Baanraak's claws got me. I remember that, and then nothing for a while. And then an echo of myself trapped in the necklace with all the echoes of the Vodian who'd died before me. I knew I was trapped—that I was going to be there forever. That I'd failed you, failed the veyâr, failed the plan, failed the worldchain.
"I wasn't going to be able to come back, because the necklace didn't know I'd died. I was in there, but it didn't do me any good. Then…magic, of a sort. Seolar told me that he loved me, and he cried—and somehow the necklace absorbed his tears, and somehow his will in contact with the necklace—told it. The spell that powers the necklace understood…maybe understood isn't the right word…but it reacted to his love for me, and started bringing me back. It had to draw from live sources, though, because you'd removed all dead sources. All the people in the room fed it, but it still needed something more. It got what it was looking for from you and Seo when you touched it. It needed…life. A little blood, a little bone, a little flesh. And a lot of energy, and it took them from the two of you."
Lauren said, "Then where is it? If you're still bound to it, why aren't you wearing it?"
"I am. Sort of. I formed around it this time. The clasp was broken, so the spell that powers it got creative—I suspect many of the dark gods are wearing their own resurrection jewelry on the inside by this time." She smiled wanly. "At least from now on I'll have to be all the way dead before anyone can get their hands on it."
Seolar had been fumbling with the complicated knot in the belt to his robe; he finally untied it and slipped off his outer robe, which he handed to Molly. "I love you," he said.
"I love you, too."
"I mean I love you. The you that's here right now. I love the you that you were before, too, and I cannot really untangle all of this in my mind, but I know now that having you in my life for the rest of my life is all I want."
Lauren smiled sadly at that, and turned to see tears in Molly's eyes.
"What's the matter?" Lauren asked her.
Molly looked from Seolar to Lauren, and then down. She tied the robe around her waist, but she didn't look back up. She stared at the belt as if it were the gate to the promised land. In a soft voice, she said, "It's all slipping away from me. I'm slipping away from me, and I can tell it's happening, and I can't stop it. I'm nothing but memory, and what memory remains is less than it was, and will keep getting less, until the body is here but I'm not. How am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to keep coming back, and comin
g back, a little less of me each time, knowing that eventually I'll be all gone?"
Lauren said, "I don't know how you'll do it. But you won't do it alone. You have me. You have Seo. And we love you."
Molly sighed. "And I'll live damn near forever if I choose to, and the two of you…" She shook her head. "It doesn't matter right now. It's a worry for another time. Meanwhile, Seo, love, you and I need to spend some time together. I need to get stronger, and so do you, and we might as well do that curled up in bed together talking. Lauren—you and I need to get started. We have so much to do, and I don't know how we can hope to accomplish all the work we need to…Why are you shaking your head?"
