Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  In the Hub, the true center of all the universes, where the dark gods watched and controlled and commanded the fates of worlds, mere assistants were as disposable as mayflies, and warranted as much interest. Rekkathav had spent the last two years balanced on the sharp edge of a knife, with fear his constant companion. The Night Watch was almost ready to harvest Earth and drink its death, and Rekkathav, if he survived to that point, would partake of the feast and get his first taste of the dark power created from the slaughter of a world and all its inhabitants. And he would move up in rank; Rekkathav would become a dark god, and no longer just a pretender. Surviving long enough to feast, though, was his great challenge.

  The hyatvit, dozen legs scrambling and twin hearts racing, kept up with the Master. "You've returned in such a state, Master. Your inspection did not go well?" He instantly regretted that question—clearly things had not gone well. The question was whether they had gone badly in a way that could be blamed on Rekkathav. "What may I do to assist you?" he asked.

  Aril stared down at him. Summon the off-duty fieldmasters. Bring them to the Hub.

  The hyatvit—his mind touched by the coldness of Aril's thoughts and the depth of Aril's anger—nodded, terror-stricken, and fled.

  Rekkathav sent messages to each of the fieldmasters via the emergency communication gates, then raced back to Aril's side to await his next orders. No new orders were forthcoming, however; instead, the Master of the Night Watch beckoned him to follow, and floated at terrible speed to the enormous main doors of the Hub, the central nervous system of the Night Watch's reality-spanning organization.

  The Master approached the doors of the Hub, stared at them for just an instant, then blew them open with the force of his thoughts. They exploded off their hinges and buried themselves in the marble floor, the metal twisted and ribboned like fruit peels. Everyone within the Hub dove for cover.

  "Not me," Rekkathav whispered. He wore a resurrection ring driven through the skin fold behind his right front powerleg, but he had not yet passed through his first death. He clung to life, an old god but not yet a dark god, not yet fed by the power of death, and every time he was faced with the possibility of his own first death he had second thoughts.

  To command the powers of the universe, to hold eternity in his hand—he wanted this for himself. He wanted some day to become what Aril was: the Master of the Night Watch, the true owner of worlds.

  But to rise through the ranks to the Mastery, first he had to survive. He did not have to avoid death, of course. A Master had died a hundred times or more by the time he reached the pinnacle of dark godhood. But Rekkathav had to keep resurrecting, and the moments between death and rebirth were when a dark god was most vulnerable. Aril knew of his ambition, and though at the moment the Master of the Night Watch was amused by it—that Rekkathav dared dream so high who had not yet tasted a single death, even his own—Aril's amusement had a nasty way of vanishing like smoke in the first stiff breeze.

  Aril glided to the center of the Hub, with Rekkathav hurrying behind him.

  Heads began popping up from behind the tall consoles that powered the Hub's observation and intervention gates. The head fieldmaster, Vanak, who was in charge of tracking activity on the worlds in which the Night Watch worked, was on duty at the time. When the Master beckoned, he came cringing up to Aril like a whipped cur. Rekkathav watched the Master, ever silent, point a finger at Vanak.

  It seemed nothing but a gesture. No lightning crackled; no thunder rolled. Yet the fieldmaster's spine arced and his fingers clenched into fists and his arms went rigid at his sides, and for a moment he made a strangling noise in the back of his throat. He stared at the Master, his mouth opening and closing as if he were a fish torn from the water and tossed into the tall grass to die.

  Then Vanak's eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor, twitching. He pissed himself, flopped and spasmed, vomited, lost control of his bowels. Watching this display, Rekkathav felt terror digging inside his gut as if it were full of fighting reptiles, cold and clawed and sharp of tooth and spine.

  Fieldmasters' live log, Aril whispered in Rekkathav's skull, and Rekkathav leapt as if stabbed and raced for the log, skittering back to place it with trembling fingers in the Master's outstretched hand.

  Aril did not look at the log, though. He simply stood, waiting, sniffing the air as if he smelled the fear that rose in the room like heat off of stones after a blazing summer day.

  Nine gates in the staff gatewall at the far rim of the Hub shimmered to life, and nine fieldmasters—dark gods of the Night Watch all, with positions of tremendous power and privilege—stepped through almost simultaneously. Their eyes first found Aril, and then Vanak at his feet, still flopping, no shred of awareness or dignity left to him.

  The fieldmasters had endured thousands of their own deaths among them. Any aspects of their living selves had long ago been stripped away, leaving them creatures of keen intelligence, ravenous dark appetites, and little else. But they were still capable of fear. Not an emotion, fear—it was a simple survival instinct. Creatures with no capacity for fear could not recognize danger to their existence and avoid it; most creatures so made didn't last long in a universe well endowed with teeth. The dark gods of the Night Watch were survivors. They stared at the grotesque remains of their still-living but destroyed colleague, and they recoiled.

  Come, Aril told them in a thought-voice that everyone within the Hub could hear, and the fieldmasters stepped toward him, their horror clear in every reluctant step.

  In the whole of the Hub, the only sound Rekkathav heard was ragged breathing.

  When the fieldmasters stood before him, Aril held the log-book out. Find an example of your signature, one at a time, and show it to me. This, too, he broadcast into the minds of everyone present.

  He handed the log to the first fieldmaster to his left, and Rekkathav watched the fieldmaster flip to a page, point to his initials, and pass the book to the next. The log went down the line, each fieldmaster finding an example of his or her initials and pointing it out, and the last fieldmaster demonstrating the presence of his own signature and returning the log to Aril.

  Thank you, Aril said. In the whisper in Rekkathav's mind, no trace of gratitude echoed.

  For a moment the Master did nothing else. Then he turned to walk away, and Rekkathav, watching the fieldmasters, saw each of them relax.

  Around the room, Rekkathav saw echoing relief on the faces of the lesser staffers. Whatever had happened was over—it had been Vanak's sin alone. And they had survived it.

  What happened next, Rekkathav would never be able to expunge from his memory.

  Aril made a tiny gesture with his left hand. All nine fieldmasters, plus the twitching hulk that had been Vanak, exploded in green fire and crumbled to dust.

  One of them had been so close to Rekkathav that he could feel the backwash of magic curling against his skin, could smell dust that was all that remained of flesh and bone and blood. Rekkathav heard screams of shock and dread throughout the Hub. He did not scream, though; he could not even breathe. His throat locked shut, his many knees gave way, and he dropped to the floor in a shivering, chittering pile.

  The Master seemed uninterested in Rekkathav or the rest of the room's survivors. His attention fixed on the senior field assistant like the rays of the sun focused through a lens. Rekkathav would have felt pity for the senior assistant had he not been so relieved not to be him.

  Gather their rings, Aril told the assistant. Place them in the terminal box.

  The fear in the room grew deeper, sharper—until that moment, the punishment of the fieldmasters had seemed simply that, a punishment, something that they would return from once their resurrection rings re-created them. Until that instant, Rekkathav had believed the Master of the Night Watch had been making a dramatic gesture of his displeasure.

  Instead, clearly, Aril intended to overturn the universe as Rekkathav had known it.

  The terminal box changed every
thing. The terminal box was designed to destroy resurrection rings—to grind the gold to powder, to strip away the magic that powered them, and to wash the resultant slurry into the sea, from whence not even the Master himself would be able to gather all the bits back up again.

  The Master was choosing to exercise his right to pass capital sentence on immortals. Rekkathav knew of the terminal box's being used through the history of the Night Watch, though its use had always been rare. He was certain it had never been used to dispose of every chief officer in the most important branch of service in the Night Watch.

  The senior assistant looked like he was about to be sick. He dropped the resurrection rings into the terminal box, one after the other. Two trips, twenty-seven rings ranging from small finger-rings to heavy bracelets to thick, massive chains. Each fieldmaster had clearly been hedging his bets, augmenting his main resurrection ring with backup rings.

  When the last of the rings dropped into the ancient, bejeweled box, the senior assistant looked to the Master, waiting for a sign that he should remove the rings—that the object lesson for all those present was done.

  Close the lid, the master said so that all could hear.

  Not just a display, then; Aril intended the destruction of the entire field command of the Night Watch in an instant.

  The senior assistant closed the lid, and tortured screams of metal against metal and magic against magic filled the Hub. Everyone stood frozen, knowing they were witnessing something unprecedented, something both huge and terrible, none of them daring to move in case whatever had happened was not over, and moving might bring them to the attention of the Master.

  The moments in which the terminal box destroyed all twenty-seven resurrection rings were the longest Rekkathav had ever experienced. When the box finished its work, the Master of the Night Watch pointed to the assistant. You are the new head fieldmaster. Choose nine associates today. Your mutual survival depends on your mutual competence, so choose carefully.

  Aril then told them something so ludicrous that, had Rekkathav not seen the destruction of the fieldmasters, he would have thought the Master of the Night Watch lied.

  New, live magic has reappeared on Earth. The planet has, under the watch of those now destroyed, begun to heal itself in spite of our working against it. The new fieldmasters' primary duties will be to determine how this has been accomplished and to eliminate whomever and whatever is responsible. The new fieldmasters will have limited time to reverse the damage done and set the world back upon our chosen course to its destruction.

  You have seen the price for failure or carelessness. Make sure you succeed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  ERIC MACAVERY, Cat Creek's sheriff and the leader of the Cat Creek Sentinels, had the watch. He'd been sitting half in and half out of the official watch gate in the Daisies and Dahlias Florist, now run by round, sweet Betty Kay Nye, taking a restful day shift. The green fire of the gate surrounded him, the energy of the universe flowed through him, and he could feel the smooth workings of the region. His watch area had no major traffic at the moment—Lauren Dane and her son, Jake, had been in and out of her home gate a couple of times. Eric currently showed both of them at Lauren's parents' old cabin in Oria, Earth's closest downworld. He didn't know why she was there, but Lauren, as the Sentinels' gateweaver, had a lot of things to keep track of. Lauren Dane's relationship with the Sentinels had been uncomfortable for a while after her dead husband's parents kidnapped him; Lauren returned from the ordeal of getting him back gaunt and strange-eyed and with her hair whacked off and not a word to say to anybody except Pete. She didn't even seem to have much to say to Pete after the first few days.

  Lauren was not a happy lady—she kept her child within arm's reach always, and vanished without warning for hours at a time. She didn't trust anyone anymore, Eric had finally realized. And he guessed she had a reason.

  He'd finally realized, as well, that he couldn't demand a minute-by-minute accounting from her and still expect her to accomplish anything, though, so in the last few months he'd backed off a bit from his close watch.

  That day, aside from Lauren, Eric had tracked a couple of little natural gates that had blinked in and out of existence in the uninhabited parts of the area. This once-rare event was becoming a more frequent occurrence, and Eric would have been happier had he known why that was so. And he'd caught Pete Stark, his deputy, friend, and fellow Sentinel, using a gate to get something from Pete's refrigerator at home while he was on duty at the station. As long as Pete hadn't been snagging some of that British beer he liked, Eric was inclined not to notice the little misuse of magic.

  He could hear Betty Kay downstairs taking an FTD order. She'd turned out to be a perfect replacement for Nancine Tubbs, the Sentinel who had previously owned the Daisies and Dahlias, but who had died in the line of duty. Betty Kay was cheerful and friendly, and people in the town liked her, even if she was a Yankee. She dated the local boys, she knew to eat grits with butter and salt and pepper—not, for God's sake, milk and sugar—and she worked hard. She talked too much, and every time he saw her she had her nose in one Jude Devereaux novel or another, and Terry Mayhew's frequent pursuit aside, Eric guessed she was still a virgin, but there were worse things you could say about a person.

  He heard her hang up the phone and come to the stairs. She yelled, "You want any lunch? Or a…rest room break…or anything?"

  "I'm good," he said.

  And then he wasn't.

  A pulse that felt like an atom bomb going off tore through the fabric of the universes and slammed waves of energy at Eric, pounding him with the wake of something huge that had moved past. The last, hardest wave physically picked him up and threw him out of the gate-mirror and sent him crashing into the wall on the opposite side of the room. He hit his head and saw stars and toppled to the floor, dazed, while thunder erupted from the middle of a tranquil, sunny afternoon, shaking the foundations of the old house that held the florist shop and the Sentinels' gate, and lightning ripped into a tree next to the building, cracking limbs and sending them flying. Downstairs he heard glass shatter and Betty Kay scream—and then rain blasted the windows like it had been shot out of a pressure nozzle.

  Eric rolled over, getting hands and knees under him. He tried to stand, but he couldn't. He was too dizzy. He looked up long enough to see that the gate was closed and the mirror had a crack running through it from top to bottom. He hung his head and found himself staring at the floor between his hands, where a little puddle was forming. Bright red. Shiny. Funny—the roof didn't usually leak red.

  The red puddle seemed to expand, or maybe it was just that everything else got smaller, fuzzed in grey. And he seemed to be falling forward…

  Natta Cottage, Ballahara, Oria

  "I don't know if I can do this anymore." Molly McColl, who had once seemed as human as her half sister, Lauren Dane, stood beside the fireplace in the cottage in a world that less than a year earlier neither of them had known existed.

  "I know it's awful for you. But we can't quit," Lauren said. "If we quit, the Night Watch wins. Everything dies." Lauren's short, dark hair swung as she struggled to hang on to her son, Jake, three years old, bright-eyed and blond and squirming to get down. Jake was alive because Molly had died to save him—her first death, and the only one she could have prevented.

  "You don't know how awful," Molly told her. "I've died five times since this started. I'm weary, I'm scared all the time, and"—Molly turned away—"and I'm losing me," she said. "It's all just slipping out of my fingers—my memory of what it was to be alive, to be real. It's like I can hold what's left of the person I used to be up to the light and see nothing there but a few threads and tatters. Rags. And the funny thing is, it doesn't even hurt much anymore."

  Lauren put Jake down, crouched, and said, "Play in here. Quietly." She handed him his toys, a stuffed duck and a teddy bear and a bag of blocks, then came over to Molly's side. With the two women standi
ng side by side, the difference in their heights, which only a year before had been identical, became impossible to overlook. Lauren was still about five-foot-six; Molly had topped out at six feet.

  An observer looking at the two of them would never have guessed how much they had looked alike before the events that had changed Molly. Lauren, in her mid-thirties, looked like the girl next door all grown up, with scruffy jeans and dark eyes and a lean prettiness that was holding up well as she got older. Molly's change following her death had brought out the veyâr in her blood and mixed it with the human; her hair was copper with a metallic sheen, braided to her waist, her eyes were enormous and the color of emeralds, and she had become thin to the point of attenuation, her body reshaping itself along alien lines until by human standards she looked like she might blow away in a good spring breeze. By veyâr standards she was still short and solid, but Molly didn't think in veyâr standards. Her body had been purely human for a quarter of a century, and sometimes the reshaping and the differences it made in the way she moved still caught her off guard.

  "I'm so sorry," Lauren said, and hugged Molly. "I hate what you have to go through. What we both have to go through. But there isn't anyone else who can do what I do, and there sure isn't anyone else who can do what you do. You can find them, Molly. You can feel them. And you can destroy them. The Night Watch can't hide from you the way it can from everyone else." She paused and cocked her head to one side. "And I only knew about four times that you'd died."