by Holly Lisle
And maybe we'll be lucky and he'll get a lot more distant very soon. Pete had appreciated the rescue. He owed the stranger his life. But everything about the stranger struck Pete as…wrong. His great height, his booming voice, his bodybuilder muscles, the sheer redness of his hair. He was too intense, too big, too there. And of course things like the storm that followed him through the gate and the lightning that knocked the rrôn from the sky didn't help. The van, too, suddenly appearing where it needed to be.
Pete knew how all these things were done. Downworld of Earth, Pete could do them, too. The stranger was clearly a gateweaver like Lauren. Seemingly one of the good guys. Apparently a friend, or someone who could become a friend. Pretty hard to think of someone who'd just killed the better part of a dozen rrôn to save your ass as an enemy.
But unless the stranger had created a gate for the van and had driven it through that gate, between the worlds, and popped it back onto Earth just outside of town, he was doing magic on Earth.
And that meant that, whatever else he was, and whoever's side he was on, he wasn't human. Which, at least in Pete's eyes, made him a problem.
In spite of the fact that he didn't trust her, Pete would have preferred to have Molly at his back. She represented the familiar. Not the fully known, but the familiar.
So, with Lauren's continued survival being most of what stood between the Night Watch and Earth's destruction, what had been so important that Molly hadn't been with them?
Fael Faen Warrior Peak, Tinhaol, Oria
Molly hadn't gone after any Night Watch nest after her talk with Lauren. She hadn't gone home, either—she hadn't been ready to face Copper House and its boundaries, Seolar and his worries, the obsequious staff and the restrictions of being the Vodi. She especially hadn't been ready to face the hollowness she found at Copper House, where everything reminded her that once she had been passionately in love and that in the eternity that lay before her she would never know what love felt like again.
Instead of going home, she'd wandered—first slowly, and then faster, her path sped by magic, seeking isolation and the peace that came with solitude. And she'd found herself in the ruins of Tinhaol, once one of the great veyâr cities of Oria, at the burial mound of Fael Faen, where the bones of ten thousand veyâr warriors lay.
She stood atop the vast mound, the Warrior Peak, feeling the death that lay beneath her feet. The ghosts of the place pushed close to the surface for her; they stood before her as clear memories that resonated in her gut. One of the earlier Vodian had fought here and had died her first of many deaths here—the death that had cost that woman her soul. When Molly closed her eyes, she could see the flames of the falling city, could hear the screams, could smell the smoke—burning dreams, burning flesh. She could feel the pain of that earlier woman's death-wound, and no less painful, the ache of loss. It was as if this destruction had happened ten seconds before, not a thousand years.
Family and friends lay within this mound, lovers and enemies, neighbors. Not Molly's by fact, yet hers all the same, for she knew their names and remembered their faces and their shared pasts and their lost hopes.
Molly sat on the mound and stared down into the vague outlines of the lost city. Nothing remained but a few broken walls, mounds and ridges of ground that ran in suspiciously straight lines, and a tower at some distance only just beginning to crumble. With her eyes closed, she could see Fael Faen as it had been—an obsidian city, polished and gleaming in the sun, pennants flying, full of bustling crowds, markets and homes, children playing in the streets.
In a hundred years, or two hundred, she would have places of her own like this. Not borrowed memories of things lost, but bits of her own life ripped away and laid ruin. She would have to stand by Seolar's grave, perhaps, or look at rubble where Copper House had once stood. If she and Lauren failed, then she would know the ruin of Earth and everyone on it; she would see cinders and frozen wastelands where nothing survived, and remember the green of growing things, the blue of the sky, the roar of the ocean in a world with atmosphere and hope both blown away. And the hollowness inside her would expand, for that which was lost and could not be regained.
Her eye caught movement down in the ruins. She stilled herself, blanked her mind, slowed heart rate and breath, and released from the distractions of her body, but with magic ready to strike, she focused on the man who had wandered into her field of vision.
He walked along the line of what had once been a street, stopping from time to time to kneel, push tall grass out of his way, and feel around on the ground. From time to time he dug a bit with a little trowel he carried, and once he stood and put something in his pocket. Molly caught his thoughts as a low, steady hum that she found calming. He was looking for artifacts from the lost city. Touching his thoughts, she discovered that he did this from time to time, and that he had quite a collection of artifacts already. His family was a surviving branch from Tinhaol. Like many of the veyâr, he engaged in ancestor worship. Also like many of the veyâr, he yearned for days long gone, for times that had been safer and better. Days when the survival of the veyâr had not been in question.
For a while Molly let herself be lulled by the ordinariness and simplicity of his mind; his thoughts felt so much better than hers had. She could just amuse herself by watching him; he would not see her atop the peak. No one would unless she chose to be seen. But in that moment, she felt a bit of kinship to him, with his fascination for ruins and things lost. She felt like the ruin of the woman she had been, and had never felt more lost. She was darkness to his light, and suddenly she wanted a bit of that light to shine on her, if only for a moment. She rose, shook off the shields that hid her, and walked down the side of the peak toward him.
"Well met, stranger!" she called.
He jumped and turned. He was broader than the average veyâr, muscular where most were whippet-slender. And dark-skinned—the veyâr she knew were fair; they ran, both in skin and hair, to pale blues and ambers and pinks, but this man was a rich blue-black. His cobalt hair, braided simply instead of in the complex fashion of the court, shimmered with a butterfly iridescence. And his amber eyes studied her, startled and curious.
"Well met, indeed," he said, and his voice held the vibrancy and beauty of all veyâr voices. He had tattoos on his cheeks, as did all the veyâr she knew—his had been done in a very pale pigment that lightened the skin above just enough to make the marks readable. She could not read them. She had never been able to read any of the veyâr marks. "Though this place of ghosts is not, perhaps, the safest place for a lady of a faraway court, a mystery such as yourself."
She stopped a ways from him. "How do you know about me?"
"I know little enough of you, fair one. But what little I know, any who met you would know. You are not veyâr—your eyes and your unmarked cheeks and the color of your skin and hair announce this. Yet you wear the robes of the court at Copper House, with the mark of the Imallin Seolar on your belt and in your silks; you are held in high favor. Your face bears not the first mark, but you are too old not to have earned marks, so you are above veyâr society and veyâr laws, where we must wear our lives on our faces for all to see. Perhaps, from the look of you, you come from outside of this world altogether. The gods, they say, have unmarked cheeks."
He smiled at her a little, and added, "Are you a god, little one?"
She thought, Yes, I am. Or a devil—I have not found the way to the truth of this new me just yet. But she said, "Would it matter? I'm no threat to you. I just came down to see what you were doing."
"And I am no threat to you, or you would not have come down. Only gods have no need for fear. So you are even more of a mystery." His smile broadened, and from his pocket he pulled a pouch, and from the pouch, removed a little statuette no bigger than his thumb, worn and dirt-covered. "This is what I have been doing. I found a house god," he said. "Once I get him cleaned up I think I'll find that he's Podrin, the Water God. I can't really tell now; the dirt has covered all the
defining marks."
He passed the statuette to her and their hands brushed, and at the touch of his skin, she almost jumped. He…resonated. He fit her, as if she'd just walked through the door of the childhood home of her wishes and dreams. Or as if he were comfortable shoes, she thought, puzzled. She stared into his eyes, and though veyâr faces were hard to read, she caught her own surprise echoed there.
She looked quickly to the statue she held, and used a corner of her belt to rub the dirt away. At another time she might have recoiled at the idea of using the beautiful, heavy silk as a cleaning rag, but at that moment she needed some distance.
The statuette cleaned up well enough. It turned out to be a little ivory man in classic veyâr robes, with inscriptions running across his belt and down the shoulders of the robe. He had the classic veyâr build, the classic veyâr face. His eyes, though, were hollow sockets.
Molly ran a finger over them, and the stranger said, "They should have obsidian beads in them. Or…" He held out a hand and she laid the statuette in his palm, being careful not to touch him again. He turned the statuette in his hand and shook his head. "In this case, not obsidian. Emerald. This isn't Podrin after all. It's Allren, the God of the High Places. First time I've ever found an Allren here." He smiled at her again. "He wasn't a local god—didn't even have a temple. So this must have belonged to a foreigner. You're good luck." He was watching her closely as he said, "And fluent, too. You're the first person I've ever met from Ballahara who didn't speak Shenrin with a heavy accent."
And the language issue reared its head again. Molly didn't speak any of the veyâr languages, or any of the languages of the other peoples of Oria, for that matter. Yet she could converse with any of them, and they with her. The necklace she wore deep in her belly, the Vodi necklace that was both her curse and her blessing, carried with it a spell that let her hear alien words—and often alien thoughts—in her own language, and spun her own words into something comprehensible to her listener.
She shrugged, as if accent were of no import.
He watched her with a steady intensity that, strangely, she did not find unnerving. She studied him in return, frankly interested.
"Why don't you walk with me a while, and I will show you the sights of this place, which was once one of the grandest and most beautiful cities on Oria."
Molly knew she shouldn't accept his invitation—but something about him drew her. It was nothing sexual, nothing illicit, not even anything emotional. She analyzed her response to him and finally decided that what drew her to him was a simple feeling of kinship, as if the two of them might understand each other. She did not let herself question too deeply the presence of a man who could understand a thing such as she was.
"I would enjoy that," she said. And followed him into the ruins.
In the Ruins, Tinhaol, Oria
The wings were a problem. They kept wanting to re-form, and the rrôn Baanraak, his body compressed for the moment into veyâr form, found that every time he became too interested in Molly and her doings, his body tried to return to his natural form. He was out of practice; he'd had more than a thousand years of mostly basking on sun-warmed rocks in the comfort of his natural form, and now, having reshaped them by magic and sheer bloody-minded determination, his bones hurt.
But she was walking with him. He had thought to lure Molly within his reach so that he might capture her again—and he had succeeded in luring her close.
But with her right there next to him, with her alive and talking and with her very nearness singing in his blood and in his shift-sore bones, suddenly he found that he did not wish to kill her again. At least not at that moment. He could let the destruction wait while he assessed the need. He found himself interested in her, and interested in her reaction to him. She was responding, not to his dull seeming—to the soothing lies that he'd placed on the surface of his mind to convince her that he was harmless—but to something deeper, something that was not a lie at all. She was responding to him.
He could feel her being drawn to what he was, and she was not repelled.
He found himself achingly curious; was she becoming more like him, even without his intervention? Or was he becoming more like her?
They ambled along the ghosts of roads, over mounds and shards, and through the bones of the city, and they talked. "What of that one?" she asked him, pointing to a heap of rubble. "Do you know what was there?" And he spun out for her a tale of what lay beneath the grass and the dirt. Or, "I cannot help but feel what this place must have been when it was full of people, full of life and color," and he would draw her a picture with words, trying to bring to life the city as he remembered it, as he had seen and experienced it, walking along the same roads, wearing this same form. She sounded so wistful, and she felt so beautiful.
The dead city still rang fresh in his memory—the place it had been before he led the rrôn and his hordes of prakka slaves against it; the place it became after. He'd never felt remorse for the attack. He'd had his reasons, and they had been valid. But seeing the place through her eyes, suddenly he felt a pang of regret that she had not shared it with him, that she had not walked these streets when they were whole, that he could not bring it back for her amusement.
He would do that if it were within his power, he realized. He would rebuild the city with a word, with a spell, and fill it once again with its stinking, crowded masses, so that she might wander through the streets and passageways, enjoying the bright colors and the babble of the markets, wandering through the libraries and the theaters.
She ached for the freedom to wander comfortably through the grand places of the world. He could feel that inside of her. He read her first life as dark and grim and lonely, where his had been wondrous. In all her existence on her homeworld—before she became the Vodi—she had never been free to move where people gathered. Among her own kind, she had suffered hellish physical pain: the absorbed pain of everyone she passed, the poisons and diseases of multitudes, all touching her, shaping her, devouring her until in self-defense she had to devour their sickness just to make the pain end. The pain of endlessly encroaching death had finally driven her into seclusion.
He had never had an experience with such a curse before. His own first life had been blissful. He had been first-egg first-clutch of one of the great rrôn-mothers of his world's last age, and was rumored to have been conceived of a mating with a god or a demon in rrôn-skin, a mark of great portent. His hatching had been attended by the notables of his sky-clan; his childhood had been pampered and full of favorable omens and auguries and budding awareness of access to magic conferred by the blood of his mysterious father; his adulthood had been an unending series of fine hunts, fine feasts, and ever-expanding acclaim and admiration. He had earned his way into the little band of world-walkers, and he had seen the potential for expansion. For greater, magnificent magic for all the rrôn.
For him, the pain had come much later, when he was capable of dealing with it. When he was capable of inflicting some pain of his own.
"Please forgive my impertinence," Molly said suddenly, and the sound of her voice snapped him back to the present, to the dead city and his itching shoulder blades, "but I have never seen a veyâr who looked like you before."
Baanraak shrugged. "I'm a transplant. My people originated far to the south and east of here. We're Tladi, also called Wanderers. I have traveled across much of Oria, seeking the scraps and whispers the past leaves behind; I washed up here some time back, and found enough of a treasure trove that I have not felt the call to wander further. I'm alone, but being alone doesn't bother me."
"Nor me. I'm used to it," Molly told him. She shrugged. "Sometimes I prefer it."
"Yes," he said. "Sometimes alone is best." He turned to face her and smiled suddenly. "We could be alone together, you and I." He laughed a little to show that he was joking. Except, of course, he wasn't.
She watched him, gaze steady and intent. "I feel I know you. Know you quite well," she said. "It's the
oddest thing. I don't, of course, but that sense of recognition lies just below the skin."
His shoulder blades itched harder, and he could feel weight gathering around them. He could feel his tailbone pressing, heavy along his spine. Could feel claws re-forming beneath his fingertips, could feel his face longing to stretch forward, could feel the mass of his true body, tucked tightly in on itself with molecules and atoms rearranged in denser, compact configurations, dragging outward in all directions as those folds of matter worked toward their natural states.
He was much more badly out of practice than he had realized.
He would be lucky to get out of her sight before he betrayed himself for what and who he was. If that happened, the two of them would have no choice but to attempt to kill each other.
"Perhaps we can meet here again sometime," he said, and smiled, hoping his smile had not grown bigger and toothier without his noticing. "But I must be going. I tire easily lately. I spent a time being so ill I thought I would not live, and some time after that recovering. And now I am better, but I must husband my strength."
She started to say something, but he held up a hand. "Meeting you has been a joy, little goddess. Should you venture in this direction on another day, perhaps you will be so kind as to walk with me again."
