by Holly Lisle
Pete liked the whisper, too. Thought it was a nice touch. He happened to know that June Bug could hear a mouse fart in the next room, but no one could call her on it.
Heyr said, "You think anyone questions that women can be heroes when your Lauren and her sister are making the first effective stand ever against the dark gods…" His voice trailed off as the Sentinels turned to stare at him.
Pete's heart sank. Clearly he should have made sure Heyr knew Molly and Lauren and their activities were a secret. That Molly's existence was a secret.
Everyone stared at Heyr. But then…then they turned to look at Pete. In most eyes, Pete saw shock or disbelief. Eric looked pissed. June Bug looked…amused, oddly. The silence was so heavy the weight of it damn near pushed all the air out of the room. This was the sort of slip that cost people their lives. And he couldn't fix it.
And then Eric said, "The last I heard, Molly was dead and buried out in the cemetery. Seems I've managed to fall a little out of the loop. But you're with Lauren all the time. So my guess is you knew about this."
Pete took a deep breath. "Yeah. I knew. Molly came back to life," he said. "Downworld. In Oria."
Eric raised an eyebrow, "Well, how convenient for her. And when did this little miracle happen?"
"Three—four months ago?"
"Mmmm. And in three, maybe four months, you've been so busy that you couldn't take the time to say, 'Oh, by the way, Eric, Molly McColl has come back from the dead, and she and Lauren are fooling around in Oria with God-only-knows-what, and maybe you might want to talk to the two of them. Maybe. You might." He glowered at Pete. "All those times when we're sitting in the office shooting the shit, it just never occurred to you that this might be an interesting topic of conversation. Or that I might have some thoughts on it. Or—Heaven forbid—an opinion."
"I know what they're doing," Pete said.
"Well. How very nice for you. Would you mind sharing this information with the rest of us—since apparently the dark gods aren't traipsing around inside Lauren's house with big knives and poisoned claws just because it seems like it might be fun. We've been thinking this was the dark gods' final push to end the world. If it isn't, and if we're going to get to fight and die for Lauren's and Molly's little project instead, I'd goddamn well like to know what we're dying for."
"It's the end of the world, all right," Heyr said from his place on the wall. "But the dark gods have suddenly run into a snag."
Eric glanced for just a second at Heyr, then turned back to Pete. He was furious. From the looks on their faces, so were the rest of the Sentinels—still excluding June Bug. Pete had told Lauren she ought to come clean with everyone and that it would have been better that way, or at least it wouldn't have been worse.
Now—well, now it was definitely worse.
"They're bringing magic back to Earth," Eric said.
"We can't use magic here," Pete said. "But the dark gods can. The old gods can, too."
Eric's face turned a dark, beefy red. "THE OLD GODS ALL LEFT!"
The shout shook all of them up. Pete had never seen Eric really lose his temper, and had never heard him roar like that. Ever.
And then Heyr stood up, and in a voice as fierce as Eric's, though more contained, he said, "The cowards among the old gods have fled, this is true. And the weak. But some among the Æsir still stand side by side with men, nor are the Æsir the last of the old gods still here. Not all have fled."
Eric wasn't cowed. "Well, maybe they're still hanging around in Wisconsin, but they packed their toothbrushes and left this part of the world three or four months"—he paused and stared at Pete—"ago. About the same time that Molly came back."
And then everyone was staring at Pete again.
"Healthy magic—live energy, the stuff that holds the universe together and that makes the gates—is what keeps this world alive, and you know it," Pete said. "You know it. Lauren is bringing healthy magic back. Molly is hunting down the Night Watch and killing them off. How can you be against that?"
Eric watched him, his distaste clear. "If they're doing such a good thing, why are they hiding it?"
"How about because you people murdered Lauren's parents for working toward this same goal?"
Heyr said, "That certainly would have to be considered. I had not thought to find myself among murderers."
"None of the people who killed Lauren's parents are still alive," June Bug said. She looked, at that moment, very old and painfully sad. "A couple of people here knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it. I let her parents know so that they could get away; by doing that, I actually got them killed. They fled at my recommendation—I didn't know their car had been tampered with." Pete saw the glimmer of tears sliding down her cheeks.
"Lauren wants to fulfill her destiny, but she doesn't want to be killed by some zealot among you, or to have her child killed," Pete said. He stood up and walked to the table at the front of the room. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Eric. "When she told me what she needed to do, I supported her. And Molly. They're doing what you can't, and what I can't. If they succeed, we get our world back."
Raymond Smetty, the transfer from Enigma, Georgia—whose future as a college football star had been destroyed by a knee injury during his last high school game—said, "The first thing you learn from your mentor is that you don't act outside the Sentinels. Oh…but you didn't have a mentor, Pete." He turned to Eric. "And this is why well-run Sentinel crews don't let outsiders in. If you kill trouble before it starts, you don't have trouble."
Everyone started shouting then, and Pete's head began throbbing. If only Heyr had kept his mouth shut.
And now the threads of the conversation were getting ugly—Raymond Smetty, that miserable bastard, pushing to have Eric removed as head of the group, pushing to send Lauren and Jake and Molly and him before a Sentinel tribunal with a recommendation to make all of them disappear, and June Bug about ready to kill Raymond, and Betty Kay sitting in the corner weeping, and Darlene siding with Raymond for the first time ever.
And then Heyr slammed his fist on something and bellowed "SILENCE!" and the room shook.
All conversation stopped. Pete would have taken odds that his wasn't the only heart that had almost stopped, too. Everyone looked at Heyr.
"I'm not here by accident," Heyr said. His voice had returned to a conversational level, but it didn't brook argument or interruption. Pete had never seen anyone look more convincingly terrifying. "I followed the trails of the first fresh magic to reach this world since Kerras fell. The tracks were very well hidden, but if I could follow them, so can others. For the first time ever—ever—someone is doing something that is reversing the damage done by the Night Watch. For the first time ever, a world has a chance of coming back. Your Lauren is the reason. She is doing something no one else could do, and she is vulnerable.
"I've come to fight for her. To protect her. Others will follow the same trails I did, and they will get here as well—either soon or later, but they will arrive—and they will declare themselves for the path of life or for the path of death. Because war is coming, you fools. War—and not a war of men, but a war of gods. The Night Watch has seen its own demise written in her work, and they are coming for her."
To Pete's astonishment, Raymond Smetty now stood, glaring, and said to Heyr, "And I still say send them before a tribunal, and eliminate all three of them. Lauren, Molly, and the kid. Because in case you hadn't noticed, in a war between gods, all the gods around here are playing on the other team."
Heyr glanced around the room and smiled, an unnerving, cannibal-looking-over-the-menu smile that made Pete's skin crawl. Heyr's eyes got bluer, though Pete would have thought that impossible. His hair looked redder. He stood taller, and his shoulders grew broader, and his muscles all flexed. Outside, thunder exploded out of a clear blue sky and lightning crashed all around the building, and rain poured out of nowhere in sheets and buckets. Heyr began to glow, and his voice took on a resonance th
at rattled the walls and floor. "Look at me, that you will know me. I do not concern myself in the petty squabbles of men, but in a war between gods, I am still first, and greatest." Plaster dust rattled loose from the ceiling.
Pete almost couldn't tear his eyes away. But he looked at the others in the room, and on their faces he saw the same things that he was feeling. Wonder. Amazement. Awe. On their lips, one word, whispered.
Thor.
CHAPTER 6
The Wilds of Southern Oria
BAANRAAK WORRIED. This was foreign to him; he was not by nature a worrier. A thinker, a planner—yes. But he saw little benefit in endlessly looping through the details of things that could not be changed or corrected, and he did not like finding himself constantly returning to three threads.
He set his wings and spiraled upward in a good, strong thermal, letting the sun warm him and the wind cool him, trying to find some peace in the rush of air past his skin. But peace eluded him.
Three threads.
One. He had not killed Molly and claimed her, though she had been within his reach.
Two. Something inside of him was twisting him away from his true nature.
Three. Someone had sabotaged one of his resurrection rings, contaminating gold with silver, and he blamed that contamination for both one and two.
The silver had to have been there all along, didn't it? Barring his recent clashes with Molly, he had not died in thousands of years. If any of Molly's people had found his many rings, they would not have tampered with them, had such tampering even been possible; they would have destroyed them. At his last prior death, thousands of years ago, he had been the Master of the Night Watch—and again, anyone coming across his rings while he was temporarily dead would have destroyed them. Or had the contamination come from a ring he'd added later, one he'd taken as a trophy from a valiant opponent?
But those were all lesser rings. They served as an added layer of protection for him, in that if he were killed and his main ring destroyed, one of those he'd added later might still bring him back to life, if in lesser form. The secondary rings, though, had little power over him so long as the first, which held all of who he was, still existed.
So he thought the contamination had to be in that ring alone. And if that were true, then he was betrayed at the moment of its forging. So why? And by whom? The makers of his ring had known him. They'd created it for him alone. What benefit had they hoped to gain by introducing a thread of order into the essential chaos of the spell that would reanimate him?
Gold was the metal of chaos, silver the metal of order. Only gold could be used to bind a spell that would create a dark god—that could hold the memories and rebuild flesh once life and soul had fled a corpse. Such magic ran counter to the order of the universe. It drew its energy from the destruction of life to create a creature with an appearance of life, but animated by anti-life. It created a moving, breathing, thinking, soulless monster, eternally hungry for destruction, hungry to create more of the power that fed it by wreaking havoc, spreading death. For that reason, vast hoards of gold drew evil to themselves—they summoned chaos. Their gleam, their beauty, their attraction came from terrifying places, and gold became an obsession because of the energy that it drew to it and because of the power it could confer.
Silver was different. Silver channeled life energies, repelled anti-life, drank from the well of order, not chaos. Silver clung to passions and emotions the way gold clung to logic and fact.
The metals, mixed, became dangerous and unpredictable, with the energies they channeled flowing erratically. Silver…confused things.
Like his goal to capture Molly, slaughter and rebuild her repeatedly until all emotion washed out of her, until he could train her as his successor. His heir. She had been within his reach, and part of him was furious that he had let her slip from his grasp when he could have taken her and returned to the plan that her sister and an army of veyâr and the disruption of other dark gods had interrupted some months before.
The thermal he'd been riding petered out and Baanraak had to work to keep himself aloft, flapping his way to the airspace above a massive sun-warmed boulder that rose through the canopy of trees beneath him. He caught the up-draft he knew he'd find there and set his wings again, spiraling, thinking.
Silver. It was the cause of his failure, why he felt as well as thought. It was why some confused emotion had moved him to spare Molly's life, had let him walk with her and talk with her and find some…some amusement in her company and then walk away. Silver was the poison killing his appetite, too—dulling his taste for the death of worlds and the magnificent power that flowed from drinking it in, devouring it, reveling in it.
Silver had to have had a part in his departure from the Night Watch; no one before him had willingly walked away from the Mastery. No one after him had, either. Masters of the Night Watch stepped down when their successors murdered them and destroyed their resurrection rings. Yet after being the most effective and most successful Master in the history of the Night Watch, he had one day handed rule over to his chosen successor and walked away. He thought at the time that he had simply lived too long—that he had grown bored and weary with the game. But boredom and weariness were both functions of life, not of anti-life. They were feelings, not thoughts.
Above all else, in the tens of thousands of years that he had existed as a dark god, Baanraak had been his own anchor in rough seas, his own shelter in storms, his own trusted advisor and sole confidant. He'd been sure that he knew himself, every bit of himself, and that he understood who and what he was, and always would.
In the last handful of months, in a space of time that was the merest eyeblink of his existence, every bit of that assurance had fallen away. He had discovered that he was not one Baanraak, but two: a Baanraak born of gold and a Baanraak born of silver. And the second Baanraak had secrets he was hiding from the first. Now every decision, every thought, every impulse became suspect.
Baanraak did not want to think anymore, at least not for a while. The boulder below him looked pleasant and secure, its peak inaccessible from the ground, all approaches clearly visible from the air.
He dropped downward, backwinging the last bit of his landing and dropping neatly to the warm sandstone surface.
He had not been to this place before. He looked around, liking what he saw: sun-scoured, moss-dappled rock, a few little bits and starts of plant life working their way from narrow crevasses, and below, a forest rich with the smell and sound of life. He could stay here for a while, sleep, eat, fall into stillness and let himself rest. Eventually he would have to figure out what the betrayal of silver meant to him, but that was not an exercise for the moment.
Sleep first.
Food second.
All else would follow.
Fael Faen Warrior Peak, Tinhaol, Oria
Molly had been at her task all day, patiently tracking Baanraak. She sprawled on her back atop the Fael Faen mound, eyes closed, shielded from notice by delicate magic and her utter stillness. Her stillness penetrated not just the movement of muscle and bone, but of breath and thought, so that she would have seemed dead to any who came upon her who had the capacity to see her in the first place. But she was alive. And aware. Baanraak's thoughts flowed over her, multilayered, complex, as fascinating as a puzzlebox to her. Observing from the outside, she could see patterns to them that she doubted even Baanraak would be able to discern—the upper layer ran quickly back and forth over his worries. Fear of contamination by silver. Questions about his own judgment. Worries over his obsession with her, and questions about the origin of that obsession—whether he was drawn to her through gold or silver.
Beneath that upper layer, a watchful second layer. Baanraak the hunter, scanning outward in all directions with every sense. This was a part of him so ingrained by use it almost didn't feel like thought. He had no other blind spots that she could discover, except the one in which she lay. At the moment he was not looking inward. Had he been, and had
something disturbed her, he would have found her watching. But the noise of his worries precluded his noticing a silent pool of otherness lying within his thoughts.
Finally, deeper sublayers—first and most powerful, a dark, cold river of hunger, death, destruction and chaos, heavy and terrifying, wide as the Mississippi. Lying within its currents, Molly could feel its pull, as irresistible as gravity. Her own echoing hungers grew keen and sharp. The capacity for chaos and the yearning to feed on destruction lay within her, deeper and stronger than she dared let anyone know, growing more fierce each time she died. In the river of Baanraak's dark currents, she saw her own reflection, and hated what she saw.
A second stream fed into that powerful river—a thin, bright trickle—a yearning toward order, toward light, toward…
Molly almost lost her focus, almost betrayed her presence to Baanraak. Despair would have given her away, and she lay so close to that edge.
