Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  The tiny trickle dripped into the raging current of Baanraak's darkness and was subsumed. She could find no trace of goodness in him beyond that first thread.

  That. That was the effect of silver. That was her hope—and she could see how futile a hope it was.

  She should have known. She wasn't the first woman to wear the Vodi necklace, or to face these changes in herself, or to search for something to hang on to, for some little thread of evidence that she might become more than what she was rather than less.

  Her sister, Lauren, had come back from her traverse of the River of Souls with a message for Molly: Some people threw away their souls, and some, soulless, could create a new soul for themselves by focusing on the quality and the meaning of the life they led. But no one had ever actually done it, Lauren said. The possibility existed, but no past success stories were there to make it seem even remotely attainable.

  Molly kept seeing threads that might give her something to hang on to, but every time, those threads broke off as she reached for them—they were nothing but illusions of hope. In the end, the previous Vodian had all removed the Vodi necklace of their own free will and walked into situations that led to their final, irrevocable deaths. They did not regain their souls; they did not find their way from anti-life to true life. They just took what shreds of their humanity remained, used that to gather the strength to remove the necklace that had made them monsters, and before they turned the final corner and embraced chaos and destruction, they ended themselves. The silver hadn't saved them. It might have prolonged their existence—prolonged the survival of the tattered scraps of humanity that clung to them—but it hadn't saved them.

  Voluntary self-annihilation, Molly thought, was her happy ending, the brightest future she had to look forward to. Her bad ending would be to permit herself to become a dark god like Baanraak. To taste the death of a world and find sustenance and addiction there, and to begin to work for the deaths of other worlds to feed her hunger.

  And every time she died, she would take one step closer to that fate—to becoming what Baanraak was. Already she found his view of the universe and his place in it understandable. She did not approve of him or agree with him, but she could see how he had come to be what he was. She could even find a place in herself that pitied him for all he had suffered. Eventually she would look at him and find that their common ground outweighed everything she shared with the people she once loved. Love and compassion fallen away, hunger all that drove her, she would finally and truly be lost.

  The presence—the contamination—of silver had not stopped Baanraak from being the worst and most dreaded of all the monstrous dark gods. In fact, it might have contributed to his success—that tiny push toward order, that tiny taste of life that clung with silver might have given him an edge the dark gods who wore pure gold did not share. It might have given him layers to which they had no access. It might have made him the fiercest of the dark gods.

  She did not let herself think about what she was doing. Baanraak had finally landed, and was settling himself onto a sun-warmed rock at some distance from her. She marked the spot and disengaged carefully from his mind. He was seeking silence—mostly as a precursor to sleep, but she did not want him to find her out. That would destroy her element of surprise.

  Molly pulled mind and body back together. She became aware of her body again, of the grass tickling the back of her neck, of her breath rushing through her lungs again and her heart quickening. She lay atop the huge mound for a moment, staring up at the sky, noticing that evening was already coming. Then she rose and ran down the Fael Faen into the city to one stone arch she had walked through with Baanraak.

  She ran because she could not know how long what she needed to do would take her. She had never done it before.

  Lauren was the master gateweaver—the one who could find a path into Hell and back, should she so choose; the one who could track a whisper across worlds and make a path that would get her to the recipient ahead of the message. Molly had no such skill. But Lauren had patiently taught her the basic techniques of weaving a simple gate, one that could take her from one point to another on a single world, in a single universe. The two of them had practiced endlessly, until with focus, Molly could get herself from one point to another on Oria without damaging herself or anyone or anything else.

  Molly had been an interesting failure at moving between worlds, though. Lauren was determined that she would learn, but they were going to need more time; Molly could open and use existing gates, but when she tried to create her own, she got lost, and the gates meandered not just through space but through time. She opened gates into the past and the future, into sideways universes and places at off angles that neither she nor Lauren could even comprehend. Lauren had been both impressed and appalled. "You're the equivalent of a pitcher with a one-hundred-and-ten-mile-per-hour fastball and a wild arm; if you don't learn how to control your aim, you're going to kill someone."

  Molly didn't need to move between the worlds at the moment, though. And her slow pitch—her stay-on-my-own-world gate—would be accurate enough for what she needed.

  She took the dagger at her hip—the one she'd worn since the day a traitor in Copper House had nearly murdered Lauren right in front of her—and held it with both hands palm-up and a bit apart. She willed it to change, and in her hands it became a full sword, double-edged and razor-sharp, with a point designed for thrusting. She then willed poison onto the tip; a brutally powerful, fast-acting neurotoxin that would spread through her victim's bloodstream and paralyze both voluntary and involuntary muscles in an instant, killing him. She would have to be careful with the blade, but going after Baanraak, she would make sure her tools were the deadliest she could manage. She'd already died more than once to him. No more. This would be the last day of his existence.

  Molly considered expanding the dagger sheath to hold the blade, but decided against it. She would not be sheathing the weapon in its current form. She and the sword would go through the gate and kill Baanraak in a single motion. Then she would butcher him and gather up his resurrection rings, for like her, he wore his embedded in his body. When she had carved her way through his corpse and located them all, she would burn his body and destroy the rings…and then she would return to Copper House and Seolar and the place where she was both wanted and loved.

  Molly smiled a little at that thought. She had someone who loved her. And she was still hanging on to enough of her memories of being human, of having a soul, that knowing that mattered to her.

  Images of everything that could go wrong flashed in front of her—the gate opening in the wrong spot, or too loudly; Baanraak being awake and ready for her; Baanraak having already moved on. She shook off the worries and took a deep breath. A lot of things could go wrong, but she would simply make sure that they didn't. Sword in hand, she rested her fingers on the sun-warmed stone of the arch.

  She looked through the arch and unfocused her eyes, so that she stared not at what lay before her but at Baanraak lying on his rock. She felt with mind and heart for the tug of the place between worlds, for the energy that connected and fed all of existence. For a long moment, nothing happened, and she felt a taste of panic and of foolishness at trying to summon the road of gods for her own use.

  But then she felt the first faint, crisp snap as she connected, and power flowed toward her. She focused her attention on the unbroken passageway created by the arch, and drew in her mind the image of a child's bubble wand being dipped into bubble solution. In her mind's eye, she lifted the wand from the liquid and found an unbroken circle of iridescent film shimmering inside the bubble ring; in the real world, the soft, hypnotic green fire of the place between worlds burned in an equally thin film across the archway. Molly looked into that fire. For a moment she could see the ruins on the other side of the arch, but as she relaxed her mind and her body, she drew an ever-sharper picture of the tall, worn rock that rose above the treetops in a vast wilderness of trees, and the rrôn asl
eep on the highest point of that rock, wings settled, nose draped across rump, long tail wrapped all the way around him in a fashion she found disturbingly catlike. Asleep and viewed at a distance, Baanraak was almost…beautiful.

  Molly did not pursue that thought. Instead she moved her view around until she was looking at the juncture where his long, sinuous neck joined his body. That would be the perfect place to strike, she thought. She was bound to hit arteries that would spread the poison quickly, and with luck she'd slice vital organs on that first thrust, too. She wanted him dead quickly, because in a fight between the two of them, he had all the advantages—size, strength, built-in weapons designed by evolution to make him a nightmare predator, and tens or hundreds of thousands of years in which to perfect their use.

  Another deep breath.

  Time to go. The first part—killing him—would go quickly. The second part—making sure that this time he stayed dead—would be disgusting and time-consuming, and she didn't relish it. But when she was done, the universe would be free from Baanraak.

  She lifted the sword to the exact spot where she would run it into him, pressed the fingers of her free hand against the fire of the gate, and for just an instant created in her mind the image of holding up the bubble wand and blowing a bubble straight to Baanraak. It was a childish image…but she felt the gate open for her, if unwillingly. She stepped into it, and the energy of the universe flowed into and around her—discordant and disturbing, alive and vibrant and resonant with the flow of an eternity that did not belong to her, singing of an immortality that excluded dead, made monstrosities like her. She did not belong in the universe, the green fire sang—she had no place in it, no business being what she was, no right to draw breath. She was not welcome, not welcome, not welcome, not—and then she burst through on the other side, vaguely sick from her passage, and landed exactly where she'd intended to, sword drawn, and rammed the blade straight into the angle where Baanraak's neck joined his massive, muscled shoulder.

  The sword drove into him as if Baanraak were no more substantial than water. Molly rammed it all the way to the hilt, twisted as she yanked it back out, and felt the spurt of hot blood gush out at her as she pulled her weapon free; she took a wild overhand swing that ripped down and through his thick, pebbled hide and into muscle, the wash of red blood ruining the rainbow shimmers of his perfect opalescent blackness.

  And Baanraak roared and leapt to his feet, his head whipping around, his talons flexing, claws splayed, bellowing "You'll die for that!" in a language Molly only caught because of the magic spelled into the Vodi necklace embedded deep inside her.

  He should not have been able to move at all, but he was moving just fine. He slashed at Molly, and she swung her sword, slicing off his foreleg. Any second, she thought. Any second and he'll go down. The poison will hit.

  She swung at his neck, hoping to behead him, and he evaded her blow and blasted a stream of fire from gaping jaws onto the stump of his foreleg instead. Wound cauterized, he turned and grinned at her, and his gold eyes glittered.

  "Cobra poison?" he whispered, and a wisp of smoke curled out of one corner of his mouth. "That would work on a human. But I'm not from your world." His grin grew broader, and Molly noticed that the gush of blood from his neck had slowed to a trickle, that the gaping slash in his shoulder was closing before her eyes. He said, "I am, of course, deeply impressed, my little tracker. You got all the way to me and struck a blow before I even knew you were here, which no one has managed to do in time out of all memory."

  He laughed, and Molly felt a force lock her hands around her blade and begin twisting it around so that the point would be aimed toward her. "You're exquisite," he said. "And you and I will make such a pair. Once I have you trained, of course."

  He shook his head sadly. "I'm going to have to kill you again, you realize. Probably a lot of times."

  Molly realized that he would—that she was going to end up running herself through with her own sword because he had decided to teach her a lesson—and in that instant she visualized an explosion ripping through him, tearing him into pieces and scattering those pieces across the forest in all directions, and she willed it with every cell of her being.

  She didn't have time to consider consequences. The explosion ripped him apart—but the force tore into her, too, and sent her flying off the rock, shredded beyond salvation, torn and shattered and dying. She had only time to think, That was stupid of me….

  Night Watch Control Hub, Barâd Island, Oria

  Rekkathav had just managed to get away from Aril, climb into his bed-nest, and dig all the way beneath the sand when Aril's summons bored into his brain like a dagger.

  Locate the keth eliminators.

  That would have woken anyone up. Rekkathav scuttled from his comfortable bed, body aching from lack of sleep, head fogged, and raced to the logging sheet.

  The keth eliminators. His limbs quivered just thinking about them. A triad of the most terrifying of the dark gods, they worked the frontier worlds where live magic still ran rampant and few dark gods ventured. They specialized in clearing the path for the incursion of less-skilled dark gods. They scared the piss out of Rekkathav.

  He searched the logs, and found the trio ten worlds down, eliminating sentients who had gateweaver potential. Their notes complained that on Myr gateweaving was a recessive trait—so a few carriers would slip through their net. It was so much easier to control the problem on gateweaver-dominant worlds. He read in an update that they were having great success with witch-burnings. Witch-burnings. Rekkathav could think of dozens of different techniques that he would use to weed out gateweavers if he were one of the eliminators; he wouldn't always rely on religious pogroms and witch-hunts. Sooner or later, after all, worlds would start realizing that the people they were eliminating were the only ones who could save them.

  But they hadn't caught on so far. And the trio did get impressive results.

  He carried the sheets from his sleeping/work chamber at the back of Aril's workroom out to the Master—he'd learned that when the Master wanted information, he also wanted Rekkathav handy to put to work using it. Nor was this time any different. Aril took the sheets, studied them for a moment, then opened a gate straight through to the most recent noted contact location. Within instants he was speaking with one of the trio, though Rekkathav couldn't hear what he was saying. They passed their thoughts privately, leaving Rekkathav in the dark. When they finished, though, Aril turned to Rekkathav and said, You will follow them. Stay out of their way, and out of their sight. You will find out what happened to my Beithan assassin, and you will bring me a report of the trio's success. Here is your gate-ring. Guard it well; your duty is to return to me with news. He handed a tiny ring to Rekkathav—the ring would expand when commanded to, but would stay very tiny to guard its stability in the meantime. Go in native form, Aril added.

  Rekkathav took the ring, bowed his acquiescence, and wished fervently that he were dead. He willed himself to human form—soft, bipedal, vulnerable, weak—and stared through the holed center of the ring until the Master's gate felt him calling it and came to him. He slipped the ring on his finger then, and the ring expanded to engulf all of him.

  He raced through the tunnel of green fire; through the Infinite Song his people, scattered after the death of their world, had sung of and yearned for; and for a moment he felt guilty. He had what his people had yearned for. And he was—or would eventually be—one of the people drinking all the life out of it.

  But he'd never seen his own world; it had been dead long before a recruiter for the Night Watch had discovered his talents with magic and his total lack of moral compass and had suggested he consider a new career. He'd left off going to meeting every third day to sing of the world of sand and sea, of beaches that never ended, of great surfs and the Bountiful Tide Pool. Rekkathav had gone in search of power. And look at him. Assistant to none other than the Master of the Night Watch.

  Disposable assistant.

&n
bsp; Sent to spy on a trio of keth eliminators and a Beithan assassin.

  He and his tender human flesh and his severe shortage of legs stumbled out of the gate into a cypress swamp full of tea-brown water and cottonmouth snakes, and he discovered that sitting in a big sandbox singing "O, Hail, Bountiful Tide Pool, Thanks for Fishes Tender" might not have been such a bad thing after all. It had been boring. He'd thought being bored was a bad thing…once.

  CHAPTER 7

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  THE SENTINELS Were still looking at him with that expression of awe and yearning in their eyes, the name Thor shaped on their lips, when the gate opened into Cat Creek.

  Heyr felt it snap wide; at the same instant, the Sentinel sitting in the mirror-gate yelped and toppled out onto the floor, blasted by flaring green fire and a push of dark energy that twisted Heyr's gut. A line of darkness edged the flare of energy in the mirror-gate. The shape of that energy slid along Heyr's nerves—dark and ugly and insatiably hungry. The gate had opened somewhere on the periphery of Cat Creek, close to town, but not in it. Like Heyr, this trouble made no secret of its arrival. He knew the shape and the signature of the things that had made that gate, and he was torn between disbelief and genuine fear. They'd come in south of town, he thought. They'd come for Lauren, and for anything that stood between her and them.