Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  He said, "You do paranoia really well, you know that? Your theory could almost make sense."

  Lauren grinned. This ground she'd been over on more than one occasion. Brian had been a conspiracy theory buff; she knew major details of some of the theories he'd thought most likely to hold some truth. The Roswell incident had been at the top of his list. She told Pete, "It's a simple application of Occam's razor—One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything. Or, more plainly, the simplest explanation is usually the truest. We know upworlders move through here regularly and have for some time. We know the dark gods are out to get us, and that they're doing it by feeding us technology and baiting us to fight each other. So if we posit the dark gods as the source of the Roswell crash, we have to make no wild-ass guesses about how the crash might have occurred. That gets an Occam score of zero—the best there is." She turned in her seat to look straight at him, and said, "Now look at the aliens-from-space theory. The closest star to us is four light-years away, more or less. Right?"

  "Right."

  "So we're looking at the use of either wormhole technology, or faster-than-light travel, or some other really amazing scientific discovery that hasn't shown up on our radar yet, because if it were a slow ship, it would have had to be a lot bigger to hold all the supplies and the generations of pilots."

  Pete considered that for a minute. "I might have a simple explanation that would still let it be extraterrestrials. How about just flying the thing from there to here with a gate?"

  Lauren shook her head. "I don't think that can be done. I don't think there's a way to get a fix on a distant planet to create a gate from one to the other." She felt her cheeks grow hot and said, "I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I was going to get a moon rock for Jake. I thought it would be kind of neat to have one, and I figured that it would be easy enough to get. After all, you can just look right up and see the moon. Straight shot at your target."

  "Makes sense."

  "You'd think so." Lauren sighed. "I waited for a night with clear skies and a full moon, and fixed a little mirror in the window, big enough for my hand to go through and pull back a nice-sized rock, and I looked at the moon, to see exactly the spot I was shooting for, and when I had it, I tried to make a gate."

  Pete looked bemused. "I'm guessing it didn't work."

  "I didn't even come close. In the mirror, I couldn't get the moon to hold still long enough to see it, much less fix on it. The closer I took my image to the surface, the faster it raced past. I could no more have opened a gate on the moon than I could have walked there on foot."

  "Moving bodies problem," Pete said thoughtfully, in a voice that suggested he was talking more to himself than to her.

  "What?"

  "What? Oh. What you were doing—it's like when you look through a fixed telescope at a distant object, the object will move out of the telescope's range. To keep the object in range, the telescope has to rotate to compensate for the movement of the Earth. But that doesn't even begin to describe all the movements in the relationship. The object moves in relationship to Earth. It also moves through space. And the finer the focus you need, the more those different sets of movement are going to mess you up."

  "That's the problem then. Gates are fixed points, with a fixed path between them."

  "And there is no way to have two fixed points and a fixed path with objects that are all moving relative to each other and relative to their suns and relative to their galaxies and relative to all of space."

  "So the Roswell aliens didn't get here from another planet by gate," Lauren said, grinning a little. "By the way, thank you. I hadn't actually thought through why that didn't work."

  Pete said, "Then why do the gates through to all the worlds you can reach work?"

  Lauren said, "That's easy. They're all this world. They aren't just fixed in relationship to each other. They are each other. Top floor, middle floor, bottom floor, basement of the same house. The stairs might not work too well during earthquakes and tornadoes, but the rest of the time they're fine."

  "Oria's day is longer than Earth's. On some of the downworlds, the day is shorter. Some of them have weird orbits. So they're still moving in different ways relative to each other."

  Lauren shook her head. "They're the same planet. The differences are like…weather. Rainy day, sunny day, hurricane, blizzard—they're all external, and if you're inside, you can still use the stairs." She leaned her head back on the seat and rested her arms on the armrests. "Anyway, back to your aliens—the bodies-in-motion problem is one point against the space-aliens-in-Roswell theory. You have to posit interstellar travel."

  "Right."

  "The second theory against is visibility. Why would aliens be coming from as close as four light-years away, or as far as a million light-years away, to here? It's like having international travelers choose Cat Creek as their vacation destination. It just isn't going to happen. People might drop off on their way through Cat Creek, though, so even that analogy doesn't really work. Our galaxy is small, it's isolated in space, and our planet is way out on one of the arms, isolated even in our own galaxy. This planet is literally in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to look at this as a reasonable destination, or even as a convenient stop-off on the way to somewhere else." She gave him a wry little smile. "So that's two points against the theory of space aliens."

  "It was probably a plant," he agreed. "I just hate thinking of things in terms of conspiracy."

  Lauren looked at him and shook her head, and spread her hands wide. "Pete…I've reached the point where I think conspiracy is all there is. Look at where we are. At what we're doing. Every bizarre theory, crackpot delusion, and old myth I ever heard of is turning out to be true. Not true in the 'Well, the ancients turned their most favorite citizens into gods, so they really did exist—sort of' brand of true, either. We have ghosts in the kitchen, monsters in the bedroom, aliens all over the place, gods and dragons and probably elves, and doors that open up out of nowhere and swallow passersby, and magic, and secret cabals dedicated to good and to evil, and a coming Armageddon, and it's all been there all along, right under our noses…" She ran out of steam and sat there staring at him, and she sighed heavily.

  "And what's next?" He nodded and smiled at her, looking like he understood. "Spontaneous human combustion, and gnomes in the garden and pixies in the milk, no doubt."

  She closed her eyes. "Probably. It's the Grand Unified Field Conspiracy Theory—everything you ever scoffed at is true, and they really are all out to get you."

  "At least it's not random. It all fits—it all has the same background explanation, no matter how strange the foreground may look. It's something you can make sense of, and once you know why—why these things are happening, why these people and creatures are involved—you can start working on how—how to stop them, how to beat them, how to fix things." He reached over and patted her knee. "And you've done that, Lauren. You figured it out. You put the pieces together and figured out the how that people who aren't even human have been looking for since maybe before our world was even born." He slowed down again as they headed into Raeford.

  "Not that long. I don't think the oldest rrôn are older than about ten…maybe fifteen thousand years. Which is old, but not billions of years old. And the rrôn were around when the first worlds died."

  "Still. People have been trying to save things for a very long time. You're the first one who succeeded."

  Lauren looked back out the window again. "I wish that were true."

  "Of course it's true. If it weren't true, the worldchain wouldn't still be dying."

  Lauren pressed her cheek against the glass and stared down at the road running beneath her, and remembered being a kid and feeling safe. "That's not actually the only explanation," she said. "Think Occam's razor. What's the simplest explanation for why no one has ever managed to fix things?"

  She could feel him looking at her, but he didn't say anything
.

  After a while she said, "They might have just killed all the ones who figured it out before."

  CHAPTER 9

  Cat Creek

  ERIC LAY ON HIS BELLY in the tall grass to one side of the road, weapon braced on a fallen log, finger on the trigger. His mouth was dry, his palms were sweating, and his gut churned and twisted. He could feel them coming—he could feel the weight of magic in the air and the sick dread of the kids to either side of him, who had trained for a lot of emergency situations before they became Sentinels, but not for shooting dark gods.

  The Sentinels had made a point of avoiding all nonhumans, both upworlders and downworlders. They'd had an isolationist policy, because that had seemed to make the most sense. The dark gods only came gunning for people who directly involved themselves in dark god business. And since the Sentinels had never done that, they were left alone to police human magic misuse and to hold back the tide of devastation that was rolling toward them.

  Eric shifted a little as the tree root digging itself into his hipbone finally caught his attention.

  The Sentinels had prided themselves on being so secretive, on always keeping themselves and their activities below the radar of the enemies they fought. But they hadn't been a secret to the gods, old or dark. They'd simply been too ineffective to bother about. The first time someone did something that actually threatened the dark gods' goals, they reacted fast enough. And kept reacting when their first shot missed.

  To his right, Betty Kay sneezed, muffling it pretty well, but probably not well enough. To his left, Raymond Smetty squirmed and fidgeted with his weapon and glanced up at the truck, pulled off to the side of the road beside his position. The hair on Eric's arms stood up. Who'd put Smetty closest to the truck? And the keys were still in it, weren't they? Thor and Loki had been positioning people, telling them where to fire and when…but who had decided Smetty, the Sentinel Eric marked as the least dedicated, the least reliable, and the most likely to bolt in the face of real trouble, needed to be right next to the means by which he might bolt? Who had done that?

  Eric ran the last quarter of an hour back in his mind and saw what he'd feared to see. It had been Loki. Loki, grinning, leaning close to Raymond Smetty's ear and whispering something that made Smetty smile.

  Loki was a troublemaker, a trickster, a deceiver. Loki played games with people because he could, because it amused him to do so.

  Eric wanted to wave Smetty over to him, tell him to change places. But there wasn't time. The keth moved into view, coming over the rise.

  He would have known them anywhere—he'd spent time pretending to be one, but he could see that he'd been a poor imitation. They were…majestic.

  Slender as reeds, twice as tall as a man, they moved forward with inhuman grace, gazellelike. Two of the three had hair red as flame. The third was golden. The hair, braided into a million tiny braids, floated around them as if it was alive. Medusas, he thought, who could turn a man to stone with a single gaze. They had strangely beautiful faces—enormous almond eyes black as jet, tiny rosebud mouths, nearly invisible noses. They wore beautiful, complex gowns, gauzy and brilliantly colored and patterned, that lifted and swirled, cloudlike, in the faintest of breezes.

  Compared with them, Thor and Loki were lumpish and gnomish and crude. Compared to them, he was even less. He was shameful. Hideous. Something that should be hidden—that should be destroyed.

  He started, slowly, to turn his weapon around, to point it toward himself. He didn't deserve to live. He was ashamed of himself, ashamed for breathing air and eating food, for poisoning the world with his existence.

  Eric had the muzzle against his chest. Was fumbling with his shoe, to get it off so that he could pull the trigger with his toe, when he caught movement to his left and saw Raymond Smetty leap up and hit something in the back of the truck.

  The box, he thought dully. The one that Loki brought, that Thor didn't want.

  And then his mind cleared, and he realized what he had almost done—what the keth had almost pushed him to, so smoothly and easily that he hadn't even felt their knives slide beneath his skin. He turned the weapon in the right direction, lined them up in his sights, and began to fire.

  Around him, the other Sentinels did the same. Even Smetty—Smetty, who Eric guessed had been Loki's choice for least likely to listen to Thor and Eric, who represented authority, and who was most likely to do something simply because he thought he shouldn't.

  The Sentinels hit the keth. He could see blood spatter, could see the impact of the bullets and whatever else he and the other Sentinels were sending at the dark gods. But the keth did not fall. Fire sprang up around them, dark and swirling—reverse-image rainbows—and fire erupted from them, hard fast arcs that hit every one of the Sentinels' positions.

  Eric thought he was dead. Closed his eyes against the blinding explosion of light around him. Heard the silence, and pulled the trigger hard, willing the keth dead even though on Earth his will held no magic, and opened his eyes to find a glow surrounding him. The shield Loki had brought. It worked. He wasn't dead yet, and neither were his people. Firing started again from all around him.

  The keth moved closer, not splitting up or getting off the road. That, he thought, was hubris—to be so sure of victory that they did not act defensively. Or maybe it was Loki's box, doing something to them that kept them from thinking clearly. The rules had changed, the playing field had evened out, the instant Smetty had switched on the box….

  Right. They were coming for the box, because if they could turn that off, he and the other Sentinels would fall to them.

  They fired and the bullets hit, but the keth weren't falling. They kept coming. They were healing their own wounds as fast as he and the other Sentinels made them, and though their once-beautiful robes were blood-soaked and cut to ribbons, the keth bore no permanent harm.

  Everything he and the other Sentinels could do was not enough. Die, you bastards—DIE! he thought. But they didn't.

  Then the bright morning sky went black in an instant, and thunder rumbled and lightning crashed, blinding, deafening, hitting the keth, binding them to the road, and the sharp breath of ozone and the stink of burning flesh filled the air. Heyr stepped onto the road behind them, clearly revealed as Thor, with his hair flying in the sudden wind and with his hammer in his hand. He sang, louder than the constant crashing of the thunder—a warrior's song in the language of another place, another time—and unholy joy lit his eyes and shone from his face. He threw Mjollnir, the war hammer, and the head of one of the keth exploded; the lightning incinerated the dark god in an instant. Though it was too bright to watch—though the whole thing burned itself into his retinas and Eric thought he would be blinded as well as deafened once this was done—he could not look away.

  Heyr-Thor's war hammer flew back into his gloved hand, and he threw it again, and the second keth fell, exploded, and was incinerated. A second catch, a third throw, a third death.

  The lightning stopped. The constant bombardment of the thunder stopped. Eric could see only the flashes of retinal afterburn; he could hear nothing at all. He lay in pouring rain, blind and deaf, blinking rain out of his face, wondering if he dared stand up until his vision cleared.

  He heard before he saw—heard faint voices that became louder, calling names. "Eric?" "Betty Kay?" "Darlene?" "I'm here—Darlene, that is." "June Bug?" "Mayhem?" "George?" "Louisa?" "Raymond?"

  "I'm here!" Eric shouted.

  He heard George Mercer's drawled "Here," and June Bug's voice, and Mayhem's. And after a moment Raymond and Louisa called out, too. But not Betty Kay.

  Then vision returned, though the world looked bleached out and pale to him, and ghostly afterimages of the three burning dark gods clouded everything.

  The others were standing up with their weapons pointed down or resting on their shoulders; all of them were looking around.

  "Nothing from Betty Kay," June Bug said.

  She'd been on the left flank, right up
against the woods. Eric had thought that the safest place to put her—she'd never been in a fight, and he guessed that of all of them, she would be the one most likely to panic.

  Heyr and Loki were at the truck, arguing about the box. Raymond Smetty stood next to Loki and a little behind him, looking defiant. Eric could see everyone else. But not Betty Kay. And he remembered the first attack of the keth, the subtle mind manipulation, and he knew what he was going to find.

  He took off for Betty Kay's position at a run, praying that he was wrong and that he'd find her alive, and knowing that he wouldn't.

  He found the place where she'd hidden, the tall grass beaten down flat. But of her, no sign. Not her weapon, not any blood, no body.

  She'd run. He could understand that. She'd fled before the keth got there. She was a kid, she was too tender to be a Sentinel, she'd washed out. But he could understand that. Not everyone could go into battle. Many soldiers were found after battles with their weapons unfired—and no one was going to mistake Betty Kay for a soldier. She could go back home to Ohio to be somebody's nice wife, Eric thought. They would have to blank out her memories of the Sentinels, but the Sentinels had been using that spell for a long time. It meant she got to live.