Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  "Do you? Then you have to let me stay with you. I hope to convince others to share my burden—to join me as immortals and as gods, but the weight I carry has proven too much for almost all of the old gods. It is heavy beyond all reason, and it may be that I alone can stand against the horrors that will come for you. You have to let me protect you. You're alone, you and your boy. The biggest and worst nightmares in the universe are coming after you, and even though we beat them today, they're going to keep coming. Without me, they'll eventually get to you. And then you will die, and Earth, which is the last repository for all of humankind through all the ages, will come to an end. And some little smattering of humankind will flee downworld, lost, refugees forever after with only memories of what they once had."

  CHAPTER 12

  Kerras—Baanraak of Silver and Gold

  BAANRAAK ARRIVED ON the dark side of Kerras in the cold—the bitter, vile, airless cold. He'd expected to have to struggle to find enough live magic on the planet to form a pocket of atmosphere around his body that he could keep warm and full of oxygen. Instead, the magic he needed was right there, rich and live and plentiful. It caused him physical pain to use it, though—it was clearly hers, the sister's. He knew her name if he thought about it—Molly had thought of her sister. Lauren. Yes. Lauren with one child, and the power to reshape a worldchain. Lauren had found a way to place a magic siphon on Kerras. And Baanraak was going to be dependent on it as long as he was here.

  He closed his eyes and breathed the layer of air that surrounded him, and made it warm. It was already sweet, irrevocably tainted by the magical energy that had transformed it.

  But he liked sweet air. He liked sun-warmed rocks, too, and the sound of tall grasses rustling in the breeze, and the sight of Vraish wildlife—eons extinct but never far from his memory. On this airless, icebound rock he now found enough magic that he could create a little pocket of his long-gone world. He could give himself a gift no other dark god had experienced—the luxury of going home, if only in a little way and for a little while.

  He would have to use live magic to do it, and that would cause him a great deal of pain. But, by the Egg, it would be better than lying on a frozen rock surrounded by nothing but ice and snow and howling winds.

  Baanraak closed his eyes. Some things one had to do without permitting oneself excessive time to think—if he allowed himself to think about this, he would find reasons to talk himself out of it. It probably was a very bad idea. But suddenly he realized that the air that surrounded him smelled exactly like Vraish air, which he had not smelled since he'd fled his world at its destruction, certain that he would not miss it. And the feeling of homesickness overwhelmed him.

  Just a little pocket, he thought, and inhaled the burning magic deeply. He fought the pain, and when he could move past it, Baanraak, with his eyes tightly closed, breathed out a pocket of air and warmth. He did not permit himself to look, for the eyes could be deceived and the art destroyed.

  He inhaled. Held the magic through agonizing pain. Exhaled, expanding the sphere of warmth and atmosphere, shaping it, controlling the live magic with the same skill and precision that he controlled death magic. The techniques were the same; only the materials and the results differed.

  Through a dozen breaths, he brought the magic into himself and shaped it outward, expanding his bubble until it was large enough that he would be able to fly, if only a little, and to hunt, if only a little, and to swim in a charming, if very small, lake.

  With his eyes still tightly closed, Baanraak began to shape. A night breeze. The rustling of tall grass. The lapping of a lake at its shores. The sound of ceyrji—little night insects—buzzing and chuckling. The low hoots and grunts of a herd of felka, his preferred prey. The scents of lizards and birds and little saurids, the chitters and rustlings. And beneath his four feet, the wonderful rightness of the land as it spread away from him in all directions, transforming.

  The place felt right—right in a way that nothing had since his world died.

  But he was not done yet.

  He pressed his body flat to the ground and breathed in the magic once more, paying close attention this time to where it came from. It bubbled up from deep within the earth, its source hidden from even his closest study. Very well, then. If he could not find the source, he would create a scavenger to sweep up the magic as it was released. He wouldn't need the source that way. He didn't feel like doing maintenance work to keep this little pocket of his alive. If he was going for illusion, he decided he would have the whole illusion, and be able to spend this time in his world simply basking on his rock and eating tasty things. He had no wish to be reminded of the artificiality of his little hideaway by its constant need for upkeep. So he set his scavenger to funnel all the magic he could get from Lauren's siphon into his little domain, and set that magic to maintain the place in working condition.

  When he was done, he lay for a while on his belly, waiting for the searing pain caused by handling live magic to subside. The stillness felt good, and the sounds of the place were like being held by his mother in the nest, when she had wrapped herself around him and they had wound necks and tails in loving embrace.

  Warmth touched his right wing tip, and he raised his head and looked. The sun was coming up over the eastern horizon, between the rocks from his family's outcropping, reflected in his family's lake. The grass waved, a herd of felka strolled in front of him, as yet unhunted and unwary, and just overhead, a pair of mating black-drops looped and rolled.

  The air smelled right, the sky looked right, the land felt right, and suddenly it was all too much for him.

  This was what he and the rest of the dark gods had lost. Had given up voluntarily. No, not even that. Had destroyed willfully. This little pocket of home brought back to him the spire cities of the rrôn carved from whole mountains, and the great vast plains filled with game—husbanded, cherished, and harvested with care and reverence. The halls of records, in which were kept tablets of the epic song cycles of the rrôn. The holy caverns that wound deep into the belly of the earth.

  Tears again filled his eyes, but he blinked them back. Instead, he stood up, launched himself into the air, and flew to the top of his rock.

  That proved to be a mistake. Flat on his belly on the ground, his little world looked and felt complete. But from the high vantage of the rocks, he could see its edges, carved out of sheets of snow and airless rock. And it only showed him that he was not home. It only dug truth's talons deeper into him, that he would never be home again.

  He took a deep breath, and the air that filled his lungs smelled so sweet, but it burned of her. Of Lauren, the sister.

  Baanraak wondered if any of the surviving live rrôn—those that had eschewed the immortality of dark godhood for life and parenthood and the continuation of the species—remembered any of the song cycles. He didn't imagine that they did. Why would they? The world they celebrated was millennia dead, along with everything on it.

  He remembered, though.

  He dug his talons into the rock, anchoring himself, and began booming his wings, remembering the rhythms of the Cycle of the Hunt. He began chanting softly the list of the sacred game.

  Felka, khroga, grorvash, rrogvall,

  Magwe, muurrhag, droovna, harrnak,

  Durgakar, goforhar, togi,

  Rradernak, formino, baghak…

  Closing his eyes, he could make it all feel real again. He could recall the voices of the chanters, the crooners, and the murmurers, all winding together in and out of each other to the beat of the steady booming of the wings of the hundred rrôn crouched upon their singing rocks as the sun rose, and again as the sun set, with necks upraised and eyes closed, lost in the hypnotic bliss of the chant. Gripping that rock, chanting the old chants, the dust of lost worlds and the stains of alien places and alien civilizations and alien people fell away from him, and he was, for a moment, wild again. Rrôn without taint and without compromise. The living hunter of live food, the hot-blooded drake
rrôn lusting after the lithe young broodies.

  He chanted through the dozen lines of the List of Choice Herd Beasts and the three dozen lines of the List of Choice Solitary Game Beasts, and because no one had sung the full Cycle of the Hunt in long ages, and it would be disrespectful to sing only the short Choice lists—once known simply as the Daily Devotion—he continued with the full cycle: the List of Game Fishes; the List of Flying Game; the tedious but necessary List of Inedibles; and the sometimes whimsical List of Lesser Creatures, with its staccato beat and its famed Insults to the Parasites stanzas. The Cycle of the Hunt was both prayer and celebration, and he performed it with full reverence, though he longed for the backup of the full chorus—the crooners carrying the cycle's ancient melody, the murmurers providing commentary on the best way to hunt each category of beasts, with asides on famous hunting accidents and blunders.

  When he was finished, he opened his eyes and bowed to the sun, for this was tradition, and the final reverence of the morning. And then he launched from his rocky perch like an arrow and plummeted into the heart of the herd, and killed the first felka in time out of memory.

  He ate it with gratitude and reverence, right where he'd dropped it, surrounded by the ghosts of his ancestors and his world, and full of guilt at his role in their demise.

  When he was finished, he flew to the edge of the little oasis he'd created and pushed through the shield that held it together, into the harsh and unprotected glare of Kerras.

  I'm sorry, he told the world. I'm sorry for what we did to you. We were wrong. I was wrong.

  He did not feel forgiveness. All he felt was the screaming of the dead, frozen into the bleak, airless terrain.

  Night Watch Control Hub, Barâd Island, Oria—Baanraak of Master's Gold

  First light of dawn. Someone had redesigned the Hub. Baanraak, circling high above it, studying the extra gates, the convenience paths, and the way that new construction blocked a few degrees of visibility in one key watchtower, had to grin. The keth were a frightening crew—powerful, smart, and telepathic. They had done a good job of improving their security against magic; Baanraak could not see a way to open a gate into any part of the structure save the gate center in the Hub. And the keth had an arsenal trained on each gate; unwanted guests coming in that way would die before their bodies moved free of the fire road.

  But the keth had grown complacent in maintaining their purely physical defenses. Baanraak could mark more than a dozen areas around the Hub that he would never have permitted to exist in their current state, because they provided excellent cover for enemies.

  He marked these locations and linked the markers to his massed troops.

  At that moment, Aril entertained a handful of Orian heads of state from the factionalized territories that lay around the Hub. The breakfast was nothing of great import; Baanraak guessed Aril held something similar for different heads of state on a regular basis. He was using flock management to govern his subject races—he gave the leaders a few minor concessions and they kept all their subjects pacified and malleable. Baanraak approved.

  The keth Master, however, was running the Hub on a skeleton crew. Half a dozen rebchyks, minor dark gods whose people had originated on Agrabaa, six worlds above Oria, made a show at the front gate. The rebchyks were big and bulky and fearsome-looking. But they weren't particularly bright, they'd never grasped telepathy, and they had mastered only the rudiments of magic and none of the fine points. They were lucky to have made it through the world gates when their planet died. They were in place to look impressive for the mortals who had to march between their crossed pikes.

  The secondary gates to the Hub were locked but unguarded. All the towers save the front two lay empty. And the people who would have been available for the Hub's defense most of the time had been shifted upworld to Earth as the Night Watch moved closer toward its countdown for a world harvest—always an intensive operation. Those who remained either operated the Hub itself or stayed close to the breakfast party to help the Master keep up the appearance of a crowded, vital power base.

  Impressing the rubes was easy. So was keeping the well-intentioned in line. But Aril had forgotten that the Hub sat inside a massive fortress for a reason: Not everyone who might want to come inside was either well-intentioned or a rube.

  Baanraak, probing the Master's surface thoughts, found this oversight understandable. In the several hundred years Aril had held the position of Master of the Night Watch, he had never faced a challenge against his Mastery.

  Aril had made an understandable mistake. But it was still a mistake. Baanraak intended to make the keth pay for it.

  Baanraak's wing—forty-six rrôn in all—hung well back. He gave his wingleaders concise instructions on where they were to land and which paths they were to follow. He placed tiny magical tracking tags on the few keth dark gods he wanted to have eliminated and linked these tags to the minds of his followers along with entry points, assigning five rrôn to each keth target, leaving twenty-six rrôn plus himself to pay a visit to Aril at his breakfast.

  Though he could have the mechanics of the takeover complete before Aril even knew he was under attack, Baanraak would not be able to claim the Mastery simply by overwhelming the current regime. Challenges for the Mastery required more ceremony than that. Baanraak would have to fulfill the covenants of challenge to win the acknowledgment of all the dark gods; to do that, he had to defeat Aril publicly in the Hub arena.

  He bent light around him and faded to invisibility. At my count, he told his wingleaders, and plummeted toward his target—and his destiny.

  Copper House, Ballahara, Nuue, Oria

  Molly lay in the bed beside Seolar and watched him until he woke. He woke beautifully—a little twitch, a graceful stretch, and a yawn—and turned to her with a smile so full of love it felt like a knife through her heart.

  "You slept well?" he asked.

  "Certainly," she lied. She had not slept since her first death—a proof of her inhuman condition that she kept far from him.

  "I dreamed of you," he told her. "And of a solution that I think would save you, though I know it is selfish of me."

  Molly didn't want to hear him continue, but she asked anyway. "What did you dream, my love?"

  "That you turned away from hunting down monsters and began doing the same work as your sister—bringing worlds back to life. It would go faster with two of you, and you would not be constantly in the path of the dark gods."

  He said it with such hope. He still dared to hope, in spite of everything he knew and everything he dreaded, and his hope was going to crush him and rip him apart, because he would not let himself see her as she truly was.

  Molly shook her head. "The magic Lauren does is based in emotion—and I suspect that she is drawing parts of it directly from her soul. I can't even stand to touch the energies she's moving, Seo. They burn me. I'm…like antimatter. I could not do what she's doing. I'm not sure anyone else could. These links she's making are as much who she is as what she's doing—and no one else has been where she's been."

  "To death and back? You have."

  "No. Not in the same way, I haven't. And that isn't even it, though I think it's a part of it. She…she stepped right into the heart of the universe, Seo. She—for lack of a better way to say it, she looked in God's eye. And it marked her. It hurts me to get too close to her, or to Jake, either. It didn't before she followed Jake through Hell and back, but since then, I can see things in her that I couldn't see before. She's changed. She's unique."

  "Then you have to keep her safe. Stay with her, or keep her here with you. Stop chasing those nightmares."

  "I can't. If I spend my time as Lauren's bodyguard, I give up everything I'm supposed to be accomplishing. Her job is to create, Seo. Mine is to destroy."

  "That isn't what you love," he said, stroking her hair. "You healed. You made everything better—you touched my people, our people, and made them whole. Walk away from the cycles of death, my beloved, befor
e it's too late. Your parents cannot have meant for you to die over and over again. No parents could be so cruel. This thing you're doing—it can't have been their plan."

  Molly said, "They didn't know me when they planned it. I was…theoretical. I was someone who could wear the necklace and wield the necessary magic to do a job—I wasn't yet someone with a mind or a heart." She turned away from him. "Or a soul. I don't want to talk about this anymore, Seo. It's too hard and too ugly and it hurts too much. If I ever had dreams, they're gone. I can't go back to them, I can't fix them, I can't have them."

  "You can find new dreams," he said, but she smiled and shook her head.

  "I don't sleep, Seo. All dreamers sometimes sleep."

  He was still for a moment, looking into her eyes. "I thought that was the case. That I never woke before you…Well. I didn't mean that kind of dream."

  "I know. And I was being flippant—but it just points out a truth that neither one of us has been willing to face. I'm not who I was—I'm not the woman you loved, the one who died that first time. I can't be her, no matter how much I wish I could. I'm really nothing more than a tool to get a job done—and the job is terrible, so I am terrible, too, because anything that was not terrible would break." She did not remind him that he'd had a hand in making her the thing that she was. He already knew that, and she did not want to hurt him any more than she had to.