Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  Eric shook his head and started to laugh. "Sure. No problem, Heyr, old boy. We'll just live. And the Night Watch—what? The Night Watch is just going to fade into the background because we decide to live? Is it that easy?"

  "It's that easy, and it's that hard. I can make each one of you immortal in this world. I can make you all gods in this world. But there's a price."

  "We've seen the price of immortality," Lauren said. "Soullessness, endless dying and returning, loss of self and humanity…a growing hunger for death and evil." She couldn't understand how he could even bring this up. He didn't trust Molly—how could he think that making more Mollys would help the Sentinels' situation, or save the world?

  Heyr raised a hand to stop her. "I'm not suggesting you join the Night Watch or the legion of death-eaters. There's another way."

  They were all looking at him, waiting—not really wanting to hear what he had to say, because it wasn't going to be good, but needing to hear because he had offered them a bit of hope.

  Save your friends, save your families, save your world. Jake's weight against Lauren was all the reason she needed to hear him out. The monsters were coming for her, and Heyr said, You can live.

  "I can take you upworld. To Kerras at first, later farther up the line. I can…fit you to the upworld so that it becomes your homeworld. I can make you old gods here. And you—when you become old gods, you can make yourselves immortal. You cannot die so long as your world lives."

  "So now would be a bad time to be an immortal on Earth," Eric said.

  Heyr nodded. "The worst. Except that if no one steps up and chooses this path, I don't think there's going to be another time. This is our last stand."

  Mayhem shrugged. "But…what you're saying is that we can be gods in our own world. We can live forever. And we can be the heroes who come riding in at the last minute and save everything. I may be stupid, but I don't see the sacrificing part of this."

  Lauren looked at him, and remembered talking to Molly, and thought, No, you wouldn't.

  Heyr shrugged. "If it were all good, Loki and I wouldn't be the last of the Æsir still here."

  Lauren stroked Jake's hair and felt him shift in her lap, snuggling closer. She pressed her face into his hair and breathed in. He smelled of shampoo and autumn leaves, sunshine and warmth. He'd always smelled like that. She would have known him blindfolded. She thought about Jake, about immortality. The problem with immortality wasn't going to be watching friends and family grow old and die in the blink of an eye, then; the Æsir had already been through that. They'd stayed immortal—and then something else had changed, and they'd moved on.

  "To become immortal, you have to take on the life force of the world you inhabit," Heyr said. "You feel what your world feels. You feel what the people of your world feel. ALL of them. You bear the foulness of the torturer and the pain of the tortured. You share in birth and in death, in every triumph, and in every tragedy." He closed his eyes, and for a moment he looked pale to Lauren, and almost fragile. He took a slow, deep breath. "You learn to block out a lot of it after a while—to dim it down. But this world is so full of the poisons of the Night Watch and so near its own death that after you've done the very best you can do, once you've blocked out almost everything, what remains is still terrible. At first, though, you aren't going to be able to get enough of a hold on the pain to block any of it, so it will all come in, and it's bad enough that it would kill you if you could die. But you can't—so you live in it, and through it. If there is a hell, it's the first days or weeks of immortality, when the whole pain of this world sits on your shoulders, when you are every person on the planet crying out for help at the same time that you are every monster on the planet drawing pleasure from his victim's pain, when you would give anything to make it all stop."

  "But you can't, can you?" Eric asked. "The change is permanent. Irreversible."

  "No," Heyr said. "Quitting is the easiest thing in the world. It's easier to reverse immortality than it is to grab onto it. You just let go of your hold on the life of the world. If you do, you'll stay an old god, but you'll be a mortal one. Being an old god is all the pleasure, none of the pain. But the Night Watch can kill old gods, and they seek them out at every opportunity and kill every one they find, to prevent old gods from getting any ideas about standing against them. Which is why old gods stay out of the way and don't make any waves. A lot of them thought they were going to be heroes once upon a time. They thought they were going to grasp immortality and stand against the fall of life—but it's hard to stand, and on dying worlds it just keeps getting harder. Immortality is hard, quitting is easy—but the only people who are going to be able to stand against the Night Watch and win are the ones who stay."

  "How do you get through it?" June Bug asked.

  Heyr gave her a big grin. "You laugh and drink and boast and fight and fuck. It all eases the pain, at least for a little while. You stand with your fellow heroes, your fellow gods, and raise up your bands of warriors, and draw your line in the dirt and tell the Night Watch, 'This line you shall not cross.'" He stared at his bottle of beer, the smile dying away, and he took a long, hard drink. His voice dropped, until he seemed to be speaking to himself. "And worlds fall anyway, because death is so much easier than life, and destruction is so much easier than creation, and the wide, smooth path beckons to so many more than the narrow, hard one." He looked up at all of them, and shook off the mood. "But now Lauren is doing what no one has ever been able to do before. She's reversing the death of worlds—and that means that being an immortal and standing against the Night Watch is not a doomed exercise in ethics anymore. It has meaning. We can fight, and we can win."

  The catch to being immortal would have to be something like that, Lauren thought. Living inside the nightmare of the world. She considered her magic, her gateweaving, the way she bound upworlds to downworlds and linked them all by her love. And she wondered if she would be able to love her world and the people on it if she knew them too well. If she were privy to the thoughts of not just the evil people but also the good ones. Because even good people hid darkness within themselves. If the pain and evil of the world filled her, would she still be able to love it enough to save it?

  And what of Jake? She couldn't become immortal if he wasn't. And even if she could make him immortal—and from what Heyr said, it sounded like something that each person had to do for himself—how could she do that to a child? How could she fill him with every horror on the planet? He'd get all the good, too—but Heyr hadn't spent a lot of time talking about all the good in the world, had he?

  Lauren looked at the other Sentinels, wondering what they would say.

  Pete cleared his throat. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I want to be able to fight. I want to have a chance of winning." He looked at Lauren. "I have something worth fighting for." He turned to Heyr. "I'm in."

  "The first of the new Æsir," Heyr said, and raised his beer to him.

  "And the second," Eric said, and shrugged. "In for a penny, in for a pound. I can't stand on the sacrifices of my ancestors and the blood they spilled fighting for home and family and freedom and survival and not offer myself up when the need arises. I love my country. I love my world. The things you love, you fight for."

  "I'm in, too." Betty Kay nodded at Eric. "I have a chance to make a difference when it really counts. I'm afraid, and I may not be strong enough—but I won't know unless I do it."

  Heyr nodded. "You're stronger than you think you are."

  And Betty Kay gave him a grin that was both happy and fierce. "That's what I'm counting on."

  Darlene stared at her hands, and June Bug chewed on a thumbnail, and George had pulled an old slide rule out of his briefcase and was fiddling with it, his eyes unfocused. Lauren understood their ambivalence. Basically, Heyr had told them all, You can be a god and you can save your world—but it's going to suck.

  Not a real strong sales pitch, that.

  Mayhem sighed. "I have the awful feeling t
hat this is a huge mistake. I hate pain. I'm a complete wuss. But I can't not do it."

  Darlene gave him a sidelong look and said, "I was counting on you to chicken out—if you did, I could."

  Heyr looked from Mayhem to Darlene and said, "If you don't want to do this, don't. Nothing you do will ever be harder, or hurt worse."

  But Darlene said, "Like Mayhem, I just can't not do it. It matters too much."

  George dropped his slide rule back into his briefcase, and closed the briefcase, and looked up at all of them, and Lauren realized that tears were dripping down his cheeks. "I have a wife I love. I have kids I love. I thought I'd lost them when the flu came through, but they made it. I dodged one bullet, and that may be the only lucky break I get. I have to do this for them—to protect them, to give them a world to live in. But doing it, I'm going to lose them. I'm going to watch them get old and die and leave this life without me, and I'll tell you right now I don't know that I can do that. I might fight with you for a while and then quit. Put down the gloves, tear up my ticket, and…" He looked down again. "I'm sorry. I should be stronger. But I'm not."

  "This is not an obligation to any of you," Eric said. "When I told you we might have to take our fight into the mouth of Hell, I didn't intend that we should take up residence there. Now…well…you are already heroes. You have already given your lives over to the service of humanity. You have already sacrificed."

  June Bug sighed. "I'm old. I'm tired. I want to carry the pain of the world on my shoulders about as much as I want to know what all of y'all think when you wake up in the morning, which is not at all. And I want to live forever in this skin even less than that." She closed her eyes, and for a moment she looked ancient. "What I want most in all the world is just to reach the natural end of my days and go wherever the people I loved have gone. I miss them." Then she pulled her shoulders back and lifted her chin and looked at all of them. "This can't be about me or about what I want. I'll serve because I can. I'll deal with forever because that's what I have to do to serve."

  And that left Lauren alone among them—the sole holdout against immortality.

  They were turning to look at her, expectant.

  She wanted to tell them yes—she wanted to be the hero with her sword unsheathed, charging headlong against the enemy arrayed before her, heedless of her own danger. But she could not. "I don't know that I can carry the weight of immortality as Heyr describes it and still do what I must do," she said. "I owe much of the magic that is pulling the worlds back together to an idealism I don't think I could sustain if I saw everything about everyone. I'm not sure I'd be able to love what is best in everyone if I were constantly drowning in their worst."

  Heyr was nodding as if he understood. "I thought that might be the case. I would prefer knowing that the Night Watch couldn't touch you, but if I have to choose between you at risk and fighting them effectively, and you safe but with your magic destroyed, I have to choose you at risk. I'll protect you to the best of my ability, imperfect though that is. We're in this together."

  He reached a hand across the table, and Lauren scooted closer to the table without waking Jake, and clasped it. Pete put his hand atop the two of theirs—and then George and Mayhem and June Bug and Betty Kay and Darlene and Eric did the same.

  "To the new Æsir," Heyr said softly.

  "To the new Sentinels," June Bug added.

  "To the stands we take, and the line we hold," Eric said.

  And Lauren said, "To the things worth fighting for—life and love, home and family, friends and freedom."

  Baanraak's Demesne, Kerras, to Research Triangle Park, Raleigh, North Carolina—Baanraak of Silver and Gold

  Baanraak finished chanting the long version of the Salute to the Sun at Close of Day just as the sun, dull red against a sky of pinks and purples, dropped below the horizon. Baanraak bowed, and held the bow out of respect.

  In darkness he rose, and inhaled the sweet air into his lungs, and listened to the sounds of life in the world he had made, and he knew, suddenly and with certainty, that Molly would be coming for him soon. She would seek him out because of the bonds they shared—the bond of hunters, the bonds of silver and gold, the bond of shared pain. And of shared nightmares. She walked through his dreams, wielding her sword, seeking his life. And he walked through her nightmares, aware of her sleeping, wanting to make her understand him. Or he wanted to make her into him. His desires still churned in him, muddy and confused. It had been long since he'd desired anything, and now he desired much, most of which could only exist at the expense of his other desires.

  There had never been anyone—anything—like Baanraak before. In the history of his universe and his worldchain, he had been unique, though he had not recognized his uniqueness for what it was until he discovered Molly and saw in his reflection how different he was from the others he'd mistaken for brethren.

  He would get to Molly through Lauren, talk to her through Lauren. He could not approach her directly—she would attempt to kill him, and at least one of them would die again. Maybe both of them. He needed an intercessor. He needed Lauren. It was time. He stood with wings outstretched, reveling for one final moment in the shape of his flesh, in the way he belonged in this world of his making. Then he closed his eyes and dug talons into the rock and drew into his body the power that would twist his form, shrinking himself into the rough approximation of a human. He did not worry about the details—he would provide himself with those when he reached Earth. For the moment, he wanted only to displace as much body mass as he could and to approximate general shape, so that when he found the identity he wanted, he could take it with minimal loss of time. He could not just compress his true mass into the necessary size—this disguise needed to be perfect, and perfect meant not leaving footprints four inches deep when walking across lawns, or collapsing chairs when sitting in them.

  The pain devoured Baanraak—he shifted and re-formed every cell in his body, stripping away everything not essential, literally ripping himself apart, cell from cell, and the fire tore him and clawed him until he collapsed on the rock in a heap. He trembled and panted, while the fire raged through his flesh.

  The pain became bearable again and he stood up—a roughly human thing, with two crude arms with workable hands and two crude legs with stump feet, a torso, a lumpish head, and rudimentary eyes, with his resurrection ring buried all the way inside him.

  When the pain ebbed to the point where Baanraak could think again, he got to his feet. He was small and weak, no longer simply a rrôn disguised, with mass and power at his call. Amputated in every direction, wingless and tailless and short-necked and small-bodied not just in appearance but in fact, raw and fresh, his flesh sought matter that it could absorb, that he might rebuild himself. He had to fight against his body's ache to return to its true form. He stilled himself. He had done this before—the Night Watch all did it when working in secret, in places where they had to not just pass as human but be human. It had been a long time, but he was no stranger to flesh other than his own.

  He stilled himself. In this time spent in his own little domain, he had abandoned discipline. He had let himself play, and had fallen into the habits of childhood, and had lived for a time in a fantasy. No more. He was Baanraak, at whose name the very Night Watch trembled.

  He was Baanraak, who drank the death of worlds.

  He was Baanraak. And he was going hunting.

  He shook off the feeling of weakness that assailed this new flesh. He embraced the pain and accepted it; pain had made him, and pain would in the end give him those things he sought. He ran the live fire through himself, letting it bite himself, and created for himself a man-size mirror, silver-backed, square and sturdy. He set it in a stone frame and melded the frame into the living rock of his perch. When he did not need it anymore, he would destroy it. But it would be convenient to have a waiting gate into which he could slip at need.

  He rested his fingers against the glass and sent his mind spinning through the vo
id, searching for one very specific man: young, single, attractive, rich, powerful, admired, corrupt…and conveniently located. He found that man in Hahlen Geoffrey Nottingham, well-diversified tech entrepreneur and billionaire with his main offices in Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nottingham was working late. He had everything Baanraak needed conveniently at hand.

  Baanraak waited until Nottingham's secretary, also working late, and at that instant discussing some task with her boss, went back to her own office. Then Baanraak stepped through the gate right in front of Nottingham's office door, closed the door, and locked it.

  He turned, and Nottingham stared at him, frozen with shock and disbelief and horror for just one instant. Of course—Baanraak didn't look human. He looked like a mass of raw pink flesh on a two-legged armature. Nottingham took in a breath to scream, and in the split second before he did, Baanraak reached into Nottingham's mind and silenced him.

  No, he said into his prey's thoughts. Neither that nor the buzzer to call her. He locked Nottingham's muscles.