Gods old and dark

by Holly Lisle

  A thunderclap in his head shook him just a little—just enough to wedge a familiar voice to the front of his overwhelmed mind. "…wall, Pete. You have to build a wall. When you feel it, you can't let yourself feel it all. See a wall around you—thin, because the pain is your immortality. You have to have the pain. But you can fill the wall with insulation. Like cotton batting, or pillows. Something that breathes, but that will keep the noise down…"

  The voice faded out in a red wash of horror—the slaughter of innocents by a despot, somewhere. He had to stop it. He had to save them.

  The thunderclap again. "…because I can't do this for you…make the fucking wall or you're going to be an immortal vegetable…or this is going to take you and you'll lose your grip on immortality and die. Right here, right now."

  Die. Yes. Dying sounded good.

  But no. He had to protect Lauren.

  He fought to hang on to an inch of space in his own mind, and he wrapped a wall around that inch. Pete pictured cotton, loose the way he'd pull it from the boll, saw himself shoving handfuls of raw cotton with the seeds and all into the rifts in that tiny wall where the horror poured in. At first it was like trying to hold back the ocean with a cotton swab. But he discovered that he didn't have to concentrate on one rent at a time; he could stand in the center of the storm that assaulted him and make himself the eye of his own counter-storm. He created a blizzard of white that poured out from him in all directions, raging against the horrors that were to become a part of him, and slowly the onslaught slowed, and the roar of the world's anguish dulled and faded, and he expanded the space he occupied until he could hear what was going on around him again, and think his own thoughts again.

  The pain, though—the pain still ate at him from the inside out. Men with sharp knives cutting through him like POWs digging their way to freedom, buzzards tearing at his flesh, agony that he could not find the way to mute or remove.

  "It's bad, isn't it?" Heyr said.

  Pete opened his eyes and sat up slowly. The others were already sitting—they looked like corpses propped up, and Pete could only imagine that he looked as bad or worse. "This is what you feel?" he rasped through gritted teeth.

  Heyr nodded. "Maybe a little less than what you're feeling. But that's pretty much it. It's been this way for the last hundred years or so, though it's been getting worse for thousands. Be glad you weren't Loki back in the day—the Æsir punished him for the death of Balder by taking away his ability to block out the pain of the world. For long he was bound here and spread open to all the horrors of this place, forced to suffer the growing anguish and the spreading death. And if it wasn't as bad then as it is now, it was bad enough. He suffered like that for a thousand years before one of the Æsir had pity on him and freed him. Loki—Loki has reason to hate the Æsir, even though he brought much of his pain on himself through thoughtlessness and through treachery. Odin still has hope for him. I see some good in him myself. But that was a great and terrible torture they put on him."

  "How do we bear it?" Darlene asked. She sat forward, arms wrapped tight against her chest, rocking. Her eyes weren't focused; her skin was as gray as the day.

  "I cannot tell each of you how to bear it. I can only tell you that I bear it because it matters that I live, and it matters that I fight—though in these last years I have been mostly deaf to those who called upon me. The world was dying, and I with it. I dulled the noise as best I could, and hid myself away with work and a woman, and I—even I—prayed for salvation or deliverance, and thought none would come. Odin once said:

  Hard is the earth that deals death for life

  When the soil is gone

  And the harrow breaks.

  Heyr stood up. "I suffered. If you stand as one of the new Æsir, you too will suffer. You will hear the cries of those who need you and you will not answer, because not even gods such as we are can be everywhere for everyone. Once we were many, and we answered the cries of those in need. But now most of the true immortals have moved on. The pain here is too great, the need is too great, and the magic…the magic was dying, and even such as I—who love Humankind—lost hope."

  The pain washed through Pete, and he tasted death sharper than bile, and he was not sure that he was strong enough to stand. Running would be sad, but it wouldn't hurt this way.

  George staggered to his feet and leaned one hand against the nearest tree. Tears ran down his cheeks. "I can't do this," he said, his words echoing Pete's thoughts. "I won't abandon you all, but there are things in my head right now that I can't live with. There are pictures in here that I can't see and still stay sane. I need to go back to being just a man." He hung his head. "I thought I could be a hero. But it isn't in me."

  "If you aren't running, you're a hero," Heyr told him. "We'll need one of our own to watch Raymond and Louisa, to make sure that they stay well away from what we're doing. We would have had to find someone like you, George, if we hadn't had you. I'll take you to Kerras and change you back as soon as I know who else needs to go. In the meantime, shake off the pain. Pull your roots back in and release the Earth." He turned to the rest of them. "Who else needs to go back? There's no shame in it, people—gods who held their immortality for tens of thousands of years have fled this world because it was too much for them. It's better to live a sane man than a mad immortal."

  "Will it always be like this?" Betty Kay asked.

  Heyr laughed a little. "That's why Lauren matters. The pain isn't as bad as it was. The despair is…less. She is healing the wounds, leaching out the poison, bringing back the life that should have been here all along."

  "If she dies," Pete said, "everything is lost."

  "So we surround her with a wall of us, and we keep her safe." Heyr breathed out softly, a small, tired sigh. "I want her to be a diamond," he said after a moment. "Hard and durable and fierce—as close to indestructible as anything can be. But I think she's an opal instead—the softest of the gemstones, fragile and beautiful and full of a fire that rough handling would destroy. That too much pain and horror would destroy. She's the only one of her kind. Maybe she can teach someone else to do what she does, but I don't think so. I think it's simply who she is that creates the magic that unbreaks the worldchain."

  They were all finding their way to their feet. Pete stood, too, feeling shaky and at the verge of vomiting, and he said, "How long until I can think straight—until I'll be anything like myself again?"

  "Hours or days. It depends on you." Heyr smiled. "And no matter how terrible you feel, you are still a god now. One of the immortals. You may want to die, but nothing can kill you without killing the whole world with you."

  "Does it get easier?"

  "For the last few thousand years, it's only gotten harder." Heyr shrugged. "If Lauren and Molly and we Æsir can beat them, it'll get easier. If Lauren can bring the worldchain back from death, everyone will want to be immortal again." He grinned a little. "And the halls of the heroes will once again fill up with gods, and drinking and wenching and merriment and the tales of great feats will fill the world. Right now, we're a lonely little band, and our tales are mostly tragedies."

  Heyr took Pete aside and whispered, "About you and Lauren. You love her, and you want her to love you. But if she never accepts immortality, then your immortality will be a wall between the two of you that will just get thicker and higher and harder over time. I've done it. It's hell. And it's a hell that gets away from you over time, with the gap between you and her starting as nothing and becoming impassable within a span of years that will feel like the space between two quick breaths. You can contemplate it now, but in a minute it'll be over—she'll be old and dying and you'll be just as you are right now. And whether she ever comes to love you or not, she'll still be gone, and you will watch her go."

  "You've lost someone you loved."

  "I'm immortal. I've lost a lot of someones I loved. It doesn't get easier."

  "You should have saved them."

  Heyr's eyes narrowed and h
is grin grew feral. "Try it. Try to give her immortality. Now that you know what it costs, now that you're wearing it in your own skin and bones, try to give her forever."

  And Pete thought about doing this to Lauren—making her feel like this just so he could keep her—and he couldn't. She didn't want this, and nothing in him would force it on her.

  Heyr was watching his eyes. "Right. You got it. Now…just keep it in mind. Because for you, this is hard. But it's going to get harder."

  CHAPTER 18

  Wold Mountain, Oria

  MOLLY WOKE IN A LITTLE TENT to the sound of a steady, driving rain. The air was cold enough that she could see her breath, and the warmth and softness of her sleeping bag cradled her and embraced her, offering her the promise of womblike comfort and wonderful peace if only she would stay. She sighed and lay staring up at the top of the tent, knowing that she had to stop putting off the inevitable.

  If she was going to be a dark avenger and fulfill the purpose of her existence, she had to go back to Earth. The Night Watch was focusing its activities there, and she could not hide in Oria, hunting down Oria's problems, when her first world needed her more. She'd discovered a whole nest of the Night Watch in Washington, D.C.—a group of lobbyists with a stranglehold on the men and women who made policy. Dark gods with poisonous intent, all of them—corporate demons, monsters in silk suits who plotted the destruction of her world over brunch and delivered death with canapés and cocktails and campaign contributions funneled through Swiss banks and offshore accounts.

  If she wasn't going to fulfill her purpose…

  That was another issue entirely. She lay inside the heads of the Night Watch as she hunted them, seeing through their eyes, sensing through their bodies everything that came to them. She could feel the aching emptiness of their lives, but she could also taste death as they tasted it—as a heady rush of power that filled the emptiness for a little while. Hunting, she lived inside a banquet spread before her in addictive bounty, and she had as yet tasted nothing for herself.

  But she wanted to. She hungered, and every time she died she came back emptier and hungrier, and the banquet grew richer before her eyes, and more compelling.

  She hungered, and her hunger had grown as keen as a good knife. Meanwhile, her desire to be a good girl and fight on the side of truth and justice had tattered with her other human feelings, and had worn thin in places, and she knew that she could be one of the Night Watch. Her kinship with them resonated every time she touched one of them, and underscored the fact that in the presence of the living she felt only pain and more pain, and a vague but distasteful shame in the fact of her own existence. The Night Watch was her natural direction, and joining it was her choice to make. She did not have to follow her predecessors among the Vodi into madness and eventual oblivion. She could experience ecstasy. She could rip her life from death itself and grow powerful beyond her own wildest imaginings. She could drink the blood of worlds and walk Baanraak's path, and eventually rule a universe.

  She slid out of the sleeping bag and let the cold seep into her flesh. She breathed deeply, feeling the cold burn her lungs, shivering as she exhaled and her breath frosted into swirling plumes.

  What did she owe the world?

  What did she owe Lauren?

  She didn't know. She rested her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. It would all just get darker for her—she had no hope anymore. Every death would simply take her closer to the point where she had to either succumb to the call of the Night Watch or destroy herself. There was no third path. She had no doubts anymore why the other Vodi had destroyed themselves. They'd looked into their own futures and they had seen the nightmare that she saw waiting in her own. And they had been strong enough to destroy themselves rather than betray everything they had once held dear.

  She had to admire that. Before, Molly had thought her predecessors cowards who had taken the easy way out. But they'd had the same banquet of slaughter and pain and torture and death spread before them that she could see spread before her, and they had chosen to destroy themselves rather than partake.

  How much longer was she going to be able to hold out? There would come a time when she no longer cared. When she would not be able to see why she had fought so hard against the coming darkness. The shards of that future already cut into her, and soon enough they would break through.

  Perhaps this would be her last chance to avoid becoming the monster that lived inside of her. Perhaps she needed to destroy herself now. Maybe even tomorrow would be too late.

  She needed to talk to Lauren. Not that Lauren would understand, but Lauren had a right to know that Molly was going to have to go away. And Lauren—Lauren was fighting right on the front lines, and she deserved more than a note telling her that Molly had gone and wouldn't be back.

  Death or oblivion—hell of a choice.

  Molly willed breakfast into being—pan-fried potatoes and slabs of country ham; and eggs, scrambled and larded through with New York sharp cheddar cheese and sautéed onions and red and green peppers; a stack of buttermilk pancakes with real butter and real maple syrup; a pitcher of coffee, hot and black; and for dessert, a bar of Dove chocolate. The condemned woman's last meal, she told herself. Her last grasp at being human before making her choice. She sat shivering and naked in the cold because feeling the cold was feeling something, and she devoured her feast.

  And when she was done, she erased her campsite with a word, and dug a small cave in the side of the mountain out of the living rock, and at the back of the little cave created for herself a mirror. And into the mirror she wove a gate—a link into Lauren's mirror in the foyer of her house in Cat Creek. She looked through it and saw that the way was clear. She dressed herself in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, all black, and took a deep breath.

  She stepped into the gate and into the green fire that burned her—that did not welcome her but instead reminded her of everything she had lost and could never have again—and she pushed through that eternity into Lauren's foyer. Into the world of her birth. Into the world that had once been steeped in the pain and sickness and despair of strangers.

  And she felt nothing.

  Cat Creek, North Carolina

  Molly walked into the kitchen, and Lauren almost dropped the plate she was washing. Jake, running in circles in the kitchen—yelling "Look, Mama. Look, Mama. Look at me!"—stopped running, stopped yelling, and tore over to his mother to cling to her leg.

  Cold blew into the room with Molly, physical cold—out-door air that clung to her and smelled of rain and pines and winter coming—and something else. Something more frightening. Like an unscheduled eclipse of the sun.

  "I finally decided to come back," Molly said by way of greeting.

  "First time since…" Lauren faltered.

  "Since I died here. Yes. Stepping through the gate into your foyer again could have been distressing, I suppose. But it wasn't."

  Molly looked exactly the way she had on Oria. That was a problem. "You didn't change when you came through the mirror," Lauren told her.

  "Change?"

  "You still look mostly Orian—hair, eyes, bone structure, height, weight…"

  Molly looked down at herself. "Well, shit. That's not going to work." She looked at Lauren with eyes that reflected no warmth, no emotion, nothing. "Right back. Let me see if I can fix this here or if I have to go back."

  Lauren felt relief when Molly left the room, and dismay that she would feel that way on seeing her sister leave. Or that she could find it in herself to hope Molly would just go on to whatever else she'd planned to do and not come back.

  But just when Lauren thought her unvoiced wish might come true, Molly, looking human, if not as she had once looked, stepped back into the kitchen. "Couldn't fix it here. I had to go to Oria. It doesn't matter anyway." She shrugged. "It's not the big problem. We need to talk."

  Lauren's stomach flipped. "Heyr can help you get full magic here, if that's what you need to do…things;
he's already made most of the other Sentinels into old gods—immortals."

  Molly arched an eyebrow. "Interesting. Doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's good to know. That you won't be alone, anyway."

  Lauren picked Jake up and held him close. "Why would I be alone, Molly?"

  "I left Seolar. I thought you should know, since you're likely to have to deal with some of the fallout. I'd meant to guard him—to watch over him. I told him I would. But…it isn't going to work out even that well."

  Lauren waited, saying nothing, feeling the cold around Molly as a chill in her heart.

  Molly's mouth twisted into something that was probably intended to be a smile. "You see it in me, don't you?"

  "See what?"

  "The monster beneath the skin. The thing that's just waiting for the last of me to die so it can come out and…wallow in death." She closed her eyes, and Lauren saw a flicker of emotion pass across Molly's face. Eyes closed, voice soft, Molly said, "It's almost here." She looked up at Lauren. "And the bad thing is, I'm almost past caring. Almost."