by Holly Lisle
"Because," Seolar said, "she is partly of your world, but she is also partly of ours. Her mother was one of your Sentinels—Marian Hotchkiss. Her father was one of our Imallins: Nerâmi, the Imallin of White Hold."
"That's impossible," Nancine Tubbs said. "You can't just mix and match like that. Horses can't father babies on cats, and Orians can't father children on humans. And Marian would never have done that, anyway. I knew her. She was as straight-laced as…as…Good Lord. The idea! And Walt would never have let such a thing happen—and the two of them loved each other—no one ever doubted that…"
Seolar held up a hand, and Nancine sputtered to a stop.
"I did not know Marian Hotchkiss, but I know of her. She and her husband are heroes to the veyâr, because they saw that we needed help, and when they could think of no other way to save us, they gave us a child who would be able to do what had to be done. Molly was conceived by magic, with intent. Her conception was carefully planned, and her gestation and birth equally carefully planned. The only thing no one planned for was having her mother die before Molly could be raised, trained, and brought here to help us."
"She didn't look like that on Earth," June Bug said. She couldn't get the picture of this new Molly out of her mind…but then, she'd never been able to free herself from the image of the old Molly, either—who had been a mirror of her dead mother.
"She did not. As long as she remained in your world's thrall, only her human side could express itself. Her veyâr side was…I don't know. Too weak? Invisible? If not invisible, then at least hidden. But her veyâr strengths have always been with her. She could heal on Earth, too. There she paid a terrible price, but because she had veyâr blood and ties to this world, she could still do magic. Here…here, she can do anything, and her magic has no price. No backlash. She is from your world and from our world, and here, she is the best of both."
June Bug, older than the others with her, knew something of what Molly was. The Sentinels forbade contact with the indigenous peoples of the other worlds they came in contact with for a very good reason. The Orians were not the first to discover that the offspring of their own kind and members of upworld races would create magic users who paid no price for their magic. Earth had suffered its share of incursions from Old Gods, too—mythology was full of stories of Old Gods who fell in love with beautiful young humans and created children with them. And the children were trouble.
Sentinel policy for the last thousand years had been to destroy such children before they could wreak havoc in their worlds. The Old Gods had mostly moved downworld to greener pastures as the worlds above Earth died and it became clear that Earth was close to its own self-destruction, so in the last hundred years, June Bug could think of only two cases that made it through the Sentinels' grapevine of the offspring of Old Gods and humans. Both children and their human parents suffered necessary accidents shortly after their births.
June Bug had never known of a case where the human parent filled the role of "Old God" and the other parent was a downworlder. And she would never have suspected the human parent to be a Sentinel, not even one who eventually fell from grace and was named a traitor for collusive activities. To bring such a crossbred child to Earth and raise it right under the noses of those charged with eliminating all such children…
But Marian and Walt hadn't done that, had they? Marian, June Bug now recalled, had vanished about twenty-five years earlier for nearly a year, to care for a dying aunt over in Raleigh. She came back looking worn and bloated, and she'd cried for months. Odd for a woman who'd lost an aunt. Not so odd for a woman who'd had to leave a small and much-loved infant in the care of others.
And that left June Bug in a bad place. According to Sentinel rules, which had been developed over the course of human history to keep the world from self-destructing and to protect the people in it, Molly McColl could not be allowed to live. Because June Bug knew the rules—something the majority of the younger members, excluding Eric MacAvery, probably did not—it fell to her to call for Molly's death.
June Bug had fallen in love with Molly—the image of her mother—the first time Molly had wandered into the library looking for books on lute music and watercolor painting techniques. Now June discovered that she was in love with a woman whose death her honor required her to order. The rest of the captive Sentinels would not know if she had failed to do what she was required to do, but if Molly destroyed their world because June Bug had failed to carry out her sworn duty, the fact that only she would know the truth would be of no consolation.
She sat on her cot with her head buried in her hands, and closed her eyes. She wanted nothing more than to sink through floor and earth and stone and molten lava into the fires of hell. Then at least she would feel she'd fallen into the right place.
I'm an old woman, she told herself. Can I not die with one love intact, pure and unsullied? Am I doomed to see every-one I've loved die before me, and one by my hand and word? Is this God's punishment for my being who I am?
Molly returned, with Bethellen at her side. Bethellen—looking bright and fresh and completely well.
And now I owe her for my sister's life, as well.
If there was a God, he had a perverse sense of humor, June Bug decided.
CHAPTER 15
Cat Creek, North Carolina
ERIC, LAUREN, AND PETE gathered around Lauren's kitchen table. With the blinds drawn and taped in place to keep stray light from revealing their presence and their nervous leaps at every creak of the old house or thump from Jake, Lauren felt like they were thieves instead of people with a right to be where they were. All of them breathed small sighs of relief when Jake finally fell asleep in a little nest of towels that Lauren made for him beneath the table. With him quiet at last, they only had to deal with the jitters caused by the house settling and by traffic on the street outside.
Those, however, were bad enough. They weren't having any luck rescuing the Sentinels. Eric, crouched over a small hand mirror he'd liberated from Lauren's dresser, searching magically throughout Oria, had grown more frantic as the hours passed. "Nothing," he muttered. "Even if they were dead, I should be able to find their bodies—but it's like they've been erased."
Lauren said, "I know this isn't my specialty, but if you'll just tell me what you're trying to do, maybe I can think of some way to help you."
"It's very simple," Eric said. "I'm trying to locate any of the kidnapped Sentinels. Or even the traitors. I've searched for all of them, one at a time, in groups, and even all together, and they just…aren't…there."
"Have you tried looking for where they last were? Maybe that would at least give you a jumping-off point."
Eric snapped at her. "No, I haven't. If I can't find the place where they are, why would I be able to find a place where they aren't?"
"I don't know. It was just an idea." She shrugged, hurt, and asked Pete, "You want something to drink? I have soy milk, some decent wine, or I could juice a cantaloupe or some oranges for you."
"Got a beer?"
"No. Sorry."
"Could you get a beer?"
She glanced sidelong at him, saw the grin on his face, and after a minute said, "Yeah. I could…get…a beer. I guess."
"You know where my apartment is?"
"No."
"Know where the old Baptist Church on East is?"
"First Baptist with the pillars?"
"Right."
"Sure."
"My apartment is the top floor of the old house that used to be the parsonage—right next door to it. I have some good beer and a couple of wedges of nice cheese in the fridge there, and I'd hate to waste either."
She led him to the mirror in the hall, and while resting her palms on it, summoned up reflections of the Baptist Church, the old parsonage, and then the top-floor apartment and the inside of Pete's refrigerator. "You know where things are in there. I can't make the light go on without us actually stepping through and opening the door, and the SBI guys might be staking
out your place, too. So I'll just hold the gate open, and you reach through and get your beer and your cheese and whatever else you want."
He nodded, she summoned the green fire, and he reached through into his house and pulled out a cardboard box with beer bottles with labels and names unlike any she'd ever seen, a variety of cheeses, some homemade bread, and a whole pie.
"Decided I didn't want to share with the SBI, just in case they got around to searching everything in my apartment."
Lauren was staring at the beer. "That's some weird-looking beer, Pete." She was looking at the names—Wychwood Brewery Company Ltd's Hobgoblin Extra Strong Ale, across whose bright blue label a grim, long-nosed, pointed-eared creature trudged through a moonlit village, carrying a ferocious-looking axe; Black Sheep Ale, with a proud ram on a parchment label; Badger Brewery Export Ale, whose label mascot was a badger; Brakspear Special Traditional Ale—lighter in color than the others, with a green shield label that made her think of knights and tourneys; and a couple of bottles whose labels she had to read twice. "St. Austell's Dartmoor Cockleroaster?" she asked.
Pete smiled. "Heady, rich…wonderful stuff. You don't, by the way, see this beer. It is not here, it has never been here, there is no such beer as this anywhere in these parts." Pete lowered his voice. "I have a friend who flies to and from England on a regular basis, and he smuggles in some of the really good stuff for me. The St. Austell's is from Cornwall. Badger comes from Dorset, Brakspear's from Henley on Thames. Black Sheep comes from somewhere up north, while the Wychwood brewery is near Oxford." He sighed, his face for a moment wistful. "Ken, a friend of mine who barkeeps at a fine little pub called the White Hart, recommends things he knows I'll like, and my…other…friend packs them in cases and smuggles it over for me aboard his plane. The Wychwood is one of my favorites—they have a number of ales and beers, and all of them are just lovely."
She said, "Why illegal English beer? Seems like a lot of trouble when you could buy beer at any corner quick mart in the state."
"No, you can't. American beer is not real beer. If it doesn't stand up on its own—and maybe have a bit of yeast in the dregs—it is not real beer. I discovered during my time in England that the only place you can get anything worth drinking is on the other side of the Atlantic. I spent my early adulthood there getting potted in pubs as often as I could. Now I sip my very good ale and just wish I was getting potted in pubs."
"You can't buy this stuff anywhere in America."
"Let me put it this way—you can't buy this stuff anywhere around here. And here is where I am. For now, anyway."
She laughed and helped him carry his loot out to the kitchen.
Eric sat there shaking his head when they walked in.
"It worked," he said.
Lauren raised an eyebrow. "What worked?"
"Looking for the last place they were." He pointed to the mirror, and both Lauren and Pete leaned over and took a look. They were staring at a magnificent fortified town, on a hill at the very center of which stood a massive, metal-clad castle. Eric jabbed at the image of the castle with his index finger and said, "That's why I couldn't find any traces of any of them."
Lauren couldn't begin to guess what the problem was, and said so.
"The whole place is copper-clad," Eric told her.
She spread her hands out, palms up. "Which means…?"
"You haven't had any problems with copper yet?"
"No."
"Copper insulates against magic. If you put copper handcuffs on a Sentinel, the Sentinel won't be able to get out of them except by mechanical means—lockpicks, a saw…things like that. If you put your treasure in a copper safe, the Sentinel—or anyone else who can use the magic—won't be able to reach through to touch it. And if you stick a whole group of Sentinels into a copper cell, they won't be able to use magic to get out, and their Sentinel friends won't be able to use magic to get in. Or even to locate them." He sighed. "Which means we can't have you just open a gate for them from your foyer. We're going to have to go there physically and get them out."
"That's not good," Lauren said. "That doesn't look like the easiest place in the world to break into."
"No, it doesn't."
Pete studied the image, sighed, and asked Eric, "Want a beer?"
"Sure. Maybe it'll help me think."
Pete popped the top on two, and handed one to Eric. "Lauren, how about you?"
"I'll go with the soy milk, but thanks anyway."
While she rummaged through her cabinets for her favorite glass, Pete settled into the chair to the right of Eric. "You're looking at either dropping us inside the gate, where we're going to be under observation from the second we arrive until the second we leave, or else starting us off outside the city in the forest—maybe right around there…" He jabbed a finger at the mirror. "…but then we have to get across the moat and the gate and still figure out how to get into the castle."
"I know," Eric said, and took a long swallow of the beer. And choked. And gasped. And sputtered. "Holy sweet jumping Jehoshaphat's grandmother, what in the hell is that stuff?" he wheezed, and wiped foam from his mouth onto one sleeve of his shirt.
"British beer."
"That's not beer," Eric muttered. Lauren watched him glare at Pete. "That stuff has teeth and legs…and hair. Good Christ."
"You should really drink it at room temperature," Pete told him. "I'm doing it wrong by having it chilled, but I've gotten used to cold beer since I moved back here."
"If it thawed out, I'd be afraid it was going to drink me. You manage to sleep at night with that stuff in the house? I'm surprised it hasn't crawled out of the icebox and murdered you in your bed."
"That would be Belfast beer," Pete said. "This is English beer. Slightly better manners. It just starts singing loudly outside your bedroom door at 3 A.M."
"Ha ha."
Lauren poured her soy milk and sat down on the other side of Eric. "So what are we doing?"
"We're debating the merits of getting shot by those fellows with the crossbows walking along the top of the wall, or dropping ourselves into the forest and then figuring out how to talk the nice fellows manning the drawbridge into letting us in," Eric said. "I don't like our odds, no matter what we do."
Lauren asked, "Is there any sort of magical protection that you can see on the outside of the castle?"
Eric said, "No-o-o-o."
"Okay. So if we landed ourselves in the forest, we could work some sort of spell that would get us past the guards."
"Theoretically. We'd still have to get into the castle by nonmagical means, and find our people, also by nonmagical means."
"Well, then we'd need some sort of…physical deception. We'd need to, I don't know, maybe look like someone who was supposed to be there. Right?"
Eric said, "But an illusion spell wouldn't hold within the castle. It would break the second we walked inside the gate."
"Is a true physical transformation possible? One that would hold even if magic were blocked?"
"Theoretically. I've never done anything like that. I have no idea the amount of magic it would take, or the amount of rebound we'd incur."
"Do we have a choice in getting your people back?"
"No. Without them, I have no hope of stopping whatever spell the traitors have set loose."
"So we're talking about possible damage versus the destruction of our planet."
Pete took a long, hard swig of his beer and closed his eyes. Eric bit his bottom lip.
"I guess it doesn't matter how much tougher we make it for ourselves when we go to unravel this mess," he said softly. "Since there won't be anything left to unravel if we don't make the jump."
Lauren nodded.
Eric took a cautious sip of the beer, wincing a little as he swallowed. He said, "I can do a transformation spell. I can do a number of other technically forbidden things, too. I can read the minds of the people there and figure out who would be most likely to get into the castle without challenge. If an
yone outside the gates knows where the prisoners are being held, I can create a physical map that will take me to them from that knowledge. If we aren't going to worry about the magical cost, I can get them out. We may have hell to pay when they're out—and it may come after us very quickly."
"We'll deal with it," Lauren said.
Pete nodded. "Point me in the right direction and tell me what to shoot. I have your back."
"All right," Eric said. "Let's do everything we can from here, and make it our goal to get in and out of there as fast as we can."
Ballahara
The presence of civilians scared the shit out of Eric. Having to take a little kid along was bad, but that wasn't the worst problem he had. Just by knowing about the Sentinels, Lauren and Pete compromised the security of a group that had managed to maintain its secrecy—and thus its security—for hundreds of years with only a few really bad breaks.
