by Holly Lisle
This was a really bad break. Lauren and Pete didn't just know about the Sentinels. They had an active, essential part in a desperate rescue mission, and he simply couldn't do what he had to do without either of them, and if he couldn't do what he had to do, most of the world's population was going to die.
But.
Oh, but.
They'd dropped into a clearing as close to the walled town as Lauren dared take them. Now he gave them last-minute instructions.
"It fires just like an automatic rifle," he told Pete, handing him the weapon he'd created so that Pete could stand guard. "Switch left, and you're on full auto. Switch center, and you're in single-shot mode. Switch right is the safety. It will never run out of ammunition—you won't have to reload, and unless I've really screwed the pooch, it will never overheat, either." He took a deep breath. "But use each shot as if you had to make bullets for the damned thing yourself. We're pulling energy from Earth to power it, and the more you use, the more chance that we do something we won't be able to fix when we get back there."
Pete nodded. "Will it kill?"
Eric rested a hand on Pete's shoulder and said, "You're going to decide that."
Pete frowned. "How so?"
"If you only want it to stun whoever is coming, that's what it will do. If you're in trouble and you need it to kill, it will kill."
"How does it know?"
Eric sighed. "Magic. That's the way things are in this place. So be…moderate. All right? Because death costs. In terms of the price our world pays in rebound effect, it costs a lot."
Pete held the weapon out in front of him, staring at it as if it might turn into a snake. Eric didn't suggest that possibility; Pete could, if he thought the wrong things, turn the thing into a snake at the worst possible moment, and Eric didn't think he'd be wise to be planting such unfortunate ideas. Instead, he turned to Lauren.
"Just keep the gate open and steady. We're going to have to go through it fast." He looked from Lauren to where Jake, asleep beside her in a big, warm nest of blankets in a wicker basket that she'd created for him, snored softly—that little-kid snore that sounded like a cat purring beside a heat vent. He was a cute little guy, and angelic-looking when he was asleep. "When you hear us coming, shove him through first. Well, make sure it's really us, then shove him through. And we'll go through. And then Pete, and then you."
"What if the traitors are with the prisoners?"
"They won't be. They might be chasing after us, but they won't be with us."
She glanced at the arch she'd formed of two saplings and bound with a silk cord. The green fire of the otherworld shimmered inside of it, and in its shadows, Eric could still see Lauren's foyer. Empty.
Empty was good.
"I'll be ready," she said. "Are you changing into…into whatever you're going to be while you're here, or once you get just outside the wall?"
"I'll change here. I want you to see what I look like, because I'll still look like that when I bring everyone back." He closed his eyes tightly and swallowed hard. "If I don't come back…" He didn't want to say those words, but he had to. "If I don't come back, you might as well stay here. There won't be anything to go home to within the month. If you dare, and if you have loved ones you can reach quickly, you might bring them over. On this side, even if they're carrying the plague, you should be able to heal them. But don't waste time trying to decide what you want to do. It…wouldn't hurt to have your contingency plans already made, so that you can just go ahead and carry them out."
Pete said, "You'll be back."
"I hope so."
Lauren asked him, "If you…ah, don't come back…is there anyone you want us to rescue for you?"
He thought about his parents, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, good friends. He started to say yes. "No."
"No?" Lauren watched his face closely.
"No. That will be my incentive to succeed."
"Good luck," Pete told him.
He nodded. Then he knelt on the frozen ground and stared up at the black sky, at the stars that twinkled in configurations that were almost, but not exactly, the way they should have been and would be in his home sky.
Let me hear what I must hear, he willed. Let me see what I must see.
Into the silence of the night sky, images poured. Voices whispered. He studied inhuman faces, forms, and voices; pored through alien thoughts and hopes and fears, willing that all things that would not hand him the key to the castle be eliminated. The babble became a steady, pulsing current, and then a faint trickle, and at last he held the three best images in his mind—three creatures for whom the watchmen would unquestioningly open the gates to the city, for whom the guards would willingly unlock the castle doors, to whom no answer would be withheld, and from whom no command would require the approval of another.
The first creature was the master of the castle—but he was currently in residence. And he never traveled without a retinue. The second was an odd, squat little monster with bat wings and a hellish, Shar-Pei-wrinkled face, who frequently traveled alone and who was fond of dropping in unannounced. He would have been perfect, if Eric hadn't had to worry about the conservation of mass in altering his form. He could fudge a little, but certainly not the sixty to seventy percent of his body mass that he would have to shed to transform into the ugly little monster.
The third was…Eric didn't know what she was. A breathtakingly beautiful creature, thin as gossamer but nearly twice as tall as a man, she had the face of a Chinese goddess—huge, almond eyes, tiny mouth, almost invisible nose—and hair red as blood and twisted into ten thousand beaded, beribboned cords. She wore a gown that floated around her as if it were alive. And, according to the thoughts of those who had dealt with her, she never spoke. She merely pointed, or if pointing did not get her what she wished, she placed a thought picture into the head of the person she wanted to obey her…and that person obeyed.
That, Eric thought, would work. He could be female for a while. Female what, he didn't know. But female.
He brought the magic into himself, and embraced its fire in each cell. He held the picture of the lovely creature in his mind, and wrapped the picture around him, and stretched himself to become it. The pain—
The pain devoured him. Fire burned in his joints, fire burned inside his lungs, fire blazed within his flesh and bone and nerves and brain until he wanted to scream, wanted to die, wanted to bite into himself and devour himself to get at the maddening, enveloping, inside-out horror of it and put an end to it.
Then, sharp as the first frost of autumn, something snapped within him and the pain was gone.
"Good merciful Lord," Pete whispered.
"Oh…" Lauren sighed, and mesmerized, rose and began to walk toward him.
"Stay," he said. "I'll be back as fast as I can. This feels…really awkward, and I want to get back into my own skin." His voice, to his horror, was his own. A man's voice, purely human.
Well, he hadn't planned on speaking to anyone but the prisoners anyway. And if they heard his voice in this body, maybe they'd believe it was really him.
He said, "Wait until sunrise. If I'm not back by then, I'm not coming."
Lauren and Pete both raised a hand, and he acknowledged their waves before he turned and headed toward the town.
Copper House
Getting in proved easy—so easy it frightened Eric. The city watchmen almost fell over themselves lowering the drawbridge for him; the castle gatekeeper threw open the gate before he even reached it, and as he passed him, said, "Shall I summon the Master for you, Glorious One?"
Eric responded with a quiet No placed in the Orian's mind. The gatekeeper dropped to his hands and knees and crawled backward, scraping his forehead across the floor as he did.
Damn. Who, or what, was this thing he was pretending to be? He was starting to scare himself.
He stalked through the mostly sleeping castle, and when he came across a guard—who shrieked at the sight of him but managed to stif
le the shocked scream almost before it left his lips—Eric touched the guard and placed within his mind the image of the prisoners.
The guard bowed, shuddering at his touch, and, discreetly pulling away, scurried off up a passageway. Eric followed, musing that he had certainly chosen the right disguise for his infiltration of the castle—but he never wanted to run into the genuine article of whatever he was.
Their path meandered through stone corridors, and then along a passageway clad floor, walls, and ceiling with copper. His terrified guide led him to a massive copper door, and with shaking hands opened it for him. The Sentinels, awakened by the sound of the door opening and by the light of the guard's lantern falling across their faces, rubbed their eyes and sat up. They looked bewildered, weary, and scared.
And now Eric came to an obstacle. He needed to have the guard leave…but he didn't dare let him get too far. The guard was going to have to show him and the Sentinels through the maze of the castle and out. He couldn't speak into the guard's mind, directing him to what he wanted him to do, because the copper that now surrounded Eric would prevent him from any magical subterfuge at all. Yet he couldn't let the guard remain within earshot, because he had to tell the Sentinels who he was and what he had to do, and the minute he spoke, the voice that came out of him would belong to a human male instead of the inhuman goddess-thing that he appeared to be, and that voice would blow his disguise. From Richmond to Gettysburg, as his father always used to say.
Eric looked at the guard, looked at the Sentinels, looked back at the guard. Dammit. He was stuck.
And then he had an idea. He pointed one finger to a place just outside the massive copper door, and when the guard took the position he indicated, shoved the door almost closed with himself inside of it. And with a finger, he traced out the message, It's me—Eric. Come with me now. Don't say anything.
"I'll be damned," June Bug muttered, but she was the only one who made any sound at all. Eric lined his captives up by twos and opened the door and, with Sentinels trailing him like chicks after a mother duck, pointed the guard toward the front gate again.
They were halfway back to the front door when the creature that Eric recognized as the master of the castle—from reading the thoughts of the gate guards when he prepared his disguise—came running up, panic etched on his face and arms waving. "No," the master begged as he rounded the corner at a dead run. "No! I don't owe you these! Take something else! Take treasure, take slaves from among my people, take…anything else, but don't take my wizards. Without them, we lose everything!"
Eric held up one long-fingered hand, palm forward in what he hoped would be a recognizable "stop" gesture. The master of the castle slowed, but he didn't fall silent.
"Who told you I had them? Was it the rrôn? Do they know? Did they tell you I had wizards here so that you would take them, and their destruction of me and my people could be complete? They are no violation of our treaty, and you don't need them. What are you going to do? Feed on them? Make them work for you? You can do your own magic! Leave them with me, I beg of you. I'll give you the terms you've wanted—I'll give you the forest roads. All of the forest roads. Just leave me my wizards…"
Eric felt stirrings of sympathy for the creature. His true panic and his clear sense of loss left Eric wondering what horrors the master of the castle and his people had been facing that they had thought their only salvation was the kidnapping and enslavement of an entire team of Sentinels.
He wasn't facing the destruction of the planet of Oria and everyone in it, though, and Eric hardened his heart against the man's plight, whatever it might be, and pointed that bony index finger down the hall the way the master had come.
The veyâr hung his head and turned away slowly. The guard made a sort of whimpering noise in the back of his throat, quickly stifled, and when Eric pointed toward the door again, led Eric and the Sentinels out.
The instant they stepped free of the confines of the copper-warded castle, Eric willed a cloud of blackness into existence, and would have had it swallow them. But as the swirling darkness rose up from the ground, the master of the castle burst out of the castle's front gate, accompanied by a young woman who looked almost human. The woman pointed a finger at him and said, "I can feel inside of him. He's human—a Sentinel—like them."
"Give me back my wizards, false keth! Give them back!" the veyâr howled.
"That thing is no true keth!" shouted the master of the castle. "Guards, your crossbows on the impostor. Kill it! It pretends to be what it is not!"
"Shit!" Eric yelled. He cast the emergency spell he'd readied for use once the cloud of darkness had swallowed him—he'd hoped to make less of a dramatic exit, but now it couldn't be helped. "Sentinels, to the gate!"
Green fire surrounded all of them plus the veyâr guard who had led them through the castle, lifted them into the air, flung them at horrifying speed toward Lauren and the gate, and threw them, breathless and anxious, on the ground in the clearing. "Now!" Eric yelled. "Get us out of here now!"
Pete, weapon trained toward the city, didn't even turn to look at them. "I've got you covered."
Lauren shouted, "Jake's through! Sentinels, to me now!"
One by one the Sentinels ran through the gate, and after each passage Lauren recharged it for the next. She was slower than Willie, but Eric was glad she could work the gates at all. Without her, he, the Sentinels, and the world wouldn't have had a chance.
"Incoming," Pete yelled, and Eric heard the weapon he'd given his deputy go off, first a few shots, and then a steady stream. "About a hundred coming by land. Christ, they're fast! They're going to be in crossbow range anytime now. We need to move faster."
"Gate's doing what it can," Lauren yelled.
"Give me back my prisoners," the veyâr roared, and a blast of white fire erupted from the ground just behind Eric, throwing him forward and to his knees. The unmistakable stink and yellow smoke of sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal rolled across the ground.
"Shit!" he yelled. "They have gunpowder!"
"Son of a bitch!" That had been Lauren.
Eric turned to find her lying on her back fifteen feet from the gate, with her face scratched and peppered by debris and the front of her coat blackened and torn from the blast. Scared—without her they had no way home—he ran to her side. "Where are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," she said through gritted teeth. "Scared the shit out of me, but I'm fine. Let me get back to the gate."
He helped her to her feet, and she frowned. "Who went through? It's shut again."
"Nobody. The explosion must have blasted debris through."
She shook her head. "I hope nobody was in the way on the other side. Come on—let's get out of here."
A second blast blew a tree ten feet from the mirror into shreds.
"They're serious about this. Pete! Put the weapon on full auto, and blanket the area." An identical weapon appeared in his hands in a flash of green fire, and he moved away from the mirror and started firing into the part of the forest behind Pete's back.
Lauren, steady as hell under fire, got the gate back up and shoved the last three Sentinels through in record time. When she yelled "You and Pete next!" Eric wanted to cheer. Pete came running and dove through, while Eric sprayed his stunner bullets into the trees and the bodies of his attackers.
"You and me together," he told Lauren, and sent a few rounds into the forest. He heard screams that told him his shots had hit targets, and he hoped that he'd been willing his enemies stunned, not dead.
"Ready," Lauren said at last, and grabbed his hand, and the two of them stepped onto the path.
In the instant they hung between the worlds, he felt a cold, angry presence push itself between him and her, prying his fingers loose from hers. A voice whispered in his ear, "She isn't for you."
And then, thoroughly creeped out, he reached the end of the path, squeezed through the mirror, and stumbled into Lauren's foyer in Cat Creek, to find the rest of the Sentinels, Pete, and a ve
ry cranky Jake waiting.
CHAPTER 16
Cat Creek, North Carolina
LAUREN'S FIRST ACT as they stepped into her crowded foyer was to turn back, reach into the gate through which she'd just come, and shatter the path that she'd walked. She did not know if any of those who pursued her could walk the paths. She did not know what the consequences would be if she destroyed a path with someone on it. But she knew what the consequences would be if she did not. The creatures pursuing her would burst into her house and hurt her, and hurt her child.
So, remorselessly, she twisted, and the spaces between the universes twisted with her, and the path fragmented into a million green-glass shards. The echo of her action blazed along her synapses and screamed into her skull. She yanked her arm free from the mirror and crumpled to the floor, holding her head tightly between clammy palms, rocking, willing the fire behind her eyeballs to die.
