by Holly Lisle
They tried to speak to each other in their remembered tongue, but their new mouths could not make the sounds their old mouths could. They looked for food, but discovered that their new stomachs did not hunger for the same things that their old stomachs had. They could communicate, but with difficulty.
No matter. They lived, they survived, and if they were distraught by their loss of humanity, still, these new bodies functioned. They had senses humans had never known. They offered … promise.
Far to the north, a mad and sobbing sea replaced both a beautiful city and a lovely lake. And in the steep, stark hills piled up around its perimeter, still smoking from the explosive power of the spell-blast that had created them, creatures with skin dark as midnight, skin that glistened with gemstone colors, with hair that floated like feathers around their faces, clung together in weeping clusters, and then, as they realized the nightmare had passed and that they had survived, pulled away, and began trying to determine who among those who survived were family, and who friends, and who enemies.
West, to the chain of islands spun like a necklace from Manarkas to Arim, where, rising out of the massed dead, the few survivors flexed taloned fingertips and admired sleek, striped fur, and felt dagger canines at the corners of their mouths. Still capable of running on two feet, but now also flexible enough to drop to all fours to pursue prey, they grinned at each other and coughed the words that they could still shape, and began to hunt those not lucky enough to have been made both beautiful and fast by the will of the gods.
Across the face of the world, in ten thousand different shapes, the living in their myriad forms moved away from the cities that could no longer be home to them, in search of prey, in search of mates, in search of companionship. By the hand of the gods, they found others like themselves. That was the clearest proof that the gods took an interest in the outcome, for rewhah on its own is a chaotic force, making changes at random that rarely leave a viable creature at the end, and that would never create breeding populations of viable creatures in territories that might support them.
In the madness of magic run wild, the gods tossed their dice. Millions died, millions changed forever, millions remained unchanged in a world suddenly hostile to them in every way.
The gods’ dice landed. The new game began. And life went on.
A light spun through the void, gently brushed into another—two tiny sparks of consciousness that somehow found one another. Luercas, lost and terrified, with no idea of where he was or how he might hope to find his way back to the Mirror of Souls and the gate back to warmth and color and light, suddenly found himself no longer alone. And with this other soul—the soul of Mellayne, who had found a way to adapt to this horrific solitude—he discovered that he could reach out and locate other tiny sparks of thought. His people.
He summoned them—called the first meeting of the Star Council.
Five years, he thought, feeling them moving toward him. Five. Or maybe ten. I can survive this for ten years if I must. Surely I’ve been here for months already.
In the eternity of cold and dark, Wraith felt a tearing, searing pain, and a scream like a world in agony dug itself into his soul and would not let go. It started, but it did not stop, and it reverberated through him until he thought he would be torn apart by it.
In that scream he saw the face of Matrin as if he stood in the heart of the rewhah storms, as if he floated with the lost souls in each of the twenty-seven new seas that held not a drop of water between them, as if he were once again in a Warren among Warreners awake and lost, and now trapped with no way out unless someone came and rescued them. Vodor Imrish showed him everything, all at once, so that his soul experienced all the horrors of the world through the eyes and heart of a god. He was more than one of the tortured, the dying, the scarred, the trapped. He was, for a god’s infinity and a single moment, all of them, and it was more than he could bear. In a place where he had no body and should feel no pain, the finger of Vodor Imrish marked him with a remembrance of the suffering of the world, and then, when Wraith was sure he would go mad from the anguish, pushed him away. Wraith spun through freezing, clinging strands of silk into light. Into dawn, above a sea that was as perfect a circle as if it had been drawn by a draftsman’s compass.
Jess, beside him, wept.
Patr, across from him, wept.
And, he realized, he, too, wept.
“The death of the world,” Patr was repeating between sobs. “The death of the world.”
Jess turned her face away, but Wraith turned her around and pulled her close and held her. The two of them reached out to Patr and embraced him, too. Three survivors, adrift in the sky at the end of the world.
Wraith caught his breath after a while, and he and Jess and Patr moved apart. The sun warmed Wraith’s skin. The wind dried his tears. “We are not done here,” he said at last. “We are alive so that we can work. So that we can gather up the people and take them home.”
Patr looked up at him. “The world is dead,” he said. “You saw it die. You felt it die.”
Wraith said, “Not all of it. This is what Solander meant when he gave me the Prophecies, when he said:
From the death throes of the Dragons the True People will be scattered, and set upon by wolves and bears hungry for their blood, hungry for their destruction. The weak will fall, and the brave will falter, but the Falcons will gather them, and guard them, strong and weak, and take them home.
‘For these are my people, the True People,’ says the god Vodor Imrish, ‘And I am not yet done with them.’”
Patr’s harsh laugh sounded like a slap in the face. “You wrote that. Do you think you’ll fool me with ‘prophecies of Vincalis’?”
Wraith looked at him calmly and said, “Should we let them die?”
Patr, who seemed to have been expecting some other response, said, “What?”
“Should we let them die? The people trapped in the Warren we’re hovering over right now, that’s floating in this wizard circle? The ones in the little towns surrounded by …” He shrugged. “Surrounded by the lost and the damned? The Scarred? They will die, you know. Most of them have no weapons, no skills. They aren’t the Kaan, who will be able to pick up their lives today as if nothing had happened. If any of the Kaan are left. They aren’t the Gyrunalles. They’re city dwellers, magic-dependent.” Wraith shrugged. “If I wrote the prophecies, what of it? You felt the hand of a god. You know we act as servants to a will greater than our own. It’s not as if I pretend guidance from some false force to give myself power.”
He felt a tug in his mind, and without knowing why he did so, Wraith turned away from Patr and looked down at the sea below them. An aircar hovered over the floating bubble that held a Warren within it, and Wraith could see that the bubble had started moving—in great haste—toward solid ground. He could feel the spells that were being cast to send that bubble—and twenty-six others like it—to safety. Move, he thought, in unison with the soft pull of voices in his head. Move, by my will, by my bones and blood, flesh and soul. Move. He realized he felt magic, that it now coursed in his veins as strongly as his own blood.
The touch of a god, he thought—and felt an instant of searing pain beneath his breastbone. He couldn’t breathe, and, gasping, thinking that maybe he had presumed too much and Vodor Imrish was done with him after all, he clawed open his tunic.
The pain stopped. The shock, though, could have killed him. He found a glowing brand there: a mark no bigger than the print of a large thumb, an oval in which a falcon sat perched on a branch, looking outward.
Patr stared at Wraith’s chest and said, “I thought you were immune to magic.”
“I thought so, too,” Wraith agreed. “But not, I imagine, to the touch of a god.” He noted a glow beneath Patr’s tunic and pointed. “Nor was I the only one touched.”
Patr looked down, and opened his tunic, and touched the mark he found there—a secret mark of favor from a god. His finger pressed against it and tears started
down his cheeks again.
“Me, too,” Jess said.
“You feel it, don’t you? Both of you? All of them—all of us—linked together by mind and will and spirit. We have become Falcons … and that is something more than I ever imagined it might be.”
Jess and Patr nodded.
“Help them, then. Help us. Join your will to ours so that we can save the Warreners.”
Together the Falcons, now truly united, mind to mind and soul to soul, brought the Warrens across the raging seas of souls to the havens of dry land.
And as the aircar in which they sat settled on the ground near the beached edge of the Warren they’d rescued, Wraith looked at the mark on his chest, now no longer glowing. The falcon looked toward the future, he thought. Toward the west, where he, in his guise as Vincalis, had been shown a place where humans might live safe from the bears and the wolves of this new age—new bears and new wolves and more, who in their twisted bodies carried the minds of angry, vengeful men.
Safe for a while, anyway. While they grew stronger. While they learned to live as part of the world again. Maybe someday the true men and the new men would find peace between them. Maybe all of Matrin would one day be a good place for everyone. But this was not that day.
They climbed out of the aircar. The other one that had circled with them now moved on—Wraith knew they were headed for another Warren. The Warreners would need someone to lead them south, where the Falcons on this continent had agreed survivors would meet.
Wraith led Patr and Jess into the Warren, through Vincalis Gate, now toothless following the death of Dragon wizardry. Wraith thought he would find people panicked, mute, lost. But instead he found them already gathering up anything that would serve as weapons, standing in lines facing the gate—men, women, and children. All pale, under-dressed, hugely obese, but with awareness in their eyes, and fierce determination.
“Of course,” he whispered. “All the ones who weren’t born in there—the outlanders, the political prisoners … the criminals …” He winced and glanced sidelong at Patr. But outsiders in the Warren didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain the calm, the fact that everyone looked ready to face what lay beyond. He knew some of these people had to be native Warreners, and they should have been terrified and helpless—but even they looked clear-eyed, confident, and somehow capable. How could that be?
A red-haired man marched along the lines, calling out, “You who have names, stay on the far side of the line. You without names must raise your hands and I will give them to you. No person steps through those gates without a name. We Warreners deserve names. We are people, and we will live like people, and die like people.”
He touched a girl’s hand. “You’re Brown.” And a boy’s hand. “You’re Tallboy.” A man, weary and stooped. “You’re Courage.” He stopped by the man, and touched him, and said, “We’re both Warreners born, you and I—but now we’re free. Our souls and our flesh are our own again; the monsters that devoured us are gone. You can feel it. Believe, man! Believe. We’re people now, and all of eternity is ours.” The weary man nodded and managed a small smile, and the leader moved on, again giving names. “You’re Hunter … you’re Copper … you’re …” He stopped in front of a gawky, rail-thin boy who didn’t fit with the others—who looked lost and starved and broken in ways none of these others were. “You have no name?” he asked the child. The boy shook his head. “You’re from the Warrens?” The boy nodded. And the red-haired man smiled and said, “I have just the name for you. Your name is Wraith.” He leaned in close to the boy and said, “It’s the best name of all. I was saving it for someone special.”
Wraith couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He stared at the mountain of human flesh who had just said that, and tried to equate the man before him with the skinny red-haired boy he’d known so long ago. He couldn’t believe it, but it couldn’t be anyone else.
He pushed past the people crowding toward the gate and the promise of freedom, squeezed along the wall, and came up behind the red-haired man. He had a lump in his throat, and tears blurred his eyes so badly that for a moment he couldn’t see at all. Wraith touched the man’s arm, and when the Warren leader turned, said, “Smoke? Is it you?”
A long moment of silence. Then, “Oh, gods. Wraith!”
They hugged, and Smoke finally pushed him away and stood staring at his face, nodding. “You look the same.”
“You don’t,” Wraith said, and laughed a little, and wiped the tears from his eyes with a quick swipe of the back of his hands.
“No,” Smoke agreed.
They stood for a moment, lost for words to bridge the gap of years and nightmares.
Then Smoke said, “Even when I was Sleeping, I knew you’d come back.” Smoke’s eyes shifted left and down, and his smile turned disbelieving. “Jess? It can’t be. You brought Jess with you, too?”
“It’s me, Smoke.” She rested her hand on Wraith’s forearm and said, “Wraith moved a world to get here.”
“I felt it move,” Smoke said. And then he turned to Wraith. “Thank you. Thank you for not forgetting about me—about us.”
“Never,” Wraith said. He felt Jess’s hand slide into his, and tightened his fingers around hers. When he looked down at her, she was smiling up at him; Wraith saw tear stains on her cheeks.
“You were right about the Warrens,” she told him.
He nodded, and kissed her forehead. “I know.”
Beyond Vincalis Gate, a new and frightening world waited. But the Warreners were still alive in spite of everything an entire civilization had thrown against them. Having conquered odds so terrible, Wraith had to think these people had a chance to win it all—the world and everything in it.
Jess whispered, “And what about you and me?”
“We have all the time in our lives to figure that out.” He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
And the first Warreners stepped through Vincalis Gate and into the wilds beyond.
About the Author
Holly Lisle, born in 1960, has been writing fantasy and SF novels full-time since November 30, 1992. Prior to that, she worked as an advertising representative, a commercial artist, a guitar teacher, a restaurant singer, and for ten years as a registered nurse specializing in emergency and intensive care. Originally from Salem, Ohio, she has also lived in Alaska, Costa Rica, Guatemala, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. She and Matt are raising three children and several cats.
She maintains a large readers’ and writers’ Web site at www.hollylisle.com/ and offers a free irregularly published writers’ newsletter, plus a readers’ mailing list, active readers’ and writers’ communities, games and contests, sneak peeks at new work, and much, much more.
Holly’s e-mail address is [email protected]. She reads every letter and e-mail, though she cannot promise to answer all of them.
