wreck of heaven Page 15

  She started to run, this time determined that she would not stop until she reached Jake; that her Brian would be coming home with her, that Molly would be going back to Oria, that these tragedies would end and be undone. She didn't care if that wasn't the way things usually worked. She didn't care if people didn't get their loved ones back from death. She didn't care if "that is not the way we do things here." Bureaucracy would not stop her, little green signs that said, "ADMINISTRATION" or "Don't step on the grass," or "STAY ON THE WALKWAY" would not stop her, and if she had to reshape this place and upset everything and wage war on the gatekeeper who stood between her and those she loved and needed, then by God she would.

  She ran—faster and faster, harder, and her muscles bunched and released, and her heart pounded in her chest, and she felt herself become a creature with wings, unstoppable, a warrior, a hero. While she ran, she did not doubt that she could take on anything.

  "I'm coming after you!" she screamed. "I'm coming, and you do not want to be the one standing between me and Jake when I get there. I'm going to tear you people apart, I am going to turn this place into a crater, I am going to tip heaven upside down and shake it until you all fall out and drop into nothing unless you produce my child for me NOW!"

  Suddenly the scene shifted. The world cracked open and darkness spilled out, and out of the darkness stepped a figure in black, robes swirling around him and occluding his face.

  "And you would take on heaven and hell and everything between to get your son back—and as an incidental—your husband's and your sister's souls as well. Is that right? You would do anything?"

  "I will do anything," Lauren said, and suddenly she was standing with a bazooka on her shoulder aimed right at the black-robed bastard, and she didn't doubt that she could turn him into ash with it.

  Cat Creek

  Pete shut down the scene he'd been viewing in the hand mirror and broke his connection with Lauren. No matter how long he watched what was going on, it wasn't going to make sense.

  He rested his head on Lauren's kitchen table. He hadn't been able to find her at all. And then all of a sudden she had erupted into view in the mirror, but for the life of him, Pete couldn't figure out what he was seeing—or, for that matter, what he was feeling.

  From the second Lauren first appeared in his view, the echoes of something terrifying had reverberated beneath his fingertips, just on the other side of the glass. He stared through the window at Lauren—the single dark spot in a river of light that creeped him out. The pulse of that river felt like every crime scene he'd ever passed and every funeral home he'd ever entered; it scraped along his nerves with the same night fears that had shaken Pete when his father died in the hospital, holding his hand, gasping for one more breath, and when Pete's dog had died, hit by a car, and when, his first year in the FBI, Pete's partner January Ellison took a bullet from a drug lord's sniper—a bullet that had been meant for him.

  Pete didn't know where Lauren was, but he knew damned well she didn't belong there. Then the river thinned out to nothing, and she hung in emptiness.

  He got dreamscape images of a tree. A road. A strangely out-of-place sign—all of them hanging with Lauren in the middle of what was clearly nothing. And suddenly an enormous black-robed, faceless horror that rose up out of the depths of Hell and was going to be a feature attraction in Pete's nightmares for the rest of forever.

  Then Lauren was holding a bazooka that appeared from nowhere, just like the nightmare she faced. Pete couldn't get to her. He couldn't help her. He couldn't even let anyone else know where she was—that would betray any trust she'd placed in him.

  She seemed to be holding her own. Or at least not giving up. But he couldn't stand to watch anymore. He felt helpless, and he felt stupid for not understanding where she was or what she was doing. He didn't know if he would be able to re-create the link between the two of them once he let her go. But he couldn't stand watching helplessly while feelings like swamp-bottom death and just-past murder crawled out of the mirror through his fingertips and went straight into his brain.

  He considering going to Oria, but clearly she wasn't in Oria. He could do magic in Oria, but if he tried following her to save her—assuming that she even needed saving, which was no sure thing—he would probably do more harm than good. He wished he could show the shit he'd just seen to Fred, but Fred still lived firmly within his "aliens-on-Earth" worldview, and Pete wasn't ready yet to bring him up to speed. But Fred had a really nice religious upbringing that had introduced him to many strange, mystical concepts, and Pete almost thought that Fred—seeing Lauren in the lighted river, or Lauren facing off with a bazooka against a Thing in Black—could have made some sense of things that left Pete flummoxed. Pete had been raised Default Christian—which meant that his parents had taken him in to have his head sprinkled in some old-fashioned church not long after he was born, and that he hadn't been inside a church since, except for weddings and funerals.

  Yet what he'd seen in the mirror had more than a whiff of the Mother Church, and suddenly he regretted his lack of interest in things religious. He wondered if maybe he hadn't missed something important. He didn't have time for a Sunday school crash course at this late date.

  He was, he thought, stuck with helping from where he was and with what he knew.

  And what he knew—at least what he knew that might be useful to Lauren—was misdirection and deception.

  "You use what you have, I guess," he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Wilds of Southern Oria

  BAANRAAK, resting comfortably outside the entrance to his cave, enjoying the sun on his hide and the redness that seeped through his closed eyelids, chose not to stir himself to wakefulness at the approach of Rr'garn. He had felt the younger rrôn coming long before he flew into visual range. Rr'garn had neither subtlety nor grace; he rode the world as if he owned it, but more than that, he rode it as if he wanted it to know he owned it.

  Baanraak, who had learned the survival value of a low profile early in his career as Master of the Night Watch, and who was the only master so far to step down successfully rather than being removed from office by the extreme measure of eternal annihilation, thought Rr'garn had little chance even to become Master of the Night Watch—a position he loudly coveted—before his subordinates wearied of him and destroyed him.

  Such loud and chaotic thoughts—perhaps, Baanraak thought, I ought to save the Night Watch the trouble and do the job for them.

  Baanraak opened his eyes at the thunderous wingbeats over his head; another foolish affectation. He could land without disturbing the leaves or the grass, or even the dust if he was careful. He didn't disturb the mind with his thoughts, he didn't disturb the world with his presence. Mostly any more, of course, he basked—he had grown weary of the game long before.

  And now this twit wanted to drag him back into it.

  Baanraak finally lifted his head from its comfortable resting place on his rump as Rr'garn landed and studied the visitor with distaste. Rr'garn had dropped to the ground at an appropriately respectful distance, but then, he wanted something. Baanraak could sift no actual respect from the noisy contents of Rr'garn's mind.

  "I'm not interested," Baanraak said. "So you've wasted the trip."

  Rr'garn said, "But you haven't even heard me out yet."

  "I heard you out long before you got here. You want me to eliminate a Vodi for you, and perhaps her Hunter, though if I can get the Vodi and the Hunter is not convenient, you'll consider the former sufficient to fulfill the contract. You offer me a fine grand mass of purest gold, unspelled and ready for my working, and an equally fine measure of silver—and there is no deceit in this offer; you have both the gold and the silver, and intend to part with it if I succeed. Which is why you're alive and not lying there in the grass with your throat torn out."

  Rr'garn pulled in his rilles and cowered like a chastised hatchling, and all the membranes slid over his eyes for just an instant before he got control of him
self and shook everything back out to adult display posture.

  "Who brought this news to you before I did?"

  "Your noisy thoughts, boy. Just as now you think you ought to kill the traitor who came to me before you and soured me on your mission."

  Rr'garn managed to keep his rilles out this time, but the membranes over his eyes flashed quick betrayal even before he could sort his thoughts. "What manner of magic is this, Baanraak, that you can pull my thoughts from my mind?"

  "No magic. Simple control, Rr'garn. You never bothered to find your own silence, choosing instead to keep your thoughts secret by hiding yourself in with a pack of others like you, none of whom has ever quieted for a minute. When you grow very still, and slow your own thoughts until they creep at the pace of a worm burrowing through earth, or even slower, to the pace of the growth of a tree, then the thoughts of others who are neither so still or so slow become bright, shiny baubles that you can pick out of the air at will."

  "I have too much to think about to turn myself into a worm or a tree, Baanraak. I'm still active in the world."

  Baanraak blinked slowly and smiled a sleepy smile at him. "And yet, while you cross-quartered my domain looking for me, I learned everything you currently know and worry about. Shall I list the enemies who seek to prevent your rise to Master? Shall I list your treacheries against the keth? Shall I tell you the name of the mate you aim to steal from one who considers you an ally, or the means by which you intend to do it? While you shouted your secrets down to me, I lay in plain sight and watched you flounder." Baanraak's smile broadened. "And yet you are too busy for silence or stillness."

  To this, Rr'garn had no reply.

  Baanraak said, "Now you hate me and wish me destroyed—and still, your fear keeps you here. And how very strange. You think this is not a Vodi, but the Vodi." He stretched his wings and uncurled and stood. He was bigger than Rr'garn, and next to his own opalescent black Rr'garn's pale gray and yellow scales looked sickly. "The Vodi? Really? Why would you think that? She's like all the others."

  "Not quite." Rr'garn spoke, though he seemed tentative. As well he might be—Baanraak could read most of his thoughts clearly enough. The little coward had managed to keep the cause of the fear that had his mind spinning tucked deep enough inside that Baanraak had to confess surprise. The Vodi. He'd thought that little myth had died during his tenure as Master. Rr'garn continued, "She's strong. She was strong before she passed into the dark—and she carries a brand on her that none of the others has."

  "A brand?" Baanraak found himself interested in spite of himself.

  "She was a deatheater in her home world. But more than that, she was a warrior. She didn't come here as a tender child, and she near killed a handful of her abductors while they were getting her here from there. She carries herself as a warrior now."

  While Baanraak thought, the very tip of his tail began to twitch. That had always been the myth—that someday, a Vodi would appear who sought not peace but war, who would not give quarter, but who would take her war to the dark gods and would eventually defeat them and unspin the darkness they had built. The tale was that she would walk the length of the worldchain, and where her feet touched life would spring forth. Life from death—for she was, at heart, as much of a soulless dead thing as any of the dark gods she set her spear against.

  That had been the myth, and in Baanraak's day they had scoffed, because the Vodi of that time had been a fragile little buttercup, as had the ones who preceded her. She'd negotiated, she'd appeased, she'd surrendered a bit here and a tatter there and a piece elsewhere until her veyâr sat on a few shreds of ground that had, at the time the first Vodi arrived, been a healthy and promising young civilization.

  "A warrior," he said. "Fancy that." Then he shook his head and laughed. "But you would think anyone a warrior who did not shriek at the sight of you."

  "Not so. My spy told me tales. He would not approach her; he lived in fear that she might notice him because he said she had hawk eyes and she made no noise when she moved."

  Baanraak did not want to let this ambitious stripling know he was intrigued. So he yawned elaborately and settled back to the ground. "And yet, a messenger came chasing after you to tell you that your spy got up his courage after all, and went after the Vodi and her Hunter. And now he's dust." Baanraak chuckled. "You need a better spy. Or at least one that isn't quite so dead."

  "He got me what I needed to know, and his reputation was impeccable. The veyâr trusted and liked him. If he was not brave, well, what of that? I needed his eyes and his ears and his discretion, not his sword. Bravery is overrated in spies. And in his case, it was wasteful."

  "Tell yourself that." Baanraak chuckled. "And so, with your slaughtered spy and your noisy mind, you come to me to ask me to destroy a Vodi for you."

  "Yes."

  "You don't think killing her a few times will be enough to frighten her into oblivion on her own, eh?" He closed his eyes, though he watched Rr'garn closely with his mind and his other senses. He knew he gave the perfect impression of an old rrôn bored and stupefied by the warmth of the sun and the sweet breezes in his nostrils, but he could not have been more tightly coiled or more ready to spring.

  Rr'garn was watching him, turmoiled mind churning its flotsam and detritus. So loud and so frightened. Baanraak waited. Rr'garn waited, too—and a surprisingly long time. This pleased Baanraak for some reason he couldn't quite put a claw on.

  At last Rr'garn said, "You do still partake of the feasting at the fall of a world, do you not? You have not set aside the drinking of death?"

  Baanraak smiled on the inside. "I still feast."

  "This one could end the feasts, and in so doing end us."

  "The Night Watch has the warriors of the upworlds at its disposal—the best and strongest and cleverest of the Night Watch, immortals all."

  "And yet not one of them is you," Rr'garn said. "We do not want an adventure out of this, Baanraak. We simply want efficiency and success. You aren't known for a trail of drama—only for getting things done promptly and well."

  Baanraak gave up the pretense of sleep. He raised his head, shook out the rilles around his face to full display, and grinned. "That's not a reputation I mind leaving at all."

  "Will you do it? The rewards for success will be rich indeed."

  Baanraak cocked his head and considered. "I think I will do it. However, it won't be for the gold or the silver."

  Rr'garn's eyerilles stood out straight as cat whiskers—an overt display of shock. Baanraak thought that in a game of bluffs, he'd have the poor, clumsy fool twelve times out of twelve, even if he couldn't read Rr'garn's thoughts.

  "Don't mistake my meaning. I may decide to accept the payment. But I'm not doing it for the payment. I want a look at this Vodi who is so different. If she is—if she truly could be the Vodi, I'll dispose of her for you. If she's not, I'll go my way, leaving her for your people to dispose of as you will—and I'll eat the next one of you who interrupts my napping."

  Rr'garn nodded, not saying a word.

  "You have her under surveillance now?"

  "Oh, yes." Rr'garn looked quite proud of himself. "I have a detail circling Copper House at all times. She's in there; she's had no opportunity to leave."

  Baanraak would have rolled his eyes, but unlike Rr'garn, he knew how to control his reactions. "Circling—as in flying circles above Copper House."

  "Yes. Out of range of their best weapons, too. We haven't had anyone take so much as a scratch."

  "How many?"

  "How—oh. Rotating shifts of a dozen at a time. A combination of watch and threat, really."

  "Clever," Baanraak said, though it was anything but. "Won't work with my plans, however. I'll go in and find a convenient watchpost out of sight and range of the veyâr. Once I'm settled in, you'll give the signal and all of your people will fly away."

  "And then you'll slip in and destroy her."

  "And then I'll probably wait a bit to get a feel for things.
You seem dreadfully impatient."

  "We have a handful of deals going on Earth that could finish it for us in as little as a month. I want her gone before we trigger the last war."

  This took Baanraak completely by surprise. "The last war? Earth hasn't even reached maximum population density yet. It's not slated to ripen fully for another ten years."

  "Many of us are hungry."

  "We used to wait a thousand years between worlds," Baanraak said. "Now it's not even fifty?"

  "This world is ripening slowly." Rr'garn gave a disgusted look at the budding forests all around the rocky outcrop that marked Baanraak's lair. "It should have huge factories, powerful war engines, mass transport at least in the budding stages. Instead, it's stalled at wind and water, with no sign of moving forward. We may be a thousand years before we can harvest Oria. And we can thank the veyâr and their backward-looking ways for that."