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  He studied her for one long moment, aware of danger drawing near but feeling that this moment and this enemy required marking in his mind. She did what he had once done in a similar situation—hunted by a wiser and more powerful enemy, he had realized at the last instant that his greatest danger lay not in dying but in living, and he had killed himself quickly. Though he had not been so clever as to share his pain and shock at his own death with his enemy. That had been a masterstroke.

  She'd gambled, and in her gamble she had won more than she ever would have believed. Baanraak's pursuer, finding in Baanraak not just a worthy enemy but at last a worthy successor, had not destroyed the gold band with which Baanraak had anchored flesh to mind. He had instead taken Baanraak, stripped all vestiges of his mortality from him, and when he was hard as diamond, the old one had trained him. Finally, when Baanraak became the perfect hunter, the perfect warrior, and the perfect killer, the old one had come to him and had found the release from the burden of immortality and the weary pains of existence by the blade of one worthy to give him the final cut.

  Baanraak knelt at the Vodi's side and gently lifted her hair away from her neck. He unclasped the necklace she wore; it came away easily now that she was dead, though he would have had a hellish struggle on his hands to get it from her while she lived. He did not wear it in any fashion—the soul-gold of the immortals would destroy anyone who tried to wear an active piece. He simply slipped it into a little bag that he tied to the belt around his waist. He let the bag dangle at his hip, took her blade, and headed for the door. Those coming would think he'd killed her; that didn't matter. The survivors would come after him no matter what he did; let them think what they liked.

  He considered going straight back the way he'd come in—his pursuers came that way, and he could have a bit of fun ripping them to pieces with their own weapons, her blade and his claws. But he had in his possession something more valuable to him than any gold bauble to be handed over to those who had hired him, or than any pile of clean gold and silver that might be offered in payment. He held in his bag the mind, the eventual body, and the indomitable will of the one creature he would never have thought to meet at this time and in this place.

  He held his heir, and for that reason alone, he would be stealthy and careful, and he would leave by taking the fewest possible chances and exposing himself to the fewest possible risks.

  Copper House

  Some niggling worry twitched through the quiet places in Seolar's mind, and he rose out of troubled sleep. Molly wasn't with him, but when he considered what she'd found out and the way she'd discovered it, he wouldn't blame her if she never spoke to him again. It wasn't her absence that had awakened him.

  What, then? He sat up, listening. He didn't hear the guards outside his door, and he should have. As he focused his concentration, he couldn't hear the guards up and down the hall—and though they were quiet, his acute hearing had always permitted him to pinpoint their presence.

  He rose, slipped on shoes and an overrobe, and over that put on sword and buckler. He considered Molly first, of course, but he knew that he had enemies too, from among the veyâr as well as outside.

  He opened the door with trepidation; he knew he might find his guards, many of them friends since childhood, dead on the floor, with the enemy waiting without. What he found, though, was an empty hall with no sign of struggle, and nothing to suggest what might have happened. For his men to have left their posts, however, leaving him asleep and unguarded, the situation had to be unthinkably bad.

  Birra had told him Molly was going to be in her sister's suite; that Molly had decided she needed to spend time studying. Seolar headed in that direction, listening for anything, but the whole place ached with a silence that defied explanation or comprehension. He tried to imagine any situation in which all of his men would abandon their posts—and the farther he got into the center of the house without passing another soul, the more clear it became that they had all abandoned their posts—and he could think of nothing; any danger should have had half of them rallying around Molly and the other half around him.

  No blood in the halls, no dropped weapons, no bodies, no smoke, no sound…

  Coming out the door, he'd walked, but the emptiness weighed on him, and dread consumed him, and soon enough he was running as fast as he could toward Lauren's suite. Once he could be certain Molly had come to no harm, he would figure out what to do next.

  No guards barred the path to Molly, though, and the door to Lauren's suite stood open. He wanted to rage, he wanted to vomit, but instead he went into the little group of rooms. No goroths. No Molly. And, aside from the complete absence of everyone, no sign of anything wrong.

  Finally, however, he heard something. He headed into the suite's bedroom, and found the hidden door into the servants' passageways ajar. He pulled it open, and heard from far away the sound of men hunting, quietly and with a sense of desperation.

  He ran, sword drawn and held ahead of him; he ran toward battle to rescue or avenge the woman he loved, the woman on whose life his people's and his world's survival, depended. He ran, praying that he would be in time to help, that everything might still be all right.

  Then the keening started.

  He could not think. He could not breathe. He pushed forward and downward, following the screams, moving at a dead run. Down into darkness and quickly into the stink of blood and piss and shit and vomit and death. His men, crowded into narrow stone corridors, most of them searching with hard eyes and weapons at the ready. He pushed through them, toward the keening, into the wine cellar of all places. He noted on entering that something had shattered the door into the wine steward's storage room. That the worst reek of puke and piss and excrement lay outside the door. Inside, fireless torches jammed into torch brackets, casting a few rings of pale, sickly light, and Birra and several others of the inner circles knelt on the stone floor, blocking him from seeing what they'd found, their heads tipped back, eyes closed. Keening.

  He did not want to see. He did not want to see. But he had to look.

  He moved forward, sword still in hand, heart in his throat. His eye caught on the cascade of copper hair, unbound, on the slump of slender shoulders, on eyes still open that stared forward, unblinking, already developing the dullness of death. On blood still red in places, in others drying to black—so much blood.

  "Oh, Molly," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry—I'll make this up to you."

  He pushed past his men, touched her cheek, stroked her hair. His fingers slid along the back of her neck to find the clasp of the Vodi necklace, and instead found nothing.

  He stared at her body then, and at his men kneeling around her, and he bellowed, "Up. Up and find whoever—whatever—did this. We have no time to mourn—the killer has the Vodi necklace."

  The keening snapped off into silence, and Birra leapt to his feet, dragging his sword from its sheath. He looked like he wanted to run it through himself. "I did not see," he said. "I thought only of my duties, to mourn her passing—I did not think to check…"

  Seolar waved him out the door without a word. For this failure—for this horrible, total failure, he would have every right to demand the lives of every man who served him. He could not speak to these men into whose hands he had entrusted everything. Everything. He could not find words beyond rage.

  He ran out into the passageway; he had no idea what he hunted, but he tried to think as his enemy must be thinking. Her killer had stolen something of immeasurable value; he held the fate of worlds in his hand. He would, Seolar thought, stay as far from sight as he could, take the safest passages out no matter how he had come in. Not for now the question of how he had gotten in—he could have used magic for that and almost certainly had done so; now only the question of how he might get back out. On his way out, he would have no magic in his arsenal.

  For all its vastness, Copper House had only four doors that led beyond the outer grounds: the front gate, the service gate, the soldiers' gate,
and the secret gate.

  He grabbed captains and quickly assigned them to each of the four. The captains stopped their searching of the subterranean passages and fled upward, dragging everyone with them, heading for the four gates that would offer the bastard egress.

  Seolar stayed behind. He did not want to go back in to see her body. But her body might be everything the worlds had left of her; if the killer had wanted her dead not just once but for all time and if he had succeeded in taking the necklace off of her before she died, then the veyâr had lost. With no Lauren and no Molly, they would move quickly to extinction as the dark gods hunted down the last of them and destroyed them.

  The worlds would keep on dying, too, Seolar thought—but the veyâr would not be around long enough to see that.

  He took a deep breath, stepped back into the cell, and went to Molly's side. He knelt beside her, scooped her into his arms, and lifted her with some difficulty. Alive she had been light; in death she seemed to be three times her living weight. With tears starting to blur his vision, he positioned her so that her head rolled onto his shoulder. He could not bear to see the horror of the vast, dark gash that ran from one side of her slender neck to the other. With her so arrayed, he started for the ramp that led upward, thinking to put her in the bed they had shared, to rest until the women could clean the body, hide the wound, and prepare her for burial.

  Something big and fast moved in the darkness ahead of him, and Seolar caught the blink of pale yellow eyes and a sense of two shapes blurred over each other, as if he could see both a man and something vastly different and far more terrible. He hesitated for just an instant, his arms full of Molly and his sword out of reach, and in that instant the creature—man or beast—bolted up the nearest ramp.

  "Oh, gods forgive me," Seolar muttered, letting Molly's body slide to the floor in a heap. He drew his sword and charged up the ramp in pursuit. The creature outran him, though since he grew to manhood Seolar had been able to run down everything but stags in the forest. Yet this thing before him fled so quickly out of his sight that only by concentrating on sound could Seolar track him.

  They pounded up the ramps, both of them running at top speed. This intruder didn't falter. He seemed, instead, to know exactly where he wanted to go. Neither of them wasted breath on shouts; Seolar felt certain that the killer would head toward one of the exits that would let him escape Copper House, and any exit was, from Seolar's point of view, as good as the next. He had guards on all of them.

  The enemy, however, had other ideas. He kept racing upward along the ramps, and at first Seolar experienced a moment of jubilation. The killer had made a mistake, and Seolar would be able to run him through and get back the necklace as soon as he realized his error and discovered that his only options were to retrace his steps or proceed onto the roof. But even once the killer could surely see that he had passed ground level, he still kept the same pace and the same direction—ever upward. Did he think to lose Seolar in his own house? Did he think that he would be able to find some other path back down? He had the distance on Seolar, and it increased with every step each of them took; Seolar guessed the killer to be nearly a floor ahead of him. They reached the level of the roof, the killer well ahead of Seolar; the killer smashed through the door with a thunderous crash and pounded out onto the narrow walkway that led to the tower parapets. Seolar thought, He has no other way off the roof, and gripped his sword tighter as he ran, mentally bracing himself for the fight to come.

  Half a floor. One quarter. A few steps and he was out into the darkness that lay beneath the gleaming stars. Before him, he could see the killer, fleeing toward the western parapet; even as Seolar watched something about him changed. His balance seemed to shift forward, with his arms getting longer, his cloak whipping up and back in a manner that made it look somehow more like wings; his neck stretched forward, and a tail erupted from his back with shocking suddenness. Seolar's brain, which had been trying to read him as a man, suddenly made the shift to what it truly saw and recoiled. One of the rrôn crouched on the western parapet, and he looked at Seolar with glowing yellow eyes and grinned with teeth that promised only death. He said, "I win, little man."

  Then the killer bunched tight and erupted into the void that lay beneath the tower, wings spread. The monster rose quickly, and though Seolar's men saw him and loosed arrows and crossbow bolts in his direction, he showed no injury from them; he caught the air and flew into the night.

  Seolar watched the rrôn fly out of reach. Some of his men would be moving back inside soon, but he saw no point in it. He turned slowly and headed back down the long series of stone ramps to collect Molly's body.

  Cat Creek

  Pete hated answering the phone when he was in other people's houses, particularly way late at night. There was nothing like having a strange man answering the phone in a house occupied only by a woman and her son for creating potential awkwardness—and picking up the phone at three in the morning…

  He sighed, and on the fourth ring he picked up. "Deputy Pete Stark."

  "Relax." Eric was on the other end. "I'm not some unsuspected relative crawling out of the bushes."

  "Good. But since it's 3 A.M. I'm guessing I don't want to hear from you, either."

  "Something going on in Oria. Actually here and in Oria. Meet at the Daisies and Dahlias."

  Pete hung up the phone, and rubbed his eyes, and swore. Disasters had a way of needing gateweavers sooner rather than later. He didn't have a gateweaver, though he'd lied to Eric when he got back from Charlotte, saying he'd be able to find Lauren if he had to and get her back pretty quickly.

  Liars live unhappy lives, he thought. Liars by profession doubly so.

  He threw on clothes and got over to the Daisies and Dahlias Florist, now out of business, and hid his car around back with the others. A few new cars in the lot, and a whole lot of others missing—it emphasized the fact that the plague, the betrayals, and the almost-total disaster were all still less than a month old. The earth hadn't even settled over Nancine Tubbs, who'd owned the shop, and her husband Ernest. Or the other dead Sentinels, either.

  He went through the screen door quietly and ran up the stairs two at a time. He wasn't last, at least—neither Eric nor one of the new kids, an obnoxious twenty-year-old named Raymond Smetty—had come in yet. Everyone else had gathered around the coffee maker that sat on the filing cabinets on the back wall. No one was in the mirror, which he couldn't remember ever having seen.

  June Bug Tate nodded to him. She was chewing on the soggy end of an unlit cigar, an unhappy expression on her face. She kept looking at the dark-haired new girl, Darlene Fullbright, who sat, back ramrod straight, on one of the hard chairs, and who was pointedly looking at everyone and everything but June Bug. The smoking issue had evidently raised its head again.

  Twice-divorced Terry "Mayhem" Mayhew had the other new girl, a perky, busty little blonde named Betty Kay Nye, backed into a corner, where he was trying out his devastating smile and his insurance-salesman charm on her. Pete couldn't hear either of them, but Betty Kay's cheeks were the color of tomatoes and ripening pretty fast.

  Thin, balding George Mercer shoved his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat as Pete headed toward them, and Louisa Tate glanced in Pete's direction. She nodded to him, but whatever she and George had been talking about came to an abrupt end.

  "Anyone hear anything about what's going on?" Pete asked.

  June Bug nodded. "I'm the one who found the problem."

  Pete got that sick feeling in the pit of his gut, remembering that June Bug had mostly found their last problem—and that had been…well. He could happily spend the rest of his life far away from any more problems like that. But the sick horror that makes people look toward train wrecks rather than away got him, and he asked, "End of the world?"

  June Bug gave her cigar a hard chomp. "Damned if I know. But I'm not going to talk about it until Eric and Raymond get here."

  Downstairs, the slam of the scree
n door, and the sound of Eric swearing. So Raymond must have been the one who let it fly. Heavy footsteps at good speed—two pairs of them—and Eric blowing through the door with a face like a thunderstorm, and behind him, looking insolent, Raymond Smetty, who had such a big chip on his shoulder Pete expected him to start walking like Marty Feldman in Young Dr. Frankenstein at any moment. Raymond had once thought he was going to escape his lineage and his fate as a Sentinel—he'd been a big high-school football player down in Enigma, Georgia, with scouts after him and promises of scholarships to just about any college he might fancy. And then he'd taken a bad hit and turned his right knee into irreparable hamburger, and all the big dreams and big promises just quietly faded away. He was an unhappy transfer, and seemed bent on raining his unhappiness on anyone convenient.

  Pete did not feel better knowing the fate of the world might someday rest in the hands of Raymond Smetty.

  "Go ahead, June Bug," Eric said, taking a seat. He gave Raymond a hard look.

  "We had some old gods in this area," June Bug said. "Three of them, from the looks of things. Today, all three just packed up and left the area. Now, they kept separate households, they didn't have much to do with each other, and they had some real long-term associations in this area. And all three just flat abandoned their homes. A gateweaver came through—one who left old god fingerprints all over his work. He went to each of the three houses, made a gate, and then moved on."