Codespell webmage book 3, p.19
Codespell (WebMage Book 3), page 19
Melchior looked up at Tisiphone, his expression troubled. It was easy to see he didn’t much like to be reminded of Tisiphone’s coming here as an invader. I didn’t either, but I did like Tisiphone, quite a lot. It was a strange feeling.
“How could you tell where the gate went?” asked Melchior. “It’s a one-way, with all sorts of variables that Ahllan had to juggle on the fly.”
Tisiphone shrugged. “It smelled of Discord.”
“Fair enough,” said Melchior, though the answer obviously didn’t satisfy him. “I suppose that’s all ancient history at this point. At the moment, we need to invent a way to use your link with Mother Necessity as a communication channel to Shara, so she can tell us how to get from here to there. You have any ideas about where to start on that, Boss?”
“No, but I’m willing to play hardware hacker and fake it.” I turned back toward the door. “Let me dig through the equipment bins and see what I can come up with.”
“All right,” said Melchior, as we passed out into the main part of the basement again. “I’ll get to work on cleaning this place up while you do that. If we’re going to be here for any length of time, we’ll want the whole shop up to Ahllan’s old standards. Especially the clean room and the workbenches.”
“What about you?” I asked Tisiphone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the hacker. Necessity does most of her own deep IT work even if she uses us as her hands when she needs them. I don’t think I’ll be much help on the hacking front, and I don’t clean. Perhaps I’ll go have a look around after.”
“After what?” I asked.
“Pouncing you.” Then she leaped, catching me around the shoulders and pulling me over.
I think I shrieked. I know I jumped. But it was actually as gentle as a tackle could possibly be. She turned in the air so that I landed on her instead of hitting the stone floor, and she cushioned both of us with her wings. I ended up lying atop her and staring into a pair of mischievous blue eyes while my heart hammered out a toccata and fugue in panic minor. I was still trying to figure out what had happened when she caught my face in her hands and pulled me down for a very thorough kissing.
“That was lovely,” I said, when she finally let me up for air, “but a little more warning might have been nice. You startled me.”
“That was the point. And sorry, no can do on the warnings front.” She grinned. “Your hour was up, and I told you back then that amorous hostilities could reignite without any prior warning. You’ll just have to get used to the occasional pounce.”
“Will I?” I put my hands on her ribs. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we? That, and whether Furies are ticklish.”
“Hey, no fair—” began Tisiphone.
I didn’t let her finish, and as it turns out, Furies are ticklish. Giggling ensued. It didn’t last long, because Tisiphone flipped me over and pinned my arms.
“Now what are you going to do?” she asked, sitting on my chest.
“Surrender?” I asked.
“Nope, sorry. Not an option.”
Since it hadn’t worked last time, I wasn’t terribly surprised. I was still trying to think of a good answer when Melchior cleared his throat.
“Should I go and find some earplugs while you two bang about for a bit?” he asked grumpily. “Or is this more of a brief-interlude-with-groping kind of thing?”
I sighed and looked up at Tisiphone. “Truce?”
“We’d probably better.” She released me and popped herself to her feet with a beat of her wings before offering me a hand. “With Nemesis running around loose, it’s important we work fast. Is there anything special I should be on the lookout for while I’m out and about?”
“Faerie rings,” I said, “if you’re feeling the need to be useful. The fewer possible routes of approach available to Nemesis, the better.”
“Good enough.” She crouched, then launched herself up into one of the air shafts, quickly climbing from view.
I looked at Melchior. He looked from me to the heavens—or possibly the air shaft—and shook his head. Without saying another word, he started in on the cleaning and organizing. I went to dig around in Ahllan’s supplies.
Several grimy and sweaty hours of sifting, sorting, and soldering later, and I had kludged together a new piece of magical test equipment built on a PDA frame and designed to check out mweblike wireless communications across every band I could think of. Whether it would work or not, I had no idea, since I didn’t really understand what Tisiphone was doing, but I was fresh out of enthusiasm and ideas.
“Would this be a good time for refreshments?” said a voice from the top of the stairs at that exact moment.
It was Haemun, wearing a truly gods-awful Hawaiian shirt and carrying a tray with lemonade and some fresh fruit. He started down.
“Sorry I can’t offer you the sort of variety I might were we at Raven House, but I had to go with what I could pick off the nearby trees and what little was left in the way of durable goods in Ahllan’s pantry.”
“No need to apologize,” I said, taking a glass. “This is pretty miraculous considering conditions. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Haemun,” said Tisiphone, dropping suddenly from an air shaft.
“You’re . . . welcome, Madam.”
Haemun swallowed visibly as Tisiphone landed and lifted a drink from the tray but kept his smile and generally did better at looking unruffled than I had the first time I’d been surprised by a Fury. Apparently he was bouncing back from the magical brainwashing he’d undergone when Nemesis took over Raven House. That was good both for him and for me. I needed to ask him about the whole thing sometime soon, but I hadn’t wanted to push.
“How’d it go?” Tisiphone took a sip of her lemonade and smiled at Haemun. “This is lovely.” He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like “Thanks,” and headed back upstairs as she turned her attention my way. “Did you figure anything out?”
“Maybe.” With one fingertip I tapped the device I’d put together. “It depends on how you get your positional information. If it acts like it would if I’d set it up, this thing should be able to detect something.”
“There’s a description that inspires confidence,” said Tisiphone.
“What do you expect?” I shrugged. “I’m a hacker, not a communications specialist. We’ll find out just how big a distinction that is in a few minutes. How’d you do?”
“I found a half dozen proto rings at nearby ley nodes, including one that was almost ripe at the place where Stonehenge sits in most of the primary lines of reality. The only full one I spotted was where Reykjavik would be. I destroyed them all, of course, but I didn’t make it as far as North America. There may be more there.”
“Then we should probably get this moving along, shouldn’t we?” I finished my lemonade and set the glass aside. “Do you know where you are right now?”
Tisiphone raised an eyebrow at me and moved her glass in a little circle to indicate she was right there with me.
“Yes, very funny,” I said. “But you know what I meant. Do you know where you are relative to everywhere else?”
“Not in the sense that you mean.” She emptied her glass. “It really only activates when I’m trying to move between DecLoci.”
“I was afraid of that.” I handed her the detector I’d put together. “Here. The power button’s on the side there. If you would be so kind as to take that and go somewhere via chaos, we’ll see whether it tells us anything.”
“How far do you want me to go?” asked Tisiphone.
“Just far enough to activate your sense of location.”
“All right.” She reached out and clawed a hole in the air, vanishing into the place between worlds.
A moment later, a tearing sound from the top of the stairs announced her reentry into the DecLocus. She walked down and handed the device to me.
“Well?”
I glanced at the readings. “Wow, look at all the garbage.” Where I had expected to see either no magical band readings or, if I got lucky first time out, a slender spike on one frequency, I had noise everywhere. “Mel, what do you make of this?”
He climbed up onto the workbench so he could look over my shoulder. “Gotta be interference from the Primal Chaos. It is the source of all magic, so maybe it registers a signal across the whole spectrum. Too bad it’s not a consistent signal. That we could adjust for. But this is all over the place both in frequency and amplitude. We’ll need a longer-duration sample to have any hope of sorting it out.”
“That assumes whatever we’re looking for will even register somewhere in this range.” I sighed. “Tisiphone, you willing to take a longer trip? Something that lasts fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Sure.” She took the detector and went.
While she was gone, Mel and I speculated on what we were looking for but didn’t reach any real conclusions. The mweb was a high-speed, high-fidelity, long-range medium, comparable to a very powerful two-way FM-radio-type signal. The Furies’ back channel to Necessity could have looked like anything from some kind of fast pulse signal up at the top of the spectrum down to the sort of extremely low-frequency long-pulse communication that was used to send messages to submarines running deep. We just didn’t know enough about the amount and rate of information transmission to do more than make wild-ass guesses. As it turned out, whatever it was, it didn’t register on my detector, nor on any of the others we tried over the next three days.
“So now what?” Tisiphone asked, after I tossed aside the latest version.
“Old-style divination, I guess.” I hate traditional magic— it’s messy, it’s unreliable, and it’s dangerous. “Unless anyone’s got a better suggestion.”
Silence.
“All right then.” I fetched a small silver basin from the sorcery side of the workshop. “Haemun!”
“Yes, sir?” He stuck his head through the hatchway at the top of the stairs.
“Could you fetch us a pitcher of water?”
“Right away.” He vanished.
A few minutes later the three of us—we’d invited Haemun, but he opted out—were standing in the center of Ahllan’s sanctuary with the water-filled basin on a narrow pedestal between us.
“What do you think?” asked Mel. “Candles and calling the quarters, or binary and lasers?”
“Let’s start with the easy way,” I answered.
“Good enough.”
He whistled a string of binary, and the red lasers flicked on. Another whistle brought up matched blue lasers. Finally, he turned on the greens to make a full-spectrum beam. The hexagrams above and below came to life.
I reached for the basin but stopped abruptly when Tisiphone lurched and caught hold of the pedestal with both hands. Her knuckles were pale and her fully extended claws— daggers of organic diamond five inches long—sank deep into the polished oak of the pedestal top. The skin of her face paled and took on a greenish tinge, and she looked as though she might throw up at any moment.
“Make it stop,” she whispered.
“Mel!” I said.
“On it.” He quickly whistled the lights out and the wards down. “Better?”
I looked at Tisiphone and nodded. Already the green had faded, and her normal color had started coming back.
“What happened?” I wanted to take her in my arms, but her claws were still out and I didn’t dare. “Are you going to be all right?”
She nodded, then smiled weakly. “I was wrong.”
“You were?” I asked. “About what?”
“About not knowing where I am except when I try to travel through chaos.” She rolled her shoulders and retracted her claws, though she didn’t release her grip on the stand.
“I don’t think I get it.” I reached out and put a hand on top of one of hers.
“Apparently I always know where I am. Well, except when a really powerful ward cuts me off from whatever it is that lets me know what I know.”
“Ahllan’s wards block it?” I asked.
She nodded. “It feels awful, like the worst inner-ear turbulence you could imagine.”
From there it didn’t take us too long to figure out what was being blocked and move on to the question of how to use it to send messages in via the back door. The locator system worked a bit like a cross between dolphin-style echo-location and the submarine ELF system. Tisiphone and— presumably—her sisters sent out a continuous series of pulses that located them for the system and illuminated the DecLoci around them. In turn the system sent them five-dimensional polar coordinates via ELF letting them know where they were relative to three-dimensional space plus time and distance up or down the world spectrum from Olympus.
What we eventually came up with as a transmission system was a bit of a duct-tape-and-baling-wire job, but hey, that’s my specialty. Tisiphone’s job was to stand still and not get too sick while Melchior flicked a set of wards on and off to create a binary signal that the locator controller couldn’t possibly not notice.
Of course, we didn’t know whether the locator system was still hooked up to any other part of Necessity, or whether either Necessity or Shara was also hooked up to the ELF transmission system, or whether either one of them was in any state to answer if they were hooked up. The best we could do was try it and see what happened. So we did.
“Anything?” I asked Tisiphone after several minutes of sending our initial message—a version of Melchior’s binary identifier.
She shook her head, then immediately looked as though she regretted it. I offered her a small plastic-lined bag at that point, and, with a surprising amount of dignity, she threw up.
“Do you want to take a break?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered. “Keep going. I think I’m starting to get used to it.”
She was lying. I could tell. She wasn’t very good at lying. I didn’t argue with her. She was four thousand years old and knew her own mind. I didn’t mention it again for the better part of a half hour in which she had to use two more bags and kept growing more pale and wan. I was just about to try to talk her into a break when she suddenly held up a hand.
“I’m getting something odd, stop messing around with the wards,” she said, cocking her head to one side. “Oh my.” She bent over the bag again, making awful noises though nothing came up. “Sorry,” she said after a while, “but that’s even worse than the flickering of the wards. The system is telling me I’m here and then there.” She pointed to her left. “Here. There. Here. Here. There.”
“Point down or left as the coordinates come in,” said Melchior.
“I have to sit down,” said Tisiphone, dropping to the floor, but she kept pointing for several minutes as the information continued to flow.
“It’s Shara!” said Melchior, when she finally stopped. “She heard us.”
I nodded. The binary flow had used “here” as 0 and “there” as 1 and had gone slow enough for anyone with an understanding of the system and a working knowledge of machine language to decode it. If we were going to have any serious communication, we were going to need a much faster transmission system or a denser code, and I said as much.
“We can use more directions, if Tisiphone can take it,” said Melchior.
“I can take it.” She sounded utterly spent, but her voice was flat, with not the slightest hint of give. “If it might lead to a way to fix Necessity, I can take anything I have to. I will take it.”
“Let’s start with base six,” said Melchior. “We can use up, down, front, back, left, and right. Octal would be better, but if this round’s representative of general wear and tear on our speaker system”—he nodded at Tisiphone—“six is going to be more than hard enough. Maybe later, if she gets used to it, we can move up to something faster.”
Looking at the wreck even this short conversation had made of Tisiphone—I had to admit I had doubts. Not that we had any other options.
“Are you ready for some more ward-field fluctuations?” I asked, though I felt like a cad for doing so. “We need to let Shara know we got her message.”
She closed her eyes, and I could see the blue veins in that thin skin all too clearly, but she nodded anyway.
“Do it.”
Over the course of the next several days, we established a solid system for communication. It was slow and ungainly and played merry hell with Tisiphone’s digestive system and general well-being. But it worked, Tisiphone was damned tough, and slowly, very slowly, she did seem to be adapting.
What ultimately developed was a very slow conversation with anywhere from minutes to hours between the segments. With Melchior sending the messages the three of us collectively agreed on, it went something like this:
“I’m so glad to hear from you,” sent Shara.
“Us, too,” sent Melchior. “Need to go to plain hex for speed—front, back, up, down, left, right. Can do?”
“Yes. Will compress syntax, too.”
“Good,” sent Melchior. “Need to fix Necessity. Will come there soon. Can you speak with her?”
“Yes/No,” Shara both agreed and denied. “Complex. Can’t explain. Like stroke, only worse.”
That one stressed Tisiphone out so badly she was ready to bite chunks out of the walls.
“Try to explain.” Tisiphone insisted Mel send that one.
“Very complex,” sent Shara. “Very long. Too much of both. Goddess still controls underneath? But can’t speak. Maybe. Need you here.”
“Can’t get there,” sent Melchior, as Tisiphone snarled it out. “Furies blocked. Send work-around?”
“Not possible yet. Running security and parts of other systems, but not master/nexus/locus of decisions. Locked out.”
I threw up my hands. “Whatever that means. Tisiphone? ”
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “A big part of what Necessity does—what Necessity is—has to do with controlling how decision loci are formed and whether they continue to exist after the initial split. That’s really the core of the whole system, and if Shara doesn’t have access to it, she may not know where she is.”
