Codespell, p.21
Codespell, page 21
part #3 of Ravirn Series
“Said the naked embodiment of vengeance.” I winked at her and pulled on the robe.
“What’s your point?” she asked me.
“Nothing at all, just sayin’.” I paced for a little while. “Megaera really agreed with you on this one?”
She nodded. “Of course she did. It’s not like you could get in without one of us—me in this case—to disable the physical security and open the door after you get around the soul lock. She knows there’ll be someone there to keep an eye on you. But even if that weren’t the case, she didn’t have a lot of choice. Put simply, you’re the best candidate.”
Maybe I really was. I got up and began to pace, well, limp in circles actually, but the intent was the same. I still couldn’t think of anyone else I’d let have the kind of access this job needed. They were all even less trustworthy than I—from my point of view, at least—which was frankly terrifying since I was already starting to think about the myriad of little things I could do to make my life easier. I could erase myself from Hades’ memory, make Athena love me like a son, even write myself back into the family of Fate.
Or write Fate out of the picture completely, a voice whispered in the back of my head as a shadow that only I could see engulfed me, a shadow with wings. I shuddered and opened my mouth to refuse. Would Eris be any better? Athena? Cerice and Fate? I forced the shadow to retreat, but I couldn’t force back its arguments.
“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll do it.” The faintest flicker of darkness edged my vision, bringing with it an instant of inhuman satisfaction. “I’m going to regret this”—I already did—“but I’ll do it.” Somebody had to.
“If it’s any consolation,” said Tisiphone, “you’ll probably regret it less immediately than you would have regretted saying no.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Megaera again. She said that if you didn’t agree to try to save Necessity, all bets were off and she was going to kill you even if it did piss me off for the next five hundred years.”
“Oh.” I caught Tisiphone’s hands in my own and looked into her eyes—I wanted her to understand that I was being serious and sincere and not the least bit snarky. “I don’t mean to criticize, but is there a reason you didn’t mention that part up front?”
“I didn’t want you to say no,” she said simply.
“Oh my,” said Melchior, whistling. “She’s really got your number, doesn’t she?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Mel?” I let go of Tisiphone and turned to glare at my familiar.
“Nothing at all, contrary boy.” He grinned. “Don’t let it worry you.”
I sighed. He might actually have a point there—in amidst the gloating.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
“Isn’t that your job?” asked Melchior.
“I’m just thinking out loud,” I replied. “We’ll have to see if we can find a way to communicate with Shara.”
“How?” asked Tisiphone. “My sisters and I have tried everything we can think of to get through to Necessity. Nothing works.”
“That’s why you called me in. I’m the expert hacker, right?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“So, have you actually tried to reach Shara? As opposed to Necessity?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” said Tisiphone, “but we’ve tried to get through to Necessity hundreds of times, and they’re in the same place, both cut off behind those damned soul locks.”
“This is true,” I said. “It’s also irrelevant, since you can’t really know where the communication breakdown is happening. It could be the locks, or it could be something specific to Necessity, something that’s stolen her voice. Something that might not affect Shara.”
“Why didn’t we think of that?” Tisiphone looked dumb-struck and abruptly sat down on the bed. “I mean, part of why we decided you could help was because of your connections to Shara. It should have been obvious.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re mostly in the killing-people business and only do tech support as a sideline,” suggested Melchior. “Now, I don’t know a lot about the ripping-folks-to -shreds-and-grinding-up-the-bits industry as a whole, but it would seem to me a fairly straightforward kind of process.”
“You might be surprised,” said Tisiphone. “Hunting targets like Eris is not as easy as it looks.”
I thought back to witnessing the Furies battle with the Goddess of Discord and shuddered at the idea that Tisiphone thought of that as looking easy. From his expression, it gave Melchior a bit of a pause as well.
“Point taken,” he said. “I imagine chasing Ravirn down posed some special challenges, too.”
“It was fun.” Tisiphone smiled broadly. “He’s very unpredictable, and that makes the game last longer. He also does things that seem terribly stupid at the time but that nevertheless work out quite well. None of us are entirely sure whether that’s the result of a sort of weird genius or some kind of divine fool’s luck.”
“Can I vote for the divine-fool option?” asked Melchior.
“No,” said Tisiphone. “Furies only.” Then she winked at him. “Either way, he makes for a good chase. Twisty.”
“Thanks . . . I think,” I said. “Can we get back to the topic at hand? Namely, figuring out some way to contact Shara. Melchior and Cerice and I tried Vtp, and we tried Voice Over Mweb Protocol and MIMs and all the other traditional high-tech solutions without any success. Absolutely nothing got through. What have you done to try to reach Necessity?”
“All the stuff you mentioned, of course. We also tried chaos modulation and physically traveling to her domain. That might have allowed us to bypass the mweb and the soul lock, but we simply couldn’t reach her.”
I held up a hand. “Before you go on, could you explain the hows of those two? A lot of the stuff you Furies do seems to violate the rules of existence as I was taught them growing up in the Houses of Fate. Take the way you rescued Mel and me from Fate security yesterday. . . . It was yesterday, wasn’t it?” Things were starting to get a little blurry around the edges.
“Depends on how you’re counting, Boss,” said Melchior. “You’ve only slept once since then, but it’s been something like forty-five hours subjective. You were on your feet for nearly that long between sleeps.”
I blinked. “Really? I know I’ve been having insomnia, but forty hours awake?” It didn’t feel anything like that long. “Maybe I should go sit down again before it catches up to me.” I limped back to the bed.
Melchior shrugged. “Maybe not for you, but I sure felt it.”
“I wonder what’s going on there,” I said. Then I shook my head. “Questions for another time when we have less on our agenda, I guess. I’m sorry, Tisiphone, I asked you a question and then didn’t let you answer it.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s actually kind of fun watching the gears in your head turn.” She looked at Melchior. “Is his brain actually powered by his mouth? Or does it just look that way from where I’m sitting?”
“It’s a mystery,” said Melchior, “but I do occasionally wonder whether he wouldn’t simply cease to exist if you disconnected his mouth.”
“I babble, therefore I am?” Tisiphone grinned.
“Something like that,” agreed Melchior.
“Chaos modulation?” I asked, pretending I couldn’t hear them. “Spooky ripping the stuff of reality transport? Explanations for same?”
“Let’s start with the first,” said Tisiphone. “It’s all about the wings.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“If you keep your mouth shut, you’ll learn faster,” said Melchior.
“He’s got a point,” said Tisiphone. “Watch.”
She stood up and stepped away from the bed, opening her wings to about eight feet—a small fraction of her total span. An instant later the fire of her wings brightened, though for the first time since I’d met her, her hair didn’t follow suit. Then the flames began to dance and jump, changing their intensity from point to point in a way that reminded me of an elaborate fractal pattern.
“Beautiful,” whispered Melchior, and it was.
“But how does it affect chaos?” I asked. “Sure, it’s magical fire, but it’s still just fire, isn’t it? And what about Megaera and Alecto?” Whose wings were storm and seaweed respectively.
“It’s not flame at all,” said Tisiphone. “No more than Megaera’s wings are actually the weeds that swallow ships.” As she said this, the stuff of her wings shifted and changed, though they retained their shape. The patterns remained as well, writ now in the whirling tumble of chaos. “I don’t really have wings, just raw chaos grafted onto my flesh and tamed by will and the power of Necessity.”
“Huh.” I never would have guessed, though I probably should have. “You send messages by creating patterns like you’re doing now?”
“Yes,” said Tisiphone. “Fractals and other forms that range the edge of randomness.” Her face fell. “But Necessity isn’t answering.
“All right,” I said. “I need to mull that over for a bit. How does the”—I made a clawing motion—“magic transport system work?”
“Very well, thanks.” Tisiphone grinned and looked vague as she let her wings resume their flame form. Then she shrugged. “Seriously, I don’t know all the underlying details. Our claws are also artifacts of chaos. With them we can temporarily punch a hole from here into there and pass through. Once we’ve left the world we’re in, we use our wings to fly through chaos to the next one.”
“That raises more questions than it answers,” I said, getting up to pace again. “You know that, right?”
“Like what?” she asked, furling her wings so that I wouldn’t run into them as I limped around.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” asked Melchior.
“Maybe a little,” said Tisiphone. “I know what we do is unusual, but it’s how we’ve always done it and it seems normal to me. What are the questions?”
Melchior put his face in his hands.
“One,” I held up a finger, “when you rip a hole through to the Primal Chaos, why doesn’t it pour through and destroy everything in the immediate area? When I make holes in the walls of reality, bad things happen, like I get eaten by chaos and only come back weeks later at the cost of glowing eyes and who knows what all fresh new personality quirks. And remember what it did to Hades, both the place and the god. You said it looked like Hades was hit by a combination tidal wave and giant tornado followed by a force-ten earthquake. ”
“Wait. You heard that?” asked Tisiphone. “I thought you were still adrift in chaos then.”
“It was overhearing that conversation between you and Cerice that reminded me I existed and gave me back my name and my sense of self. In a very real way, it was the two of you talking that brought me back.”
“I didn’t know that.” Tisiphone smiled then, almost shyly. “It’s sweet.”
“Could we not go there just yet,” said Melchior. “I foresee more distracting male-female biological interactions down that road. As entertaining as the thumping and howling was last time, it’s going to seriously reduce the overall quality of the conversation. How about I throw out question number two?” He paused, and we both glared at him. “No objections? Great. Once you’ve passed through into chaos, how do you know where you are and where you’re going?”
“What do you mean?” asked Tisiphone. “There’s nothing to it, well except that we can’t get to Necessity right now, probably because of the soul lock. We just know where we are.”
“That doesn’t strike you as the least bit odd?” asked Melchior, choking.
“No. Should it?”
I stopped in my pacing and just stared at her.
“Damn right it should,” said Melchior. “At least according to Persephone. And this ‘knowing’ thing still works?”
“Of course,” said Tisiphone, “but I don’t get it. What’s Persephone got to do with this? Beyond writing the virus that infected Necessity, that is?”
I looked at Melchior, but he shook his head. “You were there,” he said. “You tell it.”
“When I rescued Persephone, she explained her thinking in creating the virus. Part of that was telling me about Necessity and the reason she made herself into a computer. It was because the infinitely expanding nature of the multiverse was too complex for any biological intelligence—even a divine one—to keep track of. The mweb and all its huge computing capacity exists to keep track of where everything and everyone is and should be, and you’re asking why always knowing where you are freaks us out? Don’t you understand what it means?”
“Oh,” she said in a very small voice. “I’ve been doing this for something like four thousand years, since long before Mother transformed herself into a computer. It just never occurred to me to . . . Oh my.”
“ ‘Oh my’ is right,” I said. “I think we just found our point of entry. The only way you can just ‘know’ where you are is if at some level, you’re still in contact with the part of Necessity that keeps track of where everything is. If we can tap that line and get Shara to tell us where she is, we’re in and—” A new idea hit me, and I sat down.
There was no chair, so I landed on the floor. My wounded thigh screamed, but I ignored it. This was too big.
“What is it?” asked Melchior.
“Yeah,” said Tisiphone.
“You flew here,” I said, “through chaos.”
“Sure,” said Tisiphone. “And?”
“And you knew where here was despite the fact that Garbage Faerie is cut off from the mweb. Don’t you see what that means?”
“No, I— Oh. It means that at some level Necessity retains the data on where this world is relative to all the others. It’s all still there.”
“It’s all still there,” I agreed. “We can fix Necessity. It’s just a matter of how.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“A little dirty,” I said, leaning in and blowing a cloud of dust off the pegboard of the tool rack. “Otherwise, not too bad. I’m glad the cousins did most of their damage up above.”
Ahllan’s basement workshop was one of the least-trashed areas of the house, though the open light shafts had allowed a certain amount of weather to find its way down from the outside.
It was a big, rectangular space with worktables running the length of the side walls. On the right, shelves of jars held all manner of alchemical ingredients above a slate table cluttered with chalk, various alembics, string, and all the trappings of the traditional sorcerer’s art. The workspace on the left was set up as an electronics repair and assembly station, with computer enclosures, soldering irons, racks of chips, and other parts scattered amidst test equipment.
The air was just a touch damp and flavored by the concrete smell of old basement and an undertone of fried transistors. A partially effaced hexagram decorated the end wall opposite the steps, and a heavy door underneath them stood firmly closed. It was painted gray and blended with the wall.
“Where does that lead?” I asked Melchior, pointing at it.
I’d only been down there twice before, and both times I’d been too preoccupied to notice the door.
“Ahllan’s wardroom and sanctuary,” said Melchior, opening the door and stepping through. “And beyond that, the clean room.”
