Codespell webmage book 3, p.26
Codespell (WebMage Book 3), page 26
“Oh, especially when I explain it,” I answered. “That makes it all a joke between friends. Speaking of which, now that we’re past the parts you didn’t want her to hear, maybe we should call Megaera back. Unless, that is, you’ve done more double-crossing of the Furies that you don’t want them to know about.” I cocked my head to one side and took my chin between finger and thumb. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that.”
“What?” asked Zeus, suddenly sounding more than a little wary.
“Assuming I get Necessity fully repaired, neither she nor the Furies are going to be particularly pleased about the way you’ve brought Nemesis into all this. They’re bad enemies. I know I wouldn’t want my girlfriend, Tisiphone, really mad at me.”
“That’s a much better threat,” said Zeus with a tight smile. “I especially like the subtlety of mentioning, as if in passing, that you’re romantically linked to one of the Furies. For such a young godling, you’re learning how to play the game quite quickly. I will have to watch you more closely in the future.”
“I’m a fast learner, and I keep ending up across the table from the best—you for example. Now, where were we?”
Melchior put his face in his hands.
“I was calling Megaera back so that we could see about getting you on your way,” said Zeus. “At least, I presume that’s why you wanted her back. You think you’ll need her to get to Necessity.”
I nodded. That, and I was worried about Tisiphone. I hoped Megaera would be able to tell me whether she was all right or not.
A few minutes later, Megaera nodded cautiously to the latter question, though she looked worried. “I think so. Tisiphone’s angry, and she’s in some pain, but not a lot.” My expression must have shown my shock, because she laughed and directed her gaze my way. “We heal very quickly. Even with the injuries you described, I would expect her to bounce back fully within a matter of hours at most. No, it’s not her physical condition that concerns me. It’s the weakness of the link between us. I can’t tell where she is, and that’s never happened before.”
“Do you suppose she’s with Necessity?” asked Melchior.
Megaera turned to him so quickly that she blurred. “What makes you ask that?”
“The impression I got from Tisiphone was that right at the moment you can find anything in the multiverse but Necessity. Since you can’t find Tisiphone now . . .”
“How would she get there?” asked Zeus. “That’s a problem no one’s been able to solve for some time.”
“Which is why you brought Ravirn into the equation,” said Melchior, “for his skills—skills currently mirrored by Nemesis as part of her quarrel with him. If Tisiphone is with Nemesis—”
“She’d never betray Necessity that way!” snarled Megaera.
“Who says she’s anything but a key?” I said very quietly. “Tisiphone told me that I’d have to bring a Fury along when I went to fix Necessity, that without her, I wouldn’t be able to get past the physical security, or even get in for that matter. What did she mean?”
“She shouldn’t have told you that,” said Megaera.
“It was when she was trying to convince me to take the job, and you didn’t answer the question.”
Megaera closed her mouth and crossed her arms.
“If I’m going to crack my way into Necessity for you, I need to know,” I said.
“Tell him,” said Zeus.
“All right, but under protest. Necessity’s physical form is a computer. You know that. Tisiphone told you that she exists at the point of maximum improbability? The place where DecLoci are formed, where new Earths split away from the old?”
“She did.”
“Did you ever wonder about what physical shape such a place might take?” asked Megaera.
“Not really. I was mostly focused on finding a way to get there. I figured that sort of thing could take care of itself. Are you going to get to the point anytime soon, or should I get myself a drink?”
"What was the first DecLocus to split off from the world of Olympus?” asked Megaera as though she hadn’t heard me.
"I don’t know.” I shrugged. "Prime +1, I guess, the place where humanity first came into existence.”
“No,” said Megaera. “It was Prime/?, the decision point, where Necessity made her home. The alternate Olympus.”
“Wait a second,” interjected Melchior. “Are you suggesting that Necessity has an entire copy of the planet Earth to herself?”
“Close,” said Megaera. “Though I don’t see why that should surprise you given the empty world where Raven House sits. No, Necessity has an entire universe to herself. The Earth is merely the vessel that houses her spirit.”
“A planetwide computer?” I gasped.
Megaera nodded. “One that is within its own closed universe with no faerie rings and no physical entry other than this.” She extended one claw and cut a tiny slice in the stuff of reality. “With the mweb portals shut, you would need a living Fury to open the way if you wanted to enter the House of Necessity.”
“Nemesis has a living Fury,” I said, though my stomach dropped at the thought, “for now. We’ve got to find out where they are and get moving.”
“You’ll be taking me with you,” said Megaera, “of course. How soon can we leave?”
“That depends on whether Melchior’s upgrade actually bought us anything.” I looked at him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. What are we hoping for?”
“Deep insights into multidimensional quantum uncertainty, ” I replied.
“Oh, good,” said Melchior. “Then we’re screwed. Unless feeling really strange counts as a deep insight.”
“Probably not, but maybe it’ll be a place to start. In the meantime, why don’t we check in with Shara and find out whether Nemesis and Tisiphone are really there. Megaera? ”
“You want me to play signal fire like Tisiphone did, don’t you?”
“Unless you’ve got a better suggestion.”
She sighed. “Better get me a barf bag then. I was only getting it secondhand when you ran Tisiphone through the ringer, but that was bad enough to send me running for the porcelain more than once.”
“Wait,” I said. “You were feeling what Tisiphone felt?” I didn’t like that idea at all.
“Echoes of it. We are all part of the same being.”
“Even when we . . .” I couldn’t help it; I blushed.
“Only a little, by accident. I mostly tried to block it out. Believe me, I like the idea even less than you do. Your hands on my—ugh!” She shivered. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it, and you can’t make me. Not if you want to keep all of your bits where they currently reside. Let’s just make the damn call, OK?”
A few minutes later we had Megaera positioned in a small pentagram drawn on Zeus’s pristine white marble floor with permanent ink. He’d winced at that, but hadn’t suggested we stop.
“Here goes,” said Mel. Then he began sending, “Shara, are Tisiphone and Nemesis with you?”
Several long seconds ticked past before Megaera—looking even greener than her normal seaweed-and-saltwater self—jerked and pointed to her left.
I barely noticed, because at the very same moment Melchior jumped a good foot into the air.
“What’s wrong?” I caught him by the shoulder.
He held up a hand. “Hang on a second!” Then he started pointing in synch with Megaera. “I can hear her! I can hear Shara! It’s like she’s right”—he turned slowly in place— “over . . . there.”
He pointed—sort of. His finger was doing something quantum, simultaneously aimed at something that was both of this dimension and outside it.
“Megaera, can you follow his bearing?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She looked even greener than usual. “Not from here, but maybe within chaos.”
“Hang on a second,” said Melchior. “I’ll tell her we’re on the way and to keep sending.” His expression went thoughtful and abstracted. “There.”
“Then let’s go.” I scooped him up and stepped in close to the Fury.
With a distinct look of distaste, she put her left hand on my right hip and tore a hole in the universe with her right one. Then, pulling me tight against her, she leaped into nowhere.
It wasn’t until the hole closed behind us that I realized we’d forgotten to say good-bye to Zeus. Somehow, I figured he’d get over it.
Once again, the creation-in-destruction that was chaos tugged at my sense of self. The sheer power of it felt seductive and intoxicating—pure raw magic, forever and always only a hairbreadth away from the real world. All that separated the two was the swipe of a Fury’s claws. I tore my attention free of the dance and forced myself to think of other things as a queasy Megaera began to follow Melchior’s guidance through the joyous madness.
Still, I couldn’t stop feeling the chaos thrumming across my skin like a song in the back of my head, a chorus in some alien tongue I could almost make out. I found it very hard to keep from humming along, and so I didn’t pay much attention to the trip. Not until Melchior jerked in my arms, though he didn’t stop pointing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The signal’s getting kind of ragged, like something’s interfering with it or with . . . Shara!”
“Can you tell which it is?”
“Is something wrong with Necessity?” demanded Megaera, her face sheened with sweat.
“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “I can’t signal her back without a set of wards to modulate, and that’s impossible here.”
“Fly faster!” I said.
Megaera shook her head and spoke through clenched teeth, “I wish I could.”
A few more minutes passed, moments in which I found it easier to stay tuned in to the here and now instead of the chaos chorus. The tension and worry seemed to help.
“I’m losing her,” Melchior said abruptly. “The signal cut out completely for a moment there.”
Megaera nodded. “I can barely keep track of where I am.”
“How far do we have left to go?” I asked.
He shushed me and looked thoughtful, and I found myself wishing I could hear her with his ears, because the chaos chorus had picked up a bit of volume again. Finally, he shrugged. I swore. Megaera hissed. Time passed.
Then, “Gone,” said Melchior.
Megaera shrieked something inarticulate, thwarted rage plain in her face, then turned away and vomited into the void. I wanted to shriek, too. Chaos whispered to me through every pore, and this time I listened. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
“Now what?” asked Melchior.
“I . . . Hang on.” I had just had one of those belated realizations, where something has happened that you register but don’t notice. “The chaos chorus has changed.”
“The what?” Melchior looked bewildered.
“Don’t worry about it. Just ask me another question.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
That was it. “No.” Yes! The chaos song changed, I could feel it echoing through me. “Megaera, go that way.” I pointed along a bearing slightly to the left of the one Melchior had been holding us to.
“Why?” She sounded positively defeated.
There, stronger. “Because I can feel the flow of chaos, and it’s telling me to go that way.”
“All right,” she said, though she looked worn and doubtful.
I might not be able to hear what Melchior had, but I could listen to chaos, and it had been talking to me all along, telling me things about probability and uncertainty and potential. When an uncertainty was introduced into the matrix of the universe—would we or wouldn’t we make it to Necessity, was I insane—it rippled through chaos. I could feel my way into the uncertain, and if Necessity really was the point of maximum uncertainty . . .
“Keep asking questions.” They both looked at me as though I’d answered the madness question the other way, but I ignored that and made them keep asking questions until . . . “Here. Cut us a hole right here. This is Necessity.” I was sure of it.
“You’re a funny one,” said Megaera, her voice weak and thready, “but what the hell.”
Before I could respond, she’d sliced a hole into the universe and pulled us through.
We emerged in a room that was large and white and utterly wrecked. It had been a computational center once, the kind you might find in any large institution, with dozens of server racks arranged in neat rows beneath an acoustical-tile ceiling, though it appeared to be older equipment. Now it looked as though a minotaur with anger-management issues had decided it looked like a great place for experimenting with vandalism therapy. The racks had literally been pulled apart. The computers lay shattered and scattered about the room, and a huge hole gaped in the near wall. Parts of the dropped ceiling had collapsed, and a thick layer of fresh dust covered everything. I suspected that we had arrived at the ELF control center.
Megaera made the sort of noise you might get if you doused a lion’s tail with gasoline and lit it on fire. It was somewhere between a snarl and a yowl, and I felt it in my spine. I’d have pulled away from her then, but the hand curled around my hip had grown six-inch razors at the tips of its fingers and I didn’t want to self-amputate any of the things those points were resting near.
“I hate to be a bother, but could you maybe move your . . .” I raised my eyebrows and pointed downward.
Megaera didn’t answer, and she didn’t move, just stood there and sniffed the air. I was trying to decide what to do next when she let out another yowling snarl, and I found myself spinning half-around and sitting down. On the floor. Hard. But not bleeding, which was a fair trade in my book. I landed facing the hole in the wall and Megaera’s rapidly receding back.
“Was it something I said?” I asked aloud.
“Maybe it was your breath,” said Melchior. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”
I laughed, though I didn’t find the situation the least bit funny. If you’d asked me the week before what view I would most like to see of an angry Megaera, I’d have described the scene as it stood, with her heading away at speed and me not bleeding to death behind her. Now, with Nemesis running around somewhere in the vicinity, I found that I really wanted Megaera back.
I said as much to Melchior as I climbed to my feet, and he nodded. “Me, too. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on our own. So, now what? Do we follow Megaera?”
“I don’t know, Mel. On the one hand, that’s probably the path Nemesis took, and if we follow it, we might catch up with her.”
“And on the other?”
“That’s probably the path Nemesis took, and if we follow it, we might catch up with her.”
“There is that,” he said. “What about Tisiphone?”
“She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”
“So why are we walking that way?” he asked.
“Because I’m a freak of nature,” I answered.
"I can’t argue with that, but did you want to be more specific ?”
I peered through the hole. A dark hallway lay beyond, its floor marred by deep gouges as though someone had dragged a clawed and unhappy something away down its length.
I sighed. “It’s a horrible birth defect, actually; I was born with no sense of self-preservation.”
“So we’re going after them?” he asked.
“Yep.” I stepped through into the hall.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Me, too, Mel. Me, too.”
About a hundred yards farther along, we came to a series of doors and another nexus of destruction. It was hard to tell with only wreckage to read, but it looked as though Tisiphone had decided to fight back again, and the battle had crashed through into several of the rooms off the hallway, destroying their contents, including a small router closet, a bank of uninterruptible power supplies, and another server array. Again, it looked like older units.
A freshly torn-off door opening onto a utility-type stairwell suggested that the trail led up from there. Broken-off bits of railing and chunks of concrete cluttering the steps seemed to confirm that as we followed the damage upward. After a dozen or so flights, I noticed a change in the air.
“Mel, does it seem to you as though there’s a bit of a draft? And not the sort that comes from an out-of-control air-conditioning system?”
He nodded. “Not unless Necessity has a sea-scents attachment built into her climate-control system.”
Another couple of turns confirmed it. There was a cool breeze blowing down from somewhere above, a distinctly temperate and ocean-smelling breeze. That was wrong. Salt air and computers of the sort we’d been passing did not mix well. I reached for my sword, and only when I found the sheath empty did I remember I’d lost it to Nemesis. Along with my pistol and dagger. I was unarmed.
I looked at the empty sheath. “That’s not good. Mel, do you think you could do something about it?”
“Sure. Let me just try a spell.” He let out a burst of whistled code that switched from his normal style to self-harmonizing halfway through.
Sudden cold weight dragged my empty hand down. A sword . . . fish? I let go with a startled yelp and leaped up several stairs as the rather large and angry fish started flopping wildly on the landing.
“Oops!” said Melchior. “Sorry. I guess I’m not used to this quantum stuff yet. Let me fix that.”
He whistled again, this time with harmony right from the start. The fish vanished, hopefully back to wherever it had come from.
“Now, a sword.” He pursed his lips for a third whistle, one that again sounded slightly off.
“Not in my”—something filled my hand—“hand.”
It was a slender black cane with a glittering grip like a diamond grown into the shape of an angel with wings of fire. Tisiphone.
“That’s not right,” said Melchior. “It’s like I’m getting some sort of interference. Hang on, and I’ll try again.”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “The weight on this feels a little off. Let me just check . . . Ahh, nice.” With a push and a twist the grip slid away from the wood, revealing a gem-bright blade. “A sword cane, and a very nice one, too.” The blade was four-edged. Bad for slicing, but a thrust would leave a wicked wound with a cross section shaped like a plus symbol.
