Codespell, p.7
Codespell, page 7
part #3 of Ravirn Series
In the water beside me, the shark did a neat barrel roll but didn’t move away. Great, I’d found an electrically blind shark. Looking ahead I could see that my wave was about to peter out, too, leaving me pretty much stopped in the water. That’s when the shark winked at me. It was very slow and very deliberate, and I had no doubt it was a wink. I jerked away hard and just about flipped my board doing it. I would have died if that had happened. I might anyway.
The shark had mirrored pupils.
“Dairn!”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What?” yelped Melchior. “Dairn? Where?”
“The shark! It’s him, I don’t know how.”
I was already leaning back for a turn. Pivoting the board on its tail, I headed to my right, up the wave. I needed to get over the top and down the back even though that meant crossing above the shark. I didn’t dare ride any farther, or I’d go down in the soup—the white-water mess that happens when a big wave falls apart. The idea terrified me. I’m tougher and stronger than your average surfer, but that meant nothing if I was tumbling around in the water effectively blind with a hostile shark.
“Melchior—” I began as soon as I could spare the breath.
“On it,” he said, whistling the opening bar of Board to Run.
The spell kicked in when we slid down the back of the wave, shifting us from gravity-driven to magically and starting the board accelerating out toward the open ocean. Unfortunately, that pointed us straight at the next big wave. It was already breaking, so I threw myself flat on the board and duck-dived through the crest, sheltering Mel with my body. It felt like someone had dropped a very soggy brick wall on me, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. I’d been heading into the break zone, and it was safer to head offshore than in through the chop at the moment. I could turn around and figure out how to get back to shore when I hit the rollers and calmer water.
As I came out the back of the wave, I saw a silvery fin slicing the water beside me. Frightening, but at least I knew where he was. Then the next breaker was coming down on top of me, and I lost track of the shark. Swearing, I climbed back to my feet. I had better control that way, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do any paddling with that thing somewhere below me.
“Where did he go?” I asked Melchior, trying not to squeak. The only thing between us and a fall into the shark’s world was a thin plank.
He peered over the edge. “I don’t know. I can’t see him. We’ve got to get out of here.” He sounded panicky, and I couldn’t blame him.
I nodded. “I’d try the splash faerie-ring trick again, but there’s too much chop to hold the circle. Any suggestions?”
“Not really. I can’t LTP us out of here without the mweb, and I don’t know any good mweb-independent flight spells. I’d try composing one, but the turbulence has me seriously croggled, and this would be an exceptionally bad time to blow a hack.”
“No ambition to end up as shark sushi?” I asked as lightly as I could manage.
I turned the board back toward the beach. That’s when the shark returned. This time he announced his presence by nipping off one of the board’s fins. He did it gently, almost lovingly, but the impact nearly flipped us. We had to stop playing his game. That meant chaos magic, serious chaos magic.
Breathing deeply, I reached inward, trying to find the place where blood and chaos merged. The sun dimmed as I found it, occluded by the shadow of a huge raven that wasn’t really there. The Raven. The shape of my power. The shape of my soul. And with a wicked twist of will, the shape of my body.
The spell was a hack, a set of magical instructions put together on the fly. I’d performed the trick several times now, and each time I’d done it slightly differently. I was beginning to think I couldn’t repeat the process exactly, that subtle differences in my starting circumstances would force me to reorder the sequence every time. But that was the essence of chaos, wasn’t it? That and change.
Like the change from something not quite a man into something not quite a bird. A change that required rearranging every single molecule in my body all in the split second before the universe caught on and turned me into a spreading ball of organic mush. It hurt. Chaos and Discord, it hurt. In that moment between shapes, all the atoms of my body were disconnected from each other. I had no nerves to carry signals, no brain for the signals to reach, nothing at all. Yet the soul remembered the process of being torn to shreds, remembered and carried the pain into the new form.
My first word in the new shape was a harsh caw of pure agony. My second: an Anglo-Saxonism of the four-letter variety. My third was Melchior’s name, called out as I swept forward above the surfboard and caught him in my claws. It was only just in time. Whether the shark with Dairn’s eyes had already decided to stop playing with us, or whether the final attack was triggered by his awareness of my transformation, I don’t know. Whatever the case, when he hit this time, it was no gentle nip, it was a crushing blow of the jaws, shattering the board from below.
But I was already climbing up and away, with Melchior hanging beneath me. As I headed back toward Raven House, I could see the shark arrowing along below us, and I had a nasty suspicion that reaching land wouldn’t stop him.
“Mel?” I cawed in my raven’s voice.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think the odds are that thing’s going to come out of the water in the near future?”
“Let’s just say I don’t think we should to stop to wash the dishes when we get back to the house.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Is there some way we can warn Haemun to find someplace safe to wait things out? I doubt it’ll stay long after we leave.”
There was a long pause before Melchior finally answered, “Yeah, hang on.”
He whistled a choppy string of binary, then spat. A short crossbow bolt with a note tied around it emerged from his mouth and went winging ahead of us.
“How do you know he’ll find it in time?” I asked.
“I aimed for a window.”
“That should do it.” Haemun is not a fan of messes in Raven House. “What if it hits him?”
“No problem, it’s got a blunted tip. It might hurt like Hades’ own kick in the ass, but it shouldn’t do any major tissue damage.”
“Good enough. Next question: Where to?”
“How about Castle Discord?” he asked.
“I thought you didn’t much like Eris,” I cawed.
“I don’t. She scares me, all the way down to the chipset. Worse, I owe her my soul.”
That was quite literally true. Without the intervention of Eris and Tyche, or Discord and Fortune if you prefer, webgoblins and their kin would never have developed self-awareness.
“Shouldn’t that make it better?” I asked.
“No. She didn’t do it for my sake. She did it to thwart the Fates. Knowing you exist because Fate was trying to come up with a better way to rule the world is bad enough. Knowing that the reason you’re a person and not a thing is because Discord thought it would make for a good joke at Fate’s expense is so much worse. I’m the moral equivalent of that damn golden apple that started the Trojan War. If a different humor had taken her the day she messed around with webgoblin design specs, the multiverse might have a better class of rubber vomit instead of me. Quite frankly, it gives me the wobblies in my subroutines.”
“So why suggest we go see her?” The question was becoming more urgent, as we would soon reach the House and its built-in faerie ring.
“Because, for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable, she likes you. If she can think of some way to make helping you irritate the forces of order more than not helping you would, she’ll do it. Since she’s enormously powerful and—as usual—you can use all the help you can get, it seems worth the risk. Besides, it’s not like we’re talking about moving into her basement or anything. Even you’re not that cracked.”
Then we arrived at Raven House and decision time.
“Castle Discord it is,” I croaked, dropping down to touch the swirl of black within the green stone of the lanai.
We entered the faerie ring and found . . . infinite possibility. I hovered in a million different places all at the same time, none of them the one I wanted. The Castle Discord faerie ring I’d used in the past didn’t currently exist. No surprise really; Castle Discord didn’t exactly exist in the normal sense of the word, either. It changed constantly to fit Eris’s mood and whim.
Well, perhaps there was a loophole. That was the nature of what little divinity I possessed, finding the loophole in the stuff of reality—the elegant hack. Feeling my way into the Raven’s power over the faerie-ring network, my power, I reached for the circle I’d used before, the one absent from the current Castle Discord. Potentialities flashed through my awareness—rings that had existed, rings that would exist, rings that could exist—there! I touched the echo of a place that was no longer and pushed. Possible became probable became actual. Another ring joined the network, a part of me within it. I focused my attention and . . . stood within a ring of forget-me-nots in a greenhouse beneath a golden-apple sun. Castle Discord.
I stepped out of the ring and went away.
Discontinuity.
“Hello, Raven.” Discord’s voice brought me back.
The greenhouse flickered into being and was gone in the same instant. We stood now upon a bridge of glass over a river made up of the eternally changing stuff of Primal Chaos. That was my first impression. My second was of a glass tunnel suspended within that same river. One moment it seemed to be all around us, the next in one direction only. The only solid points of reference were a pair of large arched doors, one a hundred feet ahead, the other a hundred behind. Those, and the goddess herself. Well, sort of.
Eris is a creature of change. Her hair and skin are gold or black . . . and both at the same time. Like taffeta, how she looks depends on how you look at her. Some things change less than others. She is always tall. She is always beautiful, though sometimes it is the unattainable perfection of a marble goddess and sometimes the pure lusty sexiness of a Kama Sutra angel. She is always, always dangerous.
Today it appeared that she had decided to spare me the come-hither that hurts—she is a virgin goddess and only turns on the carnality to create trouble. She was just under seven feet if you didn’t count the six-inch stiletto heels on the flimsy-looking sandals whose straps twined like golden black snakes around her feet and ankles, twisting and climbing up her bare calves to just below her knees. A short split skirt of something like silk clutched at the curves of her hips and thighs, shifting its colors at the slightest movement. Above she wore an equally clingy blouse. It was nearly transparent, and I could see . . .
I swallowed and shook my head. Damn it! She was doing it to me again, more subtly this time, jacking up the sex appeal slowly as my eyes climbed upward.
“Would you please stop that?” I asked, and only as I missed the harsh cawing undertone of my words did I realize I was no longer a literal raven. I had been transformed once again. “You’re quite terrifying. You know that, don’t you?”
Eris laughed, and the sound was beautiful and terrible, like windows breaking in the city of the gods. The sex appeal blew away in the puff of wind that ruffled and opaqued her blouse at the same time it disarranged her hair. The marble goddess had arrived.
“Oh, Raven, I do miss you when you aren’t around. But it’s your own fault. It wouldn’t be such fun if you didn’t fall for it every time.”
“Don’t call me Raven.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.” She mimicked Melchior perfectly, and I realized for the first time that I didn’t see him.
“Where’s—”
“In your bag,” she answered, “sleeping it off.”
“Sleeping what off?” I demanded.
“The chaos time.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said.
“Don’t you?” The question was not a question, it was a challenge. Her tone said that the only reason I didn’t know the answer was that I was fooling myself somehow.
“Tell me that again but look me in the eyes this time,” she said. “You haven’t yet. I think we both know why, and it’s not just because you so like looking at the rest of me.” She ran her hands down her sides suggestively, and for an instant the sex appeal was back. “Come on, you know you don’t want to.”
This challenge I understood, and I had to answer it or lose face, to say nothing of self-respect, so I forced myself to look into Discord’s eyes. Of course, I saw myself looking back. The chaos that had devoured my pupils owns all of Discord’s eyes. It had scared me when mine were still black slits. Now, it was utterly terrifying. They say the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and in meeting hers I was forced to acknowledge my own recent soul-deep transformation.
“Better,” she said, and smiled. “Much better.”
“It hurts,” I answered. It did. “In so very many ways.” Not the least of which was the sudden deeper understanding of all that had come between me and Cerice.
For an instant a look of something very like sympathy flickered across her face. But it came and went too fast for me really to tell, and the look that replaced it was more than a little smug.
“Pain is how you can tell you’re alive. If you wake up some morning and nothing hurts, it means you’re dead. And then you go to Hades.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “I don’t understand why you don’t get more dinner invitations.”
“It’s because my eyes glow in the dark,” she replied.
I sighed and lifted my hands in surrender. Fencing with Eris, whether physically or verbally, is a losing proposition. She always plays for blood and nearly always gets it.
“Chaos time?” I asked, trying to change the subject back to what had happened with Melchior.
“When you transported yourself here.”
“You lost me.”
“Castle Discord is not a place,” said Eris.
“I know that. It’s a Greatspell of some sort, a permanent piece of magic surrounded by the stuff of chaos.” I gestured at the churn flowing around the glass tunnel.
Castle Discord is off the net, way off, floating completely alone in the place between the worlds. It is not attached to any DecLocus and has no world resource locator fork.
She nodded. “That, too, but I meant something else in this case. When you enter a faerie ring, you enter all faerie rings. You know that, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know why?”
“I—” It had never occurred to me to think about it. “No.”
She pointed through the wall. “That out there is the very stuff of randomness. Potentially it can become anything at all, even a god.”
“The Titans,” I supplied.
“Exactly. They self-organized from chaos, created structure from its antithesis. They are hybrid beings, chaos arranged by will into the illusion of order.”
“It’s an awfully solid sort of illusion. You, me, all of us in the pantheon are their children. Wars have been fought between the generations. Are you saying we’re all illusions, too?”
“Yes and no. The Titanomachy was real enough. Most of the children of the Titans are creatures of order, whatever their actual allegiance. Zeus is no illusion, not physically. Nor is Tartarus, where he imprisoned the Titans after the war. Neither are the Fates, for that matter. There is much that is real in the pantheosphere. You, however, are not. No more than I am.”
My stomach did a backflip with a triple twist and failed to stick the landing. I felt sweat break out on my forehead. I couldn’t possibly be an illusion. For one thing, no illusion would feel so queasy.
