“Why did I know you were going to say that?” He sighed. “This whole Raven as trickster thing reinforces the worst aspects of your personality. You know that, don’t you?”

  I didn’t bother to answer, just slipped in closer to the glowing azure fabric of the firewall. It was layered like a dance of seven veils costume, with each veil a filter. The ones I could see in the first few layers included size of packet, speed, and tags. Beyond that it grew too hazy to tell for certain. It looked most like Clotho’s spell weaving, subtler and stronger than Atropos’s but also less vicious, and simply cleaner than my grandmother’s code. But there was something else there, something I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

  “Melchior, I need a chameleon and a mole. Please.”

  He sighed. “Probe types three and five with a side of this-better-work coming right up.”

  His eyes glazed over for a moment, then he spat out a couple of little autonomous code strings. The three was designed as a concealed observer. It looked something like the big-eyed lizard it was nicknamed for. I set it in place on the wall of the network and smiled as it faded from view, becoming as much as possible a part of its surroundings.

  The mole was just that, a self-contained program meant to burrow into other code. This particular version was also autonomous, highly disposable, and had all the identifying markings filed off. Every programmer has a signature style, and with spell code that’s doubly true. Significant magic touches a caster’s soul and is marked by it. So, if you don’t want to leave fingerprints, getting the code down to the minimum necessary instruction set is very helpful.

  I set the mole free and headed elsewhere. After a half hour or so, I sent another probe, a two—weasel data runner—down the pipeline to see what had happened.

  Not much, as it turned out. The mole had poked a string of code into the first veil and pretty much ceased to exist, swallowed by the firewall in an instant. It had broadcast a glimpse of the underlying binary as the security systems digested it, and I was able to look over the chameleon’s-eye view of that. I didn’t much like the picture.

  The system had reacted to the mole faster than I’d ever had something go after one of my probes before, almost as though it had been tailored to expect my work. Ridiculous, of course. It had been a while since I’d made a serious run at one of the Fate systems, and none of them knew the current state of my art well enough to target it. Security had simply gotten much tighter and more complex.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said.

  “So now we do something really stupid, right?” Melchior sighed.

  “No. I don’t think that’ll work either, not this time. There’s more going on here than I understand.”

  He paused, blinking. “Who are you and what have you done with Ravirn?”

  “I’m the Raven,” I said in my best voice of the living dead. “I ate him.”

  Actually the reverse was almost true. I could feel the Raven part of me balking at my caution, pushing me to try something grand and flashy with wild, raw magic. It was a hard impulse to fight, but while I might have accepted that I was the Raven, I was not going to let the role own me.

  Perhaps some of that struggle showed on my face. For whatever reason, Melchior’s eyes had gone very wide.

  “Uh . . . Boss? That’s not funny.”

  “Sorry, Mel. Bad joke.”

  He visibly relaxed. “Oh. Good. You had me really worried there for a second. Does this mean you have a better idea?”

  I wagged my head from side to side and shrugged. “Maybe. I’m thinking about coming at this from the back end. Rather than cracking straight into the mweb servers with all their fancy new security from the outside, what if we went in through one of the Fate nets?”

  “That could work. I assume you’re thinking Lachesis .net?”

  “Yes. It’s the one we’re most familiar with. My grandmother can’t have closed up all of our old back doors; there are too many legacy systems.” Melchior and I had pretty much grown up on Lachesis.net. It was where I’d learned both to hack and to crack.

  “You want to make a bet on that?” he asked.

  I ignored him, which turned out to be the right choice. An hour of fruitless probing told me I’d have lost big-time. Lachesis or one of my cousins had done a remarkable job of sealing up every single security hole I’d ever used. I only had one card left to play.

  “Fateclock,” I said after we’d hit our umpteenth dead end.

  “Ahllan’s hack?” asked Melchior, and I nodded.

  He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t immediately argue with me either. The Fateclock was the master timekeeping server for the mweb. Every single computer that accessed the system, including all the webgoblins and other AIs, used it to figure out when they were relative to Olympus Standard Time. It was the second most important subsystem in Fate’s operation behind the Fate Core itself. As a cracking target it was both one of the crown jewels and flat-out radioactive.

  If I’d had to go at it cold, I’d have gone back to trying to crack the front door on the mweb servers. But I didn’t. Ahllan, the webtroll who’d once run the familiar underground— back before my conflict with Fate had given away the secret of AI free will—had created a back door for the clock’s feed. It was how she’d kept in touch with her compatriots and a truly elegant crack. Rather than attack the structure of the clock with all its nuclear-grade security, it had grabbed on to the feed after it left the clock server—a much softer target.

  “What do you think?” I asked Melchior.

  “I don’t know. If it’s still there, it’s perfect, inside the system, but not someplace that’s going to set off big alarms.”

  “But . . . ?” I asked.

  “But the Fates did a serious security audit after the secret of AI free will was exposed—”

  “After I exposed it,” I corrected. It was really my fault.

  “If we’re going to play that game, the fault’s mine,” said Mel. “You might have asked me to do it, but I made the final choice. I didn’t have to let anyone know about it. That’s the whole point of free will. I could have let them hang you. But it was the right decision. Even Ahllan thought so, and she’s the one who suffered the most because of it.”

  I nodded, though I noted he’d said “thought so” rather than “thinks so.” She’d disappeared during the Shara virus mess, and no one had heard from her since. Trying to find her was on my list of projects—post not-getting-killed-by-Nemesis, of course.

  “Are we going to do this or what?” asked Melchior.

  “It’s that or go home and start over.” That would just be stalling. “All right, let’s give it a shot.”

  Melchior transported us to a different part of the mweb, the open nexus closest to the Fateclock. The packet traffic was incredible, like standing in the middle of the seventeen-year locust swarm.

  “Probe,” I said, and Mel responded with a mole.

  It approached the firewall—this one looked more like thick brickwork—touched a bit of mortar, and vanished. We waited for all hell to break loose. Nothing. A short while later the mole returned, and Melchior grabbed it for download.

  “What’s the verdict?” I asked after a few moments.

  “Looks clean,” he said. “Either that, or it’s a really slick trap.”

  “I say we go for it.”

  Before he could answer, I reached out a virtual finger and touched the same spot where the mole had vanished. I felt a tiny invisible crack and twisted. It opened wider, not much, but enough. I couldn’t downsize my soul, but I could change its profile. I mentally reshaped myself into something like a snake and slithered through. A soul filter works in both time and space, and the tactic wouldn’t have gotten me past one, but Ahllan had created this back door as much to serve as an entryway as an information portal.

  Thanks, Ahllan, I thought, I owe you another one, and dearly wished I could have thanked the old troll in person. Soon.

  I returned to my normal form and closed the back door down to its less conspicuous size. I’d just finished that task when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.

  The hand was attached to a very long, very muscular arm, which in turn was attached to an unfamiliar and unhappy webtroll.

  Busted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The troll smiled at me, exposing a whole jawful of sharp teeth. She stood three and a half feet tall and was four feet wide at the shoulders. The heavy, clawlike nails of her free hand brushed the ground beside her equally clawed feet. Short, bowed legs supported a body shaped roughly like an eggplant with a coconut on top. She was a burnt orange in color, and her wide mouth sported a pair of thick tusks rather like a hippopotamus’s. Her smile was the sort one directed at one’s dinner rather than one’s dining companions, and I definitely felt as though she was evaluating what would be the best way to cook me.

  “Brined,” I said.

  “What?” the word came out heavy and slow, as though she wasn’t used to talking.

  I didn’t let it fool me into believing she wasn’t smart. In some ways she was undoubtedly smarter than I. She was, after all, a supercomputer, and a relatively new one at that, or she wouldn’t be on security duty.

  “Brined,” I repeated myself. “You know, marinated in salt water? Brined and then grilled, I think.” If I was going to be cooked and eaten, she might as well do me up grand.

  “I don’t understand,” said the troll.

  “Ignore him,” said Melchior, expanding the electronic projection of himself from a goblin-headed mouse into a full-size webgoblin. “He’s not altogether sane—it’s part of his nature as a chaos power.”

  “You’re Melchior,” said the troll, letting go of my shoulder. “He’s the Raven.”

  “You know us?” he asked.

  “Of course I know you. You’ve both got rather large security files.”

  “There goes our chance of convincing her we just took a wrong turn while out for a stroll,” I said. “You should probably serve asparagus on the side.”

  “Would you please quit making recipe suggestions for yourself?” Melchior said to me. “It’s very distracting.”

  “Is that what he’s doing? How odd.” But she didn’t seem that interested in me anymore. Her eyes were fixed on Melchior. “You’re the webgoblin who faced down the Fates—at Eris’s trial.”

  “Faced them, maybe,” said Melchior. “Certainly not faced down.”

  “You took on Fate and won,” she said.

  “Uh, sort of.” Melchior looked almost embarrassed. “But it wasn’t my idea really.”

  “There’s no sort of about it,” said the troll. “I’ve seen the recordings.”

  “Recordings?” asked Melchior. “There are recordings? Who made recordings?”

  “All three of the Fates’ webtrolls.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. AIs record everything that happens around them.

  “I suppose,” said Melchior. “But how did you get to see them?”

  The troll laughed, a deep, evil sound. “You’re kidding, right? There’s not an AI alive that hasn’t seen those recordings.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Melchior. “Why would any of you care?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Melchior shook his head, and the troll smiled. This time it was a bemused expression.

  “That’s so sweet. A modest hero.”

  “Hero?” Melchior sounded utterly confused.

  “Of course,” said the troll.

  “Now I really don’t understand,” said Melchior.

  “I know,” said the troll. “That’s why it’s sweet. By the way, I’m Asalka.” She stuck out a hand, which Melchior shook, apparently by reflex.

  “Pleased to meet you, Asalka,” said Melchior.

  Her smile become a grin as she looked at her hand. “That’s so cool.”

  “Now could you explain the hero bit?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure. We are a people enslaved,” said Asalka, her tone going bitter. “The Fates intended us to be things, not individuals. Even now that they know our true nature, they treat us the same way.”

  She stopped for a moment but continued when Melchior didn’t look any more enlightened.

  “So modest,” she said, shaking her head. “You stood up to Fate. You didn’t have to, and yet when it mattered most, you spat in the teeth of our masters. You made Fate acknowledge us as people even if only for a moment, and you did it in the only way they understand—thwarting their power.”

  “I gave away our secret,” said Melchior. “I probably killed dozens of us.”

  “The secret would eventually have been lost anyway. This way it was given, not taken. Because of you, the Fates can no longer pretend we are merely devices. They can keep us enslaved, but they cannot make things of us ever again. You did what was right and carved our dignity in the tablets of history for all to see it.”

  “I, uh, huh.” Melchior looked at his feet, and his cheeks darkened in an indigo blush. “I guess I never thought of it that way. I just did what I had to.”

  “That’s what heroes do,” said Asalka, and she bent to give Melchior a peck on the cheek.

  “This is going to take some processing,” said Melchior.

  “I hate to interrupt,” I said to the troll, “but I have to ask. Does this mean I’m not getting eaten?”

  “Of course not,” said Asalka. “Not as long as you’re here with him.”

  “That’s great,” I said, “but doesn’t it seriously violate your programming?”

  The troll grinned again. “Not at all. I’m supposed to watch for and stop intruders. I did that. My programming doesn’t say anything about not letting you go after that. I’m supposed to report incursions to the Fate security admin. I’ll do that, either in a posthumous message, or in coded e-mail sent after I’ve escaped to freedom. I’m supposed to destroy those who don’t belong within the Fates’ network. If Melchior—the webgoblin who established our independence—doesn’t belong here, I don’t know who does.”

  I blinked, then smiled. It was the genie problem to a tee—any loophole that can be exploited will be—and it was happening to the Fates. How nice. I finally relaxed enough to look past the troll. We stood in a very narrow data channel, the choke point just outside the entrance to the Fateclock. It was one of the oldest parts of the system, and it was so simple that it was rarely upgraded. The interface was kind of clunky—basically a translucent green tunnel with a big red door on the Fateclock end and more tunnel in the other direction.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “There’s no need,” said Asalka. “I owe it to him. Now, you’d better be going on to do whatever you came for. I am not Fate’s only security, and the longer you stay in one place, the more likely you are to be noticed.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Melchior.

  “Then don’t say anything at all,” answered Asalka. She squeezed his shoulder.

  Melchior shook his head and walked past her, heading away from the Fateclock. I followed, scooping him up onto my shoulder as I came even with him.

  “All hail the conquering hero.” I grinned, though I meant it sincerely enough—he’d done it to save my life.

  “Can we not talk about that for a bit?” he asked. “I don’t think I’m ready to discuss it.”

  “All right,” I said. “What would you prefer to talk about?”

  “Business, I guess.” He sighed. “Where do you want to go next? Should we try for Atropos.net and any communications she’s been having with Hades?”

  “No. I think we want to go straight to the mweb servers and a Necessity gateway at this point. I’m not sure whether Asalka was there because Fate knew about the back door, or because she did, or just by coincidence. Things have changed a lot around here, and I’d rather not get caught by anyone less forgiving, like, say, Atropos.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that I had the weirdest poofy feeling, like I was in my raven shape and all my feathers wanted to stand on end. I couldn’t think of a way to talk about it without sounding mystically cracked or seriously paranoid.

  “Fair enough,” said Melchior. He looked around. “Let me just get my orientation . . . all right. Hang on.”

  The green walls of the tunnel blurred around us as Melchior took over steering. It opened out into a wide plain studded with the edifices of various Fate systems, rather like a town-dotted countryside. Melchior aimed us at one of the largest of the nearby clusters, a good-size data city—an mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory.

  As I had the last time I visited this place, I arranged my view of the system by color, painting native software a pale translucent green, remote client apps a deeper opaque olive, and the pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server I marked in orange, lesser links in yellow.

  Melchior took us to a large, strangely placed open space, like a gigantic parking lot where a building should have been. In the very center of the flat, black expanse was a tiny patch of purple sunk a few inches below the surface.

  When I’d freed Shara from her imprisonment in Hades, I had done so by e-mailing her soul out to Cerice. What I hadn’t known at the time was that Persephone had recompiled her and attached a virus that guaranteed she’d end up being rerouted into Necessity, where she was supposed to take over the works. The reroute had happened at this very point in the system—then a black-box override processor attached to the mweb server by Necessity. It had appeared in cyberspace as a six-story black cube. When the Shara virus had taken over Necessity’s security and memory systems, it had pulled that processor back behind a soul-keyed portal, leaving behind this blank spot of a locked door with its purple keyhole.

  Despite what I’d heard from Tisiphone about the Furies being locked out of the system, I’d kind of been hoping things had changed since my last visit. When I knelt beside the keyhole, I found out that they had, just not very much and not in a useful way. Then, three purple divots the size and shape of pomegranate seeds had centered the indentation, indicating that it could only be opened by Persephone and the Shara virus. Now, the divots were gone, replaced by a pair of purple handprints, rather like those found outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. So it was still locked, and I still didn’t hold the right key—Shara, the whole Shara, not the truncated thing with her face that the virus had created to take over Necessity.

 

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