Codespell (18 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell
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“Well?” I asked.
Dave looked down and mumbled something.
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t get that.”
“Is . . . is there any chance you’ll be seeing Persephone anytime soon?” he finally asked. “I wouldn’t bring it up, but I know you’re worried about whether Nemesis is working with Hades.”
“How’d you—no.” I stopped myself.
Just because I hadn’t talked about that explicitly didn’t mean they would have missed my concern. The big dumb doggy thing is an act. Even though I know that, I still fall for it—witness the debacle with the poker. Cerberus isn’t really a dog. He’s a god in dog shape and the head of security for the multiverse’s biggest prison—Hades.
“Better question,” I said. “Why bring it up now?”
“Well,” said Dave. “No one knows Hades or how this place operates better than Persephone.”
“No one who
can
tell you anything, at least,” said Mort.
“Traitors,” fumed Bob. “Stinking traitors and my own blood, too.”
“Give it a rest, yap-boy,” said Mort. “We’re not telling him anything he wouldn’t have figured out for himself.” He paused. “Eventually.”
I smiled. “I guess I
am
going to see Persephone. Is there anything I can do for you while I’m there?”
“Just tell her I love her,” said Dave, blinking tears away. “And that I miss her. I know she won’t want to visit down here, and I don’t blame her for it, but maybe you could suggest she call sometime, give her my number . . . like that.”
“Of course.” I reached up and scruffed under his chin. “I’d be happy to—”
“Boss!”
“What is it, Mel?”
“I’m not sure. It feels a bit like an incoming locus transfer, but not quite.” He shook his head. “I think our departure schedule just got advanced.”
“Right. Melchior. Mtp://mweb.DecLocus.prime/Olympusgate. Please.”
He whipped out a piece of chalk and some string and quickly began to sketch a hexagram two feet or so on a side. As he filled in the cross lines, a bubble of blue light appeared next to Cerberus on Dave’s side. It was the exact shade of an incoming locus transfer protocol gate, but decidedly not the familiar hexagonal column.
“Don’t worry,” Mort said firmly. “Even if it’s Nemesis, we can slow her down a mite.”
“Thanks!” I appreciated it.
Whatever it was would almost certainly finish its arrival before Mel completed the gate, a prophecy that came true a moment later when a huge spider-centaur crossbreed appeared in the bubble. The spinnerette from earlier, or its twin sister. The second it finished materializing, it started toward me.
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Dave, moving between us.
It tried to sidestep Cerberus, opening its woman’s mouth and chittering in a way that made my bones itch, “******.”
None of the boys liked it much either, and all three heads started growling.
“Gate’s open,” said Melchior.
I turned and took a step that way but paused when the spinnerette chittered again.
“****!”
It was an awful noise, but also somehow familiar, and the thing hadn’t tried to bypass Cerberus again. Whether that was plain old common sense or something else I didn’t know, but it wasn’t actively trying to kill me, and I really wanted to know where it stood in the grand scheme of things.
“Uh-oh,” said Kira. “Playtime is officially over.”
I started to ask her why but stopped when I saw where she was looking—the gates of Hades. A figure of smoke and shadow stood there. Apparently all the noise had attracted the attention of management. Rather than settle down for a chat with Hades, I stepped into the light of the gate, so Melchior could take us elsewhere.
A Raven among peacocks. That’s how I felt, at least. What is it with garden parties and hats? The bigger and fancier and sillier the better, if I was any judge.
From the moment I’d passed through the gate in the hedge, I’d been surrounded by hats of every shape and color. Even the poor rent-a-clops on door duty had been wearing more elaborate millinery than usual. Instead of the classic black-brimmed cop caps they normally wore, they had on those felt Mountie things in pearl gray with gold braid and patent-leather chin straps. The nymph who led me into the depths of the garden had a hat, too, a rather elaborate birch-bark thing that probably would have made a great canoe for exploring very small rivers.
“What’s going on?” I asked after we’d passed beyond the hearing of the ’clops. “The guards at the city gate just pointed and grunted when I asked about finding Persephone. ”
“The goddess doesn’t like to be within walls of stone or to sleep under any roof but the starry sky,” said the nymph, leading me between a group of fountains where naiads—also in hats—lounged and drank tea. “So her mother, the Earth, made her this garden.”
That made sense. If I’d spent three thousand years as even a part-time prisoner in the twilight cavern of Hades, I’d probably have some claustrophobia issues, too. It
was
a beautiful garden, or rather a series of the sort of gardens Louis XIV might have made of Versailles had he had ten times the cultural breadth and a hundred times the budget. There was every type of garden imaginable; from the back-yard English pot garden of today, through the Japanese formal garden of the Tokugawa Shogunate, to an underwater fantasy version of the Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden in the shade. All of it was broken up by hedges that kept the whole from becoming a cacophony in green.
Even so, the sights and smells started to overwhelm me after a while. I was pretty much a stunned bunny by the time the nymph led me through a hedge maze and out into a shaded olive grove. It had a small, sunken amphitheater at its heart, descending to the circular stage in a series of grass-covered steps. More trees grew upon the stairs and a smaller, quieter group of women lounged on blankets spread beneath those silver-green leaves. For reasons unknown, the sounds of the stage did not reach us there beyond the edge of the theater.
“Persephone is below,” the nymph whispered into my ear, indicating the far slope of the theater. “You can circle around the top and come down from behind her.”
I started forward but stopped when she touched my arm.
“What is it?” I asked.
“She doesn’t like to be touched, and please don’t startle her. Hades, you know.”
I nodded gently, and the nymph let me go. I slipped around the rim of the amphitheater, took one step down, and came to a halt as I caught my first solid sight of the stage. A tall woman with dark hair and icy skin stood at the center. She seemed to look straight into my heart in the moment I saw her and to invite me to listen to a story she was telling only for me. It was the Iliad, and though she was nearly done, in that brief instant it seemed to me that all the long tale that had passed before, from the moment of its beginning with “Anger I sing—the wrath of Achilles,” had spoken itself in my head and my heart. I was enraptured. I didn’t move until she finished. If I even breathed, I didn’t know it.
The spell was only broken by the applause that followed. And I only recognized it as a spell in the moment that I took my interrupted second step down the tiers toward Persephone. She sat beside a short red-haired woman, whom I instantly recognized as my other grandmother, Thalia. Two steps more, and the woman who had been speaking left the stage to be replaced by a slender blonde garbed like a temple dancer. That was when I thought to count Persephone’s guests and knew their nature by their number. Nine. The muses, and I had just heard a part of the greatest of all the poems of Greece performed by Calliope, their leader and the very soul of epic poetry.
Then Terpsichore began to dance, and I was lost once again. Fortunately for my errand but unfortunately for my esthetic enjoyment, her performance was shorter and not immediately followed by another of the muses. Persephone turned and smiled at me when I reached the level on which she sat. My grandmother did as well, but she was outshone as the far stars are outshone by the nearby sun, and I gave my attention first to Persephone.
She is perhaps the most beautiful of all the goddesses, tall and dark of hair and eye with flawless skin and the figure of womanhood in its springtime. This was the first time we’d had an opportunity to speak since the ordeal in Hades’ office.
“Your eyes have changed,” she said with a sad half smile. “I’m sorry for that.”
“Yours have changed as well, Persephone, and for that I’m not sorry at all.”
When I’d met her, on my first visit to Hades, the pain in her eyes had almost drowned me. Later, when I’d had to take on a tiny bit of that agony in order to pass through the barrier guarding Necessity, the weight of it had nearly killed me. That pain was still visible in the depths, but now it was one tint in a sea of colors, an accent rather than the core palette. It was a change every bit as great as the one I had experienced.
“Well-spoken,” said Thalia.
I flicked my gaze to the side and caught a chaos-touched wink from her.
“Hello, Grandmother.” I bowed.
“Ravirn.” She bobbed her head. “He’s such a good boy,” she said to Persephone.
Persephone’s smile blossomed. “He is indeed.” She looked straight at me. “For the change in my eyes and in my heart, I have you to thank. You, and the webgoblin, Shara, who assumed my place in Necessity’s net. Without your initial visit to Hades, I would never have had even the chance for escape. Without your return and the sacrifices both of you made then, I might have had my freedom only at the cost of my life and everything that is.” She held her hands out to encompass the whole world, which could
well
have been undone if the Shara virus had been left unchecked.
She lowered her voice, and anger touched it, and bitter conviction. “I would have taken it even at that price, but you spared me the responsibility for the ending of all things. Thank you for saving me from my own hurt and hatred. I thank you both. I only wish I could give Shara my gratitude in person.”
“Hopefully, that will be possible in the not-too-distant future, ” I said. “If her cycle of imprisonment follows your own, we’ll know in a few more weeks. In the meantime, I have questions for you, if you’ll answer them, and greetings from an old and loyal friend of yours who wishes you’d call.”
“Friends first,” said Persephone. “You mean Cerberus— and Dhavlos in particular.”
I blinked, then realized she meant “Dave.” The longer form must be his real name.
Persephone continued, “He was my only true companion within the House of Death.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and shivered. “Tell him when next you see him that I will write to him. I can’t do more as yet, can’t bear the thought of seeing that dark land again, even over his shoulder in a video feed. I love my dog, but Cerberus is too much a part of Hades for me to be able to separate them with any ease. Which brings me to your questions. I presume they touch on the same blighted ground.”
I nodded.
“I would banish both the place and the god from thought and memory if I might, and I do not speak of them willingly. But if anyone has the right to ask me about Hades, it is you. So, come, sit beside me and ask your questions. I will try to answer them.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I would not ask . . .”
“But you must,” said Persephone. “Nemesis has returned, and she has chosen you to begin her current round of mayhem. ”
“News travels fast,” I said.
A gentle laugh drew my attention away from Persephone to Thalia.
“It does that, grandson. Especially in the great intertwined mangrove maze that forms the family tree of the Titans. I sometimes think that gossip is the smallest coin in our collective purse, spent freely and buying little, but quickly turned over.”
“Does that make me a bad penny?” I asked.
“I don’t know about that,” said Thalia. “Do you always turn up? Or only when you’re wanted?”
“Always,” said Melchior, poking his head out of my bag and looking sour. “Always.”
Thalia laughed and hopped lightly to her feet. “I think you probably know my grandson better than anyone. You certainly know him better than I, and I would remedy that. Why don’t you tell me about him while they depress themselves. ”
“Boss?” He looked up at me.
“I’m not your boss, Mel. I haven’t been since I found out you were really a person, no matter how many times you try to shift responsibility for your actions and decisions my way.”
“Come on,” said Thalia. “It’ll be fun. Well, funny anyway; I can promise that.”
“Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?”
“There’s a difference?”
Melchior sighed. “No, since you’re related to
him
, probably not. Oh, what the heck.” He hopped down, and the two of them headed up the grassy steps, leaving me alone with Persephone.
She gestured to Thalia’s empty place, and I sat.
“Start with Nemesis,” I said.
“I don’t know much about her, not after she fell. I was a child when”—she swallowed visibly—“when Hades first stole me from my mother, and she was no concern of mine then. After . . . well, when it became clear that no one was going to punish Hades for my rape and imprisonment, I lost interest in most of the other gods and goddesses, those I didn’t hate.”

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