Codespell (26 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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“That was lovely,” I said, when she finally let me up for air, “but a little more warning might have been nice. You startled me.”
“That was the point. And sorry, no can do on the warnings front.” She grinned. “Your hour was up, and I told you back then that amorous hostilities could reignite without any prior warning. You’ll just have to get used to the occasional pounce.”
“Will I?” I put my hands on her ribs. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we? That, and whether Furies are ticklish.”
“Hey, no fair—” began Tisiphone.
I didn’t let her finish, and as it turns out, Furies
are
ticklish. Giggling ensued. It didn’t last long, because Tisiphone flipped me over and pinned my arms.
“Now what are you going to do?” she asked, sitting on my chest.
“Surrender?” I asked.
“Nope, sorry. Not an option.”
Since it hadn’t worked last time, I wasn’t terribly surprised. I was still trying to think of a good answer when Melchior cleared his throat.
“Should I go and find some earplugs while you two bang about for a bit?” he asked grumpily. “Or is this more of a brief-interlude-with-groping kind of thing?”
I sighed and looked up at Tisiphone. “Truce?”
“We’d probably better.” She released me and popped herself to her feet with a beat of her wings before offering me a hand. “With Nemesis running around loose, it’s important we work fast. Is there anything special I should be on the lookout for while I’m out and about?”
“Faerie rings,” I said, “if you’re feeling the need to be useful. The fewer possible routes of approach available to Nemesis, the better.”
“Good enough.” She crouched, then launched herself up into one of the air shafts, quickly climbing from view.
I looked at Melchior. He looked from me to the heavens—or possibly the air shaft—and shook his head. Without saying another word, he started in on the cleaning and organizing. I went to dig around in Ahllan’s supplies.
Several grimy and sweaty hours of sifting, sorting, and soldering later, and I had kludged together a new piece of magical test equipment built on a PDA frame and designed to check out mweblike wireless communications across every band I could think of. Whether it would work or not, I had no idea, since I didn’t really understand what Tisiphone was doing, but I was fresh out of enthusiasm and ideas.
“Would this be a good time for refreshments?” said a voice from the top of the stairs at that exact moment.
It was Haemun, wearing a truly gods-awful Hawaiian shirt and carrying a tray with lemonade and some fresh fruit. He started down.
“Sorry I can’t offer you the sort of variety I might were we at Raven House, but I had to go with what I could pick off the nearby trees and what little was left in the way of durable goods in Ahllan’s pantry.”
“No need to apologize,” I said, taking a glass. “This is pretty miraculous considering conditions. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Haemun,” said Tisiphone, dropping suddenly from an air shaft.
“You’re . . . welcome, Madam.”
Haemun swallowed visibly as Tisiphone landed and lifted a drink from the tray but kept his smile and generally did better at looking unruffled than I had the first time
I’d
been surprised by a Fury. Apparently he was bouncing back from the magical brainwashing he’d undergone when Nemesis took over Raven House. That was good both for him and for me. I needed to ask him about the whole thing sometime soon, but I hadn’t wanted to push.
“How’d it go?” Tisiphone took a sip of her lemonade and smiled at Haemun. “This is lovely.” He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like “Thanks,” and headed back upstairs as she turned her attention my way. “Did you figure anything out?”
“Maybe.” With one fingertip I tapped the device I’d put together. “It depends on how you get your positional information. If it acts like it would if I’d set it up, this thing should be able to detect something.”
“
There’s
a description that inspires confidence,” said Tisiphone.
“What do you expect?” I shrugged. “I’m a hacker, not a communications specialist. We’ll find out just how big a distinction that is in a few minutes. How’d you do?”
“I found a half dozen proto rings at nearby ley nodes, including one that was almost ripe at the place where Stonehenge sits in most of the primary lines of reality. The only full one I spotted was where Reykjavik would be. I destroyed them all, of course, but I didn’t make it as far as North America. There may be more there.”
“Then we should probably get this moving along, shouldn’t we?” I finished my lemonade and set the glass aside. “Do you know where you are right now?”
Tisiphone raised an eyebrow at me and moved her glass in a little circle to indicate she was right there with me.
“Yes, very funny,” I said. “But you know what I meant. Do you know where you are relative to everywhere else?”
“Not in the sense that you mean.” She emptied her glass. “It really only activates when I’m trying to move between DecLoci.”
“I was afraid of that.” I handed her the detector I’d put together. “Here. The power button’s on the side there. If you would be so kind as to take that and go somewhere via chaos, we’ll see whether it tells us anything.”
“How far do you want me to go?” asked Tisiphone.
“Just far enough to activate your sense of location.”
“All right.” She reached out and clawed a hole in the air, vanishing into the place between worlds.
A moment later, a tearing sound from the top of the stairs announced her reentry into the DecLocus. She walked down and handed the device to me.
“Well?”
I glanced at the readings. “Wow, look at all the garbage.” Where I had expected to see either no magical band readings or, if I got lucky first time out, a slender spike on one frequency, I had noise everywhere. “Mel, what do you make of this?”
He climbed up onto the workbench so he could look over my shoulder. “Gotta be interference from the Primal Chaos. It
is
the source of all magic, so maybe it registers a signal across the whole spectrum. Too bad it’s not a consistent signal. That we could adjust for. But this is all over the place both in frequency and amplitude. We’ll need a longer-duration sample to have any hope of sorting it out.”
“That assumes whatever we’re looking for will even register somewhere in this range.” I sighed. “Tisiphone, you willing to take a longer trip? Something that lasts fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Sure.” She took the detector and went.
While she was gone, Mel and I speculated on what we were looking for but didn’t reach any real conclusions. The mweb was a high-speed, high-fidelity, long-range medium, comparable to a very powerful two-way FM-radio-type signal. The Furies’ back channel to Necessity could have looked like anything from some kind of fast pulse signal up at the top of the spectrum down to the sort of extremely low-frequency long-pulse communication that was used to send messages to submarines running deep. We just didn’t know enough about the amount and rate of information transmission to do more than make wild-ass guesses. As it turned out, whatever it was, it didn’t register on my detector, nor on any of the others we tried over the next three days.
“So now what?” Tisiphone asked, after I tossed aside the latest version.
“Old-style divination, I guess.” I hate traditional magic— it’s messy, it’s unreliable, and it’s dangerous. “Unless anyone’s got a better suggestion.”
Silence.
“All right then.” I fetched a small silver basin from the sorcery side of the workshop. “Haemun!”
“Yes, sir?” He stuck his head through the hatchway at the top of the stairs.
“Could you fetch us a pitcher of water?”
“Right away.” He vanished.
A few minutes later the three of us—we’d invited Haemun, but he opted out—were standing in the center of Ahllan’s sanctuary with the water-filled basin on a narrow pedestal between us.
“What do you think?” asked Mel. “Candles and calling the quarters, or binary and lasers?”
“Let’s start with the easy way,” I answered.
“Good enough.”
He whistled a string of binary, and the red lasers flicked on. Another whistle brought up matched blue lasers. Finally, he turned on the greens to make a full-spectrum beam. The hexagrams above and below came to life.
I reached for the basin but stopped abruptly when Tisiphone lurched and caught hold of the pedestal with both hands. Her knuckles were pale and her fully extended claws— daggers of organic diamond five inches long—sank deep into the polished oak of the pedestal top. The skin of her face paled and took on a greenish tinge, and she looked as though she might throw up at any moment.
“Make it stop,” she whispered.
“Mel!” I said.
“On it.” He quickly whistled the lights out and the wards down. “Better?”
I looked at Tisiphone and nodded. Already the green had faded, and her normal color had started coming back.
“What happened?” I wanted to take her in my arms, but her claws were still out and I didn’t dare. “Are you going to be all right?”
She nodded, then smiled weakly. “I was wrong.”
“You were?” I asked. “About what?”
“About not knowing where I am except when I try to travel through chaos.” She rolled her shoulders and retracted her claws, though she didn’t release her grip on the stand.
“I don’t think I get it.” I reached out and put a hand on top of one of hers.
“Apparently I
always
know where I am. Well, except when a really powerful ward cuts me off from whatever it is that lets me know what I know.”
“Ahllan’s wards block it?” I asked.
She nodded. “It feels awful, like the worst inner-ear turbulence you could imagine.”
From there it didn’t take us too long to figure out what was being blocked and move on to the question of how to use it to send messages in via the back door. The locator system worked a bit like a cross between dolphin-style echo-location and the submarine ELF system. Tisiphone and— presumably—her sisters sent out a continuous series of pulses that located them for the system and illuminated the DecLoci around them. In turn the system sent them five-dimensional polar coordinates via ELF letting them know where they were relative to three-dimensional space plus time and distance up or down the world spectrum from Olympus.
What we eventually came up with as a transmission system was a bit of a duct-tape-and-baling-wire job, but hey, that’s my specialty. Tisiphone’s job was to stand still and not get too sick while Melchior flicked a set of wards on and off to create a binary signal that the locator controller couldn’t possibly not notice.
Of course, we didn’t know whether the locator system was still hooked up to any other part of Necessity, or whether either Necessity or Shara was also hooked up to the ELF transmission system, or whether either one of them was in any state to answer if they were hooked up. The best we could do was try it and see what happened. So we did.
“Anything?” I asked Tisiphone after several minutes of sending our initial message—a version of Melchior’s binary identifier.
She shook her head, then immediately looked as though she regretted it. I offered her a small plastic-lined bag at that point, and, with a surprising amount of dignity, she threw up.
“Do you want to take a break?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered. “Keep going. I think I’m starting to get used to it.”
She was lying. I could tell. She wasn’t very good at lying. I didn’t argue with her. She was four thousand years old and knew her own mind. I didn’t mention it again for the better part of a half hour in which she had to use two more bags and kept growing more pale and wan. I was just about to try to talk her into a break when she suddenly held up a hand.
“I’m getting something odd, stop messing around with the wards,” she said, cocking her head to one side. “Oh my.” She bent over the bag again, making awful noises though nothing came up. “Sorry,” she said after a while, “but that’s even worse than the flickering of the wards. The system is telling me I’m here and then there.” She pointed to her left. “Here. There. Here. Here. There.”
“Point down or left as the coordinates come in,” said Melchior.
“I have to sit down,” said Tisiphone, dropping to the floor, but she kept pointing for several minutes as the information continued to flow.
“It’s Shara!” said Melchior, when she finally stopped. “She heard us.”
I nodded. The binary flow had used “here” as 0 and “there” as 1 and had gone slow enough for anyone with an understanding of the system and a working knowledge of machine language to decode it. If we were going to have any serious communication, we were going to need a much faster transmission system or a denser code, and I said as much.
“We can use more directions, if Tisiphone can take it,” said Melchior.
“I can take it.” She sounded utterly spent, but her voice was flat, with not the slightest hint of give. “If it might lead to a way to fix Necessity, I can take anything I have to. I
will
take it.”

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