Codespell (33 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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“How nice,” said Nemesis. “Well, that’s a start then.”
She raised the blade, and I braced myself for the pain. Then she lowered it again.
“No, if he really is your right hand, it seems only fair that I take that instead.”
Before I could move, or even breathe, she brought Melchior’s case down on the corner of the table with tremendous force. The laptop exploded into a million pieces, and I screamed. As the parts shot outward in all directions, a nearly invisible hand caught the most vital piece—the memory crystal—out of the air and flipped it in my direction. Tisiphone’s toss was so accurate that I didn’t even have to move my hand, just open it, and the crystal landed neatly on my palm. I gripped it convulsively as Tisiphone popped fully into view halfway through a spinning kick aimed at Nemesis’s head.
“Run!” shouted Tisiphone, and I did, even as Nemesis brought up an arm and deflected most of Tisiphone’s attack.
If Tisiphone hadn’t dropped her camouflage, the kick might have landed true. She’d
chosen
to draw Nemesis’s attention away from me. I was just ducking through the doorway when I heard a terrible screech. I looked back. Tisiphone was on her back now, with her head and shoulders hanging over the pit. Nemesis had hold of a table leg that she’d stuck deep into Tisiphone’s shoulder and was using it to slide the Fury farther over the edge.
“No!” I yelled, and Tisiphone’s eyes flicked toward me.
“Run, damn it!” she screamed.
Then she caught hold of Nemesis with the claws of her feet and jerked, tumbling them both into the pit. As I heard a scrabbling sound dropping away from me, I ducked back into the room. There, I saw a hand clutching the lip. It did not have claws. A half second later, another appeared beside it. Running wasn’t going to be enough, but Tisiphone had bought me time to think, something I should have done from the start.
Working quickly, I opened the front of my jacket and tucked both the crystal and what was left of the subnotebook inside. Then I pulled out my athame and slashed across the palm of my left hand. It jarred my broken wrist, and I couldn’t help whimpering, but it also sprayed blood across Nemesis’s groping hands. Reaching inward, I opened a channel to the interworld chaos and let it rip a hole in the walls of reality. This time, I didn’t wait for the stuff to devour me as I had in Hades. Instead, I stepped through the rift into the nowhere beyond, leaving Nemesis to face the growing sphere of destruction.
Chaos whispered to me, trying to incorporate my own chaotic identity into the greater sea around me, trying to make me one with itself. I could feel the mad, pulsing vitality of it across the whole of my being just as I had when Tisiphone brought me here before. It was like being immersed in a mix of Dionysus’s finest vintage and pure liquid music. All I had to do to experience it to the fullest was to let myself go and become part of the song. But I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to meet Shara’s deadline and not if I wanted to save Melchior.
I had to hold myself together until I could figure a way out of this, and I had to do it fast. I had no idea how much time Mel had, or even if he had any time at all. I needed to stay me.
“Me,” I whispered to myself. “I. Me. Me. My.”
It helped, but only a little. Asserting my me-ness wasn’t going to do it for long.
Think, Ravirn! Come on, you can do this. Think!
That was it! I had to
think
—to use the one part of me that made me who I was. My brain. I needed to think and keep thinking until I found a way out of this. Nothing was coming, though. If I were a Fury, I could have simply cut a hole in the stuff of nothingness and let myself leak into somethingness, or something like that.
But I wasn’t a Fury, and I wasn’t going to be able to lay my hands on one either. The only Fury who really cared about me had fallen into a pit in my stead, and I had no way of knowing if she’d even survived the experience. Sure, she was immortal, but she’d been fighting another immortal at the time, and her own immortality was built on the power of Necessity, who had withdrawn from the world. Maybe that made her killable. I just didn’t know and . . . I was drifting away from the point again, chaos unraveling the pattern of my thinking.
It tugged at my thoughts, trying to remake them in its own image. Look at all the pretty colors and then bye-bye.
“Focus, Ravirn. How do you get out of here?”
For that matter, how had I gotten there in the first place? Not into chaos—that I knew, at least—but into the mess that led to the chaos. How had I ended up on Nemesis’s hit list? Who had set her after me?
“No,” I tried to force myself to focus, “that’s not the right question.
Why
did they set her after me? Who has something to gain by setting Nemesis on me? Who wanted me dead?”
That wasn’t it either, though. There were easier ways to kill me than resurrecting a dead goddess. There had to be. That was too much like using Zeus’s lightning as a bug zap-per. Well, if they didn’t want me dead, what did they want? What was I good at? Hacking, which nobody hired out. Cracking, maybe. And bug fixes. Hadn’t I heard that song somewhere before?
I just didn’t get it, though. If someone was really trying to use Nemesis as motivation, shouldn’t they have given me some idea of what they wanted by now?
“Come on, give me a sign!”
That was when Megaera arrived. At first I thought I was hallucinating, that my brain had made a pattern out of the tumbling shapes and forms of the chaos passing before my eyes—calling up Tisiphone to save me despite everything.
Then she spoke. “Looks like somebody could use a lift.” She was wearing a smile, but it wasn’t a very good one—she was no better at lying than her fiery sister.
“Megaera?”
“In the flesh.” She nodded, and her green hair did intensely strange things in the gravityless nonspace of chaos.
“Here to rescue
me
?”
The smile slipped. “I could leave you here to die.”
“Could you really? Could you just fly away and leave me to dissolve in chaos?”
“Of course. It’s not as though I like you, little runaway.”
“Do it,” I said, because I suddenly didn’t believe she would. I almost had the answer now. I could taste it, though I couldn’t articulate it, like a word that was hanging just beyond the tip of my tongue.
“What!”
“Fly away. Leave me. I don’t want your help.”
She growled and extended her claws, but she neither left nor gutted me. I mentioned that, and she growled some more. Then she grabbed hold of my arm.
“Let go!” I demanded.
“Or what? There’s nothing you can do that could possibly hurt me.”
“Or I’ll let go . . . of myself, and you can try holding on to chaos amidst chaos.”
“You might be surprised what I can hang on to,” she said. “We were built to catch even the slipperiest fish.” She didn’t let go of my arm, but she did stop trying to move me. “What do you want?” she sighed.
“Answers to life’s persistent questions.”
“Not my department,” said Megaera though she still made no move to force me.
That told me a lot. I believed her when she said that she could catch even chaos hiding in chaos. That meant she had some other reason for wanting me to retain my shape and myself. The only thing I could think of was Melchior in his crystalline container, who might not take the transition so well. That’s why I hadn’t simply made good on my threat. I wasn’t willing to risk him either, but that was because I loved him. Why should Megaera care? That had to be tied in to all the other questions.
“How much has Tisiphone been keeping you up to date on our efforts to fix Necessity?” I finally asked.
“She’s told me everything.”
“Everything?” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively.
“Everything.” Her voice was rich with disgust.
Combine her expression with the fact that she didn’t seem as worried about her sister as I might have expected, and I had to assume that she believed Tisiphone would be all right—an enormous relief. And one that left me with only one question, one that would point the way to the prime mover here.
“Who are the Furies working for now?”
“What? What do you mean? We serve Necessity.”
Truth mixed with fiction: gods but she was a bad liar. I’d almost had it there, even without a real answer.
“Necessity’s been off-line a long time,” I said, “and I know for a fact you and your sisters don’t much like autonomy. You turned away from service to the Fates because you believed they didn’t have Necessity’s best interests at heart, but you wouldn’t have stayed free agents for long. Maybe I can figure it out without your help. You must be working for someone who you believe will help you fix her, someone with both the power and the motive. Who could that be?”
“I—I can’t . . . believe you’re asking that. We don’t serve anyone but Necessity.”
And now I thought I had it.
“Really? You’re as bad a liar as your sister. I’ll come with you if you’ll give me a ride to the right place.”
“Where?” She sounded wary.
“How about if you take me to Zeus?”
Megaera blinked, then nodded. “You are a clever one, aren’t you. Maybe they were right to choose you.” Then, with one great beat of her seaweed wings, she started us moving through the Primal Chaos.
So, I
had
guessed right, though I didn’t feel all that clever. I should have seen it much earlier, probably would have if I were less suspicious of family—Thalia to be specific. She’d called me with a warning about Zeus, though I hadn’t had the wit to recognize it as such at the time.
Zeus had set me up with the party—I was as sure of that now as if I’d seen him ordering the floral arrangements—but I still hadn’t figured out why. It had to do with Necessity. He wanted her fixed, and he wanted it badly. Otherwise, he couldn’t have persuaded the Furies to his side. But what was in it for him? He was perhaps the most self-interested of the gods, and he would never have put that much work into anything without a damn good reason.
I needed to know the answer to that in order to figure out how to play this, but I hadn’t come up with anything by the time Megaera cut us a door into Olympus. She took us straight to the top, the little round temple that sat on the roof of the great palace of Zeus like a cupola—the thunder god’s personal office.
The big guy was in, sitting at his desk in all his bronze-skinned, vacant-eyed glory, complete with dumb grin. This time I wasn’t buying it.
“Ravirn, my boy, how are you?” He boomed. “And Megaera, my favorite Fury. So good to see you both! If you’d called ahead, I’d have arranged a party.”
He stood up and drew us both into a huge hug. My broken wrist screamed, but not nearly as loudly as I would have expected, and I somehow managed not to let the sound reach my mouth. Instead, I kept it firmly shut.
Megaera said simply, “He knows.”
That was good. It saved me some time, a commodity I was very concerned about at the moment. As soon as Zeus let us go, I went straight to the smaller desk on the other side of the office where his computer sat.
“Hello, Zeus, how are you?” the god said to himself in my voice as I walked away, the tone jovially sarcastic. “Oh, I’m fine.” He turned his head back and forth as he spoke, mimicking a conversation with himself. “And you, Ravirn? Never better, Zeus. Good to hear that, my boy. Let me get you a drink.”
I ignored him as—one-handed—I pulled his personal computer out from under the desk and started checking ports and connectors. I was pleased by the results. The box looked state of the art. I hadn’t really expected anything less, what with Zeus’s fixation on power and potency, but I’d had to make sure.
“So,” said the god, after a moment, “are you going to talk to me? Or are you just going to tear my office apart until I smite you?” His voice remained boisterously genial, but I detected a growing edge underneath.
I was getting to him. That was good. Dangerous, but good. I wanted him off-balance when we started this conversation. It would give me an advantage, and I needed every one of those I could get. Especially since I still hadn’t figured out his true agenda in all this.
“Smite him,” interjected Megaera. “Please. Or if you’d rather not do it personally, I’d be happy to play your proxy.”
“You want to give me a reason to hold her back?” asked Zeus, his voice cold and serious.
That was what I’d been waiting for. I turned around. Zeus had settled with one hip leaning against his desk, his position studiedly casual. All trace of vacancy had left his eyes and taken the idiot grin with it. He was still bronze, but now instead of evoking too much time spent on the beach, it reminded me of Spartan spearheads.
“We could talk,” I said, “but at the moment, I’d rather do some dealing.”
“What makes you think you have anything I want?” he asked, and I knew that I had him.
If he didn’t need me, he would have simply refused. OK, why did he need me? And how much? I had to figure that out, or I was going to get taken to the cleaners. Somehow in my earlier encounters with him, I’d managed to let the hyper-frat-boy act blind me to the fact that Zeus had managed to retain control over a pantheon of fractious and clever gods for ten thousand years. He might play the idiot for public consumption, but he’d won every fight he’d ever gotten into all the way back to the Titanomachy. It wasn’t Zeus trapped in Tartarus. It was his father. Then it hit me.

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