Codespell (34 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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The Titanomachy and Tartarus! Cerberus had given me all the clues I needed, and I hadn’t really listened. Since Persephone’s virus was designed to destroy the information about who belonged where in the pantheon, Zeus was afraid that the problems with Necessity were going to free the Titans and restart the war of gods against Titans. That still didn’t explain why he’d brought Nemesis into the equation, but it took me much closer.
“Well?” asked Zeus.
I scrambled to answer now that I had something to say, “The fact that you haven’t already fried me with lightning is suggestive in itself, but I’ve got some other thoughts on the matter. I’d love to go over them in detail, but I have a problem that needs solving
right now
. If you help me with that,
right now
, then later I’ll be much more open to helping you with any problems you might have with . . . oh, say, the Titans? What do you think?”
A small thundercloud formed over Zeus’s head, and he frowned mightily. I didn’t make the mistake of believing it was an accident or for anything other than effect. Not this time. Despite the fact that precious seconds were ticking past, I sat myself down in the chair in front of the computer desk and crossed my arms. I didn’t dare blow this, so I kept my mouth firmly shut. It had a tendency to write checks the rest of me had trouble cashing. Melchior would have been proud . . . and thinking about him cut at my soul.
“All right, tell me what you need,” said Zeus after a few seconds.
I half unzipped my jacket and pulled out the busted-up subnotebook, setting it on the desk. I took the opportunity to tuck my broken arm into my jacket, then opened the laptop. The screen was completely shattered, and a couple of keys were broken or dislodged. The case looked all right—no surprise with all that Kevlar and carbon fiber—but the anodized aluminum trim had some nasty scratches, and I suspected internal damage. It was all stuff I could repair given time. But I didn’t have time, or at least, I didn’t know how much time I had. I needed to get Melchior out of the crystal and into his new body before anything further went wrong.
I looked Zeus in the eye. “You are the embodiment of creation, the pole power of life. I figure that means you can fix this a whole lot faster and more easily than I can.” I tapped the case.
“It’s a computer,” said Zeus. “What do I know from computers? You’ve debugged software problems for me before.” His porn browser had broken, and he hadn’t wanted to get Athena to do it. “You should know that.”
“Uh-uh. This is the broken body of a living being.” I pulled out the crystal. “His soul is right here in my hand. Don’t tell me you can’t heal him. We both know it’s not true.”
“When you put it that way . . .” Zeus stood up and walked over to look down at the subnotebook. “Hmm.” He gazed downward for several seconds, then nodded. “You want me to do that broken wrist of yours at the same time?”
“That’d be nice,” I said, “but it’s not my main concern at the moment.”
“Of course it’s not,” said Zeus. “Not after your little jaunt through chaos.”
“What?” I couldn’t help myself, it just burst out.
“Ah-ha,” said Zeus. “Mister smarty-pants-wet-behind-the -ears-demigod doesn’t actually know everything yet, does he? I take it you haven’t noticed that you feel recharged and rejuvenated every time you use chaos magic? That it substitutes for the sleep you now find so hard to achieve?”
He’d hit a nerve and I wanted to know more about that; but it wouldn’t fix Melchior and I really didn’t know how much time he had, so I put it aside for later thought.
“My familiar?” I prompted.
He placed the palm of his right hand in the middle of the keyboard, and shouted, “Heal!” with the deep tones and Southern accent of a revival tent preacher.
The subnotebook slid halfway across the desk, making an awful crackling noise as it went. Contrary to the noise, though, all of the visible damage began reversing itself. It looked like film of an accident being run backwards. Before I could think to say anything, the god placed his hand on my forehead, and shouted “Heal!” again.
My chair went over backwards, and I landed hard, but I didn’t pay nearly as much attention to that as I might have in other circumstances. I was too distracted by the sensation that someone had poured hot maple syrup into my veins— warm, wonderful, sugary goodness filling me up to the point of pain, with hot spots in my wrist, my bad knee, and my left pinky. A few seconds later, it had all faded away, and I felt as though my body had been returned to original specs. The feeling was reinforced by the totally unexpected restoration of the fingertip I’d lost more than a year ago in my fight with my cousin Moric—a small price, considering he’d died.
“Wow!” I said, though it sounded terribly uncool in my own ears. To make up for that, I quickly lifted an eyebrow at Zeus and asked in my best snide tone, “Did you have to do the ‘heal’ thing, or was that for my benefit?”
“Neither. I’ve just always kind of wanted to try it, and now seemed as good a time as any.”
I laughed, and in that moment I found that despite everything, I still liked Zeus. It was an uncomfortable feeling. “Fair enough. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ve got to do my part.”
Opening the drive tray on the subnotebook, I set the crystal within. The shiny black plastic that lined the sides of the surprisingly deep bay flowed around the crystal, conforming to its shape. Once it was firmly seated, I closed it up and started connecting cables from Zeus’s desktop to the little laptop. After that, it was all software.
Since Zeus’s machine hadn’t been designed for this sort of task, I had to hack some of the existing disk utilities to perform the soul-write. Then, I didn’t trust them to do the job without careful monitoring, so I spent the next forty minutes ignoring Zeus and everything but getting the job done right. At the end of that time, I had a subnotebook whose hard drive held whatever was left of Melchior—
please be all there
—and only one thing left to do.
I hit the start button.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The small laptop chimed gently as the boot process began, and I forced myself to lean back in the chair. What I could do for Melchior, I had done. Now it was all over but the waiting. An hour at least because of the recompile made necessary by the quantum hardware. That’s what I’d told Haemun, and it was likely to be more, what with all the jostling and delays. An hour or more till I found out whether I still had a best friend. I’d have screamed, but that was only going to work for a few minutes at best—the throat just isn’t built for an hour of sustained ululation.
Instead, I turned back to Zeus and Megaera and tried desperately not to think about all the things that could possibly go wrong with a soul transfer onto largely untested and experimental hardware. Hardware that, by the way, had been shattered by Nemesis, then repaired by the king of the gods through pure wild magic, and using a soul that might or might not have finished its transfer protocol.
“Are we ready to talk now?” asked Megaera, her voice dripping poison. “Have we finished playing with our silly toys and having a temper tantrum?”
I didn’t remember crossing the distance between us or grabbing her throat in my hands. Everything between her comment and Zeus shouting, “Don’t kill him!” was a blank. Almost simultaneous with the words came a gentle impact on my chest and a circle of searing pain. That brought me fully back into my right mind. I looked down to find the fingertips of Megaera’s right hand pressed into the flesh above my heart.
“Please,” said Megaera. “I just want to tear his heart out a little bit.”
“No,” replied Zeus, and she pulled her hand away, leaving five bleeding punctures where her claws had bitten into my flesh.
“I suppose you want that healed as well?” Zeus didn’t sound amused.
“No. I think I’ll keep it for now. It’ll help remind me to think before I act.”
Zeus sighed. “It’s a good idea, but somehow after reading Athena’s reports on you, I doubt it’ll be enough. Megaera, why don’t you find someplace else to be for a while. The two of you don’t play together well, and I’d rather not have to keep pulling you apart. It’s extra effort, and I’m not a big fan of extra effort.”
Without so much as a good-bye, Megaera stepped between two pillars and leaped into the sky.
“Good riddance,” I whispered under my breath.
“Could we just skip all that?” asked Zeus.
“All right.” I returned to the chair beside Melchior’s new case—close enough to touch but facing away so as not to allow myself to get too distracted. “Where shall we start?”
“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” said Zeus. “We’ve already started. I did something for you, now it’s your turn to do something for me.”
“Fix Necessity, you mean? So that the Titans don’t break themselves free of Tartarus?”
“In a nutshell,” Zeus said, nodding, “yes.”
“I’m already on the case, but you knew that. As soon as I leave here, I’ll get back on it, assuming Melchior survives his upgrade, that is.” I swallowed hard.
I would not break down in front of Zeus. I would not break down in front of Zeus. Not now, not knowing he was my . . . well, not enemy exactly. Adversary sounded about right. Especially considering the fact that he’d set Nemesis on me.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” He assumed a puzzled expression. “It may surprise you to know this, but I’m not omniscient. Cronus’s teeth, I don’t even do divination. That whole Delphic oracle shtick is Apollo’s thing, not mine. It’s always sounded like far too much work for my tastes.”
“Why did you set Nemesis on me?”
“I wasn’t sure Tisiphone would be able to convince you to the cause. Especially not as you were still attached to that girl of Clotho’s when I set the plan in motion.”
“Cerice?” I tried to keep my voice polite, though I felt more than a little sick at his mention of Tisiphone.
“
That’s
her name, yes.” He theatrically slapped his forehead.
“Could you please stop doing that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Playing stupid. Neither one of us believes it. Not anymore. Doesn’t that make it count as wasted effort? That’s your idea of a cardinal sin, right?”
The god became perfectly still, and his face lost the vague look it had assumed. “Point to the Raven. You’re right; it’s wasted effort now. I won’t even pretend to have forgotten where we were. You were about to ask whether Tisiphone knew about Nemesis and why on Earth I’d thought setting Nemesis on you would motivate you to repair Necessity.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Of course she didn’t, and it’s because I thought you were smarter than perhaps you are.”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell Tisiphone about Nemesis, nor Megaera or Alecto. To do so would have set them to wondering about my motives, and that has everything to do with the reason I arranged for Dairn to make a visit to Tartarus and, with it, Nemesis’s acquaintance.”
“I still don’t . . . Oh.” I almost had it all. “Nemesis was trapped with the Titans in Tartarus. When Necessity was damaged, that loosened the chains of all who are bound there.” Zeus smiled at me like a teacher whose student has just grasped the lesson. “Nemesis will kill me if I keep going head-to-head with her, and she’ll keep coming after me as long as she’s free. The only way to stop her is to reimprison her in Tartarus, which means fixing Necessity.”
“Precisely. The biggest problem with the plan is that you didn’t figure it out anywhere near as quickly as I’d expected. ”
“Is that why you went to plan B and set Tisiphone to wooing me to the cause?” I made the question as light as I could, but I didn’t fool Zeus.
“No, Tisiphone’s wooing was all on her own behalf. Convenient for me, but not my fault. The only thing I did on that front was suggest to Alecto that you’d make a good choice for fixing Necessity. I figured that if she agreed, that would make a two-to-one vote in your favor and give Tisiphone the freedom to pursue you without the worry that Megaera would kill you for spite.”
Another piece fell into place. “That, and you arranged for Nemesis to attack me while I was in Tisiphone’s presence. You knew that the return of Nemesis would force her and the other Furies to work faster on getting Necessity repaired. That’s what the spinnerettes have been about, lighting me up so that Nemesis could find me. Right?”
“Not quite,” said Zeus. “I did arrange for that encounter, but I don’t control the spinnerettes. They’re working for the Fate Core.”
“I notice you didn’t say for Fate,” I said, thinking back to Cerice’s suggestion that the Fate Core was becoming sentient.
Zeus shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell.”
“Huh.” That could get very ugly. “Well, what are they doing for it, and why?”
“I don’t know.” The statement was flat and unaccompanied by one of his patented dumb looks, and I found that I believed him.
“But didn’t you make Tisiphone stop chasing the one that visited Garbage Faerie?” I asked.
“Yes, but not because I was protecting the spinnerette. I just wanted her back with you, solving the Necessity problem and guarding you in case Nemesis showed up. Vengeance is a very hard goddess to control. I didn’t want you dying without solving my problem.”

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