Codespell (8 page)
Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
When I came back to myself, I reached down to my ankle, grabbed the leash, and reeled in the board.
“Better?” asked Melchior, as the tug alerted him to my return to the here and now—he’s learned to let me alone when I’m kelping, and I appreciated his patience.
“Yeah, quite a bit, actually.” I slid onto the board, tilting it and almost tumbling him off. “Sorry about that.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Apologize preemptively. It drains all the fun out of making snide remarks about the gentle grace of the lesser Greek walrus.”
“Oh, Mel, I
am
sorry. Would it help if I accidentally punted you into the water? Because, you know, anything for you. Raven’s only here to help.”
am
sorry. Would it help if I accidentally punted you into the water? Because, you know, anything for you. Raven’s only here to help.”
“Thanks, but I’ll just wait to get soaked until you fall off a wave and take me with you.”
“Good enough,” I said, digging deep and heading us in toward the break.
I kept an eye cocked behind me, both looking for the right wave and making sure not to get under the wrong one. I spotted what I wanted soon enough and paddled harder. I needed to be moving fast when it caught up to me, or I’d miss it. Once I was up, Melchior crawled out to the nose of the board and leaned over the edge. He won’t admit it, but I think he likes surfing almost as much as I do. For a little while I just slid gently up and down the face of the wave, getting a feel for it. Then I shot right up to the crest and tried a cutback to reverse course on the wave. It could have been beautiful . . . if I hadn’t buried the nose in the curl and cart-wheeled right off the board.
The next wave went better, though I didn’t try anything too showy. After that I was pretty much in the groove and even managed a beautiful little layback without killing myself. Everything was going wonderfully until I noticed a shadow as I was shooting the tube of another wave.
There’s this wild joy to be found in the front end of the tube, with the green darkness closing in behind and the sunlight at the end of the tunnel hanging just out of reach. If you get a good wave and play it right, you can stay there for ages, chasing that circle of light. I’d found the sweet spot on a beauty and was just gliding along when I realized the silvery gray shadow paralleling me a few feet away in the body of the wave shouldn’t have been there.
It was a shark, riding the inside of the breaker in a perfect mirror of the way I was riding its surface. I’d seen that happen once or twice before, but this baby was big, ten or twelve feet, and close. If I reached out my right hand, I could have touched the tip of its closest fin. Also, it was exactly even with me and had been for a while before I really noticed it. The whole thing creeped me out. Sure, shark attacks are rare. If you leave them alone, they’ll mostly leave you alone. But did
it
know that?
it
know that?
I leaned away from the shark, sliding down the wave and speeding up to get out of the tube. It nosed down and accelerated smoothly, staying right with me.
“Melchior, Shark Circuit,” I said. “Please.”
Melchior began to whistle as we came out into the sun. The codespell was something I’d come up with recently as a surfing tool. Like all of my latest magical compositions, it was mweb independent, and more dangerous because of that, especially for Mel. I didn’t much like that, but the Fates hadn’t specced out webgoblins with undigested chaos in mind the way they had the webtrolls. Despite all my modifications and upgrades, Mel was still built on a webgoblin frame.
As he finished the spell, a tiny chaos tap kicked in, creating and powering a madly pulsing electrical field tied to my board. Sharks have electricity-sensing organs, and we’d tuned the field to thrash the hell out of them.
In the water beside me, the shark did a neat barrel roll but didn’t move away. Great, I’d found an electrically blind shark. Looking ahead I could see that my wave was about to peter out, too, leaving me pretty much stopped in the water. That’s when the shark winked at me. It was very slow and very deliberate, and I had no doubt it was a wink. I jerked away hard and just about flipped my board doing it. I would have died if that had happened. I might anyway.
The shark had mirrored pupils.
“Dairn!”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What?” yelped Melchior. “Dairn? Where?”
“The shark! It’s him, I don’t know how.”
I was already leaning back for a turn. Pivoting the board on its tail, I headed to my right, up the wave. I needed to get over the top and down the back even though that meant crossing above the shark. I didn’t dare ride any farther, or I’d go down in the soup—the white-water mess that happens when a big wave falls apart. The idea terrified me. I’m tougher and stronger than your average surfer, but that meant nothing if I was tumbling around in the water effectively blind with a hostile shark.
“Melchior—” I began as soon as I could spare the breath.
“On it,” he said, whistling the opening bar of Board to Run.
The spell kicked in when we slid down the back of the wave, shifting us from gravity-driven to magically and starting the board accelerating out toward the open ocean. Unfortunately, that pointed us straight at the next big wave. It was already breaking, so I threw myself flat on the board and duck-dived through the crest, sheltering Mel with my body. It felt like someone had dropped a very soggy brick wall on me, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. I’d been heading into the break zone, and it was safer to head offshore than in through the chop at the moment. I could turn around and figure out how to get back to shore when I hit the rollers and calmer water.
As I came out the back of the wave, I saw a silvery fin slicing the water beside me. Frightening, but at least I knew where he was. Then the next breaker was coming down on top of me, and I lost track of the shark. Swearing, I climbed back to my feet. I had better control that way, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do any paddling with that thing somewhere below me.
“Where did he go?” I asked Melchior, trying not to squeak. The only thing between us and a fall into the shark’s world was a thin plank.
He peered over the edge. “I don’t know. I can’t see him. We’ve got to get out of here.” He sounded panicky, and I couldn’t blame him.
I nodded. “I’d try the splash faerie-ring trick again, but there’s too much chop to hold the circle. Any suggestions?”
“Not really. I can’t LTP us out of here without the mweb, and I don’t know any good mweb-independent flight spells. I’d try composing one, but the turbulence has me seriously croggled, and this would be an exceptionally bad time to blow a hack.”
“No ambition to end up as shark sushi?” I asked as lightly as I could manage.
I turned the board back toward the beach. That’s when the shark returned. This time he announced his presence by nipping off one of the board’s fins. He did it gently, almost lovingly, but the impact nearly flipped us. We had to stop playing his game. That meant chaos magic, serious chaos magic.
Breathing deeply, I reached inward, trying to find the place where blood and chaos merged. The sun dimmed as I found it, occluded by the shadow of a huge raven that wasn’t really there. The Raven. The shape of my power. The shape of my soul. And with a wicked twist of will, the shape of my body.
The spell was a hack, a set of magical instructions put together on the fly. I’d performed the trick several times now, and each time I’d done it slightly differently. I was beginning to think I
couldn’t
repeat the process exactly, that subtle differences in my starting circumstances would force me to reorder the sequence every time. But that was the essence of chaos, wasn’t it? That and change.
couldn’t
repeat the process exactly, that subtle differences in my starting circumstances would force me to reorder the sequence every time. But that was the essence of chaos, wasn’t it? That and change.
Like the change from something not quite a man into something not quite a bird. A change that required rearranging every single molecule in my body all in the split second before the universe caught on and turned me into a spreading ball of organic mush. It hurt. Chaos and Discord, it hurt. In that moment between shapes, all the atoms of my body were disconnected from each other. I had no nerves to carry signals, no brain for the signals to reach, nothing at all. Yet the soul remembered the process of being torn to shreds, remembered and carried the pain into the new form.
My first word in the new shape was a harsh caw of pure agony. My second: an Anglo-Saxonism of the four-letter variety. My third was Melchior’s name, called out as I swept forward above the surfboard and caught him in my claws. It was only just in time. Whether the shark with Dairn’s eyes had already decided to stop playing with us, or whether the final attack was triggered by his awareness of my transformation, I don’t know. Whatever the case, when he hit this time, it was no gentle nip, it was a crushing blow of the jaws, shattering the board from below.
But I was already climbing up and away, with Melchior hanging beneath me. As I headed back toward Raven House, I could see the shark arrowing along below us, and I had a nasty suspicion that reaching land wouldn’t stop him.
“Mel?” I cawed in my raven’s voice.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think the odds are that thing’s going to come out of the water in the near future?”
“Let’s just say I don’t think we should to stop to wash the dishes when we get back to the house.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Is there some way we can warn Haemun to find someplace safe to wait things out? I doubt it’ll stay long after we leave.”
There was a long pause before Melchior finally answered, “Yeah, hang on.”
He whistled a choppy string of binary, then spat. A short crossbow bolt with a note tied around it emerged from his mouth and went winging ahead of us.
“How do you know he’ll find it in time?” I asked.
“I aimed for a window.”
“That should do it.” Haemun is not a fan of messes in Raven House. “What if it hits him?”
“No problem, it’s got a blunted tip. It might hurt like Hades’ own kick in the ass, but it shouldn’t do any major tissue damage.”
“Good enough. Next question: Where to?”
“How about Castle Discord?” he asked.
“I thought you didn’t much like Eris,” I cawed.
“I don’t. She scares me, all the way down to the chipset. Worse, I owe her my soul.”
That was quite literally true. Without the intervention of Eris and Tyche, or Discord and Fortune if you prefer, webgoblins and their kin would never have developed self-awareness.
“Shouldn’t that make it better?” I asked.
“No. She didn’t do it for my sake. She did it to thwart the Fates. Knowing you exist because Fate was trying to come up with a better way to rule the world is bad enough. Knowing that the reason you’re a person and not a thing is because Discord thought it would make for a good joke at Fate’s expense is so much worse. I’m the moral equivalent of that damn golden apple that started the Trojan War. If a different humor had taken her the day she messed around with webgoblin design specs, the multiverse might have a better class of rubber vomit instead of me. Quite frankly, it gives me the wobblies in my subroutines.”
“So why suggest we go see her?” The question was becoming more urgent, as we would soon reach the House and its built-in faerie ring.
“Because, for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable, she likes you. If she can think of some way to make helping you irritate the forces of order more than not helping you would, she’ll do it. Since she’s enormously powerful and—as usual—you can use all the help you can get, it seems worth the risk. Besides, it’s not like we’re talking about moving into her basement or anything. Even you’re not that cracked.”
Then we arrived at Raven House and decision time.
“Castle Discord it is,” I croaked, dropping down to touch the swirl of black within the green stone of the lanai.
We entered the faerie ring and found . . . infinite possibility. I hovered in a million different places all at the same time, none of them the one I wanted. The Castle Discord faerie ring I’d used in the past didn’t currently exist. No surprise really; Castle Discord didn’t exactly exist in the normal sense of the word, either. It changed constantly to fit Eris’s mood and whim.
Well, perhaps there was a loophole. That
was
the nature of what little divinity I possessed, finding the loophole in the stuff of reality—the elegant hack. Feeling my way into the Raven’s power over the faerie-ring network,
my
power, I reached for the circle I’d used before, the one absent from the current Castle Discord. Potentialities flashed through my awareness—rings that had existed, rings that would exist, rings that could exist—there! I touched the echo of a place that was no longer and pushed. Possible became probable became actual. Another ring joined the network, a part of me within it. I focused my attention and . . . stood within a ring of forget-me-nots in a greenhouse beneath a golden-apple sun. Castle Discord.
was
the nature of what little divinity I possessed, finding the loophole in the stuff of reality—the elegant hack. Feeling my way into the Raven’s power over the faerie-ring network,
my
power, I reached for the circle I’d used before, the one absent from the current Castle Discord. Potentialities flashed through my awareness—rings that had existed, rings that would exist, rings that could exist—there! I touched the echo of a place that was no longer and pushed. Possible became probable became actual. Another ring joined the network, a part of me within it. I focused my attention and . . . stood within a ring of forget-me-nots in a greenhouse beneath a golden-apple sun. Castle Discord.
I stepped out of the ring and went away.
Discontinuity.
“Hello, Raven.” Discord’s voice brought me back.
The greenhouse flickered into being and was gone in the same instant. We stood now upon a bridge of glass over a river made up of the eternally changing stuff of Primal Chaos. That was my first impression. My second was of a glass tunnel suspended within that same river. One moment it seemed to be all around us, the next in one direction only. The only solid points of reference were a pair of large arched doors, one a hundred feet ahead, the other a hundred behind. Those, and the goddess herself. Well, sort of.
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