Cybermancy (16 page)

With Cerice’s help I managed to get to my feet. The ring, now a free-floating circle of ice, had indeed drifted away from the bank. More alarming, though, was that it was still on fire. Or rather, the water around it was on fire. Neon-green flames ringed the ice like a particularly gaudy Christmas wreath.

Something flashed in the corner of my eye, and I glanced up at the underside of the bridge, where a perfect circle of polished white stood out starkly amidst the dirt and grime. It lay directly above the place where I’d marked out my ring. The heat or the magic or something had burned a mirror-smooth finish into the concrete.

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Just then a siren started in the distance. “Come on, we’d better get going.” Lifting Melchior back into my bag, I took Cerice’s hand. “Ready?” She nodded, though I could tell she had some doubts. “Right, I’ll count to three,
then
we’ll jump. When we hit, we’ll be on our way. Just keep holding on and let me drive.”

“What about the fire on the water? Won’t that attract attention?”

I shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it unless you want to stay here and answer official questions. Besides, it appears to be dying down.”

It did, though not as quickly as I would have liked. Cerice frowned,
then
whistled a quick spell. A stand of dry and leafless brush some way upstream burst into sudden flame, sending a great plume of smoke skyward.

“There,” she said. “That’ll give them something else to look at while this drifts away.
One.”

“Two,” I answered.

We said three together and leaped. The ice had drifted a good eight feet from shore by then, an easy jump for any child of Fate.
Almost too easy in my case.
I went farther than I’d intended, landing on the far edge of the ice so that the toe of my left boot actually touched the flame. I’d have cleared the ring entirely if Cerice hadn’t had a firm grip on my hand. In fact, for one instant as my feet left the ground, I felt as though I could simply have flown away were it not for her weight.

I didn’t have time to think about it because the moment we touched down, we were elsewhere. A faerie ring is nothing like a computer-assisted locus transfer. When I asked Melchior to open a gate for me, I was creating a point-to-point link with a definite beginning and a definite end. The ring, on the other hand, was a matter of probability and will. Anytime you enter a faerie ring, you have an absolutely equal chance of emerging in any other ring among all the infinite levels of reality. Will determines where you actually end up.

In theory, if your will is strong, and you know what you’re doing, you could get in at one ring and step out of the one you want to reach as your very next stop. In practice, finding your destination is more a matter of throwing yourself in the right direction and sort of channel surfing until you hit the ring you’re looking for. I’d learned all of that with my previous faerie ring experience. This time I learned something else; not all rings are equal, and that matters.
A lot.

This ring was much stronger and wilder than the ones I’d been through in the past. Before, the rhythm had been something like
world
,
beat
,
beat
,
world
,
beat
,
beat
,
world
. Now it was
wor
-,
wor
-,
wor
-, with rings strobing by too fast even to register as places. I felt like some sort of weird quantum particle, simultaneously in multiple places at one time.
Hundreds of them in fact.

How am I going to find the right one if I can’t even see them?
a
small panicked voice in the back of my head asked. Horrible things can happen to a person who gets lost among the rings. You can lose your soul. I nearly had on my last trip.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, our progress stopped. We had arrived, at least for an instant, in one definite place. Pulling Cerice along with me, I jumped from the ring. I did it without even looking to see where we were. We could always step back into the local ring in a few moments when we’d had a chance to recover. Hopefully it would be gentler than the one I’d made in Cambridge.

“Huh,” said Cerice. “That wasn’t so bad. Step in at
home,
step out at Ahllan’s place in Garbage Faerie two seconds later. Why do you and Melchior make such a big fuss about the rings?”

“What?” I demanded, but a quick look around confirmed she was right. We stood beside the beer can ring next to the torn-open mound that had once covered Ahllan’s home. It was a sunny afternoon, and the season was much warmer than the one we’d left behind. “I . . . shit. How did that happen? Melchior?”

“I don’t know, Boss. That’s just plain spooky. I’d have expected you to at least pass through a couple of other rings on the way here. Let me think about it for a second.”

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t either of you register all those other rings?”

“What other rings?” they demanded in near-perfect unison. I sat down then. Fell down was more like it, but the effect was the same. I was no longer standing, and my butt was firmly on the ground. “Tell me what you saw,” I said.

“Same as Cerice,” Melchior said. “Step in there, step out here.” Cerice nodded. “I figured that just this once we actually had a piece of
good
luck. I take it that’s not what you saw?”

I related my experience of the ring. Melchior whistled.

“Sounds like my worries about a chaos storm and the rings being messed up too had something to it. Things certainly feel strange enough for that. I’ve got some mweb access in this DecLocus, but it’s bad and rapidly getting worse.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I had a sneaking suspicion that what had just happened with the faerie ring wasn’t related to the mweb problems and that I wasn’t going to like the truth when I finally figured it out. But there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, so I put the idea aside and got to my feet.

Garbage Faerie, as we called it, was in a serious backwater of reality. Magic ran much closer to the surface here than it did in the vicinity of Olympus, where things were more regulated. Neither Zeus nor the Fates are big fans of anyone else’s having magical power. That includes the other gods and all their myriad offspring; but the blood of the Titans cannot be denied or contained, so reluctantly, they live with us. Given the choice, I don’t think they’d allow magic to go beyond the family. But the gods—except perhaps Necessity—are finite, and the multiverse is not.

I suspect that’s the real reason the Fates went modern with their ever-expanding set of computers for tracking life threads and running coded spells. It’s also probably a big part of why Zeus has kept such a low profile for the last couple of millennia—he’s lost control, and he knows it. So now he sulks. Of course, he never really had control, but he’s dim enough that I imagine it took a while to sink in. But hey, that’s the head of the pantheon to a tee, astronomical energy harnessed to teensy-weensy processing capacity. Kind of like the early-model PCs they used to run the space shuttles at the turn of the century.

Whatever the reason, magic flows very freely out at the edges of things. The worlds there can become quite strange, bent as they are by the fundamental force of the irrational. In this one, despite an apparent lack of people, the detritus of a modern civilization lay everywhere, rusting hulks of cars, trashed refrigerators,
old
computers. The smell of decay hung heavy in the air. Yet there was a weird beauty to it all, because nature was in the process of reclaiming the works. Bindweed and other flowering creepers had taken hold of most of the larger pieces of trash, transforming junked pickups into floral topiary. A blown-out television had a Japanese rose growing out of the hole where the tube had once been.

Weird and wild and strangely wonderful, Garbage Faerie reeked of magic. Spells that might take a thousand lines of whistled code and draw heavily on the mweb in the vicinity of Olympus would need little more than a thought and pursed lips here. That plus its distance from the corridors of Fate was why Ahllan had set up shop here. I turned then to look at her blasted and empty home.

The low hill that had once sheltered a dozen homey rooms had been cloven in two, its mosaic-covered walls lying shattered and exposed to the elements. I heard a gasp from beside me and looked down to see Shara. She was trembling, and who could blame her? She had died here, falling in the ruin of this place.

“I didn’t know it was this bad,” she whispered. “I went down too early to see it.” She put her face in her hands. “I feel so awful.”

I knelt to put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault. It’s
all
my
fault.” I was speaking of her death as much as the destruction of the house.

“
Don’t be an idiot
, Ravirn,” she said. From her tone I knew she’d caught my meaning. “I know that’s hard for you sometimes”—she was interrupted by a whispered “amen” from Cerice, but didn’t acknowledge it—“but this
isn’t
your fault. Sure, you were the proximate cause, but it was Atropos and the other Fates who did this in their desire for absolute control.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But we aren’t here to argue about comparative guilt. We’re here to find Ahllan.”

“She’s gone.” Melchior was kneeling a few yards away, sniffing at the dirt. “She
was
here, but not for long.” He pointed at a pair of deep footprints in the mud. “There was a gate there.” He pointed again, but I didn’t see anything beyond a few more tracks.
“Incoming only.”

That would explain it, no physical traces. Webgoblins’ magical senses were much stronger than mine, able to see the faintest of spell traces if they hadn’t been deliberately masked.

“So what happened? It looks like something very strange.”

Melchior nodded. “Ahllan appeared through the LTP gate, walked a couple of steps, called us, then poof.”

“But she didn’t gate out?” I asked.

“Not that I can tell. And unless she did a really spectacular backflip, she didn’t leave via the faerie ring. I can’t Vtp her either. I’ve been trying since we got here. Although whether that’s because she’s blocking messages, gone somewhere off the net, or just because the turbulence is so bad, I can’t say.” He shivered. “It feels . . .
wrong
, like something crawling around the inside of my skull.
Shara?”

“I’m not hooked up, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just take Mel’s word for it. I’ve got enough problems without things crawling around inside my skull.”

Cerice gave Shara a penetrating look. Normally webgoblins hate to be out of touch with the mweb and will only break contact by order or request. The stream of information and magical power that comes to them through the mweb is as much a part of them as the blood flowing in their veins.

For perhaps the millionth time, I wished that I could experience the mweb in the same way Melchior did. Sure, I could enter its virtual space by using an athame, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. It was the difference between being a scuba diver and being a fish. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to grow gills. We needed to find out what was going on, and fast. With Ahllan missing, I could only think of one other possible source for that information: Eris.

“I want to visit Castle Discord.”

“What?” exclaimed
Shara.
“Why? We should go home and keep our heads down. This isn’t our problem. This is a matter for the gods to sort out with Necessity. If we try to fix it, if we even go within a thousand yards of the mweb servers, Fate will have collective apoplexy and murder us on the spot. Let it go.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“I’m definitely right. This is not our business.”

“So I’ll take the three of you back to the apartment before I go on.”

“Not a chance,” said Melchior. “Not with Ahllan missing. I’m going, too.”

Cerice knelt in front of Shara. “We have to do this, honey. We just have to.”

Shara sighed.
“All right.
But if we have to go, we should do it quick before the mweb cuts out and we’re forced to use the faerie ring again. Maybe it worked this time, but they still give me the creeps.”

“Amen to that.” Melchior pulled out a string and stylus and began sketching out a hexagram in the dirt. “At least when
I
make the gate, I know I can trust the driver.”

I thought back to our most recent trip from Hades and how that had gone, but didn’t say anything. Melchior clearly felt strongly on the subject, and, judging by the profound look of relief on Shara’s face, so did she. A few minutes later we stepped into the light. It wasn’t nearly as rough as our last trip. This just felt like being trapped in an elevator with its cables cut, a wild straight drop through darkness with a sudden stop at the end. We landed hard, though not hard enough to break bones.

When the light cleared, we stood on a small rectangle of stone completely surrounded by the wild billowing colors of the Primal Chaos. Some sort of irregularly shaped invisible shield prevented it from reaching the surface of the rock and devouring us, though occasional tendrils of the stuff came frighteningly close.

Eris prefers to live off the grid, way off. Castle Discord is a floating island in the sea of chaos. Whether it lies in the turbulence between worlds or somewhere beyond the farthest edges of reality is something that’s more a question of philosophy than science. To make things even more difficult, the castle moves constantly. Combine that with the fact that it’s not actually connected to the mweb, and you have a situation where only a fully functional webtroll like Ahllan, exerting maximum concentration, can keep its coordinates fixed long enough to open up a gate to the castle proper. For the benefit of visitors Eris has placed a chunk of stone in a fixed and permanent relationship to the rest of the multiverse. She called it the welcome mat, and it even had the Greek welcome,
Kalos Orisate
, carved into it in letters six feet tall. That’s where we arrived.