Mythos (29 page)

“What is that . . . thing?” Jormungand asked in the tones of an orchestra director finding a bagpipe among the picco los. “And what is going on up there?”

“We call him Laginn,” I said as I edged down to a place where I could see the eye, and it could see me.

Either the transformation and the pain that came with it had sobered me up a bit, or I was starting to adapt to the extra load of chaos, because I found that being so close to the dropoff at speed made me nervous. I rather wished I could be elsewhere, but I felt I owed it to Laginn to bail him out after all I’d put him through so far.

“He used to be Tyr’s hand,” I said. “Before your brother bit him off, that is. Now he works for him . . . kind of.”

“My brother Fenris employs the ‘hand that wouldn’t die’? No, don’t tell me about it. It’s a distraction. What I really want to know about is you and what Loki wants from you. And especially why my bite affected you the way it did.”

“Fair enough. Let me just help my friend up here.” I extended my hand to Laginn.

He didn’t grab hold, choosing instead to look back at me rather warily, inasmuch as it is possible for a hand to look at someone.

“I’m really sorry about taking you through all those transformations without asking you. I didn’t have a lot of time for polite under the circumstances. I promise I won’t do it again . . . unless I really have to.”

Laginn slumped in a sort of physical sigh, then reached out a finger to me. I lifted him back onto the top of Jormungand’s head, and he scuttled off to sit with Melchior, leaving me alone beside the eye.

“Sit,” said Jormungand, “please. Tell me everything. We’ve got some time.”

I glanced back at Tisiphone, but she just made shooing motions. There was a sort of dip in the surface of Jormungand’s skull just inboard of the eye ridge, a concave spot at the boundary between two scales. I settled myself in—it was surprisingly comfortable—and started my story.

I’d only just begun when Jormungand stopped me the first time. “Wait, you claim to come from a universe where the gods are those of the ancient Greeks? And to be related to them? That’s fascinating. You mentioned Hades and Eris earlier, but I thought you were just babbling to keep me from eating you. Who are your parents? More important, who are their parents? Are you from Zeus’s line? Posei don’s? Some other?”

“Hold it,” I said. “You know Zeus?”

“Not personally, no. But I know of him. I’ve read all the stories. I even listened to Homer a time or two when he spoke his piece close enough to the shore.” The giant snake smiled. “I do like the Mediterranean, especially in winter, though putting my neck in the Strait of Gibraltar always makes me feel as if I’m wearing a tie that’s a little too tight. Good speaker, Homer, and such lovely stories. Of course, I always assumed he was full of shit since your Eris and company had never shown their faces anywhere I could see them.

“But here I am interrupting you before you can answer my questions. Quite rude of me, actually. It’s just I get so hungry for decent conversation down there on the seafloor. It does leave me plenty of time for reading, but that’s not the same thing at all. So, back to my question. Who are your people?”

To my very great shock I found myself reciting my entire genealogy and life story to the Midgard Serpent. I had just about finished bringing him up to the present moment when he interrupted me with a small throat-clearing noise.

“We’re just about to hit Prince Edward Island. I do want to hear the rest, but if you’ve got anything you want to prepare before you go collect your Ahllan, now’s the time.”

“Who said we were here to collect her?” Melchior demanded suspiciously. He’d crept in close at some point after the sun had gone down, and I hadn’t noticed until that moment. “Way back at the start of this trip we said we were just going to visit a friend.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Jormungand. “It’s obvious you can’t leave her here under the circumstances. Hugin and Munin could come back at any time, to say nothing of Odin. That’s practically asking them to take her hostage.”

“As opposed to putting her in Loki’s hands?” asked Mel. “Where no one would ever dream of using her as a hostage?”

I couldn’t see Jormungand roll his eyes, but sitting as I was just above one, I could feel it.

“Mel,” I said, “he’s right.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to trust the word of a serpent. Come on, forked tongue? Hello!”

“I am, and I do. We have to trust someone, Mel. We’re caught between two sides in a god war, and we need allies if we don’t want to get crushed.”

Melchior’s shoulders slumped, and he nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“We’ll be back shortly,” I told Jormungand, as he lowered and angled his head so that we could step straight from the tip of his nose to a long, empty pier.

“I’ll wait out there.” He jerked his chin indicating the black depths beyond the bay, then quickly slipped away.

 

 

Ahllan didn’t wake when we trooped into the miniature cathedral’s chapter house. Nor when Tisiphone lit several of the lanterns with her wings. Nor even when we all went to stand beside the small platform that held her futon. In the dim light she looked old and tired, defeated, her cheeks sunken beneath dark eye sockets. The acrid smell of burned circuits hung in the air, which worried me even more than her appearance, especially with her in her troll shape. Only the very faint rise and fall of the covers gave any sign that she still lived.

“Ahllan?” said Melchior, very gently touching her elbow. “Ahllan?”

“Melchior?” she whispered, not opening her eyes. “Is it really you this time? Not just another hopeful dream?” She reached out a hand.

“It’s me,” he said, taking her hand between his own as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re back.”

She smiled and opened her eyes, though both seemed to take great effort. “I knew you’d come back, that not even Odin’s ravens could keep you away, though fear told me a different story.”

“Speaking of the ravens,” said Melchior, “we need to get you out of here in case they come back. Can you travel?”

“I can’t walk far, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “And carrying me would only slow you down. But that’s all right. I don’t think I’ve got much time left anyway. The ravens don’t frighten me. Nor their one-eyed master. There’s nothing they can do that will stop the inevitable for long. Just leave me here.”

“No,” said Tisiphone. Her voice was flat and hard, a Fury delivering a verdict without any room for argument. “Not while I can carry you.”

Ahllan made a protesting noise, but Tisiphone ignored her. Squatting to give herself a better angle, Tisiphone slid her hands underneath the edge of the futon platform. Very gently and very smoothly and despite her many injuries, she lifted the whole thing and got her right palm firmly under its center of balance. As she stood up, she shifted her grip so that she held it on hand and shoulder like a waitress carrying an extra-large tray.

“Easier than arguing,” said Tisiphone with a grim smile.

I could tell the effort was taking more out of her than she’d expected, but there wasn’t much I could do about that except offer to spell her after a bit, which I would. Though Tisiphone is about ten times as strong as I am, the whole package including bed, bedding, and both AIs couldn’t have run much more than three hundred pounds. I could carry that for quite a while if I had to after the supercharge I’d gotten from Jormungand’s bite.

“Shall we?” asked Tisiphone.

She started toward the door, and I had to hurry to keep ahead of her so I could hold it open. Ahllan made a few more feeble protests but gave up and drifted back to sleep when it became clear no one was going to listen to her, though I think it was more a matter of conserving her energy and not fighting a lost cause than because she agreed with us. I felt terrible about moving her, but we really didn’t have any choice.

We had just shifted back to full size outside York Miniature when there came a loud “pop” and sizzle rather like an industrial-scale bacon accident. It was followed by a solid “thump” from the far side of the miniature cathedral. Tisiphone’s fires flared.

“What was that?” she asked.

“More messages from home?” said Melchior, his voice speculative.

“I don’t understand,” said Tisiphone.

“You weren’t here the last time, but Ahllan said that’s the noise stuff makes when it comes through from the Greek MythOS,” I said. “We’d better go look.”

Tisiphone nodded but didn’t say anything, and she kept her eyes away from mine as we picked our way around the cathedral. I wasn’t sure what was going on there, though her anger with Necessity might explain it. We found a smoky silver sphere about the size of a tractor tire sitting in the middle of the dead lawn like some sort of oversized garden gazing ball. As we got closer, strange highlights started to dance across its surface like the shimmers of a soap bubble.

“I don’t like that,” said Melchior, hopping down from his perch beside Ahllan and edging toward the ball. “It looks entirely too much like the thing that showed up back in the abacus room right before we got sent here.”

I nodded, and Tisiphone set Ahllan down before stepping between us and the ball. As the Fury moved nearer, a low, growling noise began in the back of her throat. I don’t think she was even aware of it. She had just gotten within touching distance when the ball sparkled wetly and popped, vanishing into nothing. It left behind a big yellow chunk of something that looked a lot like brain coral.

“Shit,” said Melchior, and Tisiphone’s wings and hair flared. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.” He hurried forward.

“It is,” said Tisiphone, her voice choked.

“I don’t get it,” I said, coming up between the two of them.

Tisiphone didn’t answer, just placed a foot on the coral and shoved. It tipped over, revealing a highly polished convex underside, the curve of which looked like a perfect match for the vanished sphere. Bending closer I could see millions of very fine black veins running through the yellow matrix of the coral in fractal patterns. Though infinitely more complex, the effect reminded me of a cutaway view of a computer chip.

Wait a second.
Something tickled at the back of my brain.

“What am I seeing here?” I asked.

“A piece carved from my mother’s brain,” said Tisiphone, whose fires had dropped back to a very low ebb.

It came back to me then. Right before my final confrontation with Nemesis, Melchior and I had been taken to see Shara. The soul of the webgoblin had then been inhabiting one of the newest portions of the network that housed Necessity, a single, massive quantum computer that had been grown rather than constructed, a computer that looked more like a coral reef than anything built. I put an arm around Tisiphone’s waist and gave her a gentle squeeze. No matter how mad she was at Necessity for replacing her with another Fury, this had to hurt.

“I hate this,” she said, through clenched teeth. “I just hate it.”

Pulling free of my arm, she smashed a fist into the hunk of computer-coral. It split into three big pieces and dozens of smaller ones, exposing an irregular hollow space within. There, cupped in the largest of the shards, lay a tiny black lump. At first glance I thought it was a spider, but closer inspection revealed that where the head should have been was the upper half of a miniature woman—a spider-centaur and not the first I’d seen. The other, much larger version, had been the entity who took me to see Shara in the coral. Very gently, I picked up the spider-centaur. She didn’t move.

“Is that the same spinnerette?” asked Melchior.

“If it is, she’s lost a lot of weight,” I replied. “To say nothing of having made a miraculous recovery.”

The spinnerette who’d taken us to see Shara had been the size of a small car and had gotten herself killed trying to help us defeat Nemesis. I poked the little creature gently with one finger, but she still didn’t stir. For all I could tell, she’d died in transit.

Not good. I’d learned a lot about the spinnerettes since my conflict with Nemesis. They were creatures of chaos created by the Fates in the pre-mweb days. They took many shapes, but the spider-centaurs were one of the more common. These days they seemed to be at the heart of some sort of weird collaboration between Necessity and the Fates’ central computer, a collaboration the Fates desperately wanted terminated.

Combine unhappy Fates with the unknown creator of the silver spheres, the mythic crossover the abacuses had inflicted on us, and now the appearance of a spinnerette so very far from home, and stir to produce . . . what? I was starting to really get nervous about whatever was happening back home. Maybe there was more than one god war going on. And maybe whatever had sent us here was part of the opening salvo.

“We don’t have time for this,” said Tisiphone, kicking over the remnants of the computer-coral. “We need to get Ahllan someplace safe, and soon. We’re way too exposed here. Besides, no matter what’s happening back home, there’s nothing we can do about it while Odin controls the only route to our multiverse.”