Mythos (31 page)

“What are you offering?” I asked. “Because we’ve got a lot of wants and needs, some proximate, some long-term.”

Fenris shook his head. “You and my father have more in common than your eyes, don’t you? Let’s start with the proximate. Who knows? We might even be willing to cover most of those up front. Call it a gesture of good faith.”

“All right. Let’s start with food and shelter.”

“Done,” said Fenris. “I’ll have the former brought up, and you can take advantage of the latter whenever you’re ready. Laginn, you know our new friends pretty well. Could you see about the menu?”

The hand bobbed a yes, then jumped off the table and headed out the door.

“Next?” asked Fenris.

“Healer or the equivalent,” said Tisiphone. “I’m tired of feeling like I’ve been sleeping in Procrustes’ iron bed.”

“Anything else?”

I turned to Melchior. “What have you got?”

“Electronics lab, well stocked and private.”

I nodded. “I should have thought of that.”

“Well stocked I can do,” said Fenris. “Private? I wouldn’t be honest if I told you I could manage that. Even if I agreed not to spy on you, this is Loki’s operation and—”

“And I go where I want to and see what I like,” interjected Loki, appearing complete with executive-style chair a few feet behind Fenris.

“Oh, don’t give me that look, Raven.” He leaned back and put his feet up on a footstool that hadn’t been there when they left the ground. “We both knew it was true before Little Boy Blue ever asked about it. You want someplace to work on the problem of cracking MimirNet, and I will happily give you the opportunity, but only if I get to share in the rewards. And quite frankly, you owe me.”

He leaped to his feet and started to pace. “Us, really. If it hadn’t been for my boys, you’d be locked up right now or dead.”

“Boys?” said Fenris.

“Yes,” said Loki, “or didn’t they tell you how they got here? Jormungand bailed them out of a nasty mess with Heimdall and the Wild Hunt, then played taxi driver. You
were
going to tell him all that, weren’t you, Ravirn?”

Loki looked over the top of his glasses at me and snapped his fingers. A hair-thin thread of chaos shot from his hand straight toward my face. Without thinking, I opened my mouth and caught the end of it. Then slurped it down like a strand of spaghetti.
Delicious
.

“Truth spell?” I said, identifying it from the taste. “I’m hurt. Oh, and the answer, honest and uncoerced, is yes. I had every intention of telling him how much help Jormungand gave us.”

“How did you do that?” asked Loki, his voice suspicious.

“I think I’ll keep that to myself for the moment,” I said, mostly because I had no idea how I’d done it.

So I took a moment to rerun the sequence in my mind and actually came up with a possible answer, one that might not have occurred had Loki not given me the key to it himself by reminding me of Jormungand. The chaospell Loki had attempted to work on me had tasted like the venom of the Midgard Serpent felt, strong and sweet and heady. Though I no longer felt drunk on the power Jormungand had injected into my veins, I had done nothing to dissipate it. Perhaps the bite of the Serpent had worked a deeper change than I first imagined.

“Are we going to play games?” I asked, following another impulse by snapping my own fingers and tapping the bridge of my nose. I felt the power of the spell I’d swallowed go out of me and into the creation of a pair of glasses just like Loki’s. With a smile I looked over the tops of the lenses at him. “Or are we going to play nice?”

“Why can’t we do both?” he countered, reaching into his jeans pocket and pulling out an apple that couldn’t possibly have fit there.

It was big and plump and golden, and it had “for the fairest” written on it. He tossed it to me. I caught it, then just about dropped it when I sensed the magic packed frighteningly tight inside its skin. If explosives had a flavor, the apple was what a grenade would taste like.

“Name it,” said Loki, pointing to the apple.

I reached deeper into the apple with my chaos sense. Magic, lots of it, but not the raw stuff Loki and Jormungand used. This felt more like the formal spell of a classical wizard, all wards and diagrams and careful words. Then I had it. With a smile I handed the apple to Tisiphone.

“It’s got your name on it,” I said. “Or, at least, your description.”

“That’s sweet,” she said, “but considering the results of handing out the last apple with this inscription, I’m a little leery of eating it.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “This one didn’t come from Eris. It came from Idun, and unless I’m very wrong, it should put all your wounds and weariness to right.”

“If you say so.” Tisiphone nodded and took a bite out of the apple. A look of sublime delight passed across her face, and she quickly took another.

“Very good,” Loki said to me. “I’m impressed. Intuition indeed.”

I sighed. If even Loki was using that name . . . “I’m well and truly stuck with Odin’s labels, aren’t I?”

“Uh, Boss?”

“Yes, Melchior.”

“Before you go off into a whining fit on the subject, it might be worth making a concerted effort at learning from experience.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Well, I hate to sound like Cerice, but I can’t help but remember a long-running argument about the power of names and how much you hated being called Raven. Do you recall how that all worked out?”

“Oh.”

He was right. Clotho, the Fate who spins, had named me Raven after her sister Lachesis had revoked my birth name and cast me out of the family of Fate. Afterward, I’d been pretty much a nitwit about the whole thing, rejecting what I considered an unwanted “gift” from those who had made themselves my enemies. The end result of the whole thing—after an awful lot of blood and sweat—was the realization that I
was
the Raven, and the only thing I could possibly do to change it was die.

“Call me Intuition,” I said, forcing a smile, “please. Or Impulse.”

“He really is almost as irritating as you are,” Fenris said to Loki.

“Oh, Loki is nowhere near as irritating as Ravirn,” Tisiphone said as she finished the apple—core and all. She already looked significantly better. “He couldn’t be. Trust me on that.”

“Hey!” I said.

“I think we should take a vote,” said Melchior. “Hands for Ravirn?” He raised his, as did Tisiphone and Ahllan. “Loki?”

Fenris’s paw shot up, and Loki lightly cuffed him. “Mind your manners, son. Look, can we get back to the whole bargaining thing?”

“Seconded,” I said. “This is an entirely pointless digression. We’ve laid out our up-front needs. I’m sure we’ll have more to add later, but why don’t you tell us what you want. Loki?”

His face clouded. “Once, I wanted to win. That time’s come and gone. Now I just don’t want to lose. Not completely, at least. And I will lose. I will lose everything.” He rose to his feet and went to the window, turning his back on us. “I have sons. If I do not find some way to change the course of the future, I will have none. I have my freedom. If events continue as Odin has foretold, I will have imprisonment and torture—a serpent will drip burning venom upon my brow for a thousand years or more. And I will deserve it. I have life. Heimdall will take it from me. I am a god. In the world that comes after Ragnarok, I will be less than a memory.

“All that I have or love will be taken from me, and if I do not do everything in my power to break the chains of the future, I will be complicit in the loss. I will inevitably become as evil as Odin’s vision makes me out to be.” He spun around and glared directly at me. “Can you comprehend what it’s like to know your future? To see dreadful events coming straight at you with no way to avoid them? Do you have any idea of how it feels to know to the depths of your soul that you are no more than a marionette dancing preordained steps written out for you by Fate?”

Loki’s words hit me like one of Zeus’s lightning bolts. He couldn’t have chosen better if he’d searched for a thousand years, not for this rebel child of Fate’s middle house.

I jumped to my feet and offered Loki my hand. “I will help you, even if I lose my life in the attempt.”

I had risked my life for the same cause once before, though the players had been different—Fate and Discord. The battlefield had been a piece of software called Puppeteer, a program written by the Fates to erase free will. Victory had cost me my name, my family, and not a little of my blood. I counted it a bargain.

“I don’t understand,” said Loki, who had not yet extended his own hand.

“You said the magic word,” said Melchior. “ ‘Fate.’ I’m in, too, Boss.”

“For what it’s worth, so am I,” said Ahllan.

“I guess I’d better make it unanimous,” added Tisiphone, “though my reasons are not the same.”

“But you haven’t even stated your terms yet,” said Loki. “What do you want in exchange? What’s the deal?”

“There is no
deal
,” replied Fenris. “Don’t you get it? They have chosen a side. Ours. They will do what they can to help us, and we will do the same for them.”

“Oh,” said Loki.

He finally shook my hand, though he still looked as though he didn’t understand. He kept glancing at Fenris out of the corner of his eye as if asking for an explanation. I suddenly felt unspeakably sad for Loki. He simply couldn’t believe someone would take up his cause without a payoff. We
must
have some reason for our choice beyond our deciding it was the right thing to do.

The reason for his confusion didn’t matter, whether it was because he had totally internalized the future Odin had foreseen, or because of his own inner lack of loyalty, or even simply his longtime identification as the “villain.” What mattered was that he couldn’t bring himself to trust, and, as long as that was true, it would make a wall between him and the rest of the world.

Just about then, Laginn returned to lead us all to breakfast in a partitioned-off corner of the Froggy Bottom Café. Over coffee, tea, juice, three kinds of meat, six kinds of eggs, and more varieties of baked goods than I could easily count, we continued our discussion.

“I don’t actually believe I can beat the fate Odin has foreseen for all of us,” Loki said, poking at his eggs. “Ragnarok will come, and with it all of the horrors that are foretold. It’s inevitable.”

“So what
do
you hope to accomplish, Mr. Defeatist?” asked Tisiphone.

“You’d be a defeatist, too,” said Loki, “if you’d spent the past thousand years hearing about how
evil
you are and how much you deserve the horrible torture that’s coming to you. You know what really gripes me about the whole damn thing? It’s the double standards. Look at the troops, for starters.

“Is there some reason Odin’s army of the undead should be privileged over mine?” demanded Loki. “Why should warriors raised from the dead and taken to Valhalla after they died in battle be inherently more good than those who died of disease or old age and went to Hel for their afterlife? Does warmongering make a more worthy zombie? Is it an address thing? Valhalla’s a better neighborhood than Hel, so they’re the good guys! It’s classist is what it is.”

Fenris put a paw on his father’s shoulder. “Could we get back on topic? What you want and all that?”

“Right, sorry. It just pisses me off. Like I said, I don’t think we can stop Ragnarok. It has to happen, but what I’m hoping, what seeing you travelers from an alternate now has made me believe, is that it doesn’t have to happen
everywhere
. I think I could bear all the death and destruction if I knew that some other version of me somewhere had found a way out. Or, failing that, that at least my children had alternate versions of themselves living on. That somewhere there was a version of the Norse mythos that didn’t end in the utter ruin of my house.”

“I don’t know,” said Ahllan. “In our pantheoverse, the only things that don’t split when the rest of the universe does are the gods.”

“That’s Necessity’s doing,” said Tisiphone. “She prevents splits that go beyond the story of our mythos.”

“You mean there could be multiple versions of me running around if Necessity allowed it?” I asked.

“All gods forfend,” said Melchior, contriving to look utterly aghast.

Tisiphone shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. But the possibility is one my sisters and I have discussed.”

“So you think it’s achievable?” asked Loki.

Again the shrug. “Theoretically? Maybe.”

“Then I have to try. If I understand things correctly, Mimir serves the same purpose here that Necessity does in your pantheoverse. Mimir, MimirNet, MimirSoft, the whole system is run by Odin to preserve his control over the reins of reality. That’s why I built Rune”—Loki made a gesture that included the entire facility around us—“as an alternate control center, one that I could use to split off chunks of reality if I ever got the chance.”

“So, what we need to do is crack MimirNet and give you that chance,” I said. “Then we can use RuneNet to do a little cosmic rewrite.”

“There’s one tiny problem with that plan,” said Fenris.

“Which is?” asked Melchior.

“RuneNet doesn’t work. We’ve got all the computing power you could possibly want in the supercluster, an order of magnitude more than MimirNet, but we’ve never been able to get it to touch reality on even the most basic level. The system is huge, and it’s very pretty, but it’s never performed so much as a single spell operation.”

“That’s a problem, all right,” I said, removing my conjured glasses and pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “I’m guessing you don’t include that minor detail in your brochures.”

“Why am I suddenly reminded of the dotcom implosion?” said Melchior.

I snorted. “No idea, Mel. No idea.”