Mythos (7 page)

“I think it’s my turn to ask some questions,” said Ahllan after she’d whistled us all across the threshold and into the appropriate scale. “High on my list is how you came to be traveling with that?” She indicated Tisiphone with a hard look. “I’ve been wondering since you first arrived.”

“That’s a long story, and I’ll be happy to tell it as soon as I get her set down and covered up.”

Ahllan frowned but led the way back toward the chapter house. I couldn’t really blame her. I’d had a while to get used to the idea of a Fury as friend, then a lover. Ahllan’s last experience with the Furies before her involuntary exile involved having her home torn to shreds by Tisiphone and her sisters. That they were hunting me at the time probably made the present association seem even stranger.

“I’ll take care of it.” Melchior drew Ahllan aside and started explaining about the destruction Persephone had wrought on Necessity and the way our attempts at fixing it had drawn Tisiphone and me together after my relationship with Cerice hit the wall.

I sent up a silent thank-you to Melchior as I continued on to the chapter house, with a mental note to make it verbal later. A lot of that personal history was still tender ground. Having Melchior as a familiar was fantastic. Having him as a friend was priceless. The hand, apparently interested in finding out more about us, wandered after them.

While they all talked in the main part of the building, I settled Tisiphone on the couch with pillows to keep her wings from getting too badly squished and found her a blanket. She didn’t really need it, since she’s pretty much impervious to the elements, but it seemed right somehow. And maybe it was. When I tucked it up under her chin I heard a very faint rasping. It was the sound of the claws of her left hand—the one I’d left above the covers for treatment—dragging along the blanket as they retracted. Though she still hadn’t woken up, a quick check showed that all four sets had slid back into whatever pocket of reality they lived in when they weren’t extended—something I’d wondered about more than once, since six-inch claws simply won’t fit into three-inch fingers.

Next I made a quick raid on Ahllan’s healing supplies for an antibiotic to apply once I’d cleaned out Tisiphone’s wounds. As I sat beside her and dabbed at the bite on her arm, she moaned and blinked her eyes open.

“Wha . . . Where am I? What happened? Ouch.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . hurt you.” I blinked several times. “Did you really just say ouch?”

“Uh, yeah. I did. What’s
that
about?”

In the time I’d known Tisiphone, she’d suffered countless bruises, a broken wing, a truly hellacious puncture wound in the shoulder, and more cuts, slashes, and bites than I could count. She had never, not once, made the slightest complaint about any of it.

“I couldn’t help notice that you don’t seem to be healing as fast as normal either,” I said. “You’ve still got blood oozing out of cuts that aren’t all that deep and are at least twenty minutes old. Shouldn’t they be scabbed over?”

She nodded her head on the pillows, and I wondered once again at the minor miracle that allowed her hair and wings not to ignite anything she didn’t want them to.

“That’s not the only thing that’s strange,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, when we first got here, and I flew away, I really wanted to be mad at you, to blame you for the mess we’d landed in, because rage gives me strength. But I just couldn’t do it. I was angry, but not nearly as angry as I was worried and depressed. I especially didn’t want to be mad at you.” She reached out with her good hand and squeezed my wrist. “Don’t take this wrong, but that’s just not normal.”

“Not for a Fury,” I agreed, “no.”

“What’s not normal for a Fury?” Melchior asked, as he and Ahllan came through the door, followed by the hand.

“Tell you in a minute,” I said. “First, you.” I pointed a finger at the hand. “What’s your name? I’m getting tired of thinking of you as the really big disembodied hand. It’s pretty clear you’re an individual—the strangest I’ve yet to meet—but an individual nonetheless, and that means a name.”

The hand looked nonplussed, as if to say, “Who, me?”

I nodded. “What should we call you? Do you have a preference?”

It snapped its index and middle fingers against its thumb in a sharp “no.”

“Well, think about it. If you come up with something, we’ll use that; otherwise, we’ll make something up. Does that work for you?”

It bobbed yes, then wandered off into the corner, looking as thoughtful as it is possible for a disembodied hand to look.

“What is that?” asked Tisiphone. “Or, I guess, who is that?”

I quickly brought her up to date. As I mentioned where the hand had come from, Tisiphone’s fires started to burn higher, a sure sign of returning anger.

“What’s up?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“Finish the story.” When I was done, she started talking again. “How in Necessity’s name did we get here?”

I really didn’t like the idea that Tisiphone didn’t know what had happened either. The Furies are Necessity’s admins.
Nothing
the goddess does should surprise them.

She continued before I could ask her about it. “A whole different set of gods . . . that’s going to cause some problems. I wonder if I met his cousin or something?”

“Whose?” asked Ahllan. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Tisiphone, and though it wasn’t much, it was a start.

“This Fenris and the wolf who bit me.” She raised her injured arm. “When I flew out of here earlier, I went looking for some way to connect with Necessity. I didn’t find that, but I did see the silver chariot of the moon, so I went to talk to Artemis. That’s when I ran into two problems.”

“No Artemis,” supplied Ahllan, getting up and going to her healing kit.

“Uh-huh. Instead, there was a big guy wearing furs at the reins with a black wolf nearly as big as Cerberus chasing behind. I was just trying to decide what to do when the wolf turned and gave me these. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up here.” She touched the scrape on the side of her head and the bite.

“Let me look at them.” Ahllan approached from the other side of the couch and took over the cleaning job from me at Tisiphone’s nod. “Mm, nasty.”

Tisiphone winced. “Yes, they are, and I don’t understand why. Was there some kind of poison involved, or something?”

Ahllan’s eyes went far away for a moment as she accessed data. “No, not according to the accounts I can reach on the local internet. It’s not nearly as good a resource as the mweb’s data streams, but they’ve got a fair bit on the Norse gods—assuming I can trust it. The wolf who attacked you isn’t supposed to be poisonous. His name is Hati, and his purpose in life is to hunt down and eat Mani—the charioteer of the moon. Oh, and he and Fenris are not cousins, but son and father.”

“And this Loki is the father of Fenris?” asked Tisiphone.

The hand had crept closer at some point in the conversation, and now it gave a quick bob “yes.”

“He and I are going to have some words,” she said, the threat plain in her voice. She turned her gaze on the hand. “I guess you and I have something in common, though I didn’t get bitten half so hard.”

The hand bobbed.

“Figured out what you want us to call you yet?” Melchior asked the hand.

Again, the bob. Then the hand very carefully drew letters on the floor for us. It had to do it twice before we figured it out.

“Laginn?” I asked.

The bob.

“All right. I wonder what it means?”

“Let me just do a word search,” said Ahllan, though she didn’t stop doctoring Tisiphone. A few seconds later, she let out a little bark of laughter. “Apparently our new friend is something of a literalist.”

“How so?” asked Melchior.

“Laginn is Icelandic for ‘deft,’ ” she replied, “or, as we might say, ‘handy.’ ”

Laginn bobbed approvingly.

“Laginn it is,” said Melchior. “I hope you come in yourself—handy, that is.”

“Ow. Damn, that stuff stings.” Tisiphone looked almost as surprised to have said it as the rest of us were to hear it. “Sorry, Ahllan; please keep going. I really appreciate your taking care of me like this.” The troll was painting a vivid orange something onto the long scratches on the side of Tisiphone’s head.

“I don’t get it,” continued Tisiphone, closing one eye and wrinkling her nose in an obvious attempt to ignore the pain. “I’m normally not this much of a wimp. What’s happening?”

But I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know a lot of answers. Where were we in relation to anyplace we actually knew? How did we get here? How did things really work here? How were we going to get home? For that matter, what happened next?

As if in answer to that last, Ahllan let out a long yawn and stretched, cracking so many of her joints that she sounded a bit like troll popcorn.

“Children, all this running around has tired me more than I care to admit. Why don’t we close this chat session down until tomorrow morning so I can get some sleep.”

“Fair enough,” I quickly agreed. She looked awfully tired, and I wanted to spare her more stress. “Where do you want us?”

“How would you feel about sleeping in Shakespeare’s bedroom? There’s a miniature of the Stratford-on-Avon house where he grew up on the far side of the park. It’s my first fallback if this place becomes unlivable for some reason.”

“Sounds good to me. Tisiphone, do you want to join me?”

She nodded and smiled wanly before shrugging off the blanket and getting up.

“Melchior, here’s the gating address.” Ahllan’s expression became abstracted for a second.

“Got it,” he replied, then glanced at the hand. “What about Laginn? Should we take him with us or leave him here or what?”

“Better leave him here,” said Ahllan. “He didn’t come in through one of the spelled doors, and I don’t know what the autosizing subroutine would do with him.” She looked at Laginn. “I’m sorry; we’re being rude. Do you have a preferred gender, or would you prefer ‘it’? I know you used to be part of a ‘he,’ but I don’t know whether that means anything to a hand.”

Laginn shrugged, or got as close as something with no head and no shoulders could to shrugging.

“All right. Then, for simplicity’s sake, ‘him’ it is. Do you want the couch or a chair or what? I’d offer you the bed, but I don’t think my bones would agree to the deal.”

The hand snagged Tisiphone’s fallen blanket and dragged it over to a rug by the stove.

“If that works for you, it’s fine by me. Good night, children.” Ahllan headed for a curtained-off area on the side of the room.

We headed for the power outlet and Stratford-on-Avon.

 

 

Forestdown Estates really had to be the strangest place I’d visited this side of Castle Discord. That the builder had created miniatures of the outsides of the buildings was a little odd. That he had also done up the insides, including stuff that no one looking in would ever see, was downright obsessive. Tisiphone and I had taken a bedroom near the end of the hall, with Melchior opting to take laptop shape on a table outside so as to avoid our “inevitable banging and moaning.”

Because of Tisiphone’s injuries, it was more like a few lingering kisses and some high-intensity makeup snuggling. In either case, I appreciated the privacy Melchior had given us under the guise of being surly.

A few hours later, I ended up having one of my periodic reflections on insomnia. Ever since the black slits of my pupils had become tiny windows filled with Primal Chaos, sleep has become an elusive companion at best. There is something about being able to read by the light of your own eyes that makes even a sleep mask fairly ineffective. On the plus side, any use of chaos magic, say shapechanging into a raven or using a faerie ring, recharged my batteries at least as effectively as forty winks used to. But sometimes I really missed the oblivion and freedom from thought provided by regular visits with unconsciousness. Maybe I was going to have to learn to meditate.

Tisiphone sprawled beside me, her hair framing her face in a cloud of fire, her wings sticking out from under the covers and trailing on the floor. It didn’t look all that comfortable, but she slept with the total relaxation of a well-fed house cat. Awake, she was a study in dynamic tension, always ready to pounce. Asleep, the tension was gone. I reached out and absently stroked her cheek. She didn’t move.

I still didn’t know whether I was in love with her or she with me, but that seemed less important than it once had, less important than taking moments like these and treating them as the treasures they were. Maybe that was because I was growing into the role Necessity had thrust upon me when she had Clotho name me Raven and made me a power. While Tisiphone and Ravirn might be able to snatch moments of erotic companionship and to maintain a deep fondness for each other, the Raven and the Fury had other loyalties that would forever come first.

I admired the high cheekbones and the delicate network of blue veins visible in Tisiphone’s slender neck. A goddess nearly four thousand years old, the living embodiment of vengeance, and able to tear me in half as easily as I might a tissue paper—what on Earth did she see in me? Again I caressed her cheek, gently. I didn’t want to startle her awake and buy myself a new set of scars. . . . Wait a moment.

I slid out from under the blankets and shifted around so that I could both kiss her temple and jump away if I had to. I leaned forward, pressed my lips above her ear, and . . . nothing. She neither moved nor woke. I’d never seen her sleep so deeply. By all rights she should have caught my wrist in her hand in the same second my fingers first touched her cheek. After the slice she’d given my thigh, she’d made a real effort to train herself not to gut me when she woke up, but she
always
woke up.

I added another question to the list that started with “Where were we?” What was being here doing to us? Chilled, I gave up on sleep, grabbing one of the thick guest towels Ahllan had left us and wrapping it around my waist as I slipped into the hall. I ran a fingertip along the edge of Melchior’s casing as I passed on my way to the sitting room, where I flopped on the chaise. Five minutes later I was wishing I’d brought my shirt as well. I’d forgotten how much having Tisiphone in a room warmed things up—talk about your hot flashes. I made do with a floral throw wrapped poncho-style around my shoulders.