Spellcrash (6 page)

Besides, it reminded me of something . . . though I couldn’t think what. Then it began to rapidly expand, and I had it.

The chamber of the abacuses on Necessity’s world. A silver ball stained with streaks like smoke had attacked Tisiphone and me right before the abacuses went berserk and tossed us all into the Norse MythOS. The ball had taken everything an enraged Fury could throw at it without so much as a scratch. This was the same one, or its identical cousin, and . . . it was coming straight for me.

I jackknifed and dove. The ball passed above me close enough that its wake tugged at my feet. I kicked harder. The edges of my vision began to darken from oxygen starvation. It was just the message I needed.

Reaching inward, I found a second darkness in the shadow of the Raven. It enfolded me in black wings as I bent my will on the frozen chaos that makes up my physical form. After my destruction in the duel with Hades, I had shaped myself anew from the raw stuff that churns in the place between the worlds, creating a body that was 99.9 percent as real as anyone else’s.

I used the remaining .1 percent now as an entry into shape-hacking, like a command line for my own personal reality. It was a sort of time travel, really, taking a magical snapshot of the current configuration of my body and physically reverting it to an earlier version when I had worn another skin. It was exquisitely painful, severing the bonds between the atoms of my body, rearranging them all, and creating new links, all in the instant between intent and the universe’s catching on and calling me to account.

Three things made this time different from almost every other time I’d been forced to shed my normal shape. First and foremost, I did not become the embodiment of the Raven, shifting rather into the skin of the giant otter shape I’d learned in my encounter with the Midgard Serpent.

Second, I kept one thing stable from form to form, the shoulder bag bearing Melchior—Tech-Sec’s bullet- and waterproof laptop-protection system. Third, I added an entirely new twist, converting some of my body’s mass into a reasonable facsimile of the air I’d had in my lungs the last time I took this shape. I would be a slightly skinnier Ravirn when I returned to myself.
If
I returned to myself.

The thing I was coming to think of as the giant evil gazing ball of doom took another run at me.

This time, I twisted aside as easily as Loki evading the truth. While the ball was recovering, I started heading for the surface. Whatever magic had been responsible for my earlier unstoppable sinking, I’d shed it with my skin. The ball and I played tag all the way up, but it simply couldn’t catch the otter me. When I finally popped my head out of the water, the ball followed, shooting high into the air.

It hung there, a featureless, lidless, mirror of an eye glaring down at me for a couple of seconds. I could feel malice and a very personal sort of hatred regarding me from within the sphere, and I fully expected it to take at least one more shot at me. While I waited, poised to dive again at the slightest hint of attack, I took my first real look around.

I was in the center of a dark cavern nearly as big as the one that held Hades. About a hundred yards to my right, a small island provided the only visible land. What little light there was came from the upside-down candles embedded in the cake faerie ring high above. I spared a moment to wonder about the mechanics of flames that burned downward but was distracted when the great mirrored ball suddenly rotated 180 degrees vertically and shot away from me.

It must have been going a hundred miles an hour when it struck dead in the middle of the deathday cake. The faerie ring sent the sphere elsewhere in the very moment of the ring’s explosive destruction. Frosting and other debris splattered outward in a wide circle before beginning the long fall to the water below. I took advantage of the intensifying light provided by the falling candles to roll onto my back on the surface and pull my laptop bag onto the tiny dry island of my fuzzy belly.

I expected the lights to go out when the candles hit the water, but, though they quickly began to sink, they kept right on burning. I giggled at the sight—a side effect of the otter transformation.

Shapes have consequences, and otters are easily amused.

“Are we all clear, then?” Melchior asked as he poked his head out of the bag.

“I think so. I do, I do, I do!” I followed that with more giggling, which Melchior waited out.

“Sorry, Mel. If you’ll whistle me up some night vision, I’ll see if I can’t find Fenris and get us out of here.”

“Fair enough.” He whistled the binary for “Redeye.” “If he’s got any sense at all, he’s on the island.”

He ducked back into the bag and rezipped the top behind him. Then I flipped over and headed for the island, where I could make a new faerie ring.

“Now what?” asked Fenris.

The great wolf sat across the table from me in the inner portion of the lanai. Haemun had prepared us all a lovely dinner of fresh-caught ono on a bed of rice with asparagus. A half dozen bottles of sauvignon blanc—served in glasses or bowls depending on the drinking apparatus of the diner— rounded out the meal. My injured hand and nose were both much improved by the healing effects chaos had on me because of the several transformations and faerie rings I had been through. Even so, I wanted nothing more than a couple of days of peace to recover. Days I wasn’t likely to get.

“That’s an interesting question,” I replied. “Your family’s conflict with the Aesir was not the only god war worrying me last week.”

“Was it really only last week? Oy.” Melchior took a long drink of his wine.

Laginn bobbed a lazy yes from his place at the table. Though he neither drank nor ate, the hand genuinely seemed to enjoy soaking in a big goblet of wine.

“It’s been ten days exactly since gazing ball one sent us all off to play the starring role in the Ragnarok pinball machine,” I replied.

“God war?” prompted Fenris.

“Right, sorry. While we were in your pantheoverse, a number of intrusions from this one suggested that whatever it was that sent us your way was part of some larger problem or conflict within Necessity.”

“Necessity being your version of MimirNet?”

“Exactly. The elevation of my former girlfriend from programmer extraordinaire in House Clotho to Fury is a really bad sign on the Necessity front and one reason I’d been hoping to avoid having to plunge into the mess, at least for a little while.” I sighed. “But the fact that I’ve already had a spinnerette try to kill me suggests my days of playing Switzerland have already ended. I just wish I knew who sent it and what the hell that gazing-ball thing represents. The cake faerie ring was obviously built as a trap for me, and if it hadn’t been destroyed, I might have been able to follow it another step or two back or get something else out of it. Since that avenue is closed, I need to—”

“Set another place for dinner,” interrupted a voice from the outside.

I about jumped out of my skin, which elicited a laugh from the woman standing in the archway.

She was short and red-haired, with deep smile lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She had something of Madeline Kahn about her and something of Catherine O’Hara. But every bit of her appearance was a matter of artifice. A goddess can look however she chooses, and she was every inch a goddess. Thalia. The Muse of Bucolic Comedy and my grandmother.

Why, yes, I do descend from Fate and Slapstick. It explains a lot, doesn’t it? I rose to make introductions.

“Fenris, this is my grandmother, the goddess of off-color humor, among other things. Thalia, my friend Fenris, sometime Norse god of hunger.”

“Shake?” she said, extending her hand.

Fenris rolled his eyes but offered his paw.

“Laginn, Thalia. Thalia, this is Laginn, formerly the hand of Tyr, Norse God of War, now Fenris’s, uh . . . How do you introduce an undead hand?”

“Well,” my grandmother began with a twinkle in her eye, “in polite company, disembodied hands may be referred to as ‘the Sinister’ or ‘the Dexter,’ as would be appropriate here, generally being introduced only after entities with heads and/or faces. Undead hands attached to hosts are rarely introduced individually but may be referenced immediately after the introduction of the host in special circumstances. Or was that a rhetorical question?”

“Thank you, Miss Zombie Manners.” Melchior grinned.

“
Friend
will do,” said the wolf.

“Special friend?” Thalia asked with a wicked lift of her eyebrow—I’d inherited that one.

“No.” Fenris’s answer came out flat and quiet.

“But he’s such a handsome little devil.” Thalia reached out and shook Laginn.

When she set him down, he looked rather befuddled by the whole thing. Haemun bustled up just then with a chair and all the other accoutrements of dinner for Thalia. I waited until she’d settled before leaning back and giving her my best skeptical look—the one with that raised eyebrow.

“What’s up?” I asked. “You normally don’t go for the low-hanging fruit like that.
Hand
some?

Shake? You’re up to something.”

“Me? No. No, not at all.” She nodded vigorously, contradicting her words. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t get it,” said Fenris, his ears lowering in confusion.

“Then you don’t want it bad enough,” replied Thalia. While she spoke, she pointed at me, then tapped her ear, before making little dancing-spider motions.

“Wha—oh.” I shifted gears as I realized what Thalia was telling me—there was a bug in my house. “Joke’s on me, I guess.”

We spent the next twenty minutes playing polite-but-empty conversational games for the benefit of anyone listening in while we ate. It was excruciating.

Finally, Thalia rose from the table. “Why don’t you give your old grandmother the tour?” she asked, though she knew her way around well enough.

“Of course.” I came around to her side of the table and took her hand in the crook of my arm.

“Where would you like to start?”

“Anywhere is fine, child.”

As we slowly circled the lower level of the house, Thalia kept wrinkling her nose and sniffing the air very quietly. After a second round past the dinner table, she shook her head and indicated the stairs with her eyes. More sniffing as we made our way through the public areas of the upper floor. When we reached my bedroom, she abruptly stiffened and slowed her pace.

“How
does
Haemun put up with you?” she demanded. “This place is a sty. You must never put a single item of clothing away properly. Look at this!”

She pulled me over to the chair beside the bed where I’d dumped the tweed suit Eris had inflicted on me. She lifted the jacket by its collar, swinging it this way and that. Then she sniffed it here and there in a way that rather reminded me of how I’d decided if something was safe to wear in my college days.

“That’s strange,” she whispered to herself. “How did . . . Ah! Clever Discord.”

“This is a laundry disaster.” She handed the jacket to me. “It’s going to need special attention.

Hang on to it while I run and explain things to Haemun.”

While I waited, I made a very thorough inspection of the jacket. I found nothing the least bit out of the ordinary. Well, nothing beyond the fact that Eris had ruined a perfectly good set of leathers when she transformed them into tweeds for her psychologist shtick. Thalia returned a few moments later, followed by a baffled-looking Haemun carrying a big glass jar labeled

“sugar.”

It was empty, but not for long. Thalia took the jacket from me and somehow managed to stuff it into the empty jar. When she screwed the lid back on, I could see that someone had scratched a short program in hexadecimal into the lid—a spell of sealing and silence. I started to open my mouth then, but she put a finger to her lips and held the jar up to her ear, shaking it once or twice before finally nodding.

“There. We can speak freely now. Haemun, would you take that and put it someplace safe?”

“What’s going on?” I asked, as the satyr departed with the jar. “And what did Eris do about it that was so clever?”

“You’ve got a spy in your house, and she changed your clothes for you.”

“A spy? Not a bug?” I decided to let the Eris part of the question rest a moment since Thalia’s initial statement only confused me more.

“In this case, they’re one and the same. ‘The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout.’”

“A tiny spinnerette? In my clothing? And one that managed to hitch a ride with me somehow?

That’s hard to believe. It would have had to happen between the time I got home and the time Discord . . . No. No, it wouldn’t. Oh, I’m an idiot.”

“I can’t dispute that based on current evidence,” said Thalia, “but would you care to let your dear old grandmum in on the specifics?”

“I put the spinnerette there myself, back in the Norse MythOS. It arrived in a piece of machine coral of the sort Necessity’s been migrating herself into—next-generation quantum-processing technology. It looked dead, or nearly so. I felt sorry for the little thing, lost so far from home.”

“Back up about six steps,” she said. “I couldn’t ask about your new guests at dinner, and you were all smart enough to avoid the subject once I’d given you the bug note, but I’m thinking I really need to know a lot more about what’s going on here. Especially this Norse MythOS stuff.”

“And I need to know about what’s been happening here while I was away. I’ll tell my story first if you’ll answer me two questions. One, what did Eris do that was so clever?”

“When she transformed your leathers into tweeds, she got rid of the pocket you’d put the spinnerette in without getting rid of the spinnerette. That effectively trapped the creature within the fabric of the new suit. Next question.”

I still didn’t entirely understand the mechanism employed, but I knew enough now to move on.

“How did you know about the spinnerette?”

“I didn’t know for sure, but I had been shown reason to believe it was very likely.”

“Shown? By who?” I asked.

“Persephone, but it’s a long story, and I want to hear yours first.”