Spellcrash (11 page)

“I still don’t . . . Oh.” I felt my eyes widen. “Oh my. That’s really clever. Biometric-password safeguards?”

Shara nodded and smiled. “Plus the sword as physical key. It’s a two-factor system.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Melchior.

“Shara doesn’t dare open up any of the really important systems in case the other minds of Necessity use her gateway to make a move for greater control,” I said, still working out the full ramifications as I went. “But she doesn’t have to. The Furies already have at least physical access to everything.”

“It’s hardcoded,” agreed Shara. “When Necessity first transformed herself into a computer, she built that into the design specs in case anything went wrong during the changeover. For extra security, she made it a two-factor access system, Fury blood and Fury diamond.”

“I think I see now,” said Melchior. “When Necessity created Occam, she gave Ravirn extremely limited admin powers over the system. The chaos-diamond of the sword supplied the key for the lock, and the blood he charged it with identified his level of access.”

“Exactly,” said Shara. “When Cerice repaired the blade to my specifications—regrew it really—I had her infuse it with her blood, the blood of a full Fury, which grants unrestricted access to the physical plant of Necessity and to most of the software architecture as well.”

“So I probably shouldn’t misplace it, then, huh?” I turned the blade this way and that in the air—

it didn’t look anywhere near as important as it should have under the circumstances.

“No,” said Shara. “You shouldn’t. And, you won’t. I am sorry about this, but . . .” She quickly whistled a spell, something intricate and self-harmonizing. When she finished, the hilt of Occam grew suddenly, blazingly, hot along the side closest to my injured palm. The smell of burning meat filled the air, and I yelped and tried to fling the sword away. It clung to my hand as if it had fused itself to my flesh. I screamed and curled into a ball as Shara whistled a new spell. This one sounded a bit like the one used for closing athame wounds, though much more complex. The pain faded, but I still couldn’t release Occam.

“What the hell did you just do to me?” I yelled angrily.

“No more than I had to.” Shara looked simultaneously sorrowful and resolute. “The sword is a part of you now as it had to be to fulfill all of its functions.”

“That’s just gods-damned splendid, that is.” I felt a wild fury rising up from the center of my soul, and my voice followed it higher and higher. “Did it occur to you to ask first? Or that I might need both hands at some point?”

“Yes, and yes. I didn’t ask because I was pretty sure you’d refuse and, since I’d have had to do it anyway, that would only have made things worse. As for the second, I did make provisions.”

“Provisions!” I leaped to my feet and stomped over to glare down at her projected form. “You didn’t ask, and you made provisions? That’s . . . Urgh!” I couldn’t find the words.

I’d never been so angry with someone I cared so much about, not even Cerice—this was not the Shara I knew and loved. I turned away and stomped back toward Melchior. He was sitting perfectly still, a look of stunned betrayal on his face.

“I wonder if all that rage is something of a side effect?” muttered Shara.

“Side effect of what?” whispered Melchior. “What did that spell do? I couldn’t follow all of it, but what I could make out sounded really ancient.”

“It was,” said Shara. “It’s a very small part of the magic Necessity put into making the Furies what they are. Cerice found the core phrasing in the same place she found the information on the abacus network. Ravirn, I think that you will find the answer to Mel’s question if you reach for the link you now have with Occam.”

“Screw that.” I reached inward, but not for any link to the sword. No, I reached for the Raven. “I quit.” It was time to see if the sword could follow me through a transformation.

The shadow of the Raven fell over me, and I used it to rip my body apart, reshaping myself into a giant, black bird. When I finished, I looked down at my wing and found it free of Occam’s grasp.

I laughed a harsh, cawing laugh then, a laugh that cut off abruptly when I realized the sword had gone away completely. What the . . . I wrenched myself back into human shape, half-expecting to find the sword back in my hand. But no, it was still gone.

“Where did it go?” I whispered.

“That depends on whether I got Necessity’s spell right,” said Shara, her voice quiet and sad.

“Look at your palm.”

I did and found a circular patch of crystal about the size of a penny in my hand’s exact center. It looked as though someone had plugged the bullet hole the spinnerette assassin had given me with a slender diamond disk. I tapped it with the nail of my left hand. It made a dull clicking noise and, while I could feel the pressure of it all around the edges of the crystal, I couldn’t actually feel anything through the crystal. On the plus side, there was no longer any evidence I’d ever been shot.

“I don’t understand,” I said to Shara. “What the hell did you just do to me?”

“Gave you a tiny part of the magic of the Furies to go with the touch of Fury blood that now runs in your veins. In making you a blood brother to the Furies I suspect I’ve also given you a touch of their berserker madness, though that was not my intention. It may be that it’s necessary for this particular trick.”

“I’m getting really tired of people speaking in riddles and screwing with my life, Shara.” The anger had faded with my transformation into the Raven, but I could feel it welling up again.

The crystal in my palm began to tingle then, which made me angrier still. I wanted to hit something. Now! My anger flexed, and . . .

“Holy shit!” Occam was in my hand, somehow extruded from the crystal in my palm. “That’s the weirdest damn sensation I’ve ever felt.” Anger gave way to curiosity and . . . Occam went away, sliding
through
my palm into elsewhere. “I think I need to sit down now.” I felt light-headed and just generally weird as I collapsed onto a nearby couch.

Shara’s image rose from its projected chair. “Melchior, you’ll need a great deal of info about the software architecture of Necessity. Here it is.” She closed her eyes for an instant, and Melchior’s expression took on the abstracted look of a webgoblin receiving data wirelessly.

She turned in my direction again. “The only way for you to take the sword with you into the depths of the machine is for it be a part of you. Otherwise, you’d leave it behind with your body when your soul entered the virtual world. I am sorry, Ravirn. But I had to do it.” Then she vanished, leaving us alone with the empty vessel of her original body.

A moment later, Melchior’s attention returned to the here and now, and he shook his head as though trying to settle the contents within. “Wow, a lot there. Do you want to rest a bit before we go poke a finger in the hornet’s nest? Or would you rather just plunge straight in?”

“As much as I am a fan of getting things over with quickly, I think we’d better go back to Raven House and regroup. Wait—let me try something.” I returned to my feet.

I summoned up a touch of the anger I still felt with Shara. In response, Occam shaped itself into my hand. I pictured where I wanted to go and traced a sharp line through the air with my blade.

Nothing happened. Again. Ditto. Well, crap. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. I began to get really angry again, and that gave me an idea.

I imagined the walls of reality as an arbitrary barrier put up specifically to prevent me from getting home. I made the distance between here and there my nemesis. With a yell, I lunged forward and really took a cut at my newfound enemy. This time I felt the sort of resistance I might have expected from dragging the sword through a foot-thick sheet of Jell-O. The edges of an eight-foot vertical slice in space and time bulged outward like the slit skin of an overstuffed sausage. Beyond lay my bedroom.
Hah! Take that, reality!

“After you, Mel.”

As I followed him through, I imagined the gap closing behind me. It did so with the faintest echo of the sound of a metal zipper. Surreal.

Fenris paddled his surfboard along beside mine as we headed out toward the break, his madly wagging tail making a bannerlike counterpoint to his churning legs. “So, has this goblin friend of yours always pushed people around like she’s doing with you and what’s her name . . . Cerice?”

“Not at all. That’s a good part of the reason I wanted to stop back here for a while before getting in any deeper. There’s something I don’t understand going on, and that always makes me nervous.”

Melchior snorted from his perch on the tip of my board. “Said Captain Clueless. If not understanding things really bugged you, you’d spend your whole life clinging to the ceiling.”

“Gosh, thanks, Mr. Small, Blue, and Easily Knocked Overboard. Not only do I appreciate your insight; I find myself wondering why you don’t have more friends.”

“It’s probably the company I keep, if you know what I mean.” He made an elaborate show of hiding the finger he was pointing at me. “Oh, and you’re welcome.” Then he slumped back on the board. “I’m really worried about Shara. She’s
not
acting like herself.”

“Yeah, me, too.” A thought struck me. “Do you suppose it’s got something to do with what she said about the other entities within Necessity?”

“No,” said Melchior, his voice even more sarcastic than usual. “Say it isn’t so! Are you suggesting that being trapped inside a giant network with hostile intelligences locked in there with you might have an effect on mood?”

Fenris laughed a yippy little laugh at that, and Laginn rolled over on his back and mimed the disembodied-hand equivalent of wide-eyed surprise.

“Actually,” I growled, “that’s not what I meant.” I took a deep breath and pushed aside a brief and unexpected flare of anger—that aspect of Fury magic was going to take some getting used to. “I was thinking about the part where she talked about knowing the others were in system because it felt like they were all using the same mind to think with. Necessity is the Fate of the Gods and the patron goddess of control freaks. What if using that autocratic hardware to do all her processing is having an effect on Shara’s spiritware?” Melchior sat back up and looked thoughtful. “Are you sure your name is Ravirn? Because you might just have started making sense.”

It was my turn to amp up the sarcasm. “Ya think? Form shapes function, especially in the gods-and-heroes business. Look at me.”

“Do I have to?” asked Melchior.

I kept rolling. “Becoming the Raven changed me on every level. I can’t not take risks. Or keep my mouth shut when I should, for that matter.”

“You know, I’d noticed that,” said Fenris. “And, here all this time I’d just thought it was a character defect.”

“Don’t listen to Ravirn on that one,” Melchior said to the wolf. “He’s always been all ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ where it comes to his mouth.”

I nodded to acknowledge the point. “To some extent, sure. But believe it or not, from my perspective it’s gotten significantly worse. Or take what’s happened with Occam.”

“I’d rather return it,” said Melchior.

“Yeah, everybody wants to be a comedian, whether they’re funny or not. What I meant was that I keep getting these weird little bursts of anger since Shara Furyfied me to the sword. Normally, the comparative lack of any real punch is enough for me to shake off your digs, Mel. But now, even the lamest of your traditionally lame jokes is triggering a little flare of real anger.” Mel said something in response, but I couldn’t really pay attention because we’d hit the break zone at an inopportune moment, and a couple tons of water were getting ready to fall on us. Once we came out the other side of the wall of water, I just waved it all away. I had better things to do than stress about Shara. Salt air and surf and the morning sun make for a magic that shouldn’t be mixed with the more mundane sort that comes from spells and musty old gods.

“You’re sure you want to join us on this one?” I asked after I’d slashed a door into the beyond.

“It could be dangerous.”

Fenris nodded. “I spent a thousand years chained to a rock in the North Atlantic. More than anything in the world, I want to take advantage of the freedom coming here has granted me. I want to go to new places and see new things, meet people, make friends, even make all sorts of stupid mistakes.”

“Well, we can guarantee you a lot of opportunity on that last front,” said Melchior. “That’s pretty much what spending time with Ravirn is all about. Though I must say that it seems a strange sort of ambition.”

“For a thousand years I was tied to one place and one world, one future. I knew I was trapped and would remain so until the end of days, when madness and hunger would own me completely, driving me to swallow Odin and be slain for it. I want all the things Odin’s binding and Norse predestination kept me from having until now. And genuine risk and the opportunity for failure is a huge part of that. For the first time in my life, I know that I could die tomorrow and never see it coming, and that’s marvelous! Every possibility is open to me, and I want it all. I want to devour experience and lap up life. I want. I want. I want!”

He threw back his head, let out a great joyous howl, and bounded through the gate I’d opened with my sword and my anger. Melchior and I followed more cautiously. The transition from the sun-soaked porch of Raven House to a dim and cold cavern beneath an artificial island in the Mediterranean did not improve my mood.

The gigantic underground space beyond my gateway held racks and racks of shiny black multiprocessor servers like so many slabs of volcanic glass, each studded with a dim blue LED.

It looked and felt like we had just entered a high-tech tomb. Mostly because we had. A mausoleum housing what had once been one of the two or three most important computing functions in the entire Greek MythOS. In their day, the servers here had run the portion of Necessity that governed the nature and location of every power in the pantheon.

For some of us, that governance mostly consisted of loose instruction sets like the one that shaped my Raven’s magic and the part of my personality owned by the Trickster. For others, the program had much tighter parameters—binding Prometheus to the rock where an eagle would peck out his liver every morning, or preventing Atlas from a shrug that might destroy an entire world.