Spellcrash (18 page)

Lachesis drew a sharp breath, and I could picture the exact way her eyes narrowed as she did so.

“As usual, Raven, you’re wrong. I may not have a direct hold on your thread anymore, but that doesn’t mean I have no leverage over you.”

“Go to hell.”

“Allow me to demonstrate.” From behind me, I heard a twanging noise like the plucking of a harp string—the sound of someone’s Fate thread being played.

In the same instant, Melchior reverted to goblin shape and jumped a foot in the air. “Yowch!” My awareness of the world vanished in an explosion of fire that started somewhere around my heart.

Time lapse
.

“Ravirn! Ravirn! Ravirn!”

Melchior kept screaming my name over and over again, though I could barely hear him over the roar of the flames. I knew he’d been doing it for a while, though it had only just begun to mean anything to me.

“Melchior?” I called back, though I still couldn’t see anything through the wall of fire that seemed to surround and contain me—
was
me in some very real sense.

“Oh thank goodness.” There was the beginning of relief in Melchior’s voice, but an underlying strain, too. “Ravirn, come back to us, please. Calm down. You have to calm down.” I focused my attention on his voice and tried to find my way through the fires. In an instant, they fell away, and I returned to myself again. I stood beside my bed, naked, sword in hand, its point bare inches from Lachesis, who stood in front of me, calm and detached as ever—exactly the goddess I remembered from my childhood.

Wait a second—what?

The past few seconds began to dribble back into my mind . . . The Fury awakening in my heart . .

. Summoning my blade and slicing my way free of the covers as the first half of a move that launched me from bed to feet . . . Drawing my arm back in preparation for punching my sword straight through the chest of the one who had threatened my familiar . . . A cuff of velvet and steel closing on my wrist in the instant before my blade went home . . . A cuff that . . .

Oh.
I flicked a look in that direction to verify my guess. Yes.

“Thalia, I’m all right now.”

I wasn’t really. Until my fight with Fate, the webgoblin and webtroll AIs had kept the secret of their free will from Lachesis and her sisters, hiding the very existence of their own threads from the Fates. They had been able to do so because of their privileged position as the middle managers of Fate Inc., the data pushers who dealt with most of the actual day-to-day thread-management. Now, finally, the Fates had chosen to exercise the power inherent in the revelation of AI free will, their power over the threads of the AIs, over Melchior’s thread. Lachesis had just put me on notice that she held the ultimate tool of blackmail.

“You can let me go,” I said to Thalia.

“As you wish,
grandson
.” She emphasized that last word in a way that reminded me that though I had lost much that was dear when Lachesis cast me out, there were also things I had gained.

The other side of my heritage for one. Family that wasn’t poison.

At the moment, it seemed a small light in the face of a great darkness. I needed to take dreadful risks and play them exactly right if I wanted to come out the other side without Lachesis owning me. I closed my eyes and willed my sword away, willed the rage to subside a bit, though I knew it would lie close to the surface as long as Lachesis remained within arm’s reach. For several long beats, nothing happened. Then, against great internal resistance, I felt Occam slide back into the pocket dimension where it now lived between uses.

“Is all that supposed to impress me?” asked the quiet, implacable voice of Fate—my ex-grandmother’s voice.

I took one more breath to center myself, then I opened my eyes and faced Lachesis, though I did not yet meet her gaze. She was just as I remembered her: fine-boned and beautiful, tall and slender, with skin that looked as white and cold as ice, and thick black hair that fell nearly to her waist. Clotho and Atropos look much the same, as like as though the three were triplets. Despite that, there is no mistaking them one for the other, for each stands clothed in the shadow of her separate office.

Clotho spins the threads of life, and there is a wildness about her that speaks of the boundless possibility of beginnings. Atropos wields the shears, and she walks hand in hand with death, carrying with her ever and always the end of all things. Lachesis, my grandmother-not, is the measurer of threads, and bears the weight of judgment. A weight that is heaviest in her eyes.

I met those eyes now. The eyes of Fate. No matter how many times I see them, it is always a shock, seeing everything I’ve ever done or considered reflected back at me. All my secret fears and ambitions, my hates and loves, my every action was there, so many data points for Fate to weigh and find wanting. I desired nothing more than to look away, to end that sensation of being judged. I didn’t. I was done with seeking this woman’s approval, done with giving a damn what she thought about me, done with letting her have any power over me other than what she could take by force.

I snorted a laugh then, brief and contemptuous. I couldn’t help it.

“Have you always been that heavy-handed, or am I just now noticing it?” I kept my gaze glued to hers as I spoke, forced her to look into Chaos just as I looked into Judgment. “What do you want?”

“Proper respect would be a start,” said Lachesis. “I am quite certain I taught you manners in the days before you forced me to cast you out—decent clothes and fair speech and proper deportment.”

“I take it you’re referring to the court garb and pretty words you always demanded of the children of Fate?” I asked.

An earlier, less angry edition of myself might have blushed then, embarrassed to stand naked in front of the goddess who had once been the queen at the center of my family’s courtly life—the one who demanded that everything be done just so as a mark of our respect for her. Not anymore. Rather, I found a grim satisfaction in the insult she would find in my failure to dress for her. It warmed the place in my soul where the Fury lived, and I realized in that instant that the nakedness of the Sisters of Vengeance was its very own special kind of armor—a way of saying,

“I don’t have to care what you think of me.”

“I can’t say that I believe you’ve done anything to earn such signs of respect from me, and you certainly won’t be getting them.” I smiled as insolently as possible and dropped into the chair so recently vacated by Zeus, though I made sure not to break eye contact. “So why not say your piece, then get out of my life again.”

Anger bloomed in Fate’s eyes, clouding judgment in a way that I had never seen before.

“Have you so soon forgotten the power I wield over you?” Lachesis snapped her fingers, and a life strand appeared in the air before her—I had to assume it was Melchior’s.

“Not at all.” I was terrified for my friend, but I couldn’t let it show—not if I was to have any hope of remaining a free agent. “And, if you demand it of me, I will assume a different aspect than the one you see here.” With a wrench of my will and a split second of absolute agony, I reshaped myself into the giant Raven that symbolizes my place as a power of chaos—the effort very nearly knocked me out. “Does this suit you better?”

Lachesis plucked Melchior’s thread with a sharp twang, and he let out a little whimper.

Somehow, I managed to fight the fires back this time, but only just. Drawing on that rage for strength, I twisted my shape again, putting on the long-neglected aspect of a courtier in the Houses of Fate and rising from my chair. Looking down at the results, I had to suppress an urge to giggle at how very much it felt like playing dress-up.

High black leather boots gave way midthigh to emerald tights. A loose poet’s shirt of green silk showed beneath my sleeveless doublet, likewise of black leather. The latter had the outline of a green-eyed raven picked out on the left breast. I’d even added in a black cavalier’s hat with an extravagant green feather. This I promptly doffed as part of an overdeep bow that finally broke the line between our eyes in an act of faux submission.

“Better, Grandmother-not?” I kept my gaze fixed on the floor in front of her, though I caught Melchior’s sag of relief out of the corner of my eye and felt even worse about what must come next.

“Much,” said Lachesis. “Your look is significantly improved, as is your manner.” I came back upright and met her eyes again. “And it only took the reduction of Fate’s power to basest blackmail to achieve it. How proud you must feel at such a tawdry victory over the pantheon’s least and newest power.”

Pure rage flared in Lachesis’s eyes.

I braced myself for what I had to do next even as Lachesis reached once more for Melchior’s thread.

“You leave me little choice, boy,” she said.

“Oh shit,” gulped Melchior.

“Don’t.” The one word was all I said, and that barely above a whisper, but I said it directly to Lachesis and made sure to maintain full eye contact.

“You would dare to command Fate?” she asked, and I could feel the bottomless anger of a goddess denied in her voice.

If her rage and words were all I’d had to go on, I’d have caved then, utterly, and completely promised her whatever she asked and worried about fixing things later. But I had one thing more.

I had her hesitation. For the briefest moment her hand stopped moving, and I leaped into that breach.

“I
would
command Fate. I can’t stop you from taking revenge against me by meddling with Melchior’s thread. I can only promise you that he is your one and only point of leverage, and that if you harm him, I will make it the remainder of my life’s work to bring you down.” Lachesis opened her mouth in the beginnings of a laugh then, but I continued, shifting to the courtly diction of our shared past for emphasis. “Necessity is on her knees, her power broken. We stand on an Olympus in the midst of a spring that follows no winter, for Persephone walks free of the chains of Hades. Where once there were three ancient Furies, now there are two and another raw and barely a week old.”

I forced a cold smile that I didn’t feel. “Three statements of fact, my grandmother-not. They have one thing in common. Can you tell me what it is?”

She didn’t answer, and once again I changed my shape, discarding the court clothes of Fate’s House for the leathers and T-shirt of my own. Any second now I was going to keel over from heaping so much strain on top of deadly exhaustion.

“The Raven,” I said. Not that I’d really planned any of those results, but I didn’t have to tell
her
that, now, did I? “You do have powerful leverage over me, Lachesis. I admit it freely. But don’t you think it were best if you used it wisely? And also made very sure not to use it all up? Tell me what you want, then get out of my life,” I said, forcing spongy knees to keep holding me up.

Lachesis’s hand fell to her side, and she inclined her head in the faintest possible bow. “Well played, child. You learned more at my knee than ever I thought. So be it. Fate wants Necessity’s throne. Help us achieve that, and all is forgiven forever. Stand in our way, and we will destroy everything you love, starting with the webgoblin . . . with all the webgoblins.” I must have flinched then, for the hint of a smile returned to Lachesis’s lips. “Your revelation of free will in your AI allies forced us to rethink many things about our operations. One of those was our dependency on artificial intelligence with its too-clear echoes of our earlier dependency on the equally unreliable spinnerettes. We are now ready to move away from webtroll-centered control of the mweb. The transition has already begun. It’s entirely up to you whether it will be as bloody as our move away from the spinnerettes was. Think on it.” She turned on her heel and walked away without another word. When she was safely out of sight, I collapsed back into Zeus’s chair and tried very hard not to pass out. Thalia produced a glass of orange juice from thin air and insisted I drink it.

“I like that,” grumbled Melchior.

“What?” I asked.

“
Your
revelation of AI free will. My one true claim to fame, and it gets laid at your doorstep by every single member of the pantheon every time.”

By which I took it that Melchior was going to forgive me for playing dangerous games with his life thread. Good enough. We could sort out the details later when I was stronger and could do something about the mess. I finished my juice, laid my head back, and went instantly to sleep.

The gardens Demeter built for Persephone over the thousands of years of her daughter’s imprisonment are nearly as large as the city of Olympus and far more diverse. More than a hundred cultures are represented, with plants from every part of the Earth arranged in every sort of way from pleasure gardens that could have come straight from Versailles or the Forbidden City to the small personal sorts of gardens you might expect behind an English cottage or American bungalow. Nor are the gardens exclusively decorative.

In my slow walks over the previous few days, I’d seen a good many working gardens with crops as diverse as taro, coffee, and corn, making for a food-centered counterpoint to all the roses and chrysanthemums. It was exactly what I needed while I healed. That and the period of prolonged rest that the combined insistence of Melchior, Persephone, and Thalia forced upon me.