Spellcrash (19 page)

Today, Mel and I sat in the corner of an herb garden arranged along the lines of something you might find in the backyard of a Japanese teahouse, complete with a series of interlinked koi ponds. I was sprawled in a completely out-of-place but comfortable wicker chair that Melchior had conjured up for me, while he sat goblin fashion on a low teak bench.

“Boss?” asked Melchior.

“You’re never going to stop calling me ‘Boss,’ are you?” I sighed. “Of course you aren’t. What is it, Mel?”

“Are you up to Cerice yet, or should I tell her you’re asleep?”

“Asleep.” I felt well enough to finally be getting antsy about my convalescence, but I did not want to speak with Cerice, though she was only coming in at number three or four on my list of things I’d rather not deal with, behind Necessity, Fate, and possibly Discord. “Definitely asleep.”

“You’re going to have to talk to her soon. You know that, right?” But his expression took on the abstract cast it gets when he is splitting his attention between the mweb and the workaday world—and I knew he was making my excuses. It took a long time.

Why did I have to be stuck dealing with the wrong Fury? Every time I thought of Cerice, it reminded me of how much I missed Tisiphone. In appearance, she and Cerice weren’t all that far apart, tall and thin, pale, athletic. One an ice-blonde, the other a flaming redhead. They could probably have worn each other’s clothes . . . if they wore clothes. That mirroring effect made the differences in personality and expression all the starker. Cerice, even as a Fury, tended to the composed, her face closed, her blue eyes cool, her smiles thin and infrequent. Tisiphone, on the other hand, wore her emotions openly, quick with a snarl and quicker with a grin or a laugh—the fire of her hair a perfect match for the fire in her heart. Damn it, I wanted to get out of this mess and back to her.

Just then, Melchior’s eyes came back into proper focus, and his expression went sour and pessimistic, which is to say, it returned to normal. “Cerice didn’t believe a word of it this time either. Why won’t you talk to her? I mean beyond the obvious fact that she drives you crazy?

You’ve got to be recovered enough by now to deal with the inevitable.”

“Alecto.” I named the third Fury that had been much on my mind of late.

“Gesundheit!”
said Melchior.

“Huh?”

“Exactly,” he replied. “What’s Alecto got to do with Cerice? Again, beyond the obvious Fury thing.”

“The more I think about Alecto’s suspicion that Shara’s been infected to some degree with Necessity’s madness, the more I think she might be onto something. I don’t want to talk to Cerice about it until I’ve had more time to think it over, and that puts me in a bad position.” I plucked a stem of mint and began slowly tearing the leaves apart—it smelled lovely. “I can try to lie to Cerice, but she’s always had a talent for seeing through my bullshit, and, from what I know of the Furies, that’s only going to have gotten stronger with her transformation. Even if I do manage to pull it off, that’s really just by way of creating a time bomb, since the truth’s bound to come out eventually.”

Melchior gave me a rather hard look. “Why not just
start
with the truth? I know it’s not your long suit, but crazier things have worked.”

“Three reasons. First, I don’t trust her anymore, and our little chat with Zeus only reinforces that impulse. Whether he’s lying, and she sold me out for reasons of her own, or he’s telling the truth, and she wants to remove me for my own good, doesn’t really matter. Either way, I’d prefer not to give her any openings to put me out of business. Second, I don’t know how Fury Cerice is going to react to anything she perceives as criticism of Shara. She’s never had a lot of give on that front, and now she’s added major anger-management issues and great power to an already-explosive mix.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “Finally, and this is by far the most important concern, assume for a second that there is something drastically wrong with the way Shara is thinking—let’s call it electronic paranoid schizophrenia, complete with delusions and the willingness to act on them as though they were reality. Assume further that Cerice goes straight to Shara with any speculations I make on the subject in an attempt to get Shara to cut off my access again. We know she’s trying to shut me down. What happens next? Remember that while Shara hasn’t yet chosen to exercise it, she can wield most of the power of Necessity anytime she wants to.” Melchior sagged. “That’s not a pretty picture you’re painting. Not at all.” I tossed little balls of shredded mint into the nearest pond and watched as a swarm of koi appeared to check on its edibility. “I notice you’re not trying to convince me I’m wrong, Mel.”

“I wish you’d mentioned some of this before.” Melchior slid off the bench and whistled up a tiny loaf of bread that he started feeding to the disappointed koi.

I shrugged. “That’s the first time I’ve really laid it out in a front-brain kind of way. I just haven’t had the mental energy to think about it. I take it that your lack of argument means you think I might be right.”

“It’s been known to happen. Your being right, I mean.” Quiet fell between us while Melchior continued to toss bits of bread to the fish. “I hate this,” he said, as the last strip of crust went into the water.

“Hate what, Mel?”

He turned to face me. “All of it. Every last stinking thing that’s gone wrong since your great-aunt Atropos started screwing with our lives. All this messing around with the big powers, the betrayals, the unwilling transformations, the deaths, the threats. What it’s done to you, to me, to Shara and Cerice. Lachesis turning up here with my thread in hand. It all sucks!”

“I’m sorry about Lachesis,” I said quietly. In so many ways, everything he was talking about was my fault. “And Shara, and for dragging you from one end of creation to the other and back again.”

“Don’t forget the side trip to another creation entirely,” said Melchior.

“I won’t. Not that and not Ahllan’s death. I’m especially sorry for that. You don’t have to keep at this, Mel. You know that, right?” I took a deep breath. “I won’t hold it against you if you decide you need to fold out of the game now that Lachesis has ahold of your thread.” Melchior blinked several times. “I am sometimes amazed that you can remember to breathe since you have got to be the stupidest demigod this pantheon has ever produced. You can’t seriously believe I’m going to cave in to Fate now, can you?” He shook his head mock-sadly. “It’s clearly time we busted you loose of this place, as inaction seems to exacerbate said brainpower deficit.

We’re partners, Mr. I’m-feeling-sorry-for-my-poor-little-Raven-self, and that’s not going to change this side of . . . well, this side of anything I can imagine.”

“But you just said . . .” Sometimes I didn’t understand him at all.

“I said the bad stuff sucks. It does. A lot. I needed to whine a little. That doesn’t erase the good, and we’ve done and seen a fair amount of that along the way. More importantly, I don’t think there’s been a whole lot of unnecessary badness. We really did have to stop Fate from wiping out free will. So we did, and there were consequences, like my thread falling into the hands of your once-upon-a-time-grandmother. That’s the way it works. Same story with bailing Shara out of Hades, or preventing Nemesis from restarting the Titanomachy, or even that whole mess with Odin and Loki. The answer is never ‘give up’; it’s always ‘fight harder.’” I laughed. “All right, little blue man, since you’re clearly staking a claim to be the brains of the outfit, what do we do next?”

“Tell Persephone thanks and good-bye, head back to Raven House, and get roaring drunk, then take our sorry hungover asses off to DecLocus Zero and play dodge the Furies while we try to pinpoint everything that’s wrong with Necessity and see if we can’t simultaneously wrest my thread from the hands of an unjust Fate. What do you think?”

“That sounds like a terrible plan, and I for one am fully behind it.” It sounded even worse with the cold light of morning trying to yank my brain out through my bloodshot eyeballs and a very unhappy-looking Haemun standing beside my bed. He was tapping one hoof on the floor in a staccato beat that had hammered its way into my nightmares. At least that was how I figured it.

In the dream, I’d been bound naked to a rock about seven feet to the left of the one that held Prometheus. Only instead of an eagle pecking at my liver, I’d had a small purple monkey in a golden crown who was using a stone banana to drive one bright shiny nail after another into my forehead. I’d woken up midway through number seven.

“I don’t suppose you’re here to bring me breakfast?” I asked my satyr majordomo without much hope. Talking hurt, though not as much as the hammering hoofbeats.

The satyr shook his head and kept right on tapping.

“Didn’t think so. What can I do for you, Haemun?”

“You can deal with the problem you left in my kitchen,” he snapped in a voice that struck me as about ninety decibels louder than it needed to be.

In fact, between that, the hoof thing, and an eye-gougingly bright aloha shirt patterned with hundreds of huladancing rats, each one wearing its own miniature aloha shirt in a different print,
everything
about him was too loud this morning. I suspected a deliberate tactic and responded in kind.

“Done.” I said it instantly, and quietly, entertaining vague hopes that quick agreement might make him go away and let me sleep a bit more. But he was onto my tricks.

“Good answer,” he said, and pulled the covers free of my feeble grasp, dragging them right off the bed.

While I was still gasping at the sudden chill, he stuffed my blankets into the hamper. I didn’t move, and he escalated, throwing wide the curtains and increasing the light levels from painful to unbearable. Acknowledging defeat, I grabbed my robe from the chair beside the bed and staggered off to the bathroom to drown myself. Well, run ice-cold water over my head, then drink as much of same as I could stand, but the drowning-myself option had a certain appeal—

cool and soothing and final.

After forcing down three or four aspirin and a half gallon or so of water, I headed downstairs, looking for protein and further hydration. Haemun, who had finished stripping the bed, followed me down.

As I was about to turn left toward the dining room, he bellowed, “Right,” with brain-shattering malice aforethought.

Rather than risk a repeat of Haemun’s deadly sonic attack, I took a right and headed straight for the kitchen. I didn’t know what to expect when I got there, but what I found wasn’t it.

“Where’s the problem?” I asked after my second baffled circuit around his impeccably kept kitchen.

The preponderance of bright Hawaiian prints and tikithemed cookware was a kick in the teeth to my hangover-impaired sense of aesthetics, but none of it was new.

“There,” said Haemun, pointing at a large sugar jar in the exact center of the kitchen table, its squared sides perfectly aligned with the table’s in a sign of purest obsessive-compulsive neatness.

I blinked at the jar. Brown sugar. Big deal. I still didn’t get it, unless the problem was that it was mislabeled. Though honestly, I felt that “sugar” really ought to be close enough by mythological standards. That was when the sugar moved, and not at all like sugar.

Oh, the spinnerette.

That would explain the tiny network of airholes that also spelled out
sugar
on the top of the jar. I hadn’t initially recognized them for what they were. The spinnerette pushed aside the finely shredded remnants of the tweed suit Eris had inflicted on me and peered out of the glass in my direction. Inasmuch as I could read the expression on its miniature face, it didn’t look the least bit happy.

“Sorry,” I said to Haemun. “It slipped my mind. I’ll put it in the workroom.” But when I reached for the jar, Haemun rapped my knuckles with a wooden spoon. “You’ll do no such thing. Not if I have anything to say about it. You should let it out, and apologize.” I rubbed my temples. Despite the aspirin and water, my headache was not abating. In fact, it was getting worse, an effect I attributed to my trying to make my brain do things it had no business doing in its current state, like thinking. I sat down in the nearest chair and put my head down beside the sugar jar, peering at the spinnerette from a few inches.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Haemun. I know you well enough now to assume you’ve got a point even if I can’t see it from where I’m sitting. Oh, and if you’ve got any pity in you at all, speak slowly and quietly.”

Haemun smiled at me for the first time that morning and nodded. “I can do that, but let me get you a glass of juice and start some eggs. Food will do you good.” For the next few minutes I sat there idly watching the spinnerette agitatedly jump up and down and mouth things at me. It wasn’t until the food finally appeared in front of me that I realized Haemun hadn’t actually told me anything yet, and I started to wonder about delaying tactics.

Then the rumbling in my stomach and the advent of a plateful of poached eggs served in papaya halves with an English muffin and a side of fresh pineapple convinced me to let it lie a bit longer.

But when he still hadn’t said anything by the time I’d finished eating, I knew I was going to have to push.

“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me about it, or am I supposed to simply intuit your story?” Haemun turned away from the stovetop, which he was wiping down for the fourth time, and started absently twisting the tea towel he’d been using between his hands. It was patterned with vintage surfboards on a green tie-dyed background, and very distracting to watch. Finally, he sighed and leaned back against the counter.

“It’s really all just a feeling.”

I nodded. That actually made me more inclined to listen to him carefully rather than less.

Haemun is more than just the satyr he appears to be. He is the spirit of Raven House, and as such he reflects the will of its occupants in his actions and character. Not just my will, either. When Nemesis had briefly taken the place over, Haemun’s personality and manner of dress had shifted to accommodate the needs and desires of the Goddess of Vengeance. If he had a strong feeling about any resident of the house, even one as odd as a two-inch-tall spider-centaur trapped in a magic jar, I’d be a fool to ignore it.