Spellcrash (2 page)

“Is Ravirn always this dignified?” asked the wolf from off to my left.

“You have no idea, Fenris. You have no idea.” My webgoblin familiar, Melchior, shook his head sadly.

“Said the laptop with delusions of grandeur,” I replied. I wouldn’t trade Mel for anything, but sometimes I wondered if we shouldn’t tone the sarcasm down with his next upgrade. Yeah, that was going to happen.

I’d have defended myself further, but the incoming Fury picked that exact moment to pass through from wherever she had been before she sliced a doorway in space and time. An ice-clawed hand was the first thing that emerged, telling me that this must be the replacement for Tisiphone—whom I loved and had been forced to leave behind in the land of the Norse gods when she chose freedom in exile over servitude at home. I couldn’t blame her; she’d seen a chance to shed the mantle of a power forever and taken it. I’d probably have done the same if I’d had the opportunity.

The new Fury entered my world fully, and I let out an involuntary gasp. Like her sisters, she disdained the use of clothing, going naked before the elements. She was tall and slender, with hair and wings that seemed to have been carved from living ice. Beautiful, too, beautiful and cold and deadly. More than capable of tearing me in half if she wished it. She was also desperately familiar.

“You!” I said, in the exact same moment as she did.

“Well, dip me in garlic butter and throw me to Cerberus,” said Melchior.

“Raven,” said the Fury, and her voice dripped scorn.

“Cerice,” I replied, giving her my best court bow. “How lovely to see you again.” My ex-girlfriend Cerice had become the new Fury. Just as the ex-Fury Tisiphone had become my new and already-much-missed girlfriend. Naturally, I’d ended up close and personal with the wrong one.

She sniffed disdainfully as she alighted in front of me. In almost the same moment that her nostrils flared, her eyes narrowed. I couldn’t help but remember just how keen the Fury sense of smell was and relate that to the fact that I was barely ten minutes out of bed with Tisiphone. This was not going well, which meant I might as well up the ante. That’s how a trickster plays the game . . . whether he wants to or not.

“Oh, and you might recall that I prefer Ravirn,” I said.

“That name was taken from you by your grandmother. You remember her, right? Lachesis, the Fate who measures the threads?” Cerice’s voice sounded acid etched. “It no longer belongs to you. You are instead what my grandmother Clotho named you, the Raven, a power of chaos and a traitor to the Houses of Fate.” She picked that moment to snatch the pistol from my hand and twist it like a dishrag.

“Sounds like you two have some history.” Fenris’s tongue lolled as he gave a wolfy laugh.

Cerice turned a hard glare on him. “Who . . . or what in Necessity’s name are you?”

“I’m the big bad wolf and, unless I’m totally mistaken, you have to be Little Red Flaming Hood’s new baby sister.”

“If you’re referring to Tisiphone, you’ve hit one mark. As to the rest, I’m not impressed, Fido.” I took the ensuing glaring contest as an opportunity to slip on my remaining boot. I’d forgotten my shirt back in the Norse MythOS, so I had to slide my jacket on over bare skin. It wasn’t the most refined fashion statement in the world, but I liked it a whole lot more than the half-naked state it replaced.

“Look, Cerice, I’ve had a really shitty week. Did you have a point in coming here, or are you just out for a lark? Because if you’ve come to kill me, I wish you’d go ahead and make the attempt so we can get it over with. If you have some other purpose, say one that doesn’t involve you spitting and snarling at me, then you’re wasting both our times in a pretty boorish manner.” She spun around and stomped over to glare into my face from a distance of inches. If I’d had any sense at all, I’d probably have backed up or given some other sign of submission. But no one has
ever
accused me of having any sense. I leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose.

Ouch.

The punch took me in the solar plexus with near-surgical precision—hard enough to fold me up and leave me gasping on the ground, soft enough to inflict zero lasting harm. I was still trying to remember how to breathe when Cerice knelt and took the tip of my nose between two claws.

“Would you like a nice new nose ring, Raven? Because that could be arranged.” She released her grip and flicked the end of my nose, drawing blood. “I’m here because Shara wanted to see what had made its way into this multiverse from elsewhere. That done, I’m a free agent for the rest of the visit. If I wanted to kick the crap out of you, I could. I’m not going to do that because of what we used to mean to each other, but don’t bet on past relationships saving your skin a second time.

“I used to be Cerice,” she continued, “a wayward child of House Clotho and your onetime lover.

About a week ago, Shara offered me a new job, and everything changed. I’m a Fury now, and my temper is not something you want to trifle with. It owns me, and it doesn’t give a damn about your continued welfare. Piss me off enough, and I might kill you before I have time to change my mind. I’m going to go away now. Think about it.”

Her claws flashed out blindingly fast, slicing a line that ran from about a half inch in front of my eyes to a hairbreadth in front of my groin. Smiling grimly, she slipped through the cut she’d made into somewhere else and was gone. I’m almost certain the reason I didn’t come back with a snide remark before she departed was because I couldn’t breathe and not because she’d scared the bejeeburs out of me. Almost.

“You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” Melchior’s normally pale blue face had darkened to something in the neighborhood of indigo. “Why are you always trying to get yourself killed?”

“
I’m
not,” I said, “but the Raven might have other plans.” Melchior looked away.

One of the problems with becoming a power is the loss of some degree of autonomy. Take Cerice’s comment about her temper. Among the things she would have inherited when she became a Fury was an extra-large helping of little-f fury. In my case, becoming the Raven had amped the daylights out of all of my worst tendencies toward risk-taking and mischief-making.

Ravirn the hacker and cracker was a trickster. The Raven is a mask of
the
Trickster, one that all too often wears my face rather than the other way around.

Take my response to Cerice as Fury. The old Ravirn would probably have been appalled on her behalf and at least tried to think before speaking. The Raven? Not so much. The part of me that was the Trickster didn’t care about whatever madness had driven Shara to use her position within Necessity to offer Cerice Tisiphone’s place as a Fury. Nor about the madness that had convinced Cerice to agree. It cared about winning the conversational duel no matter how much of a callous ass that painted me.

On the lemonade-from-lemons side, the Trickster isn’t big on self-doubt, so I have trouble hanging on to morose. At least, when no one is actively shooting at me, I do. I rolled backwards and up onto my feet.

“Forget it, Mel. I’m sure life will drop a bucket of bricks on us soon enough without my help.”

“Now, that’s reassuring.” Melchior shook his head and started to pace. “Do you think she really meant that about Shara?”

“The hiring-decision thing?” I shrugged. “I don’t see how else you arrive at Cerice as Fury. We still don’t know what happened with Necessity to get us sent off to the Norse MythOS. It’s possible that was a symptom of a complete and unfixable crash, and that Shara’s running the show now.”

“Care to clue a guy in here?” Fenris asked me.

“Sure. Necessity is our version of MimirSoft—the goddess in computer shape who keeps track of the gods and all the infinite worlds of probability. Because of a couple of minor miscalculations on my part, she caught a virus that just about ate the entire multiverse.”

“To say nothing of the hardware damage your duel with Nemesis inflicted,” said Melchior.

“Well, yeah.” I looked at my feet. “There’s that, too, but that wasn’t really my fault.”

“So that mess you made with Mimir and Rune wasn’t exactly outside your normal mode of operations,” said Fenris.

“More like his specialty,” said Melchior.

The wolf whistled. “No wonder Odin wanted to get rid of you. Between that and your little self-aware laptop buddy here”—he indicated Melchior with his nose—“you’re something like the ultimate biological malware.”

I shrugged. “I prefer to think of myself as a hacker and cracker, but you might have a point there.”

“So who’s Shara?” he asked.

“That’s complex. She used to be Cerice’s webgoblin and familiar. Laptop by day, miniature purple Mae West by night, or something like that anyway. Now the part of her that’s really her is trapped inside Necessity and—if what Cerice said is true—she may be running the whole show.”

“Should I assume that’s your fault, too?” asked Fenris.

I looked away.

“Wow.”

“I hate to interrupt,” Melchior said, coming to my rescue, “but I’m thinking this might not be the safest place to hang out for any length of time. Shall we move this elsewhere?”

“Good point,” I said. “It’s always harder to hit a moving target. How about we start by introducing Brer Wolf around? I suspect that if we don’t do it now, we’re going to get way too busy with other issues.”

There were a million things I needed to be doing, starting with finding out what had happened to Necessity and how we’d ended up in the Norse MythOS, and moving right along to finding out what the hell Cerice and Shara were thinking. But just for today, I was going to play hooky from responsibility.

“Did you have anyone in mind?” asked Melchior.

I was about to answer when I felt a squeeze on my ankle. I glanced down. A severed hand clung there. Laginn.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to forget you. We’ll introduce you around, too.” Laginn used to be the hand of the Norse God of War, Tyr. That was before Fenris bit the hand off and a few hundred years of marinating in the Norse-style chaos that lives in the giant wolf’s belly gave it new life. Now,
it
is a
he
, as well as Fenris’s constant companion and occasional chew toy. They have a strange, semisymbiotic relationship. Which I suppose could be said of me and Melchior as well.

“Introduce us around?” Fenris canted his head to one side, managing to look simultaneously confused and hungry. “Why?”

“Well, I figure it’s my fault that you’re stuck here in the land of the Greek gods. That makes it my responsibility to help you get settled. You’re welcome to stay at Raven House for as long as you like, but that’s a pretty isolated corner of reality. I’m sure you’d like to make some friends beyond yours truly and find a better place to hang your”—I tried to think of a suitable substitute for
hat
—“collar?”

“I
hate
that word; you should watch . . .” The huge wolf stopped and made a series of slow turns, looking rather like a dog chasing his tail at one-tenth speed. “Gleipner really is gone, isn’t it? I don’t think I fully understood what that means until this very second.” Fenris threw his great head back and let out a howl that probably terrified everything remotely edible within a ten-mile radius. “I’m
free
!”

Then he actually did start chasing his tail. Just when that looked like it might be starting to lose its appeal, Laginn bolted past, running on tippy-fingers. Fenris leaped in pursuit, barking like a puppy the whole time.

I couldn’t help grinning as the two dodged in and out among the weird detritus that dotted the surreal landscape. The worlds out at the edge of the Greek MythOS can get very strange, and Garbage Faerie is one of the oddest I’ve ever visited.

It looks rather like what you might get if a high urban civilization turned over a hundred years of its trash and junk flow to a really twisted designer of Japanese formal gardens. Big-screen TVs lie cracked screen up, with delicate arrangements of pebbles tracing the fractures. Old train engines have been planted like the menhirs of Stonehenge, their original shapes all but obscured by the wild grape and morning glory that grow on them. It is beautiful and bizarre and I love it.

The exuberant game of chase played between a wolf roughly the size and shape of an anorexic Clydesdale and the bitten-off hand of a god made it all the stranger and more wonderful. I laughed aloud for the sheer weirdness of existence. Fenris was a power, too, or had been in his home MythOS. Here, he would be much weaker but also free. Free of the mantle of a power and free of the silver cord of Gleipner the Entangler, which had bound him for more than a thousand years. What would it be like to shake all that off?

I was feeling pretty good about that and my whole Big Fat Norse Odyssey up until Laginn leaped over the edge of the large and very fresh crater that dominated the scenery, and Fenris followed him down. That was when my smile died. The giant hole in the ground had once been a hill with a home under it, the home of a dear friend whose life had paid for the freedom of Fenris and his fellow Norse deities, a friend I had killed.

“You miss Ahllan, too, don’t you?” Melchior walked over to stand beside me.

“It’s more than that,” I said.

Melchior looked up at me, his expression shrewd. “You believe you’re responsible for her death, and you’re feeling guilty.”

“I
am
responsible for her death, Mel. I killed her as surely as if I’d put a bullet in her heart. I may have had the best motive in the world, but the details don’t change a thing.”

“Bullshit.” Melchior’s voice was flat and the coldest I’d ever heard it.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Bullshit.’” Melchior glared up at me. “That’s guilt talking, not sense. Details mean everything. Shooting someone because you don’t like the color of their jacket is senseless murder. Shooting someone who’s about to kill you is self-defense. Shooting someone as part of an honest, trial-generated execution is justice.”

“No matter how you slice it, somebody ends up dead and somebody else ends up a killer.”

“Look, I don’t know exactly what happened there at the end,” said Melchior. “But I do know you and what you’re capable of. I also know, or knew, Ahllan. She was the closest thing I have to a mother. The computer that absorbed her memories told us that Ahllan believed what you did was right. Between the two, I know enough to call bullshit on all this ‘I killed her’ angst. There was a lot more in the balance than just Ahllan’s life. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that what you did didn’t have to be done?”