Spellcrash (20 page)

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, it started the night Thalia put that thing in there, even though I’d yet to see it at that point—this sense that something just wasn’t right in my kitchen, I mean. I got up twice in the night to check and see if I’d left a burner on or something like that. I couldn’t find anything wrong, though the second time I heard what I thought was a mouse. You know that nasty little chewing noise that stops every time you listen for it.”

“I’d been wondering where you got to,” Melchior broke in as he came through the doorway from the main part of the house. “What’s going on?” He hopped up into the high goblin chair that Haemun pulled over to the table for him and glanced at the jar. “Oh, hey, is this that spy Thalia and Eris caught for you?”

He sounded way too cheery to be the same goblin who’d matched me drink for drink the night before, and I gave him a suspicious look.

“How come you don’t have a hangover?”

“Oh, I did,” he said cheerily, “but I whistled it away. New spell. I’d offer to do yours for you, but the code doesn’t seem to work right on meat-people. I think I actually made Fenris worse, and that’s saying something. I’ve never seen anyone but Dionysus drink like that before. Of course, he is from a MythOS where heaven is one giant binge interspersed with bouts of head bashing, so maybe it’s in his DNA.”

“I hate you, little man,” came the now-familiar growl of our lupine houseguest as he, in turn, came through the kitchen door. “And I’ll get even with you someday. That’s a promise.” Fenris flopped in the middle of the floor and pressed his head against the cold marble while Laginn massaged the back of his neck. I instantly felt better. There’s nothing like seeing someone who’s more miserable than you are to really make you feel better about life. I gave the newcomers a quick précis of what we’d talked about already, then turned back to Haemun and waved a hand for him to continue.

“The next morning, when I came in to do up breakfast, there was a scraping noise on the table, and I noticed the little gal inside for the first time,” said Haemun. “She was sitting at the bottom of the jar shredding the edge of the tweed and generally looking miserable. Knowing what Thalia had said about her, I turned the jar around so I wouldn’t have to look at her and went to work.

But the very next time I glanced over, there she was again, pulling out threads and looking sad.

This time, though, I got the feeling she needed to tell us something important and that we really ought to listen to her. But I turned the jar around again. That went on for two days, with me feeling like it was a worse idea every time I did it.”

“Could you just have been picking up her unhappiness about getting caught?” I asked.

Haemun shook his head. “I’d have thought that myself if all I was getting was the sadness and wanting out. But that was only part of it, a part that got steadily smaller as the days went by. No, what she really wants is to have a word with us—you, really—and she thinks it’s for your own good.”

“Maybe we
should
let her out, then.” I reached for the jar.

“Hang on, Boss. We don’t know who she works for or what she can do. Letting her out seems like a really bad idea to me.” Melchior stepped from his chair to the table and bent to look at the spinnerette.

Haemun made a little humphing noise that very clearly expressed what he thought about filthy goblin feet on his nice clean table, but Melchior ignored him and walked slowly around the jar.

“Mel, she’s two inches tall; don’t you think we can handle it if she decides to go all kung fu on us?” I asked.

“I’m not worried about her breaking anybody’s head,” said Melchior. “Casting spells or escaping, on the other hand . . .”

“Let her out,” Fenris said firmly, though speaking obviously made his head hurt. “No one should be locked up on suspicion or without a chance to explain themselves. And no one should ever be caged just for what you’re worried they
might
do. That’s what Odin did to me, convicted me for offenses I hadn’t yet committed, then locked me up and threw away the key. If he’d been a human dictator, everyone would have called what he did a crime. Since he was the head of the pantheon and the leader of the ‘good guys,’ people applauded him for locking away a menace to society. But that didn’t make it right, just popular.”

Melchior stopped his circling and looked at Fenris, his expression troubled. After a moment, he turned my way. “I hate it when people make moral arguments, and I’m on the wrong side of them, but he’s right, Boss. Until we have something more solid than the implications of that video from Persephone and some suspicions, keeping her in there puts us in the wrong.” He shook his head, then grinned ruefully. “Still, you’ve gotta love living in a world where the wolf of Asgard teaches you to be a better person.”

When I popped the lid on the jar, the spinnerette leaped out onto my wrist and glared up at me.

“**’* ***** ******* ****, ** ***** ***** *****!” she chittered at me in a mode I found very familiar.

“Oh hell,” said Melchior. “That sounds an awful lot like the spinnerette that Necessity sent to ask us for help with Nemesis way back when.”

“It sure does,” I agreed, “aphasia and all. And completely unlike the one Megaera’s taking orders from. What do you want to bet that Alecto’s right about which one is the true Voice of Necessity?”

“*** * **** ** ****-****,” said the spinnerette, not very helpfully.

“Do you have any idea what she wants?” I asked.

Melchior shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t seem to have the same ability to project power as the last one, maybe because it’s still larval or something. I’ve never heard of one so small.”

“**** ** ** ** ******!” She sounded very frustrated.

“I’m sorry,” I told it. “I just don’t get it. Normally, I’d take you to Shara, but I’m more than a little bit leery of letting her know what I’m doing right now.” This not being able to trust your friends stuff really sucked. “I guess the best thing we can do is take you with us to planet Necessity and see if that triggers anything.”

“Can I join you?” asked Fenris. “I need something to distract me from my urge to commit hangover-induced suicide.”

“I don’t see why not,” I replied. “It’s not like anyone’s going to be particularly happy to see us even without a giant wolf. Of course, I don’t know where we’re going proximally yet.” Melchior snorted. “So we’re working without a plan again.”

“No plan. No net. No worries,” I said.

“I’ll make sure they put that on your gravestone,” said Melchior.

“I was thinking more in terms of engraving it on the formal House Raven coat of arms,” I replied with a grin. “In Classical Greek, of course.”

“Of course,” said Melchior. “Although I’d always imagined Latin for the house shield.

Something along the lines of Caesar’s ‘
veni, vidi, vici
.’ How
do
you say, ‘I came, I saw, I made really bad decisions’?”

“*** ** **** ***?” the spinnerette interrupted, anxiously jumping up and down on my wrist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the thing had to say, but it sure did sound emphatic.

“You bet!” I agreed just as emphatically.

We had places to go and Necessity to hack, so I transferred the tiny creature to my shoulder and reluctantly dragged myself out of my nice comfy chair—the motion only made my head want to come apart a little bit. Then I led a small parade out onto the lanai, where I’d have more room to work.

I produced Occam with an angry thought and a flourish. “Where do you want to start?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose you can work that thing like you do the faerie rings and tell it to take us where we need to go?” asked Melchior.

“Worth a try.” I reached into the chaos in my blood and through it to the sword . . . and got nowhere. “Nothing doing, Mel. Oh well. Let’s see, where to go . . .” That was when I realized a heretofore-unconsidered limitation on the power Shara had given me with Occam. Unlike the Furies, who were constantly being updated as to their position relative to everything else by Necessity’s cosmic locator system, I couldn’t create a doorway to just anywhere. I needed to have very definite knowledge about where I was going, either a point I’d been to before or something like it.

“That
does
narrow our options,” replied Melchior when I explained it to him. “But it also makes the decision easier. Why don’t we start with Crete and the abacus room? That’s the oldest part of the whole network. There are bound to be some very interesting things to see there both in terms of figuring out the underlying architecture of the system and in terms of what the abacuses are actually hooked up to.”

I frowned. “I don’t know, Mel. It’s also one of the most powerful systems in Necessity’s network, and that means it’s likely to be closely watched by all the players. I’d kind of like to take my first deep look around without having three Furies, two spinnerettes, and a giant gazing ball watching over my shoulder.”

“You could send me and Laginn through first,” said Fenris. “I’m not going to be any help with the computer wizardry, but I’m an old hand at leading grumpy gods on snipe hunts. I learned that job at Loki’s knee. Besides, it’ll give me a chance to pant out some of the leftover whiskey from last night.”

The hand bobbed its agreement, then began happily dashing back and forth between the top of Fenris’s head and the base of his tail. It was nice to see that
somebody
had enthusiasm.

“* **** **** ****!” agreed the spinnerette. At least, it
sounded
like agreement.

I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea—I don’t much like sending friends out to do dangerous jobs for me, and this had the potential to be a really nasty one—but I really couldn’t think of a better alternative, so I nodded.

“Thank you, Fenris. That’ll really help.”

The giant wolf wagged his tail very gently. “Great. Let’s do it. I just wish there was some way for me to signal you once I’ve drawn any watchers out.”

“Maybe Kira could help out there,” said Melchior. “Now that Necessity’s world is hooked up to the net again, there’s no reason she couldn’t play cosmic cell phone for the wolf here. Gods know she’s used to working with canines.”

“Sounds good; give her a call and see if she’s up for it.” An hour later, after getting the all clear from Fenris, Melchior and I
finally
popped through into the ancient cavern buried within the roots of Crete and the heart of Necessity.

It looked much as I remembered, a huge open space carved from the living rock and filled with rank after rank of giant abacuses. There were hundreds of them, each ten feet tall and strung with dozens and dozens of thick horizontal bronze wires. Heavy copper beads moved back and forth along the wires, seemingly of their own accord, calculating the relative positions of all the myriad pantheoverses at speeds well in excess of early modern computers. The smells of dust and old metal gave the air a heavy, bitter flavor.

“Are you as nervous about being back here as I am?” Melchior asked me, after we’d done nothing but stare at the abacuses for several interminable seconds.

“Hell yes. Last time we stopped in here, we got thrown clean out of our own MythOS.”

“So why are we just standing here boggling at the thing rather than doing what we need to do and beating feet?”

“**** ** ****.”

“What,
exactly
, is it that we need to do here?” I asked.

Melchior scratched his chin for a bit. “Good point. I suppose we need to poke around and see if anything tries to bite us, huh?”

“That’s pretty much SOP, little buddy. Do you want to stick together?”

“Nah, we can cover more ground and do things faster apart, and that means getting out of here sooner as well. You go right; I’ll go left; we’ll meet in the back in the middle?”

“Deal. Do you want the spinnerette, or should I take her?” She grabbed onto my ear then, hard. “*’* ******* ****
***
, ********.” , .

“I guess that answers that question,” said Melchior, and headed out.

As I made my way along the bare rock face of the outer wall, I reflected on how much easier this would be if I had any clue as to what I was looking for. I mean, I knew I wanted to find the connection that plugged the abacuses into the rest of Necessity. I just didn’t know what it might look like. This system was so old and would have had its connection upgraded so many times, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything: ley line, enchanted string, copper, fiber, magic seaweed . . .

Honestly, who knew?

Whatever it was, I didn’t see any sign of it in the first fifteen minutes. Nor the next. Or the fifteen after. When I finally met up with Melchior, he hadn’t found anything either. Why is this stuff never easy?

“So now what?” I asked Melchior.

“Aren’t you the one that’s supposed to be the demigod of hacking and cracking?” he countered.

He had a point. I reluctantly left the wall and ventured over to the nearest of the abacuses. Big, bronze, and totally opaque to my supposed computer-savant eye. I lined the abacus up with another and watched the beads slide back and forth, let the steady motion of the two primitive calculators blur together as I set my hindbrain to work on the problem. Once I’d looked at two for a while, I stepped a little farther back and widened my focus to include several more.