Spellcrash (27 page)

Melchior whistled and looked very unhappy. “Are you sure Discord’s responsible?”

“Nearly. It was remembering this ring that gave me the final piece of the puzzle. In order to make this thing work, Discord would need a listening station shielded from the rest of the castle, and this spot fits the bill perfectly.”

Melchior looked dubious. “If that’s true, having the spinnerette lay a trap-trail that led us right through here doesn’t seem all that smart. Why would she expose herself to discovery that way?”

“Because Discord’s an arrogant bitch,” said a woman’s voice.

For one brief instant I thought it was Eris herself, arrived to make a triumphant gotcha. Then I replayed the words in my head and picked a different speaker.

“Hello, Cerice. How long have you been here?”

“I arrived with you.”

She faded into visibility then in all her icy glory. The aftereffects of Melchior’s “Redeye” spell painted a halo around her as she appeared, teaching me something new about the Furies—their magical camouflage extended beyond the range of visible light into the infrared.

“That would explain the extra effort needed to trigger the faerie ring. We had a hitchhiker.” Another thought occurred to me, and I tapped the fresh slice in the shoulder of my jacket. “You gave me this, didn’t you?”

“I did,” said Cerice. “When you started to fall, I dove after you. But then I realized Melchior had it covered and I sheered off. I’m new to flying, and one of my toe claws grazed your jacket.”

“And when that gazing-ball thing tried to take my head off? Where were you then?”

“I calculated the impact and decided you could take the hit. I wanted to see what it would do afterward, how it would behave. I would have saved you from the next attack because I needed you, but Alecto took care of it, so I stayed hidden.”

She looked me straight in the eyes when she spoke, and there was no hint of softness there, just a whole lot of matter-of-fact and that’s-the-way-it-is, deal-with-it. My ex, the ice queen. No wonder she’d chosen it as her element when she became a Fury.

“I’d been following you ever since you first used your sword to enter Necessity yesterday,” said Cerice. “I knew you’d find the culprit eventually, and I really didn’t want to let all my efforts at remaining concealed go to waste. Now that you have, I can deal with her.” Her claws slid from their sheaths and she flexed her wings.

“Hang on there, sweetheart,” I said. “This is my discovery, not yours, and I’m still not one hundred percent sure she’s guilty.”

Discord and I were both powers of chaos, but we really didn’t think as much alike as I and the mystery cracker who’d set up shop in Necessity’s kernel seemed to. Oh, I’m sure Discord could have chosen to mimic my techniques and done it well, but that didn’t feel quite right.

I continued. “Even if I were sure Eris was responsible, I’d want to take this slowly. Because, if that’s the case, I don’t think it would have been arrogance that led her to show me this place, more like a cry for help. So I’d like to get the details nailed down before anyone starts a war, okay?”

Cerice shook her head. “I don’t think so. I only became a Fury because someone had to save the house of order from chaos and ruin. The ongoing danger to Necessity is simply too great for me to let Discord remain free just because you’re not certain she’s guilty. We can always release her later if that’s the case. No, I’m going to do what I have to here, and you can’t stop me.” She spread her wings to their fullest extent preparatory to taking off.

“I could bite her if you want,” said Fenris helpfully. “I haven’t gotten to bite anyone in days.”

“Cerice, please . . .” I raised a hand, but made no other move. She was right in one thing—I couldn’t stop her. “Eris is my friend. Don’t do this.”

Cerice sagged a little. “Ravirn, you’re asking me to choose between you and my duty to Shara.” Then her eyes changed, becoming colder and more opaque, and her back stiffened again. “No”—

her voice shifted into something that carried notes of Alecto and Megaera in it—“you’re asking a Fury to choose between herself and Necessity, between power and identity.”

“And, so long as Necessity lives, there is only one way such a choice can ever go,” said Eris from her seat beside the fire.

I should have been startled by the appearance of Discord in our midst, and even more by our sudden change of venue from the back of the sun to the main hall of what looked like a mid-nineteenth-century British hunting lodge. I wasn’t, and that was entirely because Eris didn’t want me to be. Castle Discord can assume whatever shape Eris chooses. In this case, she had decided to put us all at our ease by including a sense of been-there-all-along in her specifications for the room.

And how did I know that? I can’t really explain it beyond saying that in becoming a power of chaos, however minor, I had acquired certain insights into the workings of chaos magic. I could
feel
what Eris had done in my soul. The space soothed. It was a pretty damned spiffy piece of spellwork. Doubly so when you considered the otherwise-jarring nature of the trophies that hung on the wall. The cow kicking over a lantern on the mantelpiece was the least disturbing of the lot.

“Mrs. O’Leary’s famous beast, I presume?” I indicated the cow with my eyes.

Discord beamed. “Yes indeed.”

“Am I missing something?” asked Fenris.

“That’s the cow that started the Great Chicago Fire,” answered Melchior. “Oh, and look, the design specs for Chernobyl reactors three and four. Yay.”

“Who’s the blond bimbo?” Cerice pointed at an extraordinarily beautiful woman in a too-clingy tunic up and to the left from the cow. She was kneeling with both hands up and in front of her as though she were offering up some invisible treasure to a lover.

“Helen of Troy, though a wax model only,” replied Discord. “Sadly, she’d lost the features that made her such a treasure for my purposes by the time she died.” Again she smiled.

I felt a chill in the depths of my soul. I could see no hint of the Eris I knew and loved in her eyes or manner at the moment. This was wholly the goddess Discord, Queen of Chaos, a pole power and more than capable of seizing the throne of Necessity by violence.

Cerice saw it, too. “Do you need any more proof, Raven? Or do you still want to try to stop me?” I opened my mouth to answer but found that I didn’t know what to say.

“Cat got your tongue?” Discord asked me. “No words of defense for an old friend? No brilliant forensic computing to expose the Trojan Eris within the heart of Necessity for what it really is so that you can prove my innocence? No guesses as to what lies within that hollow imitation of Discord?”

I still couldn’t say anything, and Discord shook her head mock-sadly.

“I thought not. There’s no chance you could ever break my system anyway. It’s quite uncrackable without the proper key. No, you can’t touch me. I have no need of you, little boy.

Go away somewhere and let the baby Fury and I discuss our business in private.” Discord laughed long and hard, and I heard the sound of shattering glass in the echoes. When she was done, she smiled and settled back in her chair, her sword across her lap as though it had always been there. Cerice extended her claws and stepped forward. I couldn’t watch anymore and started to turn away. And in that exact instant, Eris winked at me. Eris. Not Discord. I realized what the wax Helen didn’t have then, and winked back in the instant before my world changed.

Wherever Cerice and Eris were, the rest of us were not. We stood waist high in a great, turning spiral nebula, a burning cluster of golden stars surrounded by the black deeps of space.

“What in Odin’s thrice-damned name is going on?” Fenris stomped over to face me, his hackles high.

The sea of stars bent and rippled around him as though he were wading through water, a picture made doubly surreal by the disembodied hand perched daintily atop his head, looking as though it had been severed midway through scratching behind his ears.

“Am I getting things wrong?” asked Fenris. “Or did your pantheon’s equivalent of Loki just ask you to save her from your ex-girlfriend, the new vengeance goddess?”

“Actually, she asked us to save her from my ex and from herself, but that’s close enough.”

“Eris being overdramatic is really what’s going on.” Melchior stood up in his bag and made a sweeping gesture. “This is the current iteration of her computer room, with every tiny star a reference point for one of her servers. If you look closely, you can see that they’re all tiny apples in Eris’s own little tribute to Eris.”

Melchior looked up at me. “So what was that last bit all about? She obviously wants us to crack the system and save her lazy butt from the whipping she’s about to get, but I can’t even see a way to interface with the thing from where I’m sitting, much less hack it. Why can’t Eris ever just go for simple, recognizable hardware configurations like a sensible person?”

“She did,” I said, because it would irritate him and because I was one step ahead of him once again. “This will be almost painfully easy to crack.”

“Okay, wise guy. Where do we start?”

“Well, first you produce the golden apple Eris gave me the last time I was here. It’s the original, by the way. Then I take it and put it in the exact center of this nebula, where it will unlock the system for us.” I stretched and rubbed my neck. “That’s where we start to have issues, because I’m pretty sure that Eris didn’t anticipate my current inability to enter the network in the normal way, and I don’t know if that’s going to cause problems.” Melchior blinked several times. “That actually makes sense. The Trojan Eris, the trophy room, all just clues.” He whistled a quick string of code and pulled the apple out of the pocket dimension he uses to park important items. “Do you suppose she was doing it that way to hide her intentions from us, or from herself?”

“More the latter than the former.” I took the apple. “This normally sits in the hand of the wax Helen of Troy.”

I examined the stem for a moment before giving it a twist and a yank to reveal the concealed networking port I’d expected. Too bad I couldn’t use it at the moment. With a sigh, I hung the apple in the air at the center of the nebula. It remained there after I took my hand away, floating about two feet off the ground.

“Same drill as Necessity?” asked Melchior. “I go in and establish a beachhead, then you cut your way through to meet me?”

“If that works. Fenris, do you want to join us? Or should I send you home?”

“Why don’t Laginn and I just wait out here? I’m no good in cyberspace, but we can protect Melchior’s physical form in case things go south.”

“Sounds good to me.” I pulled the spinnerette from the inner pocket it had retreated to after our arrival at Castle Discord. “What about you, little boots? In or out?”

“******, *’* ********** ** ******.” Then she shook her head sadly, walked back up my arm, and crawled into the depths of my jacket again.

“I wish I knew what she was saying.” Melchior looked frustrated. “I don’t know whether she’s incoherent, profound, or comic relief.”

“Could be all three,” I replied. “That’s the way it usually goes around here, isn’t it?”

“True dat.” Melchior grinned and plugged into the apple.

“Speaking of which,” I said, “sometime when we have a moment, remind me to compliment you on the absolutely insane idea of cooking up a summoning spell for Alecto and ask you what on Earth you were thinking when you did it.”

“I was thinking that we share a number of enemies with Alecto at the moment and that that could come in handy. I’ve got one for Cerice as well.” Then he was gone into laptop shape and cyberspace.

From the inside, Discord’s network currently looked like what you’d get if you ran the annual Monarch butterfly migration into an active tornado and left it there. Whirling chaos in black and orange. Well, gold rather than orange, and, if you want to be really picky about it, they all had card-suit patterning, but metaphor’s an inexact science. Or was this a simile? I can never keep the two straight because I’ve never been entirely sure it’s worth the effort. In any case, the place was a mess of titanic proportions and completely lacking in the sort of clues I normally use to make sense of a system.

So I let the winds take me and joined the butterfly dance, hoping to find patterns amidst the chaos. I figured it wouldn’t take too long since Discord and the Raven so often think in parallel tracks. The Trickster has his claws fixed firmly in both our brains by means of our guiding natures. Thank you, Necessity . . . or rather, not.

The external pressure imposed on me by the big N is one of my many beefs with her. I don’t like that becoming the Raven means that I can never be entirely certain if a decision belongs to me or if it’s the Trickster within wearing me like a mask. If the alternatives weren’t all a hell of a lot worse, I might have been inclined to walk away rather than save her butt. Well, except for the bit where I couldn’t walk away in the direction I wanted to go without first fixing the abacus network to make me an exit sign. I digress mostly because I was having major trouble getting a grip on the basics of the system. Complete failure to compute, in fact. That was when I thought of a possible alternative solution for making sense of the giant butterfly mess.

“Melchior, could you take me back into our point of entry?”

“Sure, Boss.”

He looped me in his feathery tail and carried me deep into the heart of the whirling butterflies, where a big, gleaming golden apple hung in midair. We passed through one golden wall and into an empty spherical chamber whose sloping walls acted as one-way mirrors looking out. A staircase leading up to a closed trapdoor in the ceiling showed me where Melchior had originally entered. I hadn’t stayed there long on our first pass because nothing was there but the stairs, and all the obvious action was happening beyond the window. Now I took a more careful look around. Nothing had changed except for the way I thought about things.

“The specialist has arrived,” I said in a firm, declarative tone. Nothing happened. Sigh. “Open Sesame.” Nope. “I am Raven.”
Nada.
“So much for that theory.”