Spellcrash (3 page)

I looked away. “I could have saved her.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

How could I explain it to him? Yes, I’d done no more than what I had to, but that didn’t make it any better. Ahllan’s life was over, and it
was
my fault.

I was still trying to figure out what to say when Fenris bounced to a stop in front of me. “I feel
better
! So, where to next?”

“I know just the place,” I said.

It was the strangest game of Risk I’d ever played. The board lay on a huge gray slab of granite.

On one side lolled Cerberus, or more accurately, Mort, Dave, and Bob, since the heads were each playing individually. Fenris sat to their left, looking rather like the world’s scariest puppy by comparison. The wolf of Asgard is the size of a draft horse and looks like he eats busloads of children as often as he can get them, but the hound of Hades is built more along the lines of what you’d get if you crossed the great-granddaddy of all bulldogs with a carnivorous elephant. Add a disembodied hand and me to the picture and place the whole thing on the banks of the Styx with the Gates of Hades in the background, and you get something that makes
Dogs Playing Poker
look downright Norman Rockwell by comparison.

“You cheat,” growled Bob, a Doberman, and my least favorite head. He’d just lost a battle for Iceland.

“How could I cheat?” replied Dave, the rottweiler middle head whom I usually partnered at bridge. “It’s luck. You roll the dice and take your lumps.”

“He’s right,” said Mort, the mastiff.

“He cheats,” said Bob.

“Are you going to keep repeating that all night long, or are you going to finish your turn and pass the dice?” asked Fenris.

The big wolf looked like he was having the time of his life, and maybe he was. I’m pretty sure that growing up in a place where everyone treated you as a monster because a prophecy said you were inevitably going to turn into one would have a distorting effect on your sense of fun. It might also turn you into a monster.

That it hadn’t spoke to the innate resiliency of . . . people? Giant wolves? Gods? Don’t get me wrong; he was still a giant, slavering deity in wolf shape, if a much less powerful one. And he was potentially capable of all sorts of harm and horror, but none of that makes him stand out particularly from the rest of the divine crowd, Norse or Greek. Take my extended family for example . . . please. There’s plenty of ripping people to pieces, involuntary transformation, and old-fashioned warmongering to go around, and none of it for particularly admirable reasons.

Speaking of that last, it was at about that point that Laginn and Mort formed a temporary alliance and drove my game armies into the sea.

After I’d boxed my pieces up, I headed down to the water’s edge, settling near where Melchior was sitting with Cerberus’s webpixie, Kira—think iPhone meets miniature goth chick, and you’ve pretty much got the right picture. In pixie shape, she’s about three inches tall, blazingly hot in a dye-job black and pancake white sort of way, and straight from the capital city of bad-attitude land. The two of them were chattering away in machine language at about seven thousand times the data-transfer rate of English, and neither looked up as I passed them.

The Styx is a looped river that surrounds Hades the place. Both lie in a gigantic cavern somewhere under the roots of Mount Olympus. The underworld gates, which lay just across the water from me, were huge iron monstrosities set in a stone arch. As usual, they stood open, offering both a threat and a promise. I felt it on an extremely personal level—Hades the god has promised me a special place within. I shivered at that thought but couldn’t look away. Just outside the gates is Hades’ main concession to modernity, a check-in line taken straight from the heart of America’s dysfunctional airport-security system, complete with a full five acts of security theater.

“Hey, Boss,” said Melchior from behind me.

“Yes?” I didn’t turn around.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his tone shifting from demanding to concerned.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re not arguing about the ‘Boss’ thing. That only happens when you’re in too much trouble to take the time, or when something’s really bothering you.”

“Would it make you feel better if I grumped at you?” I asked.

There was actually quite a lot bothering me, starting with Cerice. The more I thought about her becoming a power, the less I liked the idea.

Mel sighed. “Forget it,
Boss
. The reason I spoke up is that you’ve got an incoming visual transfer protocol request from Eris. Do you want to answer or not?”

“How’d she find out I was home so quickly?” The idea of Eris keeping a close eye on my comings and goings made me nervous. I turned around. “Initiate Vtp. Please.”

“Done.” Mel opened his eyes and mouth as wide as possible. From each came a different beam of light—red, green, and blue—meeting about a foot in front of his face and forming a golden globe with a somewhat misty miniature version of Eris standing at its center.

“Ravirn, dear child, I’d like to have a private word.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something at the moment,” I replied. The “dear child” made me
very
nervous—Discord is never sweet or gentle. “I can give you a couple of moments of Vtp time or maybe stop in a bit later in the week.”

“You make it sound like I’d made a request. Silly boy.”

Her hand suddenly shot forward out of the globe, taking on weight and substance as it grew impossibly long. Before I could do so much as yelp, she caught the collar of my jacket and jerked me forward into the globe. As I became one with the projection, I could actually feel myself shrinking and growing more diffuse. It was one of the stranger experiences of a rather strange life.

I have traveled through the chaos between worlds many times. I have done it as a string of digital code moving along the carefully guarded channels of the mweb or as a deadweight dragged by a Fury. I have gone the route of curdled probability that lies at the heart of a faerie ring, or stepped straight from point A to point B by the fixed gate of a magical portrait. I have even flown the pathless infinities on my very own Raven’s wings.

None of that felt half as strange as my current means of locomotion. It was as if I had become a field or wave function that somehow propagated itself through the stuff of chaos, an impulse encoded in the very motion of the Primal Chaos. When I arrived at the other end, I had the distinct feeling that none of the me that had started the trip had any kind of direct connection to the me that ended it. Deeply, deeply creepy.

“What the hell did you just do to me?” I demanded of Eris in the instant that my mouth reconstituted itself.

She stood atop a waist-high white marble pedestal in the shape of a fluted Ionic column at the exact center of a circular colonnade and temple. A bronze plaque on the plinth said DISCORD, in case I had any doubts. In the moment of my arrival, she wore the aspect of a white marble statue in the classical mode, complete with the traditional clingy dress and strappy sandals. She stood as still as stone, and for reasons unclear, she had on a blindfold and was holding a set of bronze scales in the mode of Justice. Well, mostly in the mode. A severed thumb firmly weighted the left side of the balance, and the blindfold didn’t fully cover her eye on that side.

Her left arm was partially hidden behind her. By stepping around to that side, I could see her hand, sans thumb, held discreetly open. A cascade of coins fell from nowhere into the hand, where they vanished.

“What do you think?” Her voice seemed to issue from the air about a foot to my left. “It’s sort of a commentary piece.”

“Subtle,” I replied. “Almost as much so as usual.”

She snorted with amusement, and the whole statue routine vanished. In its place stood Discord.

How to describe a goddess whose stock-in-trade is change? Start with her height. Without the ever-present stiletto heels, she usually stands in the neighborhood of six-five, and today was no exception. Her skin shifts from onyx black to eighteen-karat gold in the blink of an eye and back at the next blink, or occasionally between blinks—think taffeta and hallucinogens. Her hair, equal parts midnight and blond, hangs to her waist, thick and straight and silken. Her body is perfect, no matter what your definition of perfect might be—that’s part of her magic. She wants you to want her so much that you’re willing to ruin yourself chasing after her though she can never be caught—again, part of the magic.

For me, today, she wore an elegant face with high-arched brows, sharply defined cheekbones, and bee-stung lips, though that almost certainly said more about my current appetites than it did about her real appearance. The goddess dress was gone, replaced by black leather pants, tight but not obscenely so, and a thin gold turtleneck that made the pants look baggy. The sandals had become a pair of knee-high boots with delicate golden chains around the ankles.

Her eyes . . . were my own, only more so. The tumbling madness of chaos fills the eyes of Eris.

Knowing the same disturbing effect looks out at the world through the slits of my pupils is one of the things that makes meeting her gaze one of the least comfortable aspects of any encounter between us. Doubly so now that I know that Loki comes equipped with the same package. It says things about my place in the cosmic scheme that I don’t particularly like to hear.

“How’s tricks . . . ter?” she asked.

She always knows exactly what not to say. Hence, “Discord.” I sighed. She laughed and winked again.

Finally, I laughed, too. “You’re impossible, you know that, right?”

“Honey, that’s my primary job description.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What makes you think I want something?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not anywhere near as stupid as I look. So far you’ve called me ‘dear child’ and ‘honey,’ and you haven’t yet done that whole magical come-hither thing you do when you’re trying to get my goat.”

“Are you saying I’m losing my sex appeal?”

She gave me a pouting look that would have made a monk regret his vows of celibacy. It certainly redlined my libido gauge, but it did it the old-fashioned way, with moist lips and artful posture and none of Eris’s patented magic-most-sensual special effects. Once I’d put my tongue back in my mouth and my eyes back in their sockets, I was able to shake it off easily enough.

“Not in the least,” I said. “We both know exactly what I meant; it’s just that one of us is playing games. If that’s how it’s going to be, could we at least move this to a poker table. I’m used to you fleecing me at cards.”

“You’re getting harder to manipulate,” she replied. “That’s quite unfair.” As she finished the sentence I found myself seated at a round table covered in green felt. Eris sat across from me wearing the traditional green eyeshade of a house dealer and holding a deck of cards. Around us the temple had become a cross between a high-end Riviera-style casino and a thoroughly equipped video arcade. On my right, slot machines shared wall space with the latest successors to the PacMans and Galagas of my childhood. On my left, a roulette table backed against a sunken pit holding a giant-screen TV, a couple of couches, and a suite of gaming consoles. Castle Discord is an infinitely mutable Greatspell taking whatever shape Eris wants at the moment.

“What’s your game?” she asked, flicking the cards from one hand to the other in a fancy cascade.

“I think that’s my question actually, and I’m not playing anything until I know the stakes.”

“You want stakes? All right, I’ll show you.”

Eris bent the deck between index finger and thumb, then flicked the center with her middle finger so that the cards shot straight across the table at my face. One by one, in the instant before they would have hit me, they turned into butterflies, each patterned in the suit of the original card. Soon fifty-two red and black butterflies were dancing around my head.

“And every one a potential hurricane,” said Eris with a wicked smile, “but only if I weight the odds right.” She snapped her fingers, and the butterflies vanished—off to cause havoc-weather if I knew her at all. “Those are the stakes.”

“Ooh, obscure
and
portentous. What more could a guy ask for?” Now it was my turn to snap my fingers. “Oh, that’s right, specifics.”

She sighed and shook her head in the manner of a teacher with a particularly slow student. “You want to know everything?”

I nodded, and the world changed around me. I sat in a high-backed leather chair and was wearing a tweed suit. A pipe was tucked in the corner of my mouth, and a notebook rested on my knee.

Eris lay at full length on a chaise beside me, one arm thrown dramatically across her face.

“I had a very unhappy childhood, Doc,” she said. “My father was a dominating bastard who thought he should be the king of the gods. My grandfather was worse—he
ate
my aunts and uncles one by one and would have eaten my father, too, if the old man hadn’t gotten him first.

Not surprisingly, I began to act out as a teenager. Wild parties.” A ghost of a bacchanal manifested itself around us. “Skimpy clothes.” Eris’s outfit went briefly as ghostly as the bacchantes. “Attention seeking, really.” The party went away, replaced by a heavy golden apple thudding down on a long marble table. “But I was just a product of my environment.” A hundred scenes of divine Greek depravity flashed by in an instant. “My family is the very definition of dysfunction and abuse.” She caught my eyes with her own. “Or should I say
our
family, cousin mine?”

I spat out the pipe. “Is this going somewhere?”

Eris shook her head sadly and sat up. “You really ought to be able to read between the lines by now.” She touched the side of her head. “This is going to give me such a migraine, and I promise that I’m going to take it out of your hide later.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I know. I am Eris, but also Discord, both goddess and power. Straightforward hurts me when it aids order against chaos.” Her brow wrinkled in pain.

Eris snapped her fingers and produced a butterfly wearing the jack of hearts on its wings. “A storm is coming.” She let out a little gasp.