Spellcrash (35 page)

I took my place. “What now?”

“Now we pull the plug,” said Alecto.

“How exactly does this all work?” I asked from my station at the head of the Titan who had become Necessity.

“Just follow along,” said Megaera. “We have no time for explanations. I can feel Nemesis chipping away at the protections that keep her from owning our souls.” I moved my hands away from Themis’s face but couldn’t keep from staring into the chaos of her eyes. “You know, I’m not really good at taking orders, or trusting the word of any goddess. Not even such a paragon as yourself.”

“Boss!” said Melchior, and I couldn’t tell whether he was more worried about the general time crunch or the Fury-baiting.

Alecto reached a hand across and caught Megaera’s wrist, just above her clenched fist. “Let me.

Raven, would you let Nemesis win to satisfy your contrariness?” Then she shook her head. “Of course you would, for you are at heart a creature of chaos. Then, in brief: Necessity’s former Titan body provides the motive power for Necessity the computer. It is a living chaos tap of the highest order. The only way to cut the power off is to cut her off. When Themis became Necessity, she foresaw that a day like this might come, and she made arrangements for it. An advance directive, if you will, with us as her designated proxies.” That made sense but left a rather large question hanging. “What comes after? Once we’ve turned off the power supply for the system, how do we reboot it?”

“We will need to replace Necessity that was with Necessity that will be,” said Megaera, and her expression grew even more bitter. “A new soul must take on the burden.”

“Whose? Yours, Megaera?” Wouldn’t that be a nightmare for me? “Or Alecto’s?” Better, but still not good.

“No,” said Alecto. “Neither. For as Furies, we draw our power directly from Necessity, and a system cannot draw power from itself. It must be another Titan or one of the other great powers of the pantheon.”

“Even if that weren’t the case,” said Megaera, “the system is programmed to prevent us from seizing power. The subsystem that governs the Furies includes a piece of code embedded in the hardware that prevents any of us from taking up the mantle.”

“And how much time will we have to replace the goddess once we pull the plug?” I asked. This was starting to sound like out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“Seconds to minutes,” replied Alecto. “Which is probably more time than we have left if we don’t do this.”

“But how are we going to get a replacement here with the mweb down?” I asked. “And who will it be?”

“He is already here,” said Megaera through clenched teeth.

“He?” I glanced at the chaos in Themis’s eyes again and . . . Lightbulb!
Oh. Hell.
“You can’t mean me! I’m not a Titan . . . am I? Even if I were, aren’t I technically a Fury at the moment and so disbarred?”

There was a crash from somewhere beyond the shadow curtain, and the sound of something big approaching fast.

“You know the answer in your heart,” said Alecto. “Shara gave you the powers of a Fury,
not
the limitations.”

“Put your hands on either side of Necessity’s face, Raven,” said Megaera, though it obviously hurt her to say it. “Necessity warned us it might come to this. I believe that it is why she had Clotho rename you the Raven. You
are
the Final Titan, and this is your hour.”
Shit! Shit, shit, shit.

“Yours will be the third part,” said Alecto. “Repeat what we have said when Megaera finishes.” She took a deep breath and began to speak, tears bright on her cheeks, “Themis, I release you from your long burden. Return to chaos with the blessing of Alecto.”

“Themis,” said Megaera, her voice breaking, “I release you from your long burden. Return to chaos with the blessing of Megaera.”

Both of them turned their gaze on me, while from without the sound of approaching doom came closer.

“Boss, you don’t have to do this.”

I glanced down at Melchior and sadly shook my head. In the absolute sense, he was right. I
could
refuse and hand the multiverse over to Nemesis. I might even be able to slip free of the proximate grasp of Nemesis somehow. I was, after all the Raven, the Trickster and finder of loopholes. In my own special case, gnawing my sword-encumbered hand off might be enough to slip me out from under the Fury clause. But I could do so only by abandoning my principles and my friends. And that I
would
not do. I lifted my eyes to meet the chaos in Necessity’s.

“Themis, I release you from your long burden. Return to chaos with the blessing of the Raven.” The goddess seemed to sigh, and for the briefest moment I felt her presence looking out at me through the gates of chaos where her eyes should have been. In that very moment, the silver orb of Nemesis rocketed into the room, coming straight for my face. Necessity’s hands lifted and caught the globe easily, bringing it down to rest against her breast in the manner of a mother with her firstborn. Then her eyes closed, and she and the globe both dissolved.

First into chaos. Then into nothing at all.

And whether it was Mother Necessity taking her misbegotten daughter into the night with her, or Nemesis finally avenging herself on the mother she hated more than any other being, I will leave to some other’s judgment.

“You must take her place on the table,” said Alecto, and there was the sound of grief restrained only at great cost in her voice.

I looked at Megaera to see whether she had anything to add, but the Fury of the Sea had no more interest in the things of this world. In the moment of her mother’s passing, she had extended her own claws to their fullest and plunged them into her heart, and now she slowly slumped to the floor.

As I allowed Alecto to help me into the place where Necessity had so recently lain, I couldn’t help but think that this was one of those victories where nobody wins. Melchior might have been thinking something similar, but it was hard to tell from his hunched and turned back.

I had no words of comfort for him, so I simply said to Alecto, “What do I do now?”

“Nothing. The tomb will take care of it.” But even as she spoke, her words seemed to go all tinny and distant, and I felt my awareness being pulled down and out of my body into the world-computer that was Necessity 2.0.

Omniscience is a strange thing from the inside. So is functional omnipotence. Not at all as one imagines it before the fact. Not even one such as I who had twice experienced what it felt like to have the sum of all knowledge poured willy-nilly into his head.

I who had briefly held the power of Necessity once before, who had become Mimir in his well for a few brief moments, now experienced the incredible inrush of everything from a new perspective. For, with my merger into the computer awareness of Necessity’s world, I had been provided with the necessary capacity to make sense of what I was given.

Using the resources supplied by my new world-sized mind, I could simultaneously experience and understand a million million things:

Melchior’s grief for his best friend’s passing beyond the bounds of mortality. Alecto’s mourning for her sisters and her resolve to carry on their work no matter the personal cost. The faded echoes of the love-in-hate Themis and Nemesis had left behind with their utter destruction.

Cerice’s slow and painful dying in the temple above. Fenris, howling alone in chaos, more cut off from pack than ever before. The faint guttering light of Shara’s soul, which Themis had somehow managed to send back to her shutdown body as a parting gift, where it now desperately clung against the pull of the yawning void of Hades.

I could understand that vacuum now as well, the way Hades the place had been designed as something of a singularity for souls, a bottomless gravity well that tugged at every living thing in every second of every day. I could see Cerberus lying deep in his cave beneath the plain at the gates, and feel the terrible loneliness that was his strongest emotion—the way his mighty heart bled for the loss of Persephone, who had provided the one true spot of brightness in a bitter existence.

I could feel the shock and terror in the soul of Fate as those Wyrd Sisters felt the change of control in Necessity. Know the terrible fear in my grandmother’s heart as she realized that the grandchild whom she had cut off and ordered killed took the reins of the universe in his shaky hands. That was the beginning of action. I let the faintest hint of my bodiless laughter ring in the Temple of Fate, let the Fates know that I had matters to settle with the family who had cast me out.

It was a laugh that I visited on Hades himself in that same instant. I wanted the god who had threatened me with torment eternal to know that his future now rested in the palm of my hand.

That I had but to make a fist to crush him as he had threatened to crush me.

Athena, too, was given notice that she was not high on my list. I sent a tiny shadow of my presence to stand before her and Zeus in the high office on Mount Olympus, where they had fled to discuss the change in the winds of the world.

And yet further my awareness stretched in that timeless instant, as I came into the full power of Necessity. An image of myself visited Haemun, alone and crying in the woods below the garden of Persephone, to offer comfort.

Another I sent to the duplicate Castle Discord I now knew that Eris had created in an unmarked and cleverly hidden pocket of chaos. I had learned and become more in the split second of my full merger with Necessity than any other being now living in our MythOS could claim. I had things to say to friends and foes both, and to every one of them I sent some tiny fraction of myself. To everyone save only Persephone.

When I asked myself why that was, I learned the first limitation of Necessity. I did not know my own mind in the same way that I knew everything else. Even with all the power in the multiverse ready at my fingertips, still there were places within my own mind that I could not reach. I had come up against the limits of myself, and it was strangely comforting.

I knew only that I was not yet ready to face Persephone, and so I hid her from myself and pondered on what that meant to what I had to say and do next. I speak here in terms of sequence, of one thing coming after another and things done and left undone, but that was not how I experienced it. It all moved in simultaneity for me, but I had to put it in order to make sense of it in the way that Ravirn-that-was would have.

So let me move from this first check on my power to the beginnings of action, step from easy to difficult, simple to complex, done to wanting-doing.

Of Melchior I will speak later. For anything I chose to do for him would be bound very tightly to my own fate, and that was a thing that needed much thought. Besides, even bound as I was, I felt that I still had a trick or two left in my bag.

So, begin with Alecto, whose hurts I comforted with a cloak of love in the shape of the wishes her departed mother had left behind for and her sisters. Next, Cerice, whom I restored to life and health in the very instant she would have died—summoning her to join her elder sister and Melchior in the tomb of Necessity. My tomb. I would have things to say to her in the fullness of time.

Shara I did not save before death took her, though I did catch her soul this side of the Gates of Hades, sparing her a second trip across that dreadful threshold that my failures had sent her over once before. I would have restored her to her body as well, but found that I could not release her from the binding she had taken on for Persephone. Nothing I could do would ever free her from her forced imprisonment within Necessity three months of every year, so instead I sent her back to her place within myself. In that moment I had found a second limit on the power of Necessity.

Precedent bound me. The internal rules of the world-computer delimited even Necessity. Again, it was more relief than burden.

I moved from Shara to Fenris, opening a gate in the wall of the world and drawing him from chaos into the light of day in the Temple of Themis above. Then I healed him and summoned him to my tomb. I would have a request for him when he arrived, but did not frame it yet. I thought it would be both a burden and a joy. But more on that in the proper sequence.

Move next to the righting of many wrongs. The mweb I restored and removed fully to my control. No more would Fate be able to use its power save through the will of Necessity.

Likewise, I restored the Fate Core and Olympus .net to proper functioning. I had no need to do the same for Discord, for in the very instant that the mweb came back online, Eris herself activated the second set of servers she had hidden in her disaster recovery site, the mirrored Castle Discord.

I took a moment then to focus more of my attention on Eris, manifesting myself to Discord in the shape of Ravirn—focusing on her through the chaos-filled eyes of a shadow of my old body.

Let me tighten my focus even more now, become for a moment the old me.

“Eris,” I said, cocking her a snarky eyebrow—I was really going to enjoy the next few moments.

“Raven?” Her tone was suspicious, as was her body language. “Or Necessity? I see one and feel the other.”

I grinned in realization—the ripple of change had not yet reached this farthest corner of the multiverse. She did not know. Oh yes, this was going to be fun. “Why not both?”

“Because it seems brutally unlikely.”

“So is winning the lottery, and in this case, my dear, you just won the lottery.” Then I hit her with one brief instant of the same damn super-sex-appeal voodoo that she’d been throwing my way for years. I watched her eyes widen and her knees wobble as she fought off the urge to ravish me, and I laughed.

“You bastard!” Then she laughed as well, long and loud and full of the echoes of shattering glass. “Beautifully done, Raven, and probably much deserved, though I promise you I’ll find a way to get even with you for it nonetheless.”

“Anything else would disappoint me enormously, Eris. Necessity has been far too stodgy to date, and I intend to fix that.”

“Necessity as the ultimate power of chaos.” Eris smiled a wicked smile. “I like that. It’s exactly the sort of change I can believe in.” Then her face grew more serious. “Are you still you in there? Or is your straitjacket as tight as mine?” For a moment she was bound in the classic canvas restraint garment, its sleeves drawn cruelly tight, the word
Discord
scrawled across her chest in blood.