Spellcrash (9 page)

Unless he had some reason to run on alert mode, noises usually didn’t wake him.

“Can I get you something?” I asked. “A drink perhaps?”

“No. I don’t need anything.” She shook her head and crossed the distance between us, putting a hand to my cheek.

So close she stood, inches away. Beautiful and naked, this lover from my past, her new appearance providing a silvery shadow of my present lover, yet I felt not the slightest hint of desire. Perhaps I was finally growing up? Or perhaps there was one betrayal too many lying between us now.

I pulled away from Cerice. “That’s not the truth. If you didn’t need anything, you wouldn’t be here.”

Cerice bowed in acknowledgment, her expression wry. “A perfect bull’s-eye, sir. Shara sent me.

She wants me to bring you to her.”

“What if I’d rather not go with you?”

“She didn’t make a suggestion of it.” This time her voice came out flat and hard.

“So, because you’ve been ordered to do it, you’ll drag me kicking and screaming?”

“Only if you force me.”

I turned away and, without thinking, put my fist through the thin stone of the wall. It hurt, but I welcomed the pain, pulling my arm back to throw a second punch. Before I could do it, Cerice caught my wrist in a grip tighter than any vise, halting the motion.

“Don’t,” she said, but then released me.

“How could Shara do this to you?” I demanded. “She knows the cost of becoming a power.” No one knew it better, not even the Raven.

“Necessity drove her to it,” said Cerice. “Necessity and necessity both. The system that holds the pantheoverse together is coming apart at the seams. Shara needed a real programmer to begin to stitch up the rips. Persephone’s virus tore the hell out of Necessity; and then, just when the goddess was starting to develop some work-arounds, you and Nemesis very nearly finished her off. If Shara hadn’t made me a Fury, this MythOS would already have de-cohered. It would have split itself into a billion inchoate worlds of probability, and they would have quickly reverted to Primal Chaos, snuffing out one by one.”

“But even so . . .” I whispered, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

“But even so, she would never have made a Fury of me had I not begged her to.”

“Begged?” I didn’t want to believe that.

“Yes, begged.” Cerice looked deep into the chaos of my eyes. “Don’t tell me there isn’t enough Ravirn left within the Raven to understand. Clotho was right: I am fundamentally a creature of order, a true child of the Fates. It wasn’t lack of love that drove me away from you; it was finally understanding that any marriage between fire and water can only end in the utter destruction of one of the celebrants.”

“I—” Cerice touched a finger to my lips, a finger tipped with a needle-sharp claw.

“The Raven would have devoured Cerice, the daughter of Fate, just as Chaos would already have devoured this entire continuum of existence if I hadn’t taken up the role of the Fury and begun the repair of Necessity. You saved us all from Order absolute when you thwarted Atropos, and from ruin when you shut down Persephone’s virus and later killed Nemesis. But the Raven is a chaos bringer, and in acting you have moved the pendulum too far in the other direction. I became a Fury to save the pantheoverse from
you
, and I did it of my own free will.” She couldn’t have hurt me more if she’d sliced me wide-open. I leaned forward and tugged a feather of living ice from one of her wings.

“This is all my fault? I’m the villain? The enemy of everything? The one who drove you to embrace your own destruction as an individual? That’s just splendid! Is that why you sold me out to Zeus? And to Fate before him?”

I didn’t see her move. Didn’t even feel the impact. One instant I was snarling at Cerice. The next I was tumbling backwards across the bed, my chest hollow and sore and half-paralyzed from the impact. I hit the nightstand and shattered it, sending Melchior’s laptop shape spinning across the room. He changed form in midair and landed on all fours.

“What in Fate’s festering name is going on!” he yelped as he bounced to his feet. Then he saw Cerice and froze. “Oh. Should I assume the boss was making his usual efforts at diplomacy? Or did
you
start this particular rerun of the hostile-and-nasty hour?” I’d have replied if I could have drawn a full breath.

Cerice shrugged. “Six from column A, half a dozen from column B. Either way, it totals up to twelve. Hello, Melchior. Is he treating you as well as you deserve?” Melchior grinned. “Treating me as well as I deserve is a mathematical impossibility, but mostly he doesn’t fall any shorter than expected. What brings you to our humble abode?”

“Shara wants a few words with Ravirn.”

“And I’d like a few with her,” I said. “Unless that whole Zeus thing is freelancing on your part.” Cerice shook her head. “I don’t know what you think I’ve done, and at this point I guess I really don’t care. I just wish Shara could have sent someone else to deal with you. When I was watching you with that dress, I almost forgot how insufferable you are. Let’s just get this over with.”

She stomped over to where I lay and caught me by the collar of my robe, lifting me to my feet as easily as I might have picked up Melchior. With her other hand, she sliced a hole in the walls of reality. Before I could so much as suggest I’d like to put some real clothes on, she stuffed me through the gap into elsewhere.

Melchior followed me a moment later. We had arrived in a very familiar and very homey sort of living room where battered furniture stood against curved green walls—an exact replica of Ahllan’s old place save for one thing only. It was entirely cut off from the outside world. There was no door, and the open skylights in the low dome of the roof showed only a blank granite that had been enchanted to cast a directionless but full-spectrum light.

The walls were painted in a mottled pattern that suggested the million leaves of a northern forest in high summer. Trellises and flowering vines heightened the effect. They climbed the walls of the dome, meeting at a heavy wrought-iron chandelier in the middle and hanging down in a thick profusion of blooms. Despite its underground location, the place smelled vividly alive and vital, like a greenhouse or a walled garden.

Shara occupied a webgoblin-sized recliner at the point farthest from our entry. At least, her hardware did. As had so often been the case over the last two years, her spiritware was not currently resident. The little purple webgoblin sat perfectly still, her Mae-Westian curves looking artificial and embalmed without the animating will that should have filled her with life.

“Shara?” I said into the silence. “Are you here somewhere?” There was no answer, and it was only in that moment that I realized that Cerice had not followed us through the gateway between worlds, that it had, in fact, closed behind us. Fear of imprisonment touched me then, and I reached for the power of the Raven. When my shadow grew black wings I relaxed, letting my connection to the inner Trickster slip away, and dropped into the twin of my old favorite recliner to wait. Melchior frowned but flopped onto one of the goblin-sized chairs and settled down as well.

Less than five minutes had passed when Shara appeared in the center of the room. I flicked a glance at her still-seated hardware form. That and the faintest hint of transparency around the tips of her ears and the ends of her hair were the only clues that she was there only in projection.

“I’m sorry,” she said, before I could speak. “I wouldn’t have kept you waiting, but Cerice didn’t immediately inform me that you’d arrived.” There was more than a hint of exasperation in her tone.

“Aren’t there sensors?” Melchior waved a hand in a vague gesture that took in the room.

“All over this world and beyond,” replied Shara, “far more than a very finite me can keep track of, even with a lot of good pseudo-AI subroutines to take up some of the processing slack.”

“Beyond?” said Melchior. “That’s new, isn’t it?” Shara nodded. “That’s one of the things Cerice was able to do, get us fully reconnected to the mweb so we could start reintegrating all the worlds that got lost in the Persephone meltdown. But it’s been a seriously mixed blessing.” She snapped her fingers, summoning a projection of a chair into existence behind her, and settled into it. “With Necessity plugged back into the system, I’m even more over-stretched and overstressed. I’m just not the computer she is.” Though her projection didn’t show it, I could hear a soul-deep weariness in her tone—she was not herself.

“I’m sorry for my part in your troubles,” I said. I hated to see a dear friend suffering for things I had done. Though I would never admit it to Cerice, her comment about saving the universe from me had struck deep into the bone. “I wish that I had been wise enough to find another way.”

“Don’t.” Shara shook her head. “You did what needed doing when it needed doing and with less collateral damage than anyone had a right to expect. I’m not interested in blame at this point. All I care about is solutions to a truly epic problem. That’s why we’re having this conversation without Cerice. How two such utterly brilliant and dear people can turn into idiot five-year-olds in each other’s presence is beyond my understanding.”

“I’ll give that a big old ‘amen,’ ” said Melchior.

I held up a hand. “Can I plead guilty to the five-year-old thing and reserve the right to contest the accusation of brilliance at a later date?” I certainly didn’t feel very smart at the moment. “What exactly
is
the problem this time? My last interaction with Necessity was brief and cryptic. As was my last interaction with you.”

Shara smiled wanly. “I wish I could remember that.”

That made me sit up straight. “What do you mean? Last time I checked, you were an AI with theoretically perfect memory.”

“Only in a stable system with regular backups. Something went ‘fap’ in a major way while you were making your last visit to planet Necessity. It fried a whole lot of subsystems and erased an entire bank of storage devices, including one that held most of a day of my personal memory. I remember shutting down some of the security systems to allow you to sneak into this DecLocus, and I remember Cerice waking me up from a reboot in a complete panic about nineteen hours later but nothing in between.”

“Holy shit!” said Melchior. “What about backups and subsystems?”

“So far nothing I’ve been able to access has given me back the missing pieces. At this point, all I know is that something gorked, and you got sent off to the Norse MythOS in the gap.”

“I thought you didn’t know what the abacus network did,” I said.

“I didn’t beforehand, but in the postmortem, Fury Cerice managed to crack open a set of control systems and absolutely ancient memory files that gave me some clues. And, more recently . . .” Shara looked down at her feet.

“More recently what?” I asked.

“More recently, I was able to keep an eye on you via the spinnerette larva that got sent through after you did.” She didn’t sound very proud of herself.

“Shara!” Melchior looked genuinely shocked. “You’re the one who’s been eavesdropping on us?”

“Not exactly. It’s more that I’ve been eavesdropping on the portion of Necessity that’s been eavesdropping on you. The spinnerette was broadcasting everything she got back to a system here inside Necessity, one where nobody seems to be home but me. It’s really a mess.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know.” Shara closed her eyes and rubbed the lids with the heels of her hands.

“That’s how bad things are. The number of systems I can’t access or can only partially make sense of is longer than the list I can use effectively. More than that, though, I can’t guarantee that any command I give will stick.”

She dropped her hands to the arms of the chair like someone bracing for a blow and looked me straight in the eyes.

“I really need your help here, Ravirn. I think Necessity may be going mad.” Melchior whistled. “That’d be ugly. What’s your evidence?” I nodded. “I thought she’d mostly gone quiet after the incident with Nemesis, that she was only communicating sporadically through the spinnerettes. Has that changed?”

“Yes and no.” The projection of Shara rose and began to pace. “Messages are still sometimes coming in through spinnerette channels, but often they’re contradictory, and the goddess has completely stopped communicating with me directly. That’s not all. The reason I can’t be sure any changes I make will stick is that someone or possibly several someones keep rewriting my code.”

“Several someones?” I said.

“Yes. Let me give you an example: About three hours ago I made a repair to one of the subroutines that tracks remerges of very minor binary world splits, the sort of thing where a woman in Taipei chooses between catching a ride somewhere and walking, but nothing of moment comes of it. Maybe twenty minutes after I made the change, a much better way of programming the patch occurred to me. I went back to implement it and found the whole thing had been reverted to the damaged code I’d cleaned up in the first place.”

“Are you sure it didn’t just break again?” I asked.

“Absolutely. There were telltales in the access logs that proved the change was deliberate.” She grimaced. “It gets worse, too. When I made the new fixes, I encrypted the subsector so that no one could get at it but me. After another hour went by, and I decided to go in and do a quick check to see how things were working and to look for signs of anyone trying to revert the thing again.”

I could see where this was going, or thought I could. “Let me guess; someone cracked the encryption and reverted it again.”

“I wish it were that simple,” said Shara.

“What did happen?” asked Melchior.

“Well, the encryption
was
gone. You got that part right. But instead of reverting it, whoever cracked the system had made a significant upgrade to my code—something that did everything my repair had done but did it better and cleaner. They also added a string that would automatically send an alert if anyone changed anything.”

“Send an alert where?” I felt simultaneously fascinated and alarmed.

“I don’t know. I made a change just to trigger the alert so I could backtrack it. But when I tried to follow the thing, I hit some sort of weird internal firewall or scrambling system. I was just trying to figure out how to crack that when another alert pulse came through from the original subsystem.” She dropped back into the chair and started rubbing her eyes again.