Codespell (15 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell
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Huh?
“What?” I asked.
“I really hate to do this,” she said, “but I have to cut this short.”
She squeezed me again—both ways—then pulled her hand free. I groaned.
“Why?”
“Alecto,” said Tisiphone. “She sensed the interference with the gate but didn’t investigate immediately because she knew I was on top of it. Then all the noise and fuss started. I imagine Megaera will be along shortly, too. That means you have to go.”
She extended an arm behind my back and made a clawing motion.
“Good-bye.” Her wings opened. “Don’t forget me.” She reached down and ran a fingertip along my zipper. “Because we’re
not
done.” She put her other hand on my chest and gently pushed. “Call me.”
I found myself standing in an mweb channel, watching as a slice in the wall in front of me healed itself.
“Oh, thank all that’s holy,” said Melchior, popping out of my pocket and assuming his full goblin size and shape. “That was the most disturbing thing I’ve ever experienced.”
I remembered then that his electronic self had been pressed between me and Tisiphone the whole time and blushed deeply. Melchior looked at me and shook his head.
“Not that, dummy, though I think it was kind of over the top for someone who still technically has a girlfriend.”
Cerice! How had I forgotten Cerice? I—
Wait a second.
“What
did
you mean?” I asked.
“Tisiphone did something very hinky with the stuff of space, time, and souls,” said Melchior.
“Wha— Oh. Shit.”
The Melchior and me that were standing in that branch of the mweb were virtual—soul constructs—linked back to our physical bodies by the mweb itself. By going into the Primal Chaos, Tisiphone had taken us out of the mweb, outside of the multiverse even. That should have broken the electronic connection between body and soul, which should have been fatal.
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“No. No, it isn’t. All the same, she did it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “What I do know is that I don’t ever want her to do it again.”
“That makes two of us,” I said. Now that I’d had time to think about it, the idea gave me the shivers.
“Three,” said a new voice, as a hand fell upon my shoulder.
I’d have jumped, but I was pretty much all startled out. Not that I could have moved. The grip on my shoulder had about as much give as Apollo’s contempt for sunblock. I found myself being turned around to face an unhappy Fury.
Megaera is shorter than her sister Tisiphone, five-nine or so and darker, with an olive complexion. Her hair, both above and below, is the green of algae, as are her eyes and the tips of her breasts. Her wings are seemingly formed of seaweed, thick and slimy like some clinging horror from the deep.
“Stay away from my sister,” she said.
“What, not even a hello?” I asked. “That’s just ru—ow!”
The fingers of her left hand, the fingers pressed so tightly into my virtual flesh, had suddenly sprouted claws.
“Did I ask your opinion of my manners?”
“No,” I said. “But—ow!”
She squeezed even harder, and the world sparkled purple at the edges.
“Did I ask your opinion at all?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“Better. Your opinion is of no interest to me whatsoever except inasmuch as it comes into alignment with my own. And my opinion is that you should stay away from my sister. ”
“Works for me,” I said. “Alecto never was my ty—”
I was pretty sure I felt the grate of claws against bone that time, but damned if I was going to squeal for her again. She stepped closer and, in a move so fast I barely saw it, wrapped her right hand around my neck.
“I could tear your throat out without half-trying,” she said. “I’d like to, like to see you and Hades have a lot of time together to discuss how he feels about you, but Tisiphone would almost certainly find out I’d done it, and she’d be mad at me. That wouldn’t serve my purpose, which is to remove you from my life and my sisters’ lives with a minimum of fuss and bother. So, what I’m going to do instead is give you this one friendly warning to go away and stay away. If you don’t follow my advice, I’ll have to live with Tisiphone getting mad at me. Do you understand?”
I didn’t answer. The claws on her right hand came out, pricking my neck.
“I said, ‘Do you understand?’ ”
I still didn’t answer. With horrifying speed, her right hand released my neck and plunged down the front of my pants. The tips of her claws just touched me, itching but not hurting.
“Last chance,” she said.
“I understand.”
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” She retracted her claws, squeezing me ever so gently. “Neither is
this
.” What had been erotic with Tisiphone was terrifying from Megaera. “I wonder why.” She laughed a cold little laugh and released me, stepping back. “Good-bye for now”—her claws flashed out between us and the world ripped—“and hopefully forever.”
She was gone. Relief flooded through me, and I dropped to my knees. Melchior put an arm around my waist.
“Can we go home now?” he asked. He sounded as wrung out as I felt.
“If, by home, you mean back to our bodies, I’m all for it. If you mean Raven House . . .”
“Yeah. I know. Hang on to me, I’ll drive.”
A few moments later, I was sitting back in my own flesh-and -blood body in Castle Discord staring at the athame sticking through my left hand. Catching it between my right thumb and forefinger, I yanked it free and set it on a handkerchief that had appeared on the desk while I was out. Blood began to drip on the floor. I sighed and whistled the seven-note spell that heals athame wounds.
In an instant the hole in my flesh closed itself, leaving behind only a faint scar. I prodded the thin white line in my palm with my pinkie—not even tender. Amazing really. Clotho coded the spell ages ago, and it’s a damn good one. It’s simple and elegant, and I haven’t the faintest idea how she managed it.
Once or twice I’ve considered playing with it to see if I could reverse engineer it, then reapply the principles to hack up a really outstanding healing program that would work on any injury, but I haven’t had the courage to actually try it yet. I’m pretty sure the spell shouldn’t work at all and that the only reason it does is that it taps deeply into both the chaos magic of our blood and the permanent enchantments built into athames. That means one mistake with the hack, and my blood could end up doing something magical and unpredictable—never a good idea.
“Are you just going to sit there and stare at your hand all day?” Melchior asked through his somewhat tinny speaker. “Someone might get the impression you’d been experimenting with pyschoreactive chemicals.”
I grinned. “ ‘Have you ever looked at your hand? I mean really looked at your hand?’ ” Then I shrugged. “Sorry, Mel. It’s just been a hell of a day.”
Now that he had my attention, he switched back to text—he doesn’t like the way he sounds as a laptop.
That it has. So, now what?
Now I call Tisiphone,
I typed.
You’re not serious.
Of course I am. We never got to talk about why I needed to get through to Necessity or what was going on with Nemesis.
That’s going to make Megaera awfully angry,
he texted.
How angry will Tisiphone be if I don’t call her?
I typed back.
She’ll think that whole seduction scene in chaos was a deception, that I was just trying to get into her pants to distract her from my business with Necessity.
She doesn’t have any pants, or hadn’t you noticed? Still, you may have a point. If you do, if it
wasn’t
just a ploy, you also have a problem. Namely, what are you going to tell Cerice?
I buried my face in my palms briefly, then went on.
I’m not sure. I felt drunk out there in the chaos, but I don’t know that that’s much of an excuse. I really wanted Tisiphone, and I don’t think that’s just because of the magical equivalent of beer goggles.
I sighed.
Ask me again later. Maybe I’ll have an answer by then.
It’s your neck.
And it still itched where Megaera’s claws had scratched me—the virtual wounds had followed me back to the real world by the magic of the athame. I scratched at the cuts. What was I doing? I didn’t know anymore what I wanted from Cerice or how to deal with her. And Tisiphone? I needed her help against Nemesis if I could get it. That was it. Uh-huh. That’s why I wanted to talk with Tisiphone before I dealt with Cerice, right? Maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d even come to believe it.
Melchior. Vtp tisiphone
@— I stopped typing.
The only address I had for her was tisiphone@necessity . . . , a fact that was disturbing in its own right—the dot-dot-dot thing that they use makes my bones itch all by itself—but at the moment it had the added problem of being attached to the incommunicado system that was the goddess Necessity. How was I supposed to get ahold of her?
You OK out there, Boss?
Yeah, but I . . . Run Melchior. Please.
“So let it be written, so let it be done,” he said as soon as he’d finished his transformation back into a webgoblin. “What’s up?”
“How exactly do we get in touch with Tisiphone now that Necessity is a black hole?” I asked.
“Good question. I suppose I could try to reproduce that thing she did when she called us on Olympus back when Necessity initially went off-line. Let me think about it.”
I nodded and waited while he stared off into space for a while. Right after the Shara virus had initially seized control of Necessity’s security systems, Tisiphone had sent us a message using something that wasn’t quite a Vtp link. She’d called to warn me that the Furies were temporarily placing themselves under the orders of the Fates and that the first thing the Fates were likely to order was my death.
After a while, Melchior finally stopped looking abstracted and nodded.
“Yeah, I think I can manage it.”
“Does that mean you figured out what she did?” I asked. “Or just that you have an alternate address?”
“Neither really. It’s more like I’ve got an idea of how to interact with the phenomena in a way that will probably get a message back to her.”
“How very authoritative.” I grinned.
He spread his arms in a “who knows” kind of way. “It’s weird stuff. The Furies do funny things with the interface between chaos and reality and the mweb.”
“Like the way they get around,” I said.
“Yeah, and look at what Tisiphone did when she rescued us from Fate security. Impossible, but here we are. I assume it has something to do with being the children of Necessity. When you’ve got the computer that runs the universe on your side, you get to cheat.”
“Root-level authority for reality.” I whistled. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before. “I could do some amazing things with that kind of access.”
Mel shuddered theatrically. “I don’t even want to think about it. Now, are you going to make the call or not?”
“Yeah. Melchior.” I waved my hands in a vaguely magical way. “Voodoo telephony. Tisiphone. Please.”
He opened his eyes and mouth wide, letting misty multicolored light pour out. It formed a rough glowing globe with a bright fiery spark at its core, rather like a lightning bug hovering in a fog. Several long seconds passed without anything else happening. No fancy three-dimensional picture. Nothing.
“Is it working?” I asked. “Do we have a connection?”
“I ’ink ’o,” said Melchior, without closing his mouth.
“Tisiphone?” I called into the fog.
No response.
“Tisiphone, are you there?”
Still nothing.
“Tisiphone, call me back when you get a chance. We need to meet.” I looked at Melchior. “Do you think she got it?”
He nodded and shrugged at the same time.
“I guess we hang up then.” I looked into the fog one more time. “Call me.” Then I made a cutting motion to Melchior. “Please.”
He closed his eyes and mouth, and the globe dissipated. “That is the strangest sensation.” Wisps of light slithered from between his lips when he spoke, like fog in photon form, and more trailed from the corners of his eyes.
“I’ll take your word for it, Mel. It doesn’t look like much fun.”
“Honestly, it’s kind of cool in an ‘it really tickles when I barf’ kind of way.” Then he shook his head. “No, that makes it sound much worse than it is, and I actually think I could kinda get to liking it.”
“Well,
that
was fascinating,” said Eris.
With the words, the room around us changed. We were no longer in a scroll-lined Alexandrian library, but rather in Eris’s game room. It was one of the most-often-repeated features of Castle Discord. Though its shape and contents changed slightly from visit to visit, there was always a big felt-covered card table, arcade-style video games, and pool or billiards.

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