Codespell (37 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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“How about this one?” said Melchior, as we came to the first door on the stairs, three landings down from the roof.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“Are
you
feeling right, Boss?”
“I’m fine.”
He gave me a worried look, and it wasn’t until we’d gotten several floors farther down that I realized it was because he’d called me Boss again and was waiting for my response. What was up with me?
When I finally figured it out, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell Melchior. It was my nonexistent feathers acting up again. The reason it had taken me so long to recognize the feeling was that it was somehow related to the song of chaos. It wasn’t Ravirn’s skin the stuff had spoken to, it was the invisible feathers of the Raven—all fluffed up and acting like thousands of tuning forks, vibrating at the same frequency as the stuff of chaos. I’d brought the feeling through into this world without really noticing it till now.
So what were they trying to tell me? I closed my eyes and focused on the sensations flowing across my skin. There was a slight increase in the fluffiness factor down and to my left, as though chaos, or whatever else they were sensitized to, was stronger in that direction. I thought back over the other times I’d felt this way and realized that many of them had come in concert with the arrival of a spinnerette.
“Come on, Melchior.” I scooped him up. “I think we’re about to have company.”
“Oh goody,” he said. “Who, and how do you know?”
“Our friend the spinnerette.” I took a deep breath. “I can . . . feel it in my feathers.”
“If you hadn’t gotten us here after Shara’s signal zorched out, I’d figure you’ve finally lost it. As it is, I’m going to give you a chance to explain that.”
As we retraced our steps back to our point of entry, I told him everything I’d figured out to date about the feathers and their relationship to chaos and the spinnerette.
“Huh,” he said, as we reached the threshold of the trashed server room, “that’s truly bizarre.” We entered, and he glanced around. “One problem.”
“What’s that?”
He twirled a finger in the air, encompassing the room with a gesture. “No spinnerette.”
The room was empty of anything living, but I wasn’t so sure I agreed with him just yet. My ruffled plumage was telling me something very different from what I could see with my eyes. Following its pull, I crossed to the point where our own footprints appeared in the dust. The feeling grew stronger and lost its directionalism.
“It’s here, but it’s not.” I set Melchior and my new sword cane down and pawed the air with my hands, feeling the outline of the spinnerette through the feathers on my palms.
“That’s an interesting statement. Care to elaborate?”
“I can feel a presence with my feathers. It’s just a hairbreadth away.” Like the distance between reality and chaos! “That’s it! Except we don’t have a Fury, and that means no way to make a safe breach in the wall. Damn it.”
As I looked around for something to throw in my frustration, my eyes fell on my cane. My
new
cane. The one produced by chaos magic gone awry. The one with the grip in the shape of Tisiphone.
“Not really.” I bent and picked it up, noting anew the diamondlike sheen and organic lines of the figure of the Fury.
Carefully, almost reverently, I drew the shimmering blade. Then, before I could change my mind, I thrust it straight into the concrete of the floor. I felt the impact all the way up my arm and shoulder into my skull, but the blade didn’t break. In fact, it sank a good inch into the floor. I jerked it free and examined it closely. Not a scratch. No maker’s mark either, no hint that it had ever been shaped by hand. No, it looked grown. Diamond-bright and at least diamond-hard, yet organic, it very much resembled the claws of a Fury.
“Here goes nothing.” I raised the blade and drew a vertical line through the air, picturing the kind of rip the Furies made in space-time.
Nothing happened. I glared down at the sword. I was sure I’d gotten that bit right. I even had a pretty good idea of why I’d been given the sword and by whom—Necessity, or what was left of her, interfering with Melchior’s whistling. So what was I doing wrong? The claws of a Fury were a part of her, and the sword was definitely not a part of me. If I was right about this, the sword was an artifact of chaos—the stuff of creation pretending to be normal matter . . . just like I was. At least according to Eris. Maybe . . .
I switched the hilt to my left hand and very carefully drew the tip across the palm of my right as I might with an athame. Instead of blood, a thin line of chaos appeared behind the cutting edge.
“You didn’t happen to install Windows when you upgraded me, did you?” whispered Melchior when nothing more happened. “This isn’t just some kind of really spectacular crash?”
“Nope.”
I switched the hilt back to my right hand. When it touched the chaos there, I felt a shock of connection, as though I were momentarily one with the blade. Darkness edged my vision—the Raven’s shadow. I could feel that the sword and its grip were a single continuous piece of organic crystal in that brief moment while both were a part of me.
Quickly, before that connection could fade, I made a vertical slice in the air. Shocking heat traced the slice in my hand, like a hot iron cauterizing a wound. I dropped the sword in surprise, looking at my palm. The line of chaos was gone, replaced by a much bigger one hanging in the air beyond. The shadow faded.
A pair of hands reached out of chaos and pulled the rip wider, allowing the spinnerette’s broad spider-centaur body to pass through.
"******!” it said. "**’* ***** **** ****.”
“Hello to you, too.” I bent and retrieved the sword, slipping it back into its cane-sheath. “You realize I can’t understand a word you’re saying, right?”
“***!” It nodded vigorously.
“You’ve been trying to communicate with me all this time, and I’ve just been too stupid to figure it out.”
Again the nod, though less emphatic.
“Uh, Boss, would you care to let me in on this?”
“Certainly. Melchior, this is . . . call it The Left Hand of Necessity. Necessity’s hand, Melchior.”
“What!” squawked Mel, as the spinnerette bowed a greeting at him. “Wait, I thought this thing came from the Fate Core.”
The spinnerette nodded, though it looked impatient.
“I’m confused,” said Melchior. “How can it be both from Fate and Necessity? And if it really is an agent of Necessity, how come Shara didn’t warn us?”
“I only just figured it out myself. You remember Cerice saying that the Fate Core was doing things on its own, possibly even becoming self-aware?”
“Yes, and . . . ?” asked Melchior.
I continued despite the spinnerette’s increasing fidgets. “Shara said she had trouble communicating with Necessity proper, that it seemed almost like Necessity’d had a stroke? Well, depending on which parts of the brain are hit by a stroke, things can get very strange. There’s something called . . .” I snapped my fingers a couple of times trying to jar the memory loose. “Damn, Alien Hand or something like that? You’ve got an encyclopedia in there somewhere, don’t you?”
“Hang on.” Melchior’s expression went slack, and his eyes flicked back and forth as though he were reading from an invisible page. “Strokes . . . Alien . . . Got it. Apraxia and Alien Hand Syndrome. Let’s see. The phenomenon is usually brought on by damage to the corpus callosum . . . disconnecting the two hemispheres of the brain . . . so that one hand literally doesn’t know what the other is doing.”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I think Necessity’s been trying to work around the damage done by the Persephone virus by annexing space in the Fate Core, but the disconnect has kept Shara from finding out.”
“That, or Necessity just didn’t want to tell her,” said Melchior.
Just as I opened my mouth to respond, the spinnerette reached out and picked up both Melchior and me. It was gentle but firm as it tucked us under its arms and started running. It ducked through the hole in the wall, turning away from the path followed by Nemesis.
“Do you think we should argue with it?” asked Melchior.
“No. We don’t know where Nemesis went. There’s a good chance the spinnerette does, and that’s where it’s taking us.”
At the end of the hall, we passed through a door into a smallish room with a big hexagram built right into its concrete floor. As soon as we hit the center of the diagram, the spinnerette whistled a spell for activating permanent, hardwired gates, and we went zipping along a communications cable to somewhere else.
We emerged through another spellgate into a nearly identical room, but the spinnerette didn’t even slow down there, nor for several minutes and many twists after. Only when we passed through a pressure hatch to arrive in a stadium-size space filled with what looked like a complete replica of a living coral reef did it come to a halt. There, in front of a yellow trunk of pseudocoral with a big glass cat’s eye protruding from it at about chest height, it set us down.
“Now what?” I asked the spinnerette.
“******** ** * ******,” it said.
“Thanks.”
It ignored me and turned to the eye. “**** **, **** ** **** ****.” That was the last thing it said that even resembled language before speeding its syntax up into a range where it sounded like gigabyte data bursts sent over a voice line.
The eye lit up, looked at the spinnerette, turned to me, rolled down to stare at Melchior, blinked once, then shot an intense beam of white light into the air in front of us. The beam stopped about three feet from the source and formed a glowing globe with an image of Shara in the center.
“It’s about damned time,” she said.
“Good to see you, too,” replied Melchior.
“Sorry, lover, but Nemesis is on her way, and you need to do a bunch of work before she arrives. Besides, I’ve got no body to give you a proper greeting, and that makes me snippy.”
“This is all some kind of computer?” I swung my arm to take in the coral.
“Quantum organics and specially grown,” said Shara. “It’s supposed to be the successor system for the pantheo-management system—Necessity’s been moving all of her systems over from the more traditional legacy hardware. This block was going to be replacing the machines Persephone gorked. It’s got a whole new type of architecture, and if Necessity’d had it in place at that time, the virus probably would have failed. Unfortunately, it hadn’t finished growing. Your job is to set up a software port from there to here once I’ve got this place flooded again and the weednet in place.”
“Weednet?” asked Melchior.
“Seaweed as multipath network cable,” said Shara. “I’ll tell you more later if we all survive the experience. For now, memorize this.”
A series of computer and network schematics flashed in the air too fast for me to do more than get a rough gestalt of a really complex intranet work-around at the hardware level combined with some sort of insanely hacked software bug fix.
“Got it?” She looked at Melchior.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then good-bye for now.”
“Wait a second, why good-bye?” I asked.
“Because I can’t go where you need to be. If the pantheo-management servers weren’t cut off from the main system, you wouldn’t need to go to them. The Persephone virus destroyed the weednet interface, and the old-style copper connections had been long since disconnected.”
“What about Tisiphone . . . and Megaera?” I asked.
“They can take care of themselves. Now that they’re here, Necessity is communicating with them directly. I can hear echoes of it, though it’s not in a form I can understand.”
“I thought Nemesis trashed the ELF system?” I’d assumed that was why the signal went dead.
“She did, but there are in-DecLocus work-arounds.”
“******* ****.”
Shara’s projection nodded. “The spinnerette tells me Necessity’s got the Furies playing a distraction game, sort of like human targets and . . .” Her expression went abstract for a moment, indicating an inflow of data. “Sorry, but that’s all the time we have, kids.” Her eyes flicked to the spinnerette. “You, ***!”
It picked us up and bolted for the door as a gurgling noise started. By the time we reached the exit, the floor was already ankle deep in water. The spinnerette splashed as it ran. It paused only long enough to close the hatch and dog it shut. Since it had eight limbs in addition to the human ones, it didn’t even have to put us down to do it. Then, back to the gate, and poof.
This time we appeared in an area heavy with dust and lit only by dim emergency lights. The spinnerette carried us through perhaps a mile of steadily rising corridors and stairs, passing numerous closed pressure doors, eventually emerging onto the top of another island, this one dotted with olive trees. The weather was wild, with huge storm clouds chasing a gale-force wind in from our left. The spinnerette set us down and began drawing silk out and making big balls that it attached to its feet.

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