WebMage

by Kelly McCullough

  For over an hour there had been no significant change in my environment. My world was a hollow teardrop with the car at the point and the front curve denned by the small, white bubble projected from my lights. The universe ended where the headlights stopped. The only other vehicles I'd seen were in the ditch. It was late at night, I was far from any major population center, and only a madman or a fool would have been driving in that storm.

  So I was unprepared when red glowing eyes suddenly appeared in front of me. For a split second I thought the Furies had found me. Then I realized they were taillights. Before I'd really begun to react, I was almost underneath a huge plow truck. Panic took the place of thought, and I stomped on my brakes instead of pumping them. The truck vanished to the left as my car spun.

  I got lucky. Instead of sailing off the road and into a tree, the Land Cruiser did a complete 360. As the truck reappeared from the right, I gave the car a little gas and hoped for traction. The tires bit, and I suddenly lurched closer to the plow. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping, so I just twisted the wheel and aimed to miss it on the left. There was the faintest of metallic ticks, as my bumper just kissed the edge of the truck, then I was past, the truck's horn blaring behind me. A moment later, I was alone again. The only evidence the incident had even happened was the adrenaline roaring through my veins and the increased pace of my pounding heart.

  I tried to shape the encounter into a metaphor for my situation of the moment, something of the "life is like that" school, but couldn't quite make it work. That's when my sense of the absurd reasserted itself. I was pursued by Furies. Fate wanted me dead. I was driving at an insane pace through a killer storm brought down by my own magic. My best friend in the world lay on the seat next to me, possibly dying. And what was I doing? I was philosophizing and trying to play pretty word games. I laughed until I cried, and if there was something of hysteria in the mix, I think it was justified. When I was done, I felt cleansed and empty, an emptiness I embraced. It was wonderful to be able to lose myself for a while, falling into a sort of Zen state in which I both directed and became the trip I was taking. It wasn't until I actually reached the heart of Minneapolis that I returned to full awareness.

  * * * *

  When I got to the place where Pleasant Avenue dives under the Washington Avenue bridge, I turned onto the sidewalk. My plan was to drive the Land Cruiser right into the front hall of the Weisman. The less time I spent outside, the less chance there was the Furies would nail me from above. Besides, the bumper of a sport utility would make a dandy door key.

  I changed my mind when, a hundred yards short of the door, I saw a bunch of frat boys passing around a bottle of vodka. As I brought the car skidding to a halt on the icy pavement, I grabbed the bag with Melchior and hooked it over my head and shoulder with one hand. With the other I nabbed my ski poles. Leaping out of the car, I bolted toward the frat boys. Every time my right foot hit the ground I felt the shock in my knee, but for the moment it held.

  "Dude!" yelled one of them. "You left your car running."

  "Don't be a jerk," said another. "You can't park there, man. The campus cops'll be all over you."

  "What's with the costume,?" asked a third.

  "Don't worry about it boys," I said, as I got within a few feet. "I'm only an alcohol-induced hallucination, the vodka faerie. I'll just be taking the bottle I crawled out of and going." I snagged it and kept moving.

  "Whoa!" said the first. "Bad strangeness."

  "Dude!" agreed the second.

  "Hey, fucker," yelled the third. "Come back with our booze."

  But I was already past them. The glass door I'd trashed in October had since been replaced. That was good. It would have been much harder to shatter the plywood patch they'd put up after I broke the old door. I was just debating whether to stop and use the ashtray as a doorknocker again when I heard the flapping of gargantuan wings. That decided the issue. When I got within six feet of the glass, I launched myself at it, turning as I pushed off so I'd hit back first, and corking the vodka with a thumb.

  The impact wasn't bad, but skidding across the marble floor in a cascade of glass shards wasn't any good for my clothes, my back, or the slice on my ribs. It did, however, protect my knee, and I somehow managed to keep the bottle intact. As I slid to rest next to a wall, I had an excellent view of Alecto landing in front of the door and furling her midnight wings. That was more than enough to get me moving. Using my ski poles as a brace, I wrenched myself to my feet and dashed for the stairs to the surrealist exhibit. I wanted to jump down the half flight, but knew I'd total my knee. As I ran I started whistling the spell that would open an old portrait-style gate. Fortunately, it was one of the oldest, and therefore, simplest of spells. I don't think I'd have been able to manage it otherwise.

  As I approached the picture that led to Garbage Faerie, I could hear the sound of huge claws skittering on the marble behind me. I was only going to get one chance to do this right. When I was thirty feet from the painting, I threw the vodka bottle as hard as I could. It struck the top of the picture and shattered, splashing alcohol all over the canvas. At twenty feet, I finished the spell. At ten, I conjured a wisp light into existence. At five, I dived for the painting, holding the hand with the wisp out to one side. As I passed through the gateway, my hand smashed into the side of the picture, releasing the animate spark that was the will-o'-the-wisp. It hit the alcohol and ignited it, closing the gate forever with a whoosh of flame.

  Chapter Twelve

  I hit the sunlit grass on the other side in a loose collapse and rolled to a stop. My body protested this new abuse, but I ignored it. I was alive and, for the moment, free. My knee could complain all it wanted. It wasn't until I tried to stand that I realized just how close my escape had been. When I put weight on my left foot, I felt a sharp pain, and the boot didn't want to sit flat. Taking it off, I found a claw tip embedded in the reinforced track where the ski locked on. The point was driven all the way through and had just pierced my woolen outer sock. Two inches of claw base protruded from the heel. It ended in a perfectly flat surface, polished to mirror brightness where the closing gateway had severed it. Looking around in the grass, I found three matching pieces and an inch or so of thumb claw.

  I also found the severed head of an allosaur. That was when I started shaking. The Furies had been playing with me. I'd known they would, but somehow seeing the evidence was different. One of them had taken the time to toss the dinosaur head through the gate instead of grabbing me. The only reason I was still alive was that I was entertaining them. The claw tip in the boot just meant one Fury was feeling a bit more vindictive than the other two, probably Megaera. I didn't think she was going to forgive me for scraping her off the roof of my car.

  I carefully gathered up the claw bits and tossed them into the large ring made from a hundred different brands of crushed beer cans. This circle denoted the boundaries of Ahllan's faerie ring. The allosaur's head followed, though it was huge and heavy and terribly awkward. I wasn't sure whether the Furies could use any of those things to track me, but I wasn't taking any chances. The inside of the faery ring wasn't really a part of the here and now. Or rather, it was part of my current reality, but it was also part of every other place that had a ring. Anything inside it had an equal probability of being in a billion other rings in a hundred million other worlds.

  What I really wanted to do more than anything else was lie down and take a long nap. Instead, I picked up Melchior and limped to the entrance of Ahllan's subterranean home. Ahllan answered within seconds. She took one look at Melchior and gestured for me to enter.

  She led me into the front room. Like all the rooms of that subterranean house it was domed, with curving walls that merged smoothly into a rounded ceiling. The walls were painted rather than mosaic. But it was as if the painter had constantly been fooling with the mixture. Each brushstroke was subtly different from the ones around it. The colors were a hundred thousand shades of green. Entering the roo
m felt like stepping into summer in the north woods, an effect heightened by the pots Ahllan had placed all around the edges of the space, each home to a different sort of creeper.

  The vines made their way up the wall until they met in the middle and cascaded down over the heavy wrought-iron chandelier. The room smelled cool and green, like an arboretum. The fixture was totally dead, but three skylights provided enough sun for the plants.

  The furniture was low and heavy and draped with thick mosslike rugs. Ahllan led me to a slightly lopsided chair and gently pushed me down. Then she pried Melchior loose from my arms and laid him on the coffee table before ducking out of the room.

  When she returned, she carried a large tray with mugs, a teapot, and the makings for a dozen or more big sandwiches. There was a thick loaf of wheat bread, five kinds of jelly, a big crock of homemade peanut butter, another of apple butter, honey, mustard, several cheeses, cucumbers, bean sprouts, tomatoes, cold beans, hummus, and a couple of spreads I couldn't identify.

  While I worked on filling my insides, Ahllan worked on keeping them from leaking out. She peeled the shirt and rough dressing away from the slash on my ribs, cleaned the wound, and stitched me up. It hurt, but didn't stop me from eating. She also wrapped my swollen knee with a compression bandage. Finally, though I hadn't mentioned it, she had a look at the place where I'd spell-patched my arm. It was clear from her expression that she didn't think much of my technique, but she didn't say anything about it. When she finished, she settled into a chair and waited.

  "What happened?" she asked after I'd finished eating. Her voice was quiet and dusty, as if she didn't use it much, but there was a richness there, too, like the oak undertones you sometimes get in a fine wine.

  I don't know why, but I told her everything that had happened to me since the afternoon when Atropos summoned me to fix her doomsday spell. Perhaps it was the faith Melchior seemed to have in her. Whatever it was, I felt better for the telling. The Cassandra curse kicked in, but I just kept going, and Ahllan's listening expression never changed. It was cathartic. Sure, I'd related all but the most recent bits to Cerice, but that was different. There was no overlying emotional tension between the troll and me to get in the way of understanding. When I finished, she sat quietly for a long time.

  "What will you do now?" she finally asked. If she thought I'd lied to her, she showed no sign of it.

  "The first thing I have to do is fix Melchior. Once he's back on his feet, I'll need to contact Cerice and find out what happened at the Fate Core and why she's so upset. I get the feeling that some very strange things went on there after I left. Then, I still have to stop Atropos. The biggest problem I have right this minute is that I'm going to need a mainframe to work on Mel. I don't dare reboot him, which means I'm going to have to plug into his memory systems from the outside."

  "I don't have access to any serious hardware without an mweb hookup, and I don't have one of those without Melchior." I laced my hands together and placed them on top of my head. "If I have to, I can use your faerie ring to go someplace with a mainframe, but that opens up another set of bad choices. Mel claimed I was off the net here and that the Furies wouldn't be able to find me. I don't know if that's true. But if it is, then the moment I venture back out of here, I'll be on the bull's-eye again."

  I sat up straight and placed my hands on the arms of the chair. "Still, if that's the only way, then that's what I'll have to do. I owe it to Mel. I'd better do it soon, too. Atropos codes a mean virus. I don't think it can do any more damage while he's shut down, but I wouldn't swear to it."

  I pushed myself to my feet. If I was going to go, I needed to do it before I fell asleep, or I'd be out for twenty hours. It wasn't a very rational decision, but then, I wasn't very rational.

  "Thanks for the food and shelter, Ahllan, but I've got to get moving."

  "Stay," she said, gesturing for me to sit again. "You're in no shape to do anything."

  "I have to go. Mel would do the same for me."

  "You would risk so much for a webgoblin?" she asked, pointing at Melchior. "He's just a laptop. A construct and one you could easily replace, at that. Why not discard him and build another?"

  "What!" I snapped. "How could you even suggest that?"

  "He's a thing, isn't he? A made device? Why should you care if you have to junk him?"

  I felt anger shoot through me like heat lightning, filling me up and overflowing into the air around me. I grabbed the lapels of Ahllan's ragged garment, and lifted her out of her seat, pulling her face up within a few inches of mine.

  "He's my friend! One of the only ones I've got. He's saved my life at least twice. I've got to help him now."

  Ahllan nodded once. "Good," she said. "I had hoped you would feel that way. Now, if you will set me down, I will provide you with the tools you need."

  "Set you down?"

  "Please," she said, and smiled, showing a complete set of carnivore teeth.

  I suddenly realized that I was staring at a troll from within biting distance and lowered her as gently as possible to the floor.

  "I'm very sorry, Ahllan," I apologized. "I'm really worried about Mel. That's no excuse, and I won't pretend it is, but… no. No buts. I'm sorry. Please forgive me." I bowed my head.

  "Consider it forgotten, boy." She gestured toward Melchior. "Shall we get to work?"

  "I'd really love to," I said. "But haven't you been listening to me? I need a mainframe."

  "And I told you I would provide you with the necessary tools, did I not?"

  "Sure, but—" I stopped abruptly as what she said penetrated the fuzziness that seemed to surround my mind. "Are you trying to tell me that somewhere in this backwater corner of reality there's a modern mainframe? Where?"

  "You might be surprised," she said. She reached up and ran a clawed finger along a scar just below her left ear. "Let's see. There." She jabbed sharply with the claw. It slid deep into her flesh, but instead of blood, green light welled out.

  "What the hell?" I began, then realized the answer. "You're a webtroll."

  "Yes. A little antiquated perhaps, but adequate for the task at hand."

  "I don't understand. The only webtrolls I know of belong to the Fates."

  She nodded. "So did I once. To Atropos."

  "What happened?"

  "Obsolescence," said Ahllan, her rich voice suddenly flat. "She upgraded to a newer model. First she vacuumed out my memory and yanked the relay unit that let me draw power from the interworld chaos, then she tossed me on the junk heap. Only, a funny thing happened. I didn't die." She shook herself like a dog shedding water.

  "As I lay there, my systems blinking out one by one, I realized I wanted to live. Not an original idea, but very important to me. I used the last of the power in my battery backup to create a locus transfer link directly into the primal chaos. Then I stepped through."

  "You what?" I couldn't help but interrupt. "That's suicide."

  "No. It was a carefully calculated risk. The Fates use the primal chaos all the time. Life threads are spun from it. The mweb runs on it. Every aspect of magical power comes from harnessing the beast of chaos into the yoke of order."

  "Yes," I said. "I know all that. I learned it at my grandmother's knee. I also learned that it will eat you if you try to deal with it directly."

  "True for you perhaps, but not for me. Do you know how the Fates channel chaos into the mweb?"

  "Of course. They use their mainframes to control the flows and…" Then I understood. Ahllan was a mainframe. "Oh."

  "Indeed. Now, let me just get the other one."

  She poked a claw into the matching scar on the right side of her neck. A moment later her flesh began to twist and shift. It was slower than Melchior's transition, and rougher, more mechanical and jerky. I'd never seen an autonomous webdevice that transformed itself in such a primitive fashion, and I remembered the early-model webgoblin my mother had kept around for sentimental reasons. Instead of becoming a laptop, it changed into what sh
e referred to as a portable. My father always insisted that luggable was a more accurate description. When the transformation was complete, she had become a tall rectangular box studded with blinking lights. A flip-down keyboard covered a green-screen CRT. For a minute I worried about compatibility, but even as the thought went through my head, two networking cables and a power shunt lowered themselves from a small box crudely welded onto the machine's side.

  Taking a memory crystal from my bag, I popped it into a receptacle on the top of the mainframe. It was my most recent backup of Melchior's DASD, or dynamically accessed storage device, his memory. The next steps would all have been much easier if he'd crashed in laptop form, but using outside magic to shift his shape might cause further damage, so I would just have to do things the hard way. I started by plugging one of the cables into Melchior's nose. Opening his mouth as wide as it would go, I reached in and disengaged his central processor by pulling on his uvula. The power shunt slid into the depths of one pointy ear. When that was firmly in place, I reached into the interface box on the side of Ahllan's mainframe form and flipped a switch. Melchior twitched like a heart-attack victim when you hit him with the paddles, and a low hum began to emerge from the area of his belly.

  He was all prepped. It would have been nice if I could have taken a nap first, but what I'd said to Ahllan about Fate-coded viruses still held true. If I really wanted to save him, I didn't dare wait. So the remaining cable slid into the port on the athame's hilt and the slender blade slid into the palm of my hand, letting my animating will flow out of my body.

  * * * *

  The outside world vanished, and I plunged into a universe of the electronic. Ahllan's interface was odd. All of the 3-D objects were harsh-edged and translucent, with no curves. Colors were bright glowing primaries. It was like an early nineteen-eighties vision of cyberspace made real. If I hadn't been in such a hurry, it might have been fun in a weird retro sort of way. As it was, the effect was distracting. It took me a couple of minutes to orient myself properly and find the pathway to Melchior's drive system. It was a long, burnt-orange chute. A huge gate made of what looked like neon-green ice blocked it off from the main flow of Ahllan's consciousness. There was a big old biohazard symbol set over the latch of the gate.