Ahllan wasn't taking any chances with whatever had crashed Melchior. If the Fates had been true to form, there was a nasty pathogen of some kind in there, and anything that worked on webgoblins was probably also effective against webtrolls. The data gate swung open to let me pass, then closed behind me with a harsh clang. At times like these I wished I could put my faith in prayer. Unfortunately, I'd met Zeus. When you know a god personally, it's very hard to believe in him, especially if he's a lecherous idiot. Sure, there are other gods, but none of the ones I've talked to have struck me as particularly useful, and Necessity, the governing power of the multiverse, is too impersonal. So I sent off a vague request to the Powers and Incarnations to not let me kill myself too badly and jumped into the chute.
I went zipping down a waterslide filled with jellied light, all bright and slippery and vaguely disturbing. At the bottom, I crossed into Melchior's memory. The difference was like digital and analog. One second I was up to my neck in bright orange goo, the next I was sitting on a huge, overstuffed footstool. I was inside Melchior's head. It looked like one of those houses people tell creepy stories about. It was large, drafty, poorly lit, and full of shadows that didn't belong to anything I could see. On the plus side, that was pretty much what it looked like the last time I'd been there. On the minus side, well… it looked like it looked and felt like it felt. Also, the electricity was off.
The lights and other systems normally would have run off Melchior's internal power, which was currently out of the circuit. The only reason this little corner of cyberspace existed at the moment was that we had the power shunt sending a trickle charge into the driver for his optical storage. In theory, that meant there was no power available to either his CPU or whatever nastiness the Fates had coded into the mweb's security algorithms. I only wished I could believe it.
I headed for the basement. Like most houses, the mansion of my familiar's memory kept all the important operational bits in the darkest, dampest, least inviting place. My theory is that it's a subtle means of speeding the work of repair crews. Soonest done, soonest gone. I was on the fourth step down when I had my first encounter with whatever was wrong with Melchior. The tread made a sad little splintery sound as I put my foot on it and gave way. Kicking off with my other foot got me clear of the collapsing step, but it also put me off-balance. When the stair I jumped to also started to let go, I just curled up in a little ball and hoped.
Remarkably, that seemed to work. I ended up tumbling down a series of disintegrating steps, but each one held long enough for me to bounce to the next. I eventually came to rest at the bottom, bruised, but essentially unharmed. Dusting myself off, I turned and examined the damage. The stairs looked as though something had been gnawing on them. If I were a pest expert I might even have been able to hazard a guess as to what. Instead, all I could say was that it had sharp teeth. I drew my rapier.
The next bit was going to be tricky. The entrance to the equipment room was guarded by a steel vault door. Under normal circumstances, I'd have placed my hand on the palm reader and it would have opened. That wasn't going to work without power. But a small door sat just above the reader. Opening it exposed a large dial.
I stood quietly with my fingers hovering above it for several minutes while I tried to remember the combination, but the numbers just wouldn't come. In frustration I kicked the door. It rocked. Or rather, the whole structure of the doorframe rocked. Checking around the edges, I found more evidence of gnawing. Whatever had been eating the house had found its way into the equipment room. While this meant the damage was going to be worse than it would have been if the room had maintained its integrity, it also meant I was probably going to be able to get in. A small consolation, but a real one. Stepping back to get a good run at it, I charged the door.
It leaned heavily into the room, hit something, and bounced back, sending me staggering away. I was just starting to swear about that when the door tipped past its balance point and fell outward. It was six inches thick and made of hardened steel. The frame was similarly constructed, and together they must have weighed more than a ton. The noise they made when they hit the floor was spectacular. Dust shot up at the impact, cracks spiderwebbed the concrete, and a cascade of what looked like huge fuzzy June bugs followed the door into the hall.
Most of them were inert, robbed of motion by Melchior's loss of power, but a few had managed to link themselves to the power shunt. They were sickly and torpid, unable to fly, because of the weakness of the charge, but there were thousands of them, and it wasn't always easy to tell the live ones from the dead ones. For ten or fifteen minutes, I danced around the dark basement trying to skewer them all with my rapier, while they tried to take thousands of very small bites out of my hide. It was beginning to look like I might have played my last video game. In the end, however, the low-power environment saved my neck, and I got off with only minor bleeding. I didn't want to think about what they would have been like if I'd had to deal with them awake and lively. An image of fuzzy, flying piranhas came to mind.
Walking across drifts of little bodies to get into the equipment room had to qualify as one of the most disturbing events of my life. I knew that if I lived to be a thousand, my dreams would always be haunted by the crunch of little carapaces cracking, and the squishy feeling as their insides made a break for it.
The bodies were thigh deep in the room beyond, and a few of them still had some life left, but it was more an irritation than a real obstacle. The equipment room was dominated by a huge antique furnace that looked something like a giant squid developing a close personal relationship with a '72 Dodge Dart. There was also a big old junction box, a decrepit hot water heater, and a cluster of pipes experimenting with non-Euclidean geometry. In the center of the area was a large, stainless-steel rack packed with bright shiny computer equipment. It seemed terribly out of place, which was a bizarre thought when you considered that the entire structure was actually a sort of tangible metaphor for the interior architecture of a very modern laptop.
But then, both computers and sorcery have always attracted an odd catalog of practitioners. Taking a seat in front of the central monitor, I pulled out the keyboard tray. Since this was the core processor for the optical memory, it was powered up. It was also covered with something that looked like very fine pink cobwebs. Closer inspection revealed it was actually thousands of individual strands. I picked one at random and traced it from the place it was attached to the monitor out to the punctured corpse of one of my june bug things. That explained why some of them had still been working. Even as I watched, a fine thread extended from a dormant one lying near the computer rack, and started probing for something to latch on to. I brushed it aside.
Typing quickly, I pulled up a schematic of the optical memory. It appeared as a 3-D walk-through blueprint of the Victorian house I currently occupied. After activating a second monitor, I pulled a memory crystal from my pouch. This action sent a message back to Ahllan, and she responded by accessing the actual, physical crystal I'd left in her reader. It would provide me with a complete copy of Melchior's read/write memory as it had been the last time I backed him up. Sadly, I hadn't been making backups as often as I should have, and the crystal was over a month old. If I just restored from there, he was going to lose all that time.
Worse still, a backup of an autonomous webdevice like Melchior was never completely accurate. I think it's the chaos tap that powers them that's ultimately responsible. Having the stuff of randomness fed directly into their veins day and night has a warping effect. They start with all their ones and zeros in neat little rows, but over time some of those binary numbers go irrational. It's that disorder that gives them a sort of personality. Nothing can survive contact with the raw stuff of creation without changing.
There was a gentle chime from the memory processor and an almost identical blueprint came up on the second monitor. Now we would see whether I was really as good a hacker as I thought I was. The task was to compare the two schematics, f
ind where the newer one differed from the older, and decide whether the difference was due to injury or the transformations of time. I would need to carefully excise the damaged portions and slot in pieces from the older model. The nasty part would come when I hit a place where I was dealing with damage to new memory files. There I'd have to wing it.
It was hard, tedious work, and it took hours. The thorniest problem came from the fuzzy little attack vectors mweb security had sent into Melchior's system. They bred like roaches, and they were everywhere. If I missed even one, they would be back on the offensive a matter of minutes after reboot. I swept up as many as I could, using subroutines like Roto-Rooter and Spic-n-Span to clean out hard-to-reach nooks and crannies of the DASD, but I knew they wouldn't get them all. After I finished reconstruction and cleanup, I'd have to code a really serious insecticide and fog the whole place. Then, and only then, could I try rebooting Melchior.
When I started the process I'd been going on twenty very strenuous hours with no sleep, maybe more. It was hard to tell exactly, because of the seasonal and circadian shifts that went with the trip to Garbage Faerie. Also, time always gets funny whenever you pass through a gate. By the time I finished my initial cleanup and reconstruction, that number was well over thirty, and I was utterly exhausted. I staggered as I climbed the rebuilt stairs and hopped up onto the overstuffed footstool that marked my point of entry. When I arrived, Ahllan dropped a rope out of an invisible hole in the ceiling.
The ascent through the tube of jellied light took the last of my reserves, and I practically passed out when I snapped back into my body. The energy required to whistle the spell that sealed the wound left by the athame was almost the last erg I had. It took an enormous effort of will to get up and disconnect the wires from Mel. Once I had them loose, I lowered myself onto one of the couches.
"I'm just going to check out for while, Mel," I said, patting his arm. "I'll see you in the morning."
Then, because he looked so sad and alone on the table, I reached across and lifted him over to join me. Pillowing his head in the crook of my arm, I settled down. Before I knew it, I was asleep.
I'm not sure what woke me. Perhaps it was some small sound. Perhaps it was the light streaming in through the skylights. Whatever it was, it didn't bring me all the way up, and I was pretty sure I would be able to go right back down again. Frankly, nothing in the world sounded better. So, when I heard the sound of someone moving in the room, I didn't even open my eyes.
"Ahllan," I said. "Just throw a blanket over me and try to be gentle if you need to sit on me. I'm not moving ever again." It was at exactly that moment that Cerice started yelling at me.
Chapter Thirteen
"What streak of divine idiocy possessed you to do that to the Core?" shrilled Cerice. "You've betrayed the whole structure of Fate." I'd been almost completely asleep when she arrived, and the harangue was the first intimation I had of her presence.
"Cerice?" I mumbled. However much sleep I'd had, it wasn't anywhere near enough. I forced my eyes open. She was standing over me, wearing full armor, her helm tucked under one arm. "When did you get here?"
"What difference does that make?" she snapped.
"I don't know. It's the first question that popped into my head. I suppose I could have asked how you got here. Or why you're here. Or what you're here for. I already know who you are, so that's out. But of the five interrogatives, when just sort of bobbed to the top of the list." I was little punchy.
"You're absolutely impossible," she snarled.
"Really? That's one the nicest things anyone's ever said to me." She was still glaring, but it was clear she'd lost her momentum. I pressed my advantage. "If you tell me I'm incorrigible as well, I'm yours for life."
She sighed and dropped into a chair. "You are, you know."
"Ecstasy. Take me, I'm yours." I don't know what she would have said next, because the sliding metal noises of Ahllan's transformation announced the troll's return to the world of the bipedal.
"Welcome back, mein hostess," I said. Then I realized something. "Hey, you're transforming in front of Cerice. Now she's going to know you're a webtroll."
"Old news," said Cerice. "I've known for years."
"How did that happen?" I asked, sitting up and shifting Melchior onto my lap. He remained cool and still.
"Uh-uh," replied Cerice. "That's not my secret to tell. Besides, the last time we spoke the Furies were on their way to kill you, and you were rather abrupt with me. I'm not telling you another thing until you explain why you let a virus loose in the Fate Core without warning me first."
"But," I started. Then I stopped.
My normal response to harsh questions is counterattack. My verbal reflexes were telling me I should point out the issue of the webtroll again, but a very small, very quiet voice in the back of my head was saying that would be a bad idea. It was telling me that if I wanted any chance of getting back on Cerice's good side, it would be a good time for apologies and explanations and that winning an argument is not always a victory. Listening to this inner voice of sanity, I began again.
"Let me start by apologizing for anything I might have done in the Fate Core that upset you. However, I'm fairly certain that what I remember happening there, and what you're telling me happened, are two very different sets of events. Now, would you rather that I tell you what went on as it happened to me, and then you can tell me the version you heard?" I asked. "Or, should we do the reverse?"
"How about if Ravirn goes first?" asked Ahllan. "I've already heard his story, and I can get you something to eat while he talks. That way I won't miss anything."
"That sounds fantastic," I replied. "What about it, Cerice?" I asked. "I'll do whatever you want, but I'm starving."
"All right," she said. "I've already blown the version of the scene where I come storming in, tell you what I think of the awful things you've done, condemn you as a damned liar, then sweep out of your life forever. I might as well opt for creature comforts while I wait to see whether I should shoot you or not. Ahllan, would you bring some of those little biscuity things you make with the chocolate and clotted cream? I love those."
"Of course, my dear."
The troll bustled from the room. Bustling and trolls don't normally go together. They're more the stalking or lurching type, but as I've noted before, there was something distinctly grandmotherly about Ahllan. Of course, the only thing she had in common with my grandmother was the ability to strike terror into the hearts of anyone rational enough to realize what they were dealing with.
I turned back to Cerice and began my story. My explanation of my motives for entering the Core were, of course, marred by the curse, but once I got into events and away from Atropos, it subsided. Ahllan returned at about the point in the narrative where I'd sicced a pack of prehistoric carnivores on the Furies. The tray she placed on the table contained a variety of baked goods, coffee, tea, sugar, and a huge vat of clotted cream. She'd also brought a bundle containing a fresh set of tights, a tunic, and a pair of court boots I'd left behind after my earlier convalescence. She set it beside my other gear, apparently rescued from beside the faerie ring while I slept. When I finished my tale, Cerice gave me a long hard look.
"I think I begin to understand why everybody ignored Cassandra," she said, sounding exasperated. "That's nothing like what I heard. And my sources were pretty reliable. Why should I believe you?"
"Because I have a naturally trustworthy face?" I asked hopefully.
"Ha!"
"All right. I didn't think that would fly. How about because I was there, and you weren't?" I asked.
"That only works if I believe you're a reliable witness," she said.
"That's the crux of the matter, isn't it?" I sighed. "I wish I could tell for sure whether you weren't believing me because of the curse or just because of me. But I suppose it doesn't matter. Okay, let me pose a question. Whose testimony are you relying on to contradict mine? I doubt you've spoken with the Goddess of Discor
d, not that she's reliable. Also, she was only there by proxy. Laric was both reliable and present, but he's dead." I closed my eyes for a minute. I was going to have serious hysterics about that, just as soon as I could find the time. "Which, I must admit, is wholly my fault. Hwyl would rather have his tongue torn out than say a kind word about me. Dairn is likewise a partisan witness. Also, they both arrived on the scene late. Melchior is hopefully on the mend." I brushed my hand across the skin of his forehead. "But if you won't take my word, I can't imagine you'd take his."
"Actually," said Cerice. "I would take his word quite seriously if you hadn't just spent the last ten hours rewriting his memory."
"Ouch," I said. "I give up. Whose word are you taking over mine?"
Cerice turned her attention to Ahllan. "How much does he know?"
"Know about what?" I interjected.
"No," said Cerice. "As I said before, it's not my secret."
"Wait," I said. "Does this have something to do with how you knew what Atropos was up to?"
Cerice shook her head. "I can't tell you that."
"It's all right," said the troll, smiling gently. "He has all the pieces. He'll figure it out eventually."
"Don't bet any money on it," said Cerice, derisively. "It took him almost four years to figure out he had a thing for me. And the only reason he finally twigged to that was because I hit him over the head with it. Deduction isn't his long suit."
"Gosh, thanks," I said, shifting in my seat. "Now what are you talking about?"
"You're sure it's all right," Cerice asked Ahllan. The troll nodded.
Cerice stood and pulled Shara from the compartment on the back of her armor, paused for a moment, then started peeling the armor off. While she changed, so did I. Getting out of the outfit I'd spent so much of last two days in felt heavenly. Apparently, Cerice felt much the same way about shucking her armor.
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