"Oh shit," said Melchior, jumping to his feet. "That's it."
"What's…" I trailed off before I really got started. I could see it too. "My grandmother already knows about Puppeteer," I whispered. "She's known about it all along."
Eris gave me an odd, almost pitying, look. "Of course she does. She couldn't help but know. The Fates, Tyche, me, we're all tuning forks for the forces involved. When the note is struck, we resonate in sympathy."
"I am so fucked," I said.
"As much as I'd like it if the singular pronoun were the correct one, Boss, I'm afraid it just isn't so," interjected Melchior. "The proper phrasing is 'We are so fucked.'"
Chapter Eighteen
I stared blankly around the open deck of Eris's tower. I was in shock. No, I'll be honest. I was beyond shock, in a special little realm reserved for those who have quietly deceived themselves about the basic nature of their existence and are suddenly faced with the truth. Denial is a great place to live, as long as nobody ever opens the windows on reality.
I had no doubt Eris would lie to me in an instant if it served her interests. For that matter, she'd probably lie to me just for fun if she thought it'd make my life a little more discordant. But this was no lie. It was certainly possible Eris could have learned about Puppeteer through some other means, but her explanation made too much sense.
What Atropos wanted to do would have profound consequences. The spell was bound to make some sort of existential noise. I'd avoided using magic after my assault on the Fate Core because I was concerned about the Fates detecting me. Why should a spell of Puppeteer's magnitude be any less obtrusive? When I looked things square in the face, I couldn't bring myself to believe my grandmother was completely unaware of Atropos's plans.
Far more disturbing was the sudden conviction that it didn't really matter one way or the other. My grandmother was a manipulator and a controller, the absolute dictator of my family. No, that wasn't nearly broad enough. My grandmother, Lachesis, was the measurer of Destiny. Every thread spun by Clotho passed though her hands to be given its allotted span before going to Atropos for the final trimming. Atropos might be the gleeful administrator of mortality, but it was Lachesis who decided who would live and who would die and on what schedule. She would no more disapprove of a spell that gave her greater authority than a penguin would disapprove of ice.
When Atropos had shown me Puppeteer and commanded me to help her, she hadn't been concerned about the other Fates finding out. She'd been concerned about them finding out too soon. She didn't want to ruin the wonderful surprise she was making.
For months, I'd been figuring that all I needed to do to get out of my personal war with Atropos was to show Puppeteer to my grandmother and prove I hadn't started things. When I hacked the Fate Core, I'd dug the hole even deeper, but I'd still believed all I really needed to do to make things better was show my grandmother the truth. It had never once occurred to me what it would mean if she already knew.
I found myself sitting on the rough timbers of the tower roof without even the vaguest memory of how I got there.
"You're telling me the truth, aren't you?" I whispered up to the goddess.
"Of course," said Eris, with a grin. "I almost never lie. Why bother when the truth is usually so much more devastating? The truly honest individual has very few friends. Like most young people, you have a certain passion for the truth. With age, however, you'll find that the occasional comforting lie or self-deception makes for a much more pleasant existence. The bleakness of truth can be very hard to face."
She shook her head, and her skin shifted from gold to black and back again as the light played over her trichromatic features. "Diogenes was a masochist. If he'd ever found his honest man, he'd have been deeply disillusioned. I imagine the first thing that honest man would have said is: 'You've spent your whole life looking for me? What an enormous waste of time. Why didn't you try making things better where you were instead of searching for a semi-mythical place where they're already perfect.' Diogenes might have had a hard time answering that question."
"Maybe," I said, "but at least he had an ideal to strive for." I was wishing right then and there for one of my own. Having one of the pillars knocked out from under your universe really makes you wish for an alternate support structure. As a dedicated cynic, I've always prided myself on building my world on the shifting sands of the actual, the real. At the moment, I was envying the bedrock foundation of belief that provided the fanatic with his unshakable sense of his own virtue.
Eris's breaking-glass laugh crackled forth again. "Priceless," she said. "Idealists are some of my favorite people. They're so committed to achieving perfection of one sort or another they'll turn down opportunities for incremental changes that go in their direction. Take democracy; I can't begin to count the number of times people have refused to vote for the lesser of two evils and ended up with the greater one in their living rooms. It's really quite delightful. I do love idealists. They make my life so much easier."
I decided I wasn't the person to try to defend ideological purity, not with my cynical side screaming that Eris was absolutely right. It isn't easy to put together a rational plan when the one you came in with has been dynamited. My original plan had called for collecting my evidence and running. Instead, I was sitting on top of the tallest tower in the Citadel of Discord without the slightest idea what was going to happen next. And, at least until Eris's spell was finished recompiling, there was nothing else for me to do but ruminate.
On the one hand, it felt wonderful actually to have a moment where I could stop and think. On the other, I had the sense that someone had just hidden the goal posts, and I was running out of time to find them before the Furies ended the game.
"Who else knows about Puppeteer?" I asked at last. "Do the Furies?" That was my biggest worry now, that they might know and be allied with Fate.
"I doubt it," replied Eris. "The effect is still a subtle one, even if it is pervasive, and the sisters of vengeance are not noted for their appreciation of fine distinctions. I once heard Tisiphone say she liked to think of subtlety as a type of large-caliber automatic weapon. Actually, Tisiphone and her sisters aren't alone on that score." She turned away from where I was sitting to look out over the battlements. "I don't know if you've read that dreadful little book by Bulfinch, but his listing of the peccadilloes of the various children of the Titans, while lacking in style, does have a rather painful degree of accuracy. As a group, the denizens of Olympus and Hades are not known for careful thinking."
"What she's saying," said Melchior, as he paced back and forth, "is that most of the deities of ancient Greece couldn't navigate their way out of an unwalled amphitheater with a map, a guidebook, and GPS."
"I think I begin to see why self-determination wasn't in your original specs, little man," said Eris, giving Melchior a penetrating look. "But you've stated the case succinctly enough. If any of my fellow gods had the wit to listen for Atropos's meddling, they might well be able to discover it. However, I doubt any of them would exert themselves on the topic. Even if they did, I wouldn't want to bet any stake I was afraid of losing that they would understand what they'd found."
"So," I said after a moment, "why don't you fit that pattern?"
Eris laughed again. "Oh, I've never been of the same mind-set as the rest of my divine cousins, which is one of the prime reasons I chose to set myself up as a nemesis to the whole idiotic lot. Also, having Atropos and her sisters to play against all these years has kept me sharp. I dislike the three of them with an intensity beyond anything you can probably imagine, but I won't lump them with the others for wit. Your grandmother in particular is a very, very sharp operator. I've never seen her do anything for fewer than three reasons. Even her most-straightforward-seeming statements and actions are carefully crafted to serve more ends than the obvious ones. All in all, a much nastier opponent than Atropos."
"What?" I asked, sitting up. I needed something to take my mind off the ticking
clock. How long was that damned recompile going to take? "You've got to be kidding. Are we talking about the same two Fates here? Lachesis may yank on the threads of destiny, but it's Atropos who cuts them short."
"That's actually part of it," said Eris. "Atropos is a very straight thinker. If she doesn't like you or what you're doing, her first impulse is to kill you outright. Only if she's blocked does she resort to anything else, and even then she'll just do her best to make you miserable."
"Isn't that enough?" I asked. "She's doing a damn fine job in my case. I don't see how anyone else could make my life any worse."
"You lack imagination, boy. I could make your life infinitely more painful if I wanted to." She smiled, almost wistfully. "But that wasn't my point. Where Atropos goes for the direct route, Lachesis is more subtle. If she were out to get you, you'd never even know it. She doesn't make people's lives into living hells, she arranges things so that they do it to themselves. Someone trying to kill you is a problem that's amenable to direct solutions. Someone who puts you in the position of wanting to kill yourself has created a situation that's far harder to deal with. I'll take the straight thinker as an enemy over the twisty one every time."
I wanted to argue on my grandmother's behalf, but found I couldn't. When I was driving cross-country with a crashed Melchior in the seat beside me, I'd begun a process of introspection. In the past few minutes I had taken another long walk down the path I'd started then. I wasn't entirely sure where the journey would lead, but it was changing the way I looked at things in a deep and fundamental way. I was coming to believe that my grandmother didn't deserve my allegiance. It was a very painful realization, and one I would rather have done without, but change is a necessary corollary of life. Either you're going somewhere or you're dead.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing I'd discovered in the hour or so since awakening in chains was that I liked Eris. Growing up as a scion of the middle house of Fate, I'd been taught that Eris, and Tyche with her, were the epitome of chaos and evil. More than once, my mother had warned me that if I didn't quit behaving in such a disobedient and willful manner, the Goddess of Discord would carry me away to be a slave in her castle.
Now, here I was, face-to-face with the great bugaboo of my childhood, and she was nothing like I'd expected.
Certainly she was frightening, but in many ways she was less scary than the matriarchs of my own family or the Furies. She possessed something the other divine figures lacked: a genuine sense of humor. It was a dark and brutal humor, but then the multiverse is a dark and brutal place. If you couldn't joke about the macabre and the bleak, you were likely to be mighty short on laughs.
Just then there came a descending whistle like incoming mortar fire. I hunched up, but there was no explosion. Instead, it ended with a sound like a soggy Ping-Pong paddle smacking a leather couch. Before I could move, I felt a sharp jab in the ribs. Eris had poked me with an amber crystal about five inches long. It was shaped like a four-sided anorexic pyramid, with a base perhaps an inch across and a tip like a blowdart. Binary code ran through it in sharp angular lines of gold.
"I'm calling it Orion," she said, handing me the spell.
"The Hunter," I replied dryly. "How original."
I held it up against the star-speckled blackness that encapsulated Castle Discord like a snow globe. For one brief moment I found myself feeling that neither side was worth fighting for, and I contemplated throwing the spell into that darkling sea and giving up on the whole thing. But that wasn't an option. Regardless of all the other issues, I was committed to opposing Atropos and Puppeteer, even to the death. More than that, though, I was committed to my friends, Melchior and Cerice, Shara and Ahllan, and that meant I had to keep moving forward.
"So, 'Once more unto the breach' dear friends,'" I whispered to myself. Then I stood up. "My lady Discord, it seems we are to be allies of a sort. That being the case, what should I call you? Eris seems too informal. And referring to you as Goddess of Discord every time I speak goes too far in the other direction."
She laughed her dissonant laugh. It was beginning to grow on me, sending a pleasant chill running down my spine. There was something appealing about it, something that went straight to the libido. It made you want to tell her jokes and… Realizing where my mind was wandering, I shook my head to clear it. She was doing it again.
"What a funny child you are," she said when she stopped laughing. "Formality is oil for the machine of social order. It smooths the way and puts people in their place. That's why your charming grandmother and her splendid sisters insist on all that bowing and courtly language. I've no use for any of it. You may call me whatever you wish. I've been known to answer to many things, most of them unprintable, and taken delight at every hurled epithet. To this day Athena still calls me 'that bitch.'" She smiled in fond remembrance. "But, if the thought of addressing me as 'hey you,' or 'demonspawn,' distresses you, call me Eris, or even simply Discord."
"I think I'll go with Discord," I replied, after a moment's thought.
She licked her lips. "Is Eris a touch too intimate?" she breathed.
It was like she'd read my mind. I reddened, and my desire meter pegged deep into the danger zone. I took a deep breath and let it out. Another. "Look, Discord, if you really want me to help with Orion, you're going to have to quit doing that."
"You'd better listen," interjected Mel, from somewhere near my knees. "The boy has focus issues. Ask anybody. He has enough trouble with walking and chewing gum, much less debugging and fantasizing. It's too much to ask."
"Oh, all right," she said. "I'll turn it down." She smiled and a twinkle appeared in her eye. "But I won't promise to keep it that way."
She let out a reverse wolf whistle. The waves of sex appeal that had been rolling off of her and slowly eroding my ability to think vanished like they'd never been. She was still stone gorgeous, but now she possessed the same statuelike quality of distance as the Fates or Furies.
"Thank you," I said, with as much sincerity as I'd ever mustered. "Now, if you can give me someplace quiet to work, I'll see what I can do."
She nodded. "Done."
That was her only move, and I started to ask where we should go. Then I realized that the air was no longer cold and flavored by the outdoors. Instead, it was warm and slightly stale. There'd been no sensation of movement and, even more amazing, no feeling of disorientation, but now we stood in the game room I'd visited earlier. It was like the trick she'd pulled when I first woke up from my little nap, not appearing so much as suddenly having been there all along.
"How do you do that?" asked Melchior. His tone clearly expressed the incredulity I felt.
"Do what?" The goddess grinned.
"Move us around like that? It's not an Up link or any other kind of transport I've ever used."
"Do you want to know the secret?" she asked.
"That's why I asked," said Melchior.
"I didn't move us at all."
"Then what did you do?" I asked.
"Nothing at all," she said.
"That's ridiculous," said Melchior. "We were standing on a windy tower top. Now we're in an interior room. One with really ugly art." He pointed at an oil-on-velvet painting of dogs playing poker.
At just that moment one of the dogs grinned and winked at me, and I realized that it was a coyote rather than the collie I had taken it for at first. I gave a start. In response, the coyote showed me its hand. Five aces. Hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds, and what looked like paw prints. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again the painting had returned to normal.
Melchior continued, "Something had to change for us to get here."
"No," said Eris. "It didn't."
"Then," I interjected, "why do we see things differently?"
"I was wondering how long it would take you to ask the right question," said Eris. "It's all a matter of perspective. Castle Discord doesn't really exist in the classical sense of the word. When I decided I needed a home other th
an Olympus, I wanted something that would suit my mood. And since my mood is notorious for being an ever-changing target, I needed something as malleable as thought itself."
"If we're going to get all existential," said Mel, "we'd better get comfortable first." He hopped up onto the card table and sat down.
I took a chair and did the same.
"Castle Discord is a state of mind," said Eris, "an island of probability floating in the ocean of chaos that separates the worlds. It's more like a suit of clothing for my mind than a building. It assumes whatever form I think it should. When I decided we were in the game room, the castle rearranged its internal reality to reflect that desire."
"But when we were wandering around earlier it seemed relatively rational in structure," I said. "Rooms seemed to be more or less the same size on the inside as the outside. Stairs led neatly from one floor to another. We were able to follow cables from point A to point B without passing through point £."
"You must possess an orderly mind," she said. "When I'm not exerting my direct will on any part of the castle, it assumes the shape of whoever is occupying that portion of it. Didn't you encounter any oddness at all?"
"It was day on the inside and night on the outside," I replied.
"Does he miss a lot of appointments?" Eris asked Melchior.
"Do satyrs chase nymphs?" replied Melchior. "Does your hard drive always crash the day before you do a major backup? Is Atropos a control freak?"
"Yes, Mel," I said. "I think we get the point. I've been known to lose track of the time on occasion. So I get distracted and go off task every once in a while. Is that a hanging offense?"
"It is for your grandmother," he replied, "and for Atropos."
"Speaking of tasks," interposed Eris.
"Right," I said. "Mel, if you'd be so kind as to switch to laptop form, I should take a look at this."
"As you wish," he replied.
He winked at me and melted. Like a plastic action figure on a griddle, the process started with his feet. Soon there was nothing left but a flat blue lump, which then reshaped itself into a streamlined clamshell. Flipping the lid, I opened his memory bay. A small but surprisingly deep drawer, it was lined with shiny black plastic. I set Orion in place and watched as the bay flowed around the crystal, conforming to its shape.
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