WebMage

by Kelly McCullough

  "That's what I thought I said." I sat up straight. "Powers and Incarnations, I'm an idiot. You know what, Mel? You are a beautiful person."

  "Look, if you're going to drift off into insanity, could you at least do it quietly?" He turned and stared out into the darkness.

  "Don't you see it?" I asked.

  "Why do I suddenly feel like I've wandered into Waiting for Godot?" he asked. "Here we sit, two fools on a gray stage waiting for nothing. We've even got the tree."

  He didn't see where I was going. It was kind of nice to be one step ahead of somebody for a change. Still, I couldn't leave him hanging.

  "I'll make it easy for you," I said. "Ahllan and Shara are missing and presumed dead because they went into a gate that almost certainly dumped them into the Primal Chaos, right?"

  "Yep."

  "Mel, how did Ahllan survive after Atropos threw her on the junk heap?"

  "She needed energy, so she transported herself into the Primal Cha…" His face lit up like Apollo rising in the east.

  "If they're still out there, can you—" He cut me off.

  "Already on it." He hopped to his feet. "Executing Red Flag." His expression went far off and dreamy for a few seconds. "Red Flag away," he said. "Now we wait."

  I don't know if it's possible to express the way I felt then. Waiting to find out whether someone you care about is alive or dead is perhaps the most emotionally wrenching experience a person can have. In its own hellish way, it's worse than the news that someone you love has died. At least with the latter, the worst has happened and you can begin to deal with it. The uncertainty of not knowing leaves you without any landmarks. You slide endlessly up and down the ladder that leads from hope to despair. I was in the middle of a downswing when Melchior let out a whoop.

  "I've got a response from Ahllan," said Melchior, his voice crackling with excitement. "It's a message-received confirmation and a time-critical Up address."

  The news sent a momentary thrill through me. Ahllan was alive! The happiness was brief, however, and it was followed by a nasty crash. As long as the matter of Ahllan's whereabouts and status were unknown, I'd been able to focus on that. Now, with the issue at least partly resolved, my mind turned to Cerice and Shara. The image of Hwyl carrying Cerice off fixed itself firmly in my inner vision, periodically alternating with a picture of Shara with an arrow sticking out of her face.

  I barely noticed as Melchior set up an ltp link. It wasn't until he actually tugged my sleeve that I realized it was ready. That presented me with a couple of problems. First, I couldn't stand up. My bad knee wouldn't take my weight. That was relatively minor. I could always crawl into the ltp field. The second problem was more serious: what to do about Dairn.

  I didn't want to leave him there. Atropos might send one of her brood back to check on him at any time, and he knew enough about our movements to make me nervous. Likewise, I didn't want to take him to Ahllan's new hiding place. If he got loose, he'd bring the forces of Fate down upon us. Even if he stayed firmly tied up, Atropos might have some way to track him. That wouldn't have stopped me if I'd thought he could be used as a bargaining chip to get Cerice back. But he was a failure, and Atropos wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice him. Just slitting his throat and leaving him for the crows seemed the most sensible solution, but I couldn't do that either. As much as I hate to admit it, I have a bad case of ethics. Then I hit on the perfect idea. I had Melchior levitate him to the faerie ring and push him in. It wasn't the same as killing him, because he would probably manage to roll out again before he lost his mind, but he was certainly in for a very bad time. With that taken care of, we headed out.

  * * * *

  Chaos. The raw, wild wine of creation. The mad tumble of it met my eyes from a distance measured in fractions of an inch. For a brief instant, I thought Mel had blown our transfer. That impression was quickly dispelled as I completely failed to dissolve. Then I realized I was viewing the stuff through a crystalline barrier. It induced a strange sort of déjà vu, and when I rolled onto my back, I discovered why. We had arrived in a huge sphere of transparent crystal, perhaps fifty feet across. It was identical in type, if not in scale, to the one in which I'd had my disastrous initial discussion about Puppeteer with Atropos. It was even filled with the same strange, clear fluid.

  Suspended seemingly at random in this liquid matrix were various oddments of furniture and electronics. If you were to take the contents of Ahllan's former home, mix them into a bowl of Jell-O, and let it set up, you would have achieved a similar effect. Nearest us, perhaps eight feet away horizontally and four vertically, was an electronics bench, its surface canted about thirty degrees toward us. Ahllan hung in space a few feet above it. A bright purple laptop lay on the bench in front of her. An arrow was driven through the upper half of the clamshell casing and the screen was a splintered wreck. Melchior shot across the intervening space and ran a small hand across Shara's keyboard.

  "Is she dead?" he whispered.

  "No." said Ahllan. "The arrow missed her motherboard and her DASD memory. But she's in a very bad way. She was in goblin shape when it hit, and she lost a lot of blood. The only way I could save her was by forcing a shift to laptop mode. Unfortunately, I couldn't pull the arrow beforehand without killing her, and it has a metal shaft. Besides the obvious damage to her screen, there was some shorting in the connected components. I've done everything I can to stabilize her, but I'd rather not try to make repairs without her designer on hand."

  "And Cerice isn't exactly available," I said, sitting up. The thick warm fluid took much of my weight.

  "No," agreed Ahllan, "she's not."

  "That'll have to be job one," I said.

  "The Fates aren't going to want to let her go," said Melchior.

  "I think it can be done," I said. "I have something they want more than they want her—something they'll be willing to trade for."

  "I don't think I'm going to like this," said Melchior. "What did you have in mind?"

  "My life."

  "I was afraid you were going to say that," replied the goblin. "You can't do it."

  "Why not?" I asked. "I got her into this mess. In fact, I got you all into this mess. If the only way to make things right is by giving myself up to the Fates, that's what I have to do."

  "As your partner," said Melchior, "I'm going to veto this one."

  "I'm sorry, Mel. You're the best friend I could have asked for. I love you like a brother, but I think I'm going to have to dissolve the firm."

  "That's not going to fix everything," he snapped. "You know that. Even if you get Cerice free and she's able to repair Shara, Atropos still wins. With you gone, and probably Eris as well, Atropos will be able to implement Puppeteer unopposed."

  "Atropos hasn't solved her coding problems yet," I replied. "Maybe she never will. Even if she does, she won't go unanswered. Tyche's still out there. You can take Orion to her. Don't discount yourself or Cerice when you discuss opposition, or these two, for that matter." I gestured at Ahllan and Shara.

  "Nor will Eris be removed from the scene forever," said Ahllan. "She's a true immortal. The worst they can do is torture and imprisonment, and no chain can hold the Unbinder indefinitely."

  "You're not agreeing with him." Mel's voice was incredulous as he turned to Ahllan.

  "If you have an alternate solution," she said, "now's the time to propose it."

  "That's not fair," he said. "Come on, Ravirn. You've at least got to take another look at Orion before you do anything else."

  "What's Orion?" asked Ahllan.

  We brought Ahllan up to date. Then she told us her story, confirming what the webpixie had said.

  "Which brings us to your arrival here," concluded Ahllan.

  "That's something I've been meaning to ask," I said. "Where is here? More to the point, what is it? I was in a similar bubble once, but that's as far as my knowledge extends on the subject."

  "It's a sort of looped gate," replied Ahllan. "If you think back to your transp
ortation to Castle Discord, you'll remember that a single-use gate keeps track of its two endpoints though a series of sliding mathematical formulae. Imagine a point outside the mweb, a random location somewhere between the worlds. Now picture a gate that starts and ends at that point. The mathematical value for your start point is identical to the value for your end point, so you end up with a gate that opens into itself."

  "OK," I said. "I'm with you so far. But don't you run into a paradox? I mean, when you step out through the gate, don't you bump into yourself coming back in?"

  "You would if you tried to do it within the ordered confines of normal space-time. But out here"—she gestured to the phantasmagoric dance outside of the sphere—"what you get is a sort of self-enclosed bubble of reality."

  "And the fluid?" I asked.

  "Condensed probability," she replied. "The essence of order."

  I shook my head. "I'm having a hard time believing this."

  "Oh, don't do that," said Ahllan, her tone deathly serious. "You might make the whole thing vanish."

  "Now, just a second," I said. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard." I was about to go on when I saw the evil sparkle of humor hiding behind her seriousness. "Are you pulling my leg?"

  "Maybe." She grinned.

  "Ravirn's going to throw his idiotic life away trying to bust Cerice loose, and you're cracking jokes?" asked Melchior. "How can you do that at a time like this?"

  "How could I not?" asked Ahllan.

  "She's right, Mel. It doesn't make any difference in the end result, but isn't it better to go to the block laughing rather than crying?"

  "No!" snapped Melchior. "You shouldn't go to the block at all. And if you do go, you should snarl and claw the whole way, and spit in the executioner's eye before he swings the blade."

  "All that does is raise your blood pressure," I said. "That's no good."

  "Why not?" he responded. "It's not like the axe isn't going to lower it right back again."

  "Point taken, Mel," I sighed. "But none of this is releasing Cerice from durance vile. Why don't we get this program running before my nerve breaks?"

  It was a valid concern. I might believe I had a moral obligation to substitute my neck in the noose for Cerice's. Actually, there was no might about it. Moral considerations aside, I knew now that loved her. If I could buy her life at the cost of mine, it was a bargain.

  That didn't mean the prospect left me unmoved. It scared me beyond the capacity for rational thought. Still, I couldn't see any way around it as things stood. And I didn't think the Fates were going to give me a whole lot of time to concoct a better plan. For that matter, with my right knee shot, my left arm mostly useless, and the pile of other injuries I'd acquired along the way, I was in no shape to pull off a strenuous rescue.

  "Mel, I'm sorry. Powers know I don't want to do this, but I can't see any other options. I need your support, now more than I've ever needed it before."

  "Dammit, that's not fair," he said. "My job has always been to get your ass out of the fire. Now you want me to support you putting it in? I just can't do it." He turned away, and half swam, half flew to the bench where Shara lay.

  "He'll come around," said Ahllan. "Just give him a little time."

  "Ahllan, I don't have a little time. I should be gone already."

  "No, you should not. There are a number of preparations to make first. You have to have a binding deal with the Fates before you surrender yourself into their power. Otherwise, you might just as well not go for all the good it will do Cerice. Frankly, I don't know how you're going to be able to trust a word they say."

  "Actually, I think I've got a solution to the reliability problem," I said. "The trick is going to be establishing a secure channel of communication, one that doesn't just let them backtrace me and scoop me up."

  "There, I can help. Atropos is the one who thought up these bubble gates. She did it to have a secure retreat. There's no way to get here without knowing the exact location and gate formula, and since we're bouncing around in the primal chaos those change on a minute-to-minute basis. I built this one right after Shara revealed me to Cerice. I knew I might need another bolt-hole one day."

  "If that's the case, why don't we begin?"

  "Not quite yet," said the Troll. "Melchior was right about one thing. You should have a second look at Orion before you go. It'll give you another bargaining chip, and if you can fix it quickly, you can leave a copy here for me to send to Tyche. The girl is powerful, but a complete scatterbrain. If Eris couldn't make the spell work, Tyche never will. She'll need a corrected version if she's going to accomplish anything."

  "All right," I said. "But I shouldn't give it more than an hour."

  "Agreed. I think the primary reason the Fates took Cerice was to draw you in. As long as they believe you'll come for her, Cerice should be safe enough. But if you don't take the bait quickly, they may try to up the pressure."

  "Mel," I said, "are you willing to take one last ride with me? I want to look at Orion."

  He turned back to face me. "All right."

  A few minutes later I once again slid into Orion's complex architecture. This time though, I knew what to look for. With a virtual Melchior at my side, I dived deep into the angular logic of the code. The flaw was right where I remembered, and it was the work of seconds to extend my consciousness into it. Using cracking tools coded long ago, Melchior and I broke the fissure wide open. The subroutine thus revealed was like an origami crane with a broken wing. Together we carefully unfolded it, looking for the critical mistake that prevented its proper functioning.

  It was a simple thing really, a tiny loop of logic that forced the spell to write and rewrite the same bit of data over and over again. Worse, if it did ever manage to move on, it would do the same for each location searched. Under normal circumstances, that would have caused an overflow of the spell's memory resources, an error that would have caught Eris's attention. In this case however, it didn't blow the memory's capacity. Instead, it dug a self-perpetuating pit in one tiny part of it, a much more subtle problem.

  The patch we put on the spell didn't really fix the problem. I wasn't a good enough programmer to remaster Eris's intricate work. Instead, it did what most of my code did; it jury-rigged a work-around. Now, when the program hit the flawed subroutine, it would go through once, necessary for the proper function of the spell, then the patch would kick the write function on to the next data band. It worked a bit like tapping the side of CD player to make it skip.

  When we finished, I had Mel copy a duplicate of the patched program to his DASD memory. It pretty much absorbed all of his free space, but he could hold it. Then I popped out Eris's crystal, loaded a blank one provided by Ahllan, and burned a new copy.

  "There you go," I said, holding the spell up for Ahllan to look at. "No matter what happens to me now, there's a way to pull the source code on Puppeteer."

  "That still doesn't provide us with a counterspell," said Melchior. "From what Eris said about the way these things work, the second Orion is ran, it'll be like goosing Atropos and the other Fates. They're going to know Puppeteer is in the hands of the enemy, and they're going to be furious. Unless someone can code a counter pretty damn quickly at that point, things are likely to get very ugly. With neither you nor Eris available for that duty, there isn't going to be a whole lot of point. If Ahllan is right, Tyche isn't going to be much help."

  "Get Cerice to do it," I replied. "I may be able to out-hack her, but as far as straight coding is concerned, she's better than I'll ever be." I handed the crystal to Ahllan. "See that it gets to whoever needs it."

  "I will," she said. "In exchange, I've got a couple of things for you." Seemingly from nowhere she produced an intimidating-looking device that was all leather and chrome.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "An orthopedic knee brace. After your refusal to get your leg properly fixed the first time you collapsed on my doorstep, I did a little shopping. I had a feeling you mig
ht need this eventually. It's not exactly like armoring you for battle, but it's similar," she said, bending down to put it on me.

  I examined the brace while Ahllan strapped it in place. It was an articulated leather sleeve that strapped around the leg. Two pneumatic pistons ran from just above the joint to just below it, one on the inside of the leg, the other on the outside. They looked rather like the devices that hold the hatchback of a car open. It wasn't pretty, but it would keep my weight off the joint. When she was done, she handed me a cane. Its shaft was a highly polished cylinder of ebony, its head a perfect sphere of emerald glass.

  "Thank you," I said. "You've saved me a serious indignity. I wasn't looking forward to arriving at the Temple of Fate using a wheelchair."

  "Bad bargaining position," she said, "to say nothing of how much harder it would be to make a break for it should you get the chance."

  "Not likely, but I'll keep it in mind. Now, if you'll provide me with a link, I've a call to make."

  "Certainly." Her eyes began to glow.

  "Wait," interjected Melchior. "I'll do it." His voice was thick with emotion.

  "Thank you, Mel. It means a lot."

  "You're welcome," he replied. "I have a condition though."

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "I want you to take me with you."

  "I can't do that," I said. "The price is high enough already."

  "It's far too high, if you ask me, but that's not what I meant. I'm planning on coming back. One of us doing the noble sacrifice routine is more than enough. Cerice may not know about Shara, and I don't want to think about how she's going to respond when she finds out about you. Someone's going to need to be there for her, if for no other reason than to give her a ride. I expect she'd rather not rely on the good graces of the Fates for that. So I'll be coming, too. You can negotiate my free passage when you make your deal."

  "That's fair," I said. "Ahllan, is there anything special we need to do to make a visual transfer protocol link from here untraceable? Or does the nature of the bubble do everything for us?"