Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  Cerice grinned and shook her head. “You amaze me.”

  “If we had time, I’d do more than that.” I waggled my eyebrows.

  “But we don’t.” She sighed. “I have to get my sword, change clothes . . .”

  “All the usual silly pomp and circumstance,” I said, referring to my late family’s fixation on the proper protocols and fancy dress.

  “Are you going to wear that?” she asked, pointing to my leather jacket.

  “And the pants. One of the few benefits of being an outcast is that I no longer have to conform to my great-grandmother’s fixation on courtly manner and garb. No more tights and doublets for this boy.”

  “But I like you in tights,” said Cerice.

  “All right,” I said. “For you I’ll wear tights. But not for this. With the Kevlar lining, my motorcycle kit is better armor than anything else I own. Especially now that I’ve got the matching helmet. Besides, I’m going to be way less conspicuous dressed like this than you are in your gear.”

  “There you’ve got a point,” said Cerice. “But that’s what magic’s for. Come on, we need to get moving.”

  I nodded and followed her back to our bedroom. All I had to do was change pants and grab my helmet and my magic kit. The bedroom wasn’t very big, so I did that and got out of the way. I found Melchior in the kitchen getting a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge.

  “You’re eating,” I said, when he started in on it. I was surprised. It didn’t happen very often.

  He nodded. “I was hungry.”

  “Really?” That never happens.

  “Really. The mweb’s down, and pizza’s a lot more fun than AC.”

  Then I understood. Food is something webgoblins indulge in mostly for the pleasure of it, since they draw the bulk of their power from the mweb itself, both personally and for spells. They have the capacity to tap the power of the Primal Chaos directly, and until the mweb came back up, that’s what we’d have to do for spells. But chaos is dicey stuff, and most of us and our familiars try to avoid dealing with it in the raw, preferring the predigested version that the master servers channel into the mweb. Minus that reliable power source, if Melchior didn’t feel like running the risks of a direct tap, he had to fall back on chemical or electrical energy—food or the light socket. I’d have made the same choice.

  “Where’s Shara?”

  “Sucking on the game station’s power cord. She said that after spending time around Persephone, the whole idea of eating sounds pretty risky.”

  “Big impact for such a short time,” I said. “Shara used to be a sucker for desserts. It’s hard to imagine five minutes with a goddess, even one as harsh as Persephone, changing that.”

  Melchior looked up at me, his face troubled. “That’s what I said. She gave me a very funny look then and pointed out that she’d been in Hades for quite a while before we arrived. When I asked her if that meant she’d run into Persephone before, she shook her head and told me I wouldn’t understand. I think more happened to her there than she’s willing to tell.”

  “Do you think we need to push her on this?” I asked.

  Melchior shrugged. “I don’t know. I love Shara, and I’d trust her with my soul, but this worries me.”

  “Me too, Melchior. Me too.”

  Just then, Cerice joined us. She wore a tightly fitted and fully articulated suit of lamalar armor, very light and reinforced with magic so that it could stop anything short of an RPG. It was red and gold, of course, and looked something like a Greek hoplite’s gear as reimagined by a fighting-game designer. It had a heavily padded compartment in the small of her back for Shara in laptop form and a number of clips where she could attach various articles, including the rapier and Beretta semiautomatic pistol she’d already slung. She had a small pack as well, holding the diamond-shaped buckler she preferred to a parrying dagger, along with her T-faced helm. The helmet’s horsehair crest was just poking out of the top.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “No, but let’s do it anyway.”

  I collected my shoulder bag—now prepped with everything I’d need for making a faerie ring—while she tucked Shara away. Melchior likewise assumed laptop shape and went into my bag. Once Cerice had whistled a spell of concealment, we were ready to go. It was a really elegant little piece of magic crafted by Clotho many centuries ago and refined and rerefined by her and her sisters until it was only a few bars long.

  “Where do you want to set it up?” she asked, as we went out the door.

  It was a good question. We wouldn’t be able to close up behind us, and you never know when some poor soul might stumble into the ring, or worse, when something really nasty might come slithering out of it. Reality has diverged a great deal since Nyx laid the egg that became the Earth and sky, and not all the paths have been pleasant ones. There were some very dark places to be found among the infinity of worlds and even darker things lurking in them, so it had to be someplace isolated, where things that go bump in the night wouldn’t be a problem.

  Fortunately, I’d had time to think it through. “The river.”

  She shrugged. “I guess you’re the expert.”

  I tried not to laugh at that. I’d built one, once, and I hadn’t enjoyed the experience. A short walk brought us to the Charles, where we made our way under the AndersonBridge, just upstream from the Weld Boathouse. It wasn’t exactly isolated—nowhere in the Boston area is—but between the hour and the icy cold, we were alone. Even in January the channel wasn’t fully frozen—too much salt swept in from the harbor—but there were big sheets of ice along the edges.

  “There.” I pointed at the nearest.

  “What?” asked Cerice, looking baffled. “Where?”

  “On that chunk of ice.”

  “You’re crazy, you know that, right? The ice all along here is brittle. It could break off at any moment.”

  “That’s what makes it perfect,” I said. Cerice looked dubious. “Look, just trust me on this. Everything’ll be clear in a few minutes.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see why Melchior is such a worrier.” She briefly closed her eyes. “All right, it’s your show. Get on with it.”

  “Thanks for all your confidence,” I said, winking at her.

  Before I picked my way down onto the ice, I clipped my blades onto my belt and checked the hang of my pistol. Entering a faerie ring unarmed is a fool’s choice. Cerice followed me but stopped with her feet still on dry ground. As I knelt and opened my bag, extracting the tools I’d need, Melchior shifted back to goblin shape and poked his nose out.

  “Are we there yet?”

  I nodded. “All that’s left is the ring.”

  “That’s like a parachutist saying all that’s left is the part where we jump out of the plane,” he observed grumpily.

  I didn’t answer. I had other things on my mind. Taking a fifteen-foot piece of networking cable out of my bag, I used a jumper to connect the two ends so that it looped back on itself.

  I’d just lifted the athame I’d borrowed from Cerice’s stash to replace my melted one when Melchior held up a hand.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just a thought.”

  “Which is?”

  “I was wondering if whatever cut this world off from the mweb will have any effect on things like the faerie rings.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “How would that work?”

  “Well, what if it’s not actually the mweb itself that’s having problems? What if there’s some kind of turbulence or storm in the Primal Chaos itself? What if the many layers of reality are being tossed around by that?”

  I set the athame down. “Do you have anything to back that up?” I asked. “Because if you do, I’d like to hear it before I take any irrevocable steps.”

  “No. I’m just speculating.”

  “So do you want to call this little trip off?”

  He shook his head. “We have to go and go soon.”

  “Then why are
you sharing?” I said, letting my exasperation color my words.

  “Well, the idea’s a scary one, and I didn’t want to be afraid all by my lonesome.”

  “Right,” I said, with a sigh. “Then if you don’t have any other gloomy little ideas to share, I’ll get back to work.”

  I picked the athame up again. This time, no one interrupted me as I cut a long shallow slice in the palm of my left hand. The blood welled up quickly, and I’d soon smeared it over the entire length of the cable and the connector. After that was done, I whistled the spell for closing athame-generated wounds and went to work laying the loop of cable out in as perfect a circle as I could manage. That involved crawling out onto the thinnest part of the ice, which made an ominous cracking noise as it took my weight.

  Next came the really dangerous part, opening a hole into the Primal Chaos. As a direct descendant of the Titans, I have the stuff bound into the very matrix of my bone and being. I called on that resonance as it was expressed in the blood I’d smeared on the cable to put a microrip in the fabric of reality.

  Pure raw chaos poured through but not in the controlled way I’d expected. The last time I’d done this, it had raced thrice around the circle of blood, cutting a faerie ring into the turf as neatly as a glass cutter might put a hole in a window. This time, the entire circle flash-burned in a single instant, and the air above the ring actually caught fire. The explosion threw me a good fifteen feet.

  The world wavered and rippled around me, like air over hot pavement. Shadows flitted at the edge of my vision, making wings of darkness. The magical turbulence felt as if I’d gotten in the way of a tidal bore. As I fought to hold on to consciousness, I couldn’t help wondering whether the effects were real or in my head, because if it was the former, we were in deep, deep trouble.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Are you all right?” Cerice was bent over me, her fingertips pressed into my neck at the pulse point. I had only very blurry memories of her getting there.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked. I hadn’t blacked out, but it had been mighty close. I wanted to see if her experience matched mine.

  “Your faerie ring arrived with a bang. It was quite spectacular. I expect that the local emergency services people will be along shortly. I take it rings aren’t supposed to do that?” she asked dryly.

  “No. Not in my very limited experience.” I sat up, though the effort made the world crinkle around the edges. “Did it work?”

  “Oh yeah.” Melchior came up next to Cerice. “Speaking of which, unless you want the effort to have been wasted, we need to get moving. It’s starting to float away.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  With Cerice’s help I managed to get to my feet. The ring, now a free-floating circle of ice, had indeed drifted away from the bank. More alarming, though, was that it was still on fire. Or rather, the water around it was on fire. Neon-green flames ringed the ice like a particularly gaudy Christmas wreath.

  Something flashed in the corner of my eye, and I glanced up at the underside of the bridge, where a perfect circle of polished white stood out starkly amidst the dirt and grime. It lay directly above the place where I’d marked out my ring. The heat or the magic or something had burned a mirror-smooth finish into the concrete.

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Just then a siren started in the distance. “Come on, we’d better get going.” Lifting Melchior back into my bag, I took Cerice’s hand. “Ready?” She nodded, though I could tell she had some doubts. “Right, I’ll count to three, then we’ll jump. When we hit, we’ll be on our way. Just keep holding on and let me drive.”

  “What about the fire on the water? Won’t that attract attention?”

  I shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it unless you want to stay here and answer official questions. Besides, it appears to be dying down.”

  It did, though not as quickly as I would have liked. Cerice frowned, then whistled a quick spell. A stand of dry and leafless brush some way upstream burst into sudden flame, sending a great plume of smoke skyward.

  “There,” she said. “That’ll give them something else to look at while this drifts away. One.”

  “Two,” I answered.

  We said three together and leaped. The ice had drifted a good eight feet from shore by then, an easy jump for any child of Fate. Almost too easy in my case. I went farther than I’d intended, landing on the far edge of the ice so that the toe of my left boot actually touched the flame. I’d have cleared the ring entirely if Cerice hadn’t had a firm grip on my hand. In fact, for one instant as my feet left the ground, I felt as though I could simply have flown away were it not for her weight.

  I didn’t have time to think about it because the moment we touched down, we were elsewhere. A faerie ring is nothing like a computer-assisted locus transfer. When I asked Melchior to open a gate for me, I was creating a point-to-point link with a definite beginning and a definite end. The ring, on the other hand, was a matter of probability and will. Anytime you enter a faerie ring, you have an absolutely equal chance of emerging in any other ring among all the infinite levels of reality. Will determines where you actually end up.

  In theory, if your will is strong, and you know what you’re doing, you could get in at one ring and step out of the one you want to reach as your very next stop. In practice, finding your destination is more a matter of throwing yourself in the right direction and sort of channel surfing until you hit the ring you’re looking for. I’d learned all of that with my previous faerie ring experience. This time I learned something else; not all rings are equal, and that matters. A lot.

  This ring was much stronger and wilder than the ones I’d been through in the past. Before, the rhythm had been something like world, beat, beat, world, beat, beat, world. Now it was wor-, wor-, wor-, with rings strobing by too fast even to register as places. I felt like some sort of weird quantum particle, simultaneously in multiple places at one time. Hundreds of them in fact.

  How am I going to find the right one if I can’t even see them? a small panicked voice in the back of my head asked. Horrible things can happen to a person who gets lost among the rings. You can lose your soul. I nearly had on my last trip.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, our progress stopped. We had arrived, at least for an instant, in one definite place. Pulling Cerice along with me, I jumped from the ring. I did it without even looking to see where we were. We could always step back into the local ring in a few moments when we’d had a chance to recover. Hopefully it would be gentler than the one I’d made in Cambridge.

  “Huh,” said Cerice. “That wasn’t so bad. Step in at home, step out at Ahllan’s place in Garbage Faerie two seconds later. Why do you and Melchior make such a big fuss about the rings?”

  “What?” I demanded, but a quick look around confirmed she was right. We stood beside the beer can ring next to the torn-open mound that had once covered Ahllan’s home. It was a sunny afternoon, and the season was much warmer than the one we’d left behind. “I . . . shit. How did that happen? Melchior?”

  “I don’t know, Boss. That’s just plain spooky. I’d have expected you to at least pass through a couple of other rings on the way here. Let me think about it for a second.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Didn’t either of you register all those other rings?”

  “What other rings?” they demanded in near-perfect unison. I sat down then. Fell down was more like it, but the effect was the same. I was no longer standing, and my butt was firmly on the ground. “Tell me what you saw,” I said.

  “Same as Cerice,” Melchior said. “Step in there, step out here.” Cerice nodded. “I figured that just this once we actually had a piece of good luck. I take it that’s not what you saw?”

  I related my experience of the ring. Melchior whistled.

  “Sounds like my worries about a chaos storm and the rings being messed up too had something to it. Things certainly feel strange enoug
h for that. I’ve got some mweb access in this DecLocus, but it’s bad and rapidly getting worse.”

  “Maybe that’s it.” I had a sneaking suspicion that what had just happened with the faerie ring wasn’t related to the mweb problems and that I wasn’t going to like the truth when I finally figured it out. But there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, so I put the idea aside and got to my feet.

  Garbage Faerie, as we called it, was in a serious backwater of reality. Magic ran much closer to the surface here than it did in the vicinity of Olympus, where things were more regulated. Neither Zeus nor the Fates are big fans of anyone else’s having magical power. That includes the other gods and all their myriad offspring; but the blood of the Titans cannot be denied or contained, so reluctantly, they live with us. Given the choice, I don’t think they’d allow magic to go beyond the family. But the gods—except perhaps Necessity—are finite, and the multiverse is not.