“This is ridiculous,” said Cerice, standing up and shaking the shards of glass from her lap.
“Is it?” asked Eris, pinning me with her gaze. “Then swear the oath.”
I opened my mouth to do just that, but something stopped me. I was certain I’d had nothing to do with whatever was tearing up the mweb. Positive. And yet I found that I wasn’t willing to swear to it. Perhaps I’d learned a lesson from my almost disaster over Shara. Or perhaps it was that Eris was asking me.
I believe that she has a certain fondness for me, and I know she knows she owes me. But despite all that, she is still Discord, with all that means. Her reason for existence is entropy. She is the heat death of the universe, and no loyalty or friendship will ever change that. If throwing me away might advance her goals, she wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond. I could like her. I could make alliances with her. I could even expect her to guard my back if our goals were momentarily the same. But I could never, ever trust her.
I shook my head. “Why are you asking me this? Is there something you know that I don’t?”
Eris laughed again. “Many things, Raven, many things. And now one more.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Cerice. “I’ve just—” Her voice cut off midsentence, and she froze.
A sort of velvet silence descended over the room, and I realized that the only things still moving were me and Eris. Melchior and Shara were as still and quiet as Cerice. Even the dust motes dancing in the light of the golden-apple sun had frozen in place.
CHAPTER TEN
I turned my head back and forth, gazing first at my frozen friends, then at Eris, then back again. I was furious, and for just a moment I saw myself as the Raven she kept naming me, a black bird flying at her face to peck and claw her eyes and beat her senseless with my wings. I throttled down the urge to hurl myself across the ruins of the table, clutching the arms of my chair as an anchor against the angry seas of my soul.
“Interesting,” said Eris, cocking her head to one side. “I wondered how you would react. Whether you would embrace your new self or cling to the old.”
“Stuff it, Discord.” I used her title rather than her name, as I always did. It was a way of putting a little more distance between us. “Release them.”
“Or what?” She laughed, then raised a warning hand as I stood. “Don’t. I like you, Raven. But if you start this, I’ll finish it. Besides, they’ll come to no harm, and I’ll let them go much sooner if I don’t have to counter any heroic gestures on your part. I just wanted a moment to talk with you in peace, and this seemed simplest. Do sit down.”
I wanted to rage and throw things, but all that would have done was make her happy. She feeds on strife. So I painted the calmest expression I could manage on my face, sat down, and put my feet up on the chair so recently vacated by Megaera.
“Your move,” I said.
“Oh, very nice.” Eris returned to her own seat in front of the suddenly restored table. “You’re getting better at this, though you do need to learn the trick of relaxing your shoulders. I can see the anger you’re carrying there, and it gives the lie to your act. Here, like this.”
Eris leaned slightly farther back in her chair and all tension seemed to drain from her body. With it went the suit, replaced by a black silk camisole and a pair of low-rise gold denims. She looked sexy and slinky and completely at ease, rather like a cat in a sunbeam.
“There,” she said. “See how easy it is? That used to drive daddy Zeus crazy when I was a teenager, and he was yelling at me.” She grinned. “But not half as crazy as it drove my stepmother, Hera.”
“Stepmother?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. Discord’s past is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. Some claim she’s Ares’s twin, the child of Zeus and Hera. Others insist Nyx, or Night, as she is sometimes called, mothered her with no father in sight.
“Yes,” said Eris, steepling her hands. “I was a cuckoo in her nest: one more product of Zeus’s philandering ways. Oh how Hera hated me and hated even more Zeus’s claim that I had come from her womb entwined with my brother Ares. I think the only reason she let him get away with it was to prevent news of yet another of her husband’s bastards from becoming the talk of Olympus. You know”—she looked thoughtful for a moment—“I’m really rather surprised she’s never managed to murder Zeus. It’s not like she doesn’t have the motive. Maybe I could do something to move that along. The succession struggle would be rather entertaining. Don’t you think?”
“I’ll pass if you don’t mind. I’ve got enough deity-generated stress in my life at the moment.”
“You have managed to piss off half of the poles of existence, haven’t you,” she said. “You must sit pretty high on both Fate’s and Death’s lists at the moment. Are you sure you don’t want to help me help Hera do away with Zeus? That would give you Creation to match Hades’ Destruction and quite the trifecta.”
I shuddered. “No thanks.”
“Too bad. Creation is weaker than it once was. Zeus, the usurper to the throne of his father Cronus, is not as worthy a target as the old Titan. Still, it would have been fun. If you’d said yes, I might have decided to adopt you. You’d suit my line much better than Lachesis’s.”
“I’m pretty sure she’d agree with you. She did, after all, cast me out of her House and take back my name. You remember that, don’t you? As I recall it was because I’d just saved your sorry ass from a bad date with Necessity.”
She scratched her chin. “No. I can’t say it rings any bells.” I growled, and she laughed. “Relax. I do owe you one, but we both know it wasn’t me you were saving there. It was your soul. If you could’ve cut me loose without compromising your personal integrity, I don’t think I’d be here now, would I?”
I looked at the floor. She had a point, sort of.
“Oh, don’t feel bad about it,” said Eris. “I don’t much care about means except where they can be twisted to make life a little bit harsher. I’m much more interested in ends. And that brings me back to where I was when I made us a little time to talk alone.” She waved a hand toward the frozen form of Cerice.
I felt another stab of anger, and apparently failed to conceal it, because Eris let out another of her broken-glass laughs.
“Don’t grimace at me like that,” said Eris. “She’s a pretty enough thing, but not really in your league anymore. You’d be much better off taking Tisiphone as a consort.”
“What!” I squawked. “That’s mad. I love Cerice. But even if I didn’t, Tisiphone is a Fury, and I’m—”
“Raven. You may not choose to admit it, but you are no longer a scion of the middle house of Fate. You have transcended your origins and are playing on a much bigger stage. The girl”—she waved at Cerice again—“is an exceptional child of Clotho’s House, but that’s all she is. You are your own House now, a power, if a minor one as yet. As long as you tie yourself to Cerice, you will possess a significant vulnerability that any of your enemies could exploit. Especially your enemies in the Houses of Fate.”
“But—” I began. A power? I wasn’t at all sure I liked the sound of that.
“Allow me to finish. Tisiphone, while she has her quirks, seems genuinely fond of you. And no one, and I mean no one, would dare to strike at you through her. Not only does she have the innate strength to protect herself against most threats, but she also walks in the shadow of Necessity. That is armor even against the greatest powers.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. It was all true—irrelevant, since I was genuinely in love with Cerice—but still true. In its own way it was even very good advice, and that made it completely out of character for Discord.
“One, I like you. Two, I owe you a favor. Three, Tisiphone really needs to get laid. It might mellow her a bit, and that would make her less likely to interfere with me. I’d still have Megaera and Alecto to worry about, since no amount of sex is going to help the former and I don’t see anyone around to throw at the latter.” She
smiled, and there was nothing nice in the expression. “And finally and most importantly, I know you won’t take my advice even though you know I’m telling you the truth. What more could Discord ask for in the way of strife than painful truth offered fruitlessly to a friend?”
“How can you think that way?” I whispered in horror. I liked Eris. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. And I’d thought she liked me. “How can you think that way?” I repeated.
“I’m Discord,” she said very quietly. “How could I not?” And for just an instant I saw a pain in her face to rival Persephone’s.
It was gone so quickly I’d never be able to swear I’d really seen it, and yet I knew it would haunt me for a long time to come.
“Thanks,” I said, “for telling me things I don’t want to hear. Perhaps you could make it up to me by telling me something of the other sort.”
“It’s possible. What do you want to know?”
“What does it mean to be Raven? Everyone keeps telling me I should accept my new ‘destiny,’ but no one wants to tell me a thing about how to do that.”
“That’s probably because no one really knows.” Eris grinned and held up her hands to form an X. “There are two major axes of power in the pantheon. They sit at right angles to each other like some giant crosshairs. The first you’ve had intimate contact with, the conflict between Order and Chaos, or Fate and Discord if you will. The second is between Death and Creation, represented by Hades and Zeus.”
“But Clotho’s role as Fate’s spinner also touches on Creation,” I said.
“Exactly, just as Atropos with her shears is the Fate of Death. In your previous family, the creation-destruction axis is split, whereas I embody the lot for Chaos.”
I was starting to get a headache. “What does that all have to do with my question?” I asked, rising to pace.
“Everything. Nothing.” Eris held up her hands like a pair of balances. “Clotho was given some reason to name you Raven, just as she once was given a reason to name me Discord.”
“Then Eris . . .”
“Was the name Zeus hung on me to complement the one he gave his precious Ares.”
Something else hit me. “Wait a second, what do you mean Clotho was given a reason?”
“Necessity is the Fate of the Gods. Though Clotho spins them, it is Necessity who manages the threads of the powers both greater and lesser. When your experiences in the Fate Core stripped you of an ordinary sort of destiny, it took you out of the hands of the lesser Fates, your family. Combine that with the immortal blood of your great-grandmother, and you became a player on the stage overseen by Necessity.”
“Are you trying to say that I’m a god?” My knees didn’t seem to want to work properly, and I dropped into the nearest chair. It had been Alecto’s, but now it rearranged itself to fit me.
“Perhaps someday,” said Eris, “if you live long enough, which likelihood I doubt. You are, however, a power, and what a power may become, no one knows except perhaps Necessity herself. Do you think Clotho wouldn’t have tried to kill me in my crib if she’d known what it would mean for me to grow up Discord?”
“I—uh . . .”
“But she didn’t know my ultimate fate any more than I do. She knew only that I was to be a power and that I bore the mark of chaos. Oh, and that that was what Necessity wanted. That’s all any of us really know about you, that you are a power, the first new one born in many long years, and one marked by chaos. For all I know, you may someday supplant me as Zeus supplanted Cronus at the splitting of the worlds that birthed the multiverse.”
“Oh.” I thought about the implications of that for a bit and the idea that my role as Raven might disrupt the status quo. “Why isn’t everyone trying to kill me while I’m still too weak to defend myself?” I asked after a while.
Eris laughed. “Atropos already has, though that was before your new name came into play, and she will again. You can bet that Hades will as well, now that he’s got an official excuse. Once the idea penetrates Zeus’s dim little brain, he’ll probably join the party, too.”
“Which leads to two more questions. Why have I still got a pulse?” I put a finger to my throat just to double-check. “And what about you?”
“You are alive because there are rules, and Necessity is their enforcer. As for me, if you try to usurp my throne, we’ll likely have words. Otherwise, the simple fact of your existence creates discord among the gods, and discord is my reason for existence. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a special present Necessity dreamed up just for me.”
“Goody.”
“You’re welcome. Speaking of presents, that brings me back to the original reason I shut off the peanut gallery so that we could have this quiet little chat. That is, the problem with the mweb and Necessity’s request that I look into it. While I’d prefer not to do anyone any favors, I’m not going to turn down that particular request. Unfortunately, I’ve already been working on this mess for reasons of my own with no results to date. Since I really don’t want to go back to Necessity empty-handed, I thought I might lean on you for a little help. After all, the mweb is just one gigantic magical construct that has something wrong with it, and bug-hunting is your specialty. Perhaps even the reason Necessity sent you a name.”
“I—” What did I want to say?
Eris is a profoundly unsettling goddess. Every conversation I have with her reorders my universe in some new way, though not always for the worse. I realize that her gift and her reason for being is what she calls strife, but while she certainly disturbs me no end, I sometimes wonder if she’s not nearly as much of a villain as she likes to pretend to be. If, perhaps, discord with a small d is something we all need from time to time to keep us from stagnating. In the House of my grandmother such ideas would be rankest heresy, but what about in the House of Raven? I needed to think about that.
“Well?” asked Eris. “I’m waiting.”
“I’ll help.”
I didn’t add that my motives had very little to do with helping her out and were much more about satisfying my own concerns and curiosity, not to mention finding Ahllan. With Eris backing me, I had a far better chance of hacking my way to the truth than I would on my own.
“You’re such a good boy,” she said. “It just makes me want to give you a big wet kiss.” Without crossing the intervening distance she stood above me. Slowly, ever so slowly, she leaned down and put a hand on each arm of my chair, giving me a very clear view down the front of her camisole. “What do you say?”
“That I wish you wouldn’t do that sort of thing,” I said, closing my eyes and turning my head to one side. It was not easy, but it was necessary.
“Pity,” she whispered, moving even closer and taking the pointed tip of my ear gently between her teeth. “But if you insist.”
“—about had it with you!” said Cerice from beyond Eris, finishing the sentence she’d begun so long ago. Then, “What the fuck is going on here!”
Eris stood up and made a show of adjusting her clothes. I put my face in my hands.
“Discord,” I said through my fingers. “That’s what’s going on.” I dropped my hands and glared at Eris. “Can’t you ever give it a rest?”
“No,” she said, and I caught just an echo of her earlier pain, “I can’t. Not for one single second. Now, we have work to do.”
The boardroom was gone, replaced by a tile-floored computer center. The big square tiles were all gleaming white and mirrored the grid of the dropped ceiling above. Aluminum racks stood along the walls, each with several large golden apples mounted within and wires trailing down through holes cut into the tiles. Between racks were numerous Formica-topped tables strewn with the electronic detritus typical of labs and equipment rooms everywhere. A faint background hiss whispered of fans that kept the space beneath the floors at a constant positive pressure. A bank of uninterruptible power supplies stood in one corner. In other words, in every respect but one it mimicked the typical corporate computing center. Eris drew
attention to that anomaly with a tap of one long black-and-gold-painted fingernail. The big metallic apple rang hollowly in response.
“Multicore Macintosh servers set into my own special case mods,” said Eris. “They’re all cross-linked like a Beowulf cluster, only better since I use my own custom operating software to maximize performance. I call the result a Grendel group.”
“Hold on a second,” said Cerice, stomping over to stand in front of Eris. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“About what was going on?” asked Eris, her voice deceptively sweet. “I thought Ravirn covered it pretty well: Discord.”
“And the part where you paralyzed us? You know, when we couldn’t move, but we could hear every vicious word you said?”
I was glad Cerice was looking the other way, because though I managed not to say it aloud, I could feel my mouth shaping the words, oh shit. So Eris had given me a lecture on why I should dump Cerice right in front of her. Thank you, Discord.
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