Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  “And if we don’t?” snarled Cerice.

  “Why then, you’ll have to learn how to backstroke through Primal Chaos. If Necessity hasn’t already figured out what your Raven has done, she soon will. At that point, I do not want to be seen as sheltering him or you and your equally radioactive webgoblin. In fact, I don’t want to be seen anywhere near you.”

  “But I thought you said you wanted an explanation from me,” I said, “about Shara and Necessity and the mweb.”

  “That was before this.” She pointed at the computer screen. “The collateral damage possibilities in your likely splash zone are now greater than my curiosity. As much as I’d like to know exactly what you’ve done, and even more what in the name of all gods you were thinking, I’m not willing to have you around long enough to give me the answers. You have exactly two minutes to get out of here on your own power. After that, you’ll be leaving through a hole in the floor, one that’ll take you straight out to the Primal Chaos. Good-bye, Ravirn. It’s been interesting knowing you.”

  With that, she vanished.

  “What do we do now?” asked Melchior.

  “Leave,” I said.

  I opened my shoulder bag and gestured for him to climb in. As he managed that, I looked back to the place where I’d been sitting. Cerice had sense enough to come with me, at least for the moment. But I was worried about Shara and called her name. She didn’t answer, and I could hear her slide a little farther under the table.

  Let’s see, I thought to myself. Eris is gone. Does that mean she’s relinquished local control?

  I pictured the room sans the table Shara had hidden herself under. It vanished, exposing the webgoblin. I breathed a little sigh of relief. Eris hadn’t needed to do that. That she had meant she retained at least a little goodwill toward me. It also meant I might be able to do everything I had to and get us moving in the minute and a half of grace we had left. I didn’t kid myself that she’d been bluffing about the trapdoor.

  “Come on, Shara. We don’t have time for games.”

  “This is all my fault.”

  “It is not,” said Cerice. “It’s Ravirn’s.”

  “I won’t argue with you about that last until I’ve got more facts, and we’ve got more time,” I said. Besides, she might be right. It was my blown rescue that put us all here. “Hurry up, Shara.”

  “All right,” she answered, standing up and coming closer. “I’ll come, but you’d be better off leaving me to fall into chaos and oblivion.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Besides, I’m sure as heck not going to let all the work I did breaking you free of death’s cold grip go to waste in one quick drop with a sudden stop at the end.”

  Catching her by the scruff of the neck, I lifted her in beside Melchior. That left us about one minute. I rearranged my mental image of the castle, putting myself inside a memory from an earlier visit, a flower-filled greenhouse with a neat circle of forget-me-nots. Though in the present, I imagined myself outside the circle and standing within touching distance of Cerice. She looked startled by the transition.

  “Don’t think I’m ready to forgive you yet,” she said, her voice husky.

  “I don’t need your forgiveness,” I answered. I was still mad at her and suspicious. I held up a hand to forestall any response on her part. “And I don’t need an argument. You can yell at me later. For now, we need to be gone from this place.”

  “And how!” said Melchior, from my bag. “We’ve got fifteen seconds left.”

  “I don’t—” began Cerice.

  “No time,” I said, catching her hand in my own and tugging her toward the forget-me-nots.

  She didn’t resist, and a moment later we stood inside the circle. A moment after that we stepped out of another circle. At least that’s how I imagined everyone else experienced things. I had experienced a thousand or more possible rings in near perfect simultaneity, just as I had the last time I entered a faerie ring, an effect—I suspected—of my new status as the Raven. This time I’d braced myself for the experience, reaching first for the ice ring we’d left behind in Cambridge. But it had melted away in the salty waters of BostonHarbor, and so I had to choose another.

  “Garbage Faerie?” said Cerice, looking around. “But why?”

  “It’s the ring I’m most familiar with,” I said. “And now, I’m the one who needs some time alone.” I unslung my shoulder bag, setting it at Cerice’s feet. “I’ll be back.” I thought about my new suspicion that somehow Cerice had set this all up. “Or then, maybe I won’t.”

  She opened her mouth to speak. I just turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Boss,” Melchior called out, “you want me to come with you?”

  “Not right now, OK?”

  “All right, but be careful.” His face took on a brief look of concentration. “Thought so. This DecLocus is completely off the mweb now, too. That’ll cut down on possible nastiness, but you never know what might be lurking in one of these backwater worlds.”

  I nodded, to let him know I’d heard, and made a show of loosening my rapier in its sheath, but I didn’t answer. I really needed to be alone and think.

  When we’d stopped in Garbage Faerie earlier, I hadn’t had time to do much more than glance at the place. It had been afternoon then. It was night now, but still quite light. Twin moons hung low in the sky. I walked toward the front of Ahllan’s shattered home. It drew me like a magnet, this ruin I had caused. The rotting husk of a place where I had once found refuge—it suited my mood perfectly. To put it bluntly, I felt like shit.

  Not all that long ago, I’d beaten the system, defeating Fate in a battle over the future of free will. At the time I’d figured everything that came after would be easy by comparison. Sure, I’d picked up some heavyweight enemies and gotten the crap beat of me, but I was alive and in love and triumphant. All that I’d needed to make the victory complete was to save Shara. After fighting Fate—my own family—how much trouble could Death be? Orpheus had managed it, and let’s face it, he wasn’t the sharpest twig on the Olympian family tree.

  I’d even been right. Cracking Hades hadn’t proved to be much of a problem. At least it hadn’t seemed that way at the time. But now? Now I was beginning to think I’d been set up. The question was, by whom?

  Ahllan’s door lay in a broken heap just inside the threshold. I stepped over the jagged bits of wood and into the hall beyond. It used to be that the low ceiling made me want to stoop. Now it lay open to the sky, more a ravine than a hallway. The first door on my right led into the domed living room, or it had. The roof had caved in, and the doorway was choked with rubble. There would be no more cozy teas here. I wandered deeper into the house, arriving at my onetime bedroom. I turned in, sitting on the edge of the dust-covered futon.

  This was the first bed I’d shared with Cerice. Things had seemed so much simpler then. I’d known who my enemy was. Atropos. OK, it had turned out that she was only one-third of the problem, but still I’d known I was up against Fate. Now, I was so turned around that I was wondering whether Cerice might be the enemy. She certainly had the brains and the talent, but despite my suspicions, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Maybe because I didn’t want to. I might regret it later, but for now I mentally put her aside. So, who else was there?

  Shara? That was silly. She was a webgoblin, not a power, and she’d still be trapped in Hades if I hadn’t gone in after her. Yet the gorgon who pushed us out of Necessity’s system had worn her face, a fact certain to land me in a world of hot water whatever the cause.

  Ahllan would be a likelier choice if she hadn’t vanished. Atropos’s old server was a wily webtroll who’d managed to run a guerrilla operation against the Fates for years without suffering detection. Shara had been part of that network, a key player even. But what would Ahllan have to gain?

  I didn’t have enough information, and there were too many players. The Furies, Hades, Persephone, Eris. Hell, even Cerberus.

  He mi
ght do a fine impression of a big dumb dog, but he was tens of thousands of years old and deadly smart. Not to mention, he was in the perfect position to get me in and out of Hades in one piece. That bore more thought.

  Rising from the bed, I went back into the hall. It ended at a metal pressure hatch salvaged from the USS Arizona. It was twisted now, half-off its hinges. The steps beyond took me down into what had once been Ahllan’s workshop for electronics and magic. The basement should have been pitch-black, but the air shafts that led to the surface had been ripped wide open by the passage of the Furies, and silvery splotches of moonlight made it almost as bright as outside.

  I walked to the electronics bench and set a rack for chips upright. Its contents had spilled across the long table. I began to pick them up and sort them. I worked mostly by touch, counting pins with my fingers and dropping them back into the appropriate bins.

  Cerberus. What had Kira said about him? That there were really four dogs involved. Bob, Dave, Mort, and the master intelligence, Cerberus. What must it be like to be a pack instead of a person? A group intelligence? And one with mixed loyalties, if Kira was right.

  There was a faint scuff behind me and the sound of a throat being cleared. “Ravirn?”

  The voice was barely above a whisper. Gentle, feminine, apologetic.

  I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “I don’t want to talk to you yet, Cerice.”

  “I’m not Cerice.”

  It didn’t sound like Shara either. I felt a chill as if someone had lightly run a finger up the back of my neck. Tempering an urge to draw my sword, I turned around slowly. Tisiphone stood in the center of a rough circle of silver moonlight, the terminus of one of the air shafts.

  “I just dropped in,” she said, glancing at the opening above her.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “We can move very quietly when we want, part of the job.” She seemed subdued, something I’d never seen in her before.

  “Oh.” That didn’t sound good, but I didn’t have a lot of options. She was between me and the door. I didn’t have a spell prepped, Melchior was a long way away, and sword or pistol would be foolish at best. I’d just have to stall for time and hope someone above had seen Tisiphone make her entrance. Not that I was sure that would help. “Should I be running?”

  “I’m not here officially. Or perhaps I should say that, officially, I’m not here.” She half smiled.

  I half smiled back. Maybe the current situation wasn’t going to result in any blood loss. I’d like that. Especially since the blood would almost certainly be mine. “All right then. If you’re not here, where are you?”

  “En route.” I must have rolled my eyes or something, because she apologized. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be cryptic. I’m just not very good at this.” I wanted to ask what she meant by “this” but didn’t get the chance. “I’m supposed to meet my sisters at . . . No. I probably shouldn’t tell you that. I’ve got . . . boundaries I mustn’t cross. Suffice it to say I’m supposed to be meeting my sisters so that we can go on to Castle Discord and ask about what you and Eris found out.”

  “But that’s not what you’re doing?” I made the statement a question. I wanted to know more, though in a way I already knew the worst. If the Furies were on their way to Eris, my grace period was coming to an end. Once Necessity found out about Shara, or whatever the thing wearing her face was, she’d start handing out death warrants.

  “No,” answered Tisiphone. “I came here instead, because I needed to talk with you first.”

  “With me? Why?”

  She stepped suddenly closer then, moving into shadow, hiding her features. “Don’t you know?”

  I shook my head though I was beginning to have suspicions.

  “I—I want to get to know you better.”

  I’d never heard of a Fury hesitating about anything before, and here Tisiphone was doing it for me. Heady stuff, and scary. I’d have to watch my step. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  “I think you are,” she said, though she sounded more wry than angry. She touched her lips. “This body is more than just a shell for the soul of vengeance. It’s part of who I am, a woman as well as a goddess. That’s very . . . hard, sometimes. I tend to frighten men. You understand?”

  I did. On the list of men she frightened, I was currently occupying the top slot. But at the same time, I felt sorry for her. She seemed so vulnerable right now, a condition antithetical to her nature as a Fury. That had to hurt.

  I smiled as gently as I could. “Maybe I do understand, Tisiphone. I don’t know that I would have this time last year, but I was just plain old Ravirn then.”

  Things had changed for me when Clotho named me Raven. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, she’d transformed me. OK, maybe that was stretching it. If Eris was right, Clotho’d just acknowledged the reality of the changes I’d wrought on myself through my conflict with Fate. Whatever the case, I was no longer what I’d once been.

  If I felt this conflicted about becoming even the minor power I now was, how much harder must it be to fill one of the more important boxes on the cosmic org chart? What would it feel like to be the personality trapped inside the role of Fury? I don’t know if what I was thinking showed on my face or what, but Tisiphone nodded then.

  She cocked her head to one side. “I think you really do understand, at least to some degree, Raven.” The last word came out as a whisper.

  “I’d rather you didn’t call me that,” I said.

  “And sometimes I’d rather that no one call me Fury. That name obscures the Tisiphone underneath. But often we don’t have choices. I am what I am, and there’s no denying it. Nor can you deny what you’ve become. But perhaps some good can come of that. I could never have offered ‘plain old Ravirn’ what I’m offering the Raven.” She stepped closer still, close enough to touch, and I had no doubt about what she meant.

  “Thank you, but I just can’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked, reaching out and touching my cheek. “Am I so horrible to you?”

  “No. Not at all. You are . . . beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying, like a forest on fire. I’m flattered that you find me so appealing. If my life were different, I might want to spend some time getting to know you as the woman inside the Fury. But—and I’ll be honest with you because you’ve been honest with me—I might not. I know this will hurt you, and I’m sorry, but you have to put me high on the list of men you frighten.”

  “I know that,” said Tisiphone, her voice rough and husky, “but I think you could overcome it with my help. No, I know you could, if you wanted it badly enough.”

  “Maybe. But even if that were true, I couldn’t give you a yes. I’m with Cerice.”

  “But she won’t claim you! She barely even acknowledges you have a relationship!” Anger flared in Tisiphone’s eyes. “She denies you. I would never do that.”

  “All that may be true,” I said. All that and more. Like the fact that I was out here all alone because I’d had another fight with Cerice, and on top of that I was more than a little bit worried that my lady fair was an evil genius. “Cerice and I may be a bit of a mess right now. We may even be on the way to not being a couple anymore. But that’s not decided yet. Until it is, I can’t do anything but tell you no.”

  “And if you do break up?” asked Tisiphone.

  “No. I won’t play that game. For now, all my ‘ifs’ belong to Cerice. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Your loyalty is one of the things I find most attractive. Damn.”

  She turned away, walking across the room. For a brief moment, moonlight touched her again, and I thought I saw something sparkle on her cheek. It couldn’t have been a tear, could it? Not on a Fury. I wanted to go to her, to give her some comfort, but I couldn’t. Not here. Not now. Not the way she wanted.

  “Tisiphone?”

  “Yes,” she turned quickly, and this time I was sure I saw tears as she came back toward me.

  “If it helps at all, turni
ng you down is one of the harder things I’ve had to do.”

  “It doesn’t help, but I thank you anyway. It’s probably for the best, really. Furies don’t exactly get a lot of time off. My complete lack of a love life for the last couple of hundred years speaks to that all too clearly.” Her laugh was bitter and brittle, too close to the tears she’d already shed.

  “Even if I did say yes,” I said, “I’m poison. Too many powers want to make an end of me. Your job would probably come into conflict with any feelings you had for me before too long. Then what would you do?”

  “Silly boy,” she said, her tone mixing mocking and regret. “It already has.”

  “What?”

  “I told you when I arrived that I was supposed to be on my way to meet Megaera and Alecto so that we could all have a nice little chat with Eris.”