Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  “Really?”

  That was absolutely fascinating, and it made sense. The mweb is powered off taps into the Primal Chaos, so that jibed with Tisiphone’s background during the conversation. It was something I’d have to think about later, when I had fewer problems. Just then I heard a loud hiss from behind me, like an angry snake, a fast-moving angry snake, very fast. Before I even had time to move, whatever it was rocketed past my head, the noise rising to a screeching wail as it did so. An instant later it ended in a very final sort of thump as a good-sized hole appeared in a sapling ahead of me and to the right.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, picking up the pace.

  “Gyrojet rocket,” said Melchior, in that abstracted tone he uses when he’s accessing online information. “A big one. Judging by the hole it made, maybe twenty millimeters.”

  “Damn rent-a-clops. They’re—”

  I heard a second hiss. A third. I threw myself to the ground as brown leaves and bits of branch rained down to the tune of a whole fucking snake party. I scuttled for the protection of a fallen log. Somewhere along the way I banged my right knee, the bad one, on a rock or something. The world went all red and runny around the edges, and I screamed. I didn’t faint, but I sure as hell wanted to.

  “I think we hit ’im!” bellowed a rough voice from somewhere uphill.

  More hisses and whines. That was the really surreal thing. People were shooting at me, but the Gyrojet rounds were so quiet except when they hit something really solid that I could still hear my pursuers. The owl hooted again, this time from right overhead. I looked up and saw gray wings circling.

  “Down there!” called another cyclops.

  The heavy rocket-propelled slugs started hitting more consistently in my vicinity. Several hit my log with dull thuds. One of those sent up a shower of splinters, some of which embedded themselves in my cheek and the back of the hand I’d used to shade my eyes. The clops were getting closer fast, and I was pinned down.

  “Mel, see if you can’t do something about my leg.”

  He nodded and whistled a short spell, shaping his hand into a gun. The claw of his index finger elongated into a hypodermic needle, and he jabbed it into the side of my neck.

  “Better Living Through Chemistry,” he said, naming a spell that involved a whole lot of morphine, “but lower dosage.”

  It would take a few minutes for maximum effect, but I fancied I could already feel it starting, a cool soothing flow running through my veins.

  “Thanks.”

  That addressed one of my problems. Unfortunately, it was the least of them. More slugs hammered into the log and the ground around me, throwing up puffs of dirt and more splinters. I couldn’t even raise my head safely, much less leave the shelter of the log. If I didn’t do something quick, the clops would have me.

  Come on, think, Ravirn! I heard the rustle of wings and saw black feathers out of the corner of my eye. I rolled onto my back, drawing my .45 by sheer reflex and scanning the sky. Nothing. The owl had risen so it was barely a dot. I let out a little sigh of relief. I didn’t want to take a shot at Athena’s owl. Hell, I didn’t want to take a shot anywhere on Olympus, but I couldn’t very well let it kill me either.

  “We’ve got him now!” yelled one of the clops. He was practically on top of me.

  “I don’t think so,” responded a dusty contralto from downslope. Cerice!

  The words were followed by what sounded like a series of bombs going off, fifteen of them in rapid succession. It took me a moment to realize it was the firing of Cerice’s Beretta, the whole damn clip. After the eerie quiet of the rocket bullets, and in light of our proximity to the great irritable sky-father, it seemed insanely loud.

  The steady stream of hissing wails cut off like someone had flipped a switch, emphasizing the thunder of Cerice’s pistol even more. For a long moment perfect silence held the forest in its grip. Then the sound of big bodies taking cover broke the spell.

  “Come on!” yelled Cerice, “I’ll keep you covered.” She followed that with a couple of more shots for emphasis, having apparently reloaded.

  I didn’t need a second invitation. With my left hand, I levered myself onto my feet. My right was busy with my pistol. My knee still hurt, though a bit less thanks to the morphine. Something big passed between me and the sun, and I glanced up to see whether the owl had decided to attack. It was gone. In its place great fingers of cloud had come streaming in from the direction of the palace. Lightning danced along the edges of the front. I hobbled faster.

  “Oh shit,” said a clopsian voice. “That’s done it.”

  The hiss of rocket-propelled slugs started up once again. The sounds of advancing clops did not. Since I wanted to keep it that way, I fired a couple of rounds upslope, aiming high since the clops hadn’t really done anything to me.

  “Maybe the gun isn’t such a good idea,” said Melchior, jerking his thumb skyward.

  “Tell it to Cerice. She’s the one who started it.”

  “You’re very welcome,” she said, as I reached the place she was waiting for me. “I—”

  A great hammer of thunder drowned out whatever she was trying to say. She shook her head and caught my arm, pulling it over her shoulder. She started half-dragging, half-carrying me off at an angle to my earlier path. A child of Fate, she could as easily have lifted me in her arms but apparently chose to spare my dignity.

  “—ome on!” she yelled. “Shara’s holding the gate open. But we don’t have much time. The wrath of Zeus is going to land on us any minute.”

  Thunder rolled steadily now, sometimes quieter, sometimes louder. It mostly drowned the screeching hisses of the Gyrojets, though occasional explosions of dirt or falling bits of tree served as a reminder that the clops had not yet given up.

  “Thank you,” I said contritely. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful about the rescue. Your timing was perfect. I was just surprised that you didn’t think about the consequences.” I pointed skyward.

  “Who says I didn’t?”

  “Huh? I don’t get it.”

  She smiled a sad smile, but didn’t slow down, pulling me along as she spoke. “I guess I deserve that with the way I’ve been treating you lately. I’m truly sorry about that. I know I’ve been a royal bitch, and you’ve been unreasonably patient with me. We need to talk about that just as soon we have a safe moment. In the meantime, suffice it to say that I’m not going to let a bunch of goons pump my beau full of holes, not even if stopping it means I have to spit in the teeth of Zeus himself.”

  A gigantic lightning bolt ripped a tree into shreds behind us, sending splinters flying and a column of smoke climbing up toward the clouds. It was no longer possible to tell whether the clops were still shooting because a tearing wind struck now, mimicking the leaf-shredding effects of the rockets and turning the smoke column into a long gray banner.

  “You might want to tone down the ‘defying the gods’ stuff,” squeaked Melchior, from the place he had taken in my bag.

  “I don’t think it would matter,” shouted Cerice. “Besides, I meant every word. This one’s mine.” She squeezed my arm. “Or at least, I’m his if he’ll still have me.” Then she laughed, the first real laugh I’d heard from her in a long time. “Anyway, I planned for the storm. It’s keeping the rest of the pursuit down nicely.”

  “Great!” said Melchior. “They’re both crazy. Who knew Ravirn-style nuttery was communicable?”

  Just then we broke through into a little clearing. Waiting at the center stood Shara, one foot firmly within the light column of an open gate spell. She grinned in obvious relief when she saw us and gestured for us to hurry.

  I was still trying to process Cerice’s last statement when we reached the gate. “Does that mean you’ve made some sort of decision about where we stand?”

  “You could say that,” said Cerice with a smile. She stepped into the light and pulled me in after, planting a firm kiss on my lips. It was a sweet kiss, and as she pulled back I
felt hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “I lo—”

  The universe imploded to the accompaniment of a pulse of bone-crushing sound and a blinding flare of white light. Lightning, with the thunder coming simultaneously because the strike was right on top of us. I felt searing pain followed by a sensation of falling that went on for far too long as colors flashed wildly in the darkness around me. It felt as if someone had pulled Olympus out from under me, leaving behind a hole into the chaos that holds the worlds.

  At first I felt nothing but terror at the idea of being lost in the place between here and there, but that pitch of fear can’t be sustained for long. I began to have room for other emotions. Curiosity about where I was and what was happening to me. Disappointment that I might never know for certain what Cerice had been about to say. Even a tiny stab of guilty relief for the same thing.

  I still cared deeply for Cerice, but I was no longer entirely certain that she was the only woman in the world for me. An awful lot of bad blood had fallen between us since I’d returned Shara to her, and nothing could ever completely clear that away. And there was Tisiphone. I certainly wasn’t in love with her, not yet at any rate. But seeing her vulnerability and knowing how she felt about me had really moved me, and I didn’t know what that might mean for Cerice and me. Why did relationships have to be so complicated? The roiling colors of chaos held no answer.

  I don’t know how long my interlude there in one of the borderlands of chaos lasted. Time does not run the same in the place between worlds. But I can pinpoint the moment it ended, when I crossed from falling through nowhere to falling into somewhere, and fall I did, for we appeared well above the level of the ground.

  It was a matter of blinks. Eyes open on chaos. Blink. Eyes open on the manicured grounds of a huge garden or arboretum. I had an instant to register flowering trees and a great cluster of roses in full bloom, and for my brain to reassert the familiar and comforting ideas of up and down, sky and earth. Then up and down noticed me. It was not a long fall, no more than ten or fifteen feet, and it ended gently enough, though the spirea I crushed might have different ideas about that.

  Still, I was more than a little stunned, and I lay for several long seconds staring up into the deep blue sky. My contemplation was interrupted by my sidekick swearing like a harpy. Sitting up and looking around, I quickly discovered why. Something, either the lightning striking the gate or the imbalances in the mweb, had set the normal rules of locus transfer protocols awry. Rather than depositing us all together, the gate had spat us out in a loose line at some distance from each other.

  Where I had landed on the relatively benign spirea, Melchior had come down square in the roses. Shara, who I also located by her swearing, had apparently landed in an ornamental pond just visible beyond them. At least that’s what I inferred from the fact that she was standing next to it, dripping wet and covered with duckweed. Cerice was not immediately visible, and that worried me. But the fact that three of us had arrived relatively intact, and that the pond backed against a thick privet hedge suggested that she was probably merely out of sight rather than out of this world.

  Getting to my feet required a little effort since my knee still hurt, though not nearly as badly as it had before we’d taken our long fall through chaos. Once I was up, I collected Melchior from the roses, then headed for Shara and the hedge, limping only slightly. I’d barely gotten there when I heard a very muzzy-sounding Cerice on the other side.

  “Wher’d ev’ybody go?”

  “Over here!” cried Shara. “Are you all right?”

  “M’re ’r less,” answered Cerice. “I landed pr’ty hard, and . . . Oh hell.” A thunk, thunk, thunk sound like knuckles rapping on glass came through the greenery. “ ’M in the hedge maze, aren’t I?” Cerice was starting to sound more coherent.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Shara.

  “Damn, any idea what the current chip model is?”

  “No,” Shara answered, “but I can try to find out.”

  “Don’t, I’d rather not announce our arrival just yet.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Chips? Thunk?”

  “If you were looking down on the maze from above, you’d see what looks like a giant computer chip in green and gold. The gaps between the privet are floored with heavy glass with marigolds underneath. It’s supposed to represent the latest in processor technology. So, with the way computers are advancing, the maze is constantly being updated. It’s almost never the same from visit to visit.”

  “Goody,” said Melchior. “Does it have any other special features?”

  “Yes,” said Cerice, her voice resigned. “Once you’ve entered, you can only leave through the exit gate.

  “I take it you know where we are?” I had a nasty suspicion I already knew the answer.

  “We’re in the gardens of House Clotho,” said Shara.

  “This is where the gate was supposed to take us?” I asked her, feeling sick.

  Shara nodded. “That’s what Cerice asked for.”

  I turned to the hedge. “Just for the record, the Furies are at this very moment on their way to confer with the Fates in hopes of procuring my death warrant. The Houses of Fate are not a good place for me right now.”

  “I know they aren’t,” said Cerice, sounding defensive, “but I needed to stop in here.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this one,” I mumbled.

  “Neither can I,” said a cold hard voice from just behind me.

  “Oh shit,” said Melchior in a very small voice. Then he slapped his hand over his mouth.

  “Hello, Clotho,” I said, without turning around.

  “Hello, Raven,” she answered, her voice even colder and harder. “What brings you here?”

  “Fate?” I said, pivoting now, and offering a deep bow. “But then you’d know that better than I would. Yes?”

  I kept my gaze from meeting her own, choosing instead to look over her left shoulder. I had seen the power of Fate’s eyes too many times to chance it lightly.

  “You’ve always been such an amusing child,” said Clotho in a tone totally devoid of amusement. “Your fate is no longer in my hands, and we both know it. I suppose I really should have asked Cerice what brings you here, as it was her familiar who made the travel arrangements.”

  She turned then to Shara. “You’re looking a bit the worse for wear, little one. Are you still grateful to the Raven for his gift of renewed life, or does the shadow of the grave ahead rob you of its riches?”

  “Leave her alone,” snapped Cerice. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

  “No she hasn’t, but neither has she done anything for me. Oh, this is tedious. As much as I’d like to make you work the maze, I don’t have the time to wait for you. Let’s see, I can’t cancel the magic of the maze without doing it serious harm, so . . .”

  Using the Fate trick of self-harmonizing, she whistled something that sounded like the Toccata and Fugue played in a roomful of helium by a fifty-piece orchestra. In response, the privet hedge started writhing like a huge green caterpillar beset by army ants. When it stopped, a single arched opening stood directly in front of us, with Cerice on the other side. Behind her, the passage split and then reformed, with another opening at the other end.

  “A binary gate, the simplest of all chip forms,” said Clotho. “I imagine you can solve this one quickly enough?”

  “But of course, Grandmother.” Cerice curtsied deeply. Her tone was frigid and formal, devoid of the warmth she usually showed when speaking of or to Clotho. “Thank you.” She took two steps forward, exiting the maze.

  Too curious as to how this would be received, I gave up my effort to avoid Clotho’s eyes and looked straight at her face. I needn’t have bothered. Her expression was as still and blank as a marble sculpture, her skin as white and perfect. Her eyes, Fate’s eyes, were directed at Cerice, not me, and I could read nothing in their silvery depths.

  I wondered what Cerice saw there. The eyes of Fate are k
nowing eyes, twinned mirrors that show the person who meets them a vision of their own life through time. Sometimes the looking glass is dark, showing you only the shadows of your fate. Sometimes the light comes through, illuminating the best hope for your future, the brightest take on your past. But always there is a sense of heaviness, of judgment waiting, the sure knowledge that you can never escape your own reflection or yourself.

  “Speak,” said Clotho. “I have been summoned to council. I was casting a gate when yours dropped you so precipitously on my back lawn. The Furies have news for me and my sisters. They are all at the Temple of Fate now. They are waiting. So am I.”

  Cerice looked at her feet, then back at Clotho. “For what? You’re Fate. Surely you know why I’ve come.”

  “Surely I do. But until you have said it, it has not happened. Fate has been thwarted before. Has it not, Raven?” She addressed me, but her eyes never left Cerice’s.