“If you insist, Grandmother, I will say it.” Cerice took a deep breath. I could see that every word was costing her. “I came here to resign.”
Clotho’s expression, already statue-still, somehow managed to become even more remote and devoid of human expression. Mine probably did some interesting things as well. I wasn’t sure where this was going, and I was downright shocked to hear Cerice say something like that to Clotho.
“Resign from what?” asked Clotho. “Your position as one of my programmers? Your duty to your family? Your very blood? What will you renounce for this”—she flicked a finger in my direction—“betrayer of the House of Fate? Your House.”
“The first only, Grandmother, though I will not live in this House any longer. I honor my family and the duty I owe you, but I cannot live with my heart torn in two.”
“So you will walk away from us, from me? For what? Has the Raven even promised you anything?”
“Not really,” said Cerice, her voice practically a whisper. “Not recently. In fact, considering how things have gone over the past few months, I wouldn’t blame him if he walked away from me right now.”
I wouldn’t walk away, though I had to admit the thought had crossed my mind and more than crossed it. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do.
“But his choice is not what this is about.” Cerice straightened her shoulders and spoke her next words in a clear, carrying voice, “This is about being true to myself. And the truth is, I love Ravirn, or Raven, or whatever the hell he turns out to be. That means I can’t stay here.”
“Perhaps it does,” said Clotho, “but walking away from me is not as easy as that, my child. Not at all. Still, we can discuss all that later, when I get back. Now, I have an appointment to keep.”
“I won’t be here when you return,” said Cerice.
“Believe what you like,” answered Clotho, “but it’s not so easy to argue with Fate.” Her statuelike calm broke, as she smiled a very thin smile. Then she whistled.
The hedge struck like a snake, wrapping us in coils of green before we could move.
“Good-bye, children,” said Clotho’s now-disembodied voice. “Have fun with the maze. It’s a very special design. I’m sure I’ll see you when I get back. You’ll have to tell me then what you think of your introduction to the age of quantum computing.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The hedge stopped writhing, leaving the four of us surrounded by walls of green. But they were nothing compared to the wall between Cerice and me. As I met her sad but hopeful eyes, I felt so confused. Only minutes ago I’d been absolutely furious that she’d brought us to House Clotho of all places. Minutes before that she’d saved me from the clops, just as she had once saved me from Atropos. I loved her, but our relationship had changed so much over the last few weeks I didn’t know whether we still had a future.
That hurt. It killed me that I couldn’t just tell her I loved her and make everything better, but it wouldn’t have been honest. I needed to think through the implications of the most recent events.
Silence stretched out between us while I searched for something to say. Finally, I opened my mouth, not knowing what would come out but feeling like I had to say something. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her hanging any longer.
Cerice touched my lips with her finger. “Don’t. Not unless you’re really ready. You’ve given me all the time in the world despite the way I’ve treated you. The least I can do is give you the same courtesy. You’ve been telling me you love me for months, not just with words, but with your actions. Let me tell you not just that I love you, but how.”
“I really, really hate to say this,” said Shara, twisting her small fingers in her long purple hair, “but could this maybe wait until we’re somewhere a little less dangerous? I don’t think we want to be here when Clotho gets back. If she’d been any angrier, she’d have been smoking.”
“Yeah,” agreed Melchior. “When you decide to burn a bridge, Cerice, you really toast that sucker.”
Cerice nodded. “Point taken. But I’m not sure we can get out of here. The maze is always hard. When I was ten I was lost in here for almost a week.” She turned slowly in place. “I don’t even see an opening, much less an exit. Maybe that’s because of the quantum computing stuff. Whatever the reason, I don’t know where to start.”
“Only one way to fix that.” I took a closer look at the hedge that surrounded us. I wanted to hear more of what Cerice had to say, but Shara was right—we needed to get moving.
At first glance it seemed as though the growth around us was indeed continuous and unbroken, but as I stepped closer to one wall, there was a flicker, and a neat gate appeared in the hedge. I took another step, keeping my eyes fixed on the opening. As I did so, it flickered again and changed back from opening to wall. That made a weird sort of sense, considering the nature of the quantum bit, or qubit.
In a normal computer, everything is binary. Each bit is either a one or a zero. Qubits, on the other hand, had three states simultaneously, zero, one, and zero/one. So the open gate of a one could instantly become a closed zero. Or in this case, it could and probably should be both. I took another step closer. The gate flickered again, opening. Another step. Flicker, closed. Step. Flicker, open.
“What are you doing?” asked Cerice. “Once you headed for it, that section of hedge went all blurry.”
“Blurry?” That seemed very odd. Sure it flickered as it changed, but the end result was perfectly stable. Wasn’t it? I suddenly remembered my experience with another chaotic system, the faerie rings, and how it differed from everyone else’s. “Tell me what you see, Cerice.”
“All right.” She sounded like someone humoring a sick relative. “I see a section of hedge that looks like it’s just on the other side of a sheet of glass smeared with Vaseline. Until you started paying attention to it, it looked just like the rest of the hedge.”
“Huh.” I took a step forward. The gate flickered closed. “How about now?”
“Same thing.”
“Shara? Melchior?”
“Ditto.”
“Me too, Boss.”
Very interesting. Maybe there were some pluses to this whole chaos power thing after all. Quantum effects are tied very closely to the mathematical foundations of chaos. Time to try an experiment. Reaching inward as I did when casting an old-fashioned spell, I touched the place where my blood tied me to the Primal Chaos and willed the gate back open. A shadow flickered between me and the sun, and the hedge section vanished.
“What did you just do?” asked Cerice. “There’s a gate there now.”
Score! I tried again, focusing my will on the space immediately to the left of the gate I’d just opened. Again the shadow. I was ready for it this time, looking at the ground when it came. Wings! The outline was only there for the briefest fraction of an instant, almost too fast to register, but I had no doubts about what it was. The shadow of a giant raven. I looked up at the hedge. The gate had doubled in width.
“Spooky,” said Melchior.
He didn’t know the half of it. I laughed, a harsh cawing sound, at least to me. “I don’t think we’re going to have much trouble with Clotho’s maze after all. Come on.” I lifted Melchior into my bag, and once Cerice had picked up Shara, I took her free hand. “This way.”
It was easy now to hold the gate open with my mind. We passed through it and into a narrow passage beyond. I focused my will. The shadow came again, and the far wall vanished. After a few dozen repetitions, a gate opened with no hedge beyond it. We were out, and I had taken another tentative step toward the terra incognita called Raven.
“Are you feeling all right, Boss?” Melchior asked from his perch in my bag.
“Why do you ask?” I wasn’t. Not really.
I would use the power because I had to, because power ignored is not power defused. One of the rules of magic is that if you don’t channel power, it will channel you. But I’d never asked for any of this, and fra
nkly, it freaked me out.
A sharp claw poked me in the ribs, and I looked down. Melchior raised one dark blue eyebrow at me. He didn’t buy it. Well, neither did I, but maybe we could both rent to own.
“Forget it,” said Melchior, in a voice that clearly said he wouldn’t. “We can talk about it later. For now, where are we going? And how are we getting there?”
“Cerice?” I turned to her. “You have anything more you want to do here?”
“Nope. I’m done.” She looked around wistfully, like a kid leaving home for the last time. “I’ll miss this place. But I don’t belong here anymore.”
“Shara?”
“I’ve got no agenda, big boy. Well, there’s getting my soul back in one piece, but I don’t even know where to begin on that now that Necessity’s network is closed to us.”
“Then we need to get to Hades,” I said, “to see if Cerberus can help us reach Persephone. We’ll have to go sooner rather than later, but I’d bet Midas’s golden horde that things are going to get ugly fast on that end. We need to rest and regroup a bit before we tackle the big dog.”
“Cambridge?” suggested Cerice.
I shook my head. “Too many people know about that place, the Fates and the Furies topping the list. Likewise Garbage Faerie.”
“You know,” said Melchior, “maybe we need to find a new line of work. The list of places we can’t go back to is getting awfully long. I’m starting to feel about as welcome as Dionysus at an AA meeting.”
I had to chuckle. “You may have something there, little buddy. Let’s try using a faerie ring if there’s one around here. I’ve got a hunch I’d like to play.”
“There’s one over this way,” said Cerice, pulling on the hand she’d never let go of. “What’s this ‘hunch’?”
“Just bear with me; you’ll see in a moment.” Or she wouldn’t if I was wrong. It was more chaos magic, and I didn’t know whether it would work, or whether it was something I should even try.
“All right,” said Cerice. “I’ll wait. I’ll trust you, but only because crazy seems to work for you.”
She led me into a large arbor walled off from the main garden by thick ropes of ivy and climbing roses. It was hard to tell through the profusion of greenery, but the skeleton of the place looked to be an intricate wrought-iron lattice, like something made by a giant clockwork spider. More creepers wove their way through an openwork dome of verdigrised copper pipe.
Underneath lay the circle, and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Maybe Clotho did have a sense of humor after all. It was made up entirely of foot-tall lawn gnomes. They stood or sat facing into the center of the ring in a variety of vaguely rustic poses. All of them were dressed in the classic style, with pointed cap, button-up shirt, baggy trousers, and fuzzy boots. Only, instead of the usual bright colors, all of the clothes except the red hats had been painted over in flesh tones, and each of them wore a little Greek tunic over the top of its other clothes.
“I wonder how Zeus feels about this,” I said.
“I don’t know,” replied Melchior. “But I can’t help noticing the whole place is made out of conductive materials and firmly grounded.”
“There is that. Now, let’s see if this works the way I think it will.”
Cerice nodded, and we crossed into the ring together. I felt a myriad of possible rings open out around me. It was a sensation I was becoming accustomed to. This time, instead of reaching out for a specific place and taking us there, I tried to imagine a series of conditions I wanted met. Someplace safe. Someplace slow. Someplace secret. A refuge. For what felt like ages, nothing happened, nothing physical at least. I could sense something of me reaching out into the ring network, touching first this ring, then that, until finally, I got a sense of connection. Squeezing Cerice’s hand, I moved us forward into . . .
Paradise. That’s the only way to describe it. We stood on a grand marble balcony hanging over a white sand beach on one side of a huge half-circle bay. But this was not the sterile white marble of Zeus’s Olympus. This was a rich, green marble veined with black, like great slabs of gem-quality malachite. Neohedonist instead of neoclassical. A low balustrade of the same marble ran along the edge of the balcony, turning and following a wide flight of stairs down to the beach on my right. The air was humid and tropical, redolent with the smells of greenery and flowers, but not too warm.
Looking directly across the water, I could see mountains reaching down to the far edge of the bay, iron-rich soil exposed here and there by jagged rents in the velvety tropical forest, like a red arm in a tattered emerald sleeve. To my left, the mountains climbed up to a cloud-shrouded peak. To my right the bay opened out into the deep blue sea stretching luxuriously to the horizon. It was one of the most beautiful settings I’d ever seen and I wondered how such a place could be so devoid of people.
“Where are we?” asked Cerice, her tone hushed in wonder.
“Welcome to Raven House,” said a new voice from behind us.
I should have been startled, practically jumping out of my skin. I wasn’t. It was like I’d expected the voice. I let go of Cerice and turned slowly around. I found myself facing a faun in a Hawaiian shirt. He had curly hair and a little soul-patch beard. A thick cluster of leis was wrapped around his equally thick neck. He smiled and stepped forward, lifting one of the leis off and placing it around my neck, then doing the same for Cerice.
“Raven House?” exclaimed Melchior. “That’s ridiculous, there is no such place. And who in Hades’ name are you? You look like the product of a nightmare brought on by eating a pineapple-and-feta-cheese pizza with an ouzo margarita on the side.”
The faun took a much smaller lei from around his wrist and popped it none-too-gently over Melchior’s head. “I am the spirit of this place. If you have problems with my appearance, or its appearance, take them up with your partner’s subconscious. Because this is indeed Raven House.”
Melchior gave me a very hard look as the faun moved on to give Shara a lei. “He’s kidding, right? Tell me you didn’t come up with this. Tell me you have more respect for continuity than to do this.” His gesture took in the great house that rose behind the faun.
It was mostly green marble and aqua-tinted glass, in a sort of high modern mix of classical Greek and nouveau-tiki lounge. It should have been an awful kludge, yet it seemed perfectly harmonized with its environment, the greens blending smoothly into the jungle surrounding it. There was a big open porch behind the balcony, with a fountain centering it and low, comfortable furniture scattered in conversation sets.
I turned to the faun. “Can you fix us a couple of daiquiris?”
“Of course, what would you like?”
“What are the options?”
“You name it, we’ve got it.”
“Guava,” I said. “Cerice?”
“Banana.”
“Done,” said the faun, turning and heading for the bar.
“Looks like paradise to me, Mel. If this is Raven House, I, for one, am in.” I pulled off my leather jacket and slung it over my shoulder.
The webgoblin put his face in his hands. “A faun in a Hawaiian shirt fixing daiquiris is your idea of a power’s proper home. That’s crazy.”
“That’s chaos,” the faun called over his shoulder, “and the Raven is a power of it.”
“Could be worse,” said Shara, shaking her head. “He could be wearing a kilt.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s a good thing I’m more of a surfer than a golfer.”
Just then the faun returned.
“What should we call you?” I asked, taking my drink.
“I’m tempted to say ‘Id—Id Runamuck.’ But that would be cruel. My name is Haemun. Is there anything else I can get you?”
“Food would be good. Rice, fish, something simple.”
“I’ll get right on it.” Haemun headed for the depths of the house.
“Now,” said Cerice, “I think it’s my turn to talk. At least I think that’s where
we were before we left the maze. Just let me get out of this armor.”
She reached to her side and popped the buckles on her breastplate, letting it fall on the thick carpet that set our cluster of furniture off from its surroundings. Her shoulder pieces and bracers followed quickly. Underneath, she wore a thin silk blouse.
“Oh, that’s so much better.” Cerice rolled her shoulders, which did interesting things to the rest of her torso. “Could I impose on you to scratch my back before I make an emotional spectacle of myself?” I stood up and obliged as she peeled off the rest of her gear. “Nice,” she almost purred. “Thank you.” Then she turned and gave me a gentle push toward my chair. “Now, I have some things that need saying.”
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