This time Haemun had put out four place settings, two with bar chairs to bring the goblins up to the height of the table. The spread was lavish, with cinnamon toast, crepes, sausages, and tons of fresh fruit including papaya, pineapple, slices of cantaloupe and honeydew, and pomegranate. There was also some sort of delightful egg casserole involving bacon, mushrooms, and spinach. For drinks he provided coffee and tea, milk, and three kinds of juice—passion fruit, guava, and orange. I had a bit of everything, as did Cerice and Melchior.
Shara looked tempted right up until he brought out the fruit plate. At that point she let out a small sigh, hopped down from her chair, and unplugged an extension cord from a lamp. Dragging it back to the table, she whistled a short spell that capped two of her claws with copper and stuck them into the plug’s end. I took it from Shara’s actions that this world had also been cut off from the mweb but didn’t ask because I didn’t want to put her on the spot about her behavior.
The food tasted fabulous, and very little conversation occurred while we paid it our proper respects, just polite grunts and requests to pass this or that item. I’d just started in on a second cup of coffee when Melchior caught my eye.
“I hate to end this delightful little idyll in de land of denial, but the mweb is dying, and we need to get moving.”
I sighed. “You’re right, Mel. As much as I’d like to stay here, it’s time. Do we want to try to put together a plan, or should we just blunder along like we always do?”
“Why mess with success?” he answered.
Cerice smiled sweetly. “I notice your limp is better this morning.”
“‘A hit, a very palpable hit,’ ” said Shara.
I winced and nodded. “Point taken. But I’m not sure that there’s much to plan. We go from here to the shores of the Styx and ask Dave to get us in contact with Persephone, or to take her a message if he can’t do that.”
“What would a message like that say?” asked Shara. “‘Sorry you’ve been condemned to eternal damnation here in scenic Hades, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to mess up everybody else’s life, too. Please call off your virus.’ I’m sure that’ll work. After all, it’s not like she comes from a family willing to call down an unending winter to get her out of there.”
Melchior turned to look at her. “Aren’t you just in a pissy mood this morning.”
“I’m sorry, maybe it’s having my soul ripped in half that’s put me off my feed.” She closed her eyes for a moment, exposing how dark the purple hollows underneath had grown. “I really am sorry. That was uncalled for. I guess I just feel like shit, and I’m scared none of this will work. Or maybe I’m just scared to be going back to the borderlands of Hades. I didn’t much like being dead, and even the half-life I’ve got now is precious. But I don’t know what else to do either, so I guess I’ll be coming along.”
I met Shara’s eyes. “You’re right. Convincing Persephone to give up her scheme to break free of Hades is going to be hard, maybe even impossible. The odds are this will all end badly. We still have to try, or at least I do. Not just because the Fates and two out of three Furies are likely to use this as an excuse for payback. Even if I could stay here safely forever, I’d go.”
I stood up and started to pace. “The mweb is the center of my family’s existence. My whole family, not just the Fates, but all the children of the Titans. We need it. And on a less noble note, I need it. I’m a hacker, a computer-centered sorcerer, and I’ll do what I have to to keep it going. If that means taking on Persephone, or Cerberus, or even Hades himself, so be it.”
“I could say I was doing it for love,” said Cerice. “But that’s not my only reason. We’re in the same boat on the hacking front, a boat that will soon be up that proverbial creek if we can’t get this fixed.”
“I’m in, too,” said Melchior. “That leaves us back at the question of a plan.”
“Go to the Styx,” I said. “Talk to Cerberus. I can’t see my way past that point. Too many variables. Anybody else?” Cerice shook her head. Melchior shrugged. I looked at Shara.
“Oh, let’s just get it over with.”
That just left getting changed and going. “Haemun,” I called. “Are you around here someplace?”
The faun appeared from deeper within the house. “I am indeed.” This was the first I’d seen of him this morning, and I couldn’t help but notice that today’s aloha shirt was even more garish than yesterday’s.
“Do you know what happened to our clothes?”
“Of course.” He smiled, then looked expectant.
“Would you care to share that information?” I asked, trying not to roll my eyes. Why was everyone in my life born difficult?
“Certainly. They’re in the laundry.”
Great. Soggy leather. “I don’t suppose you’d care to fetch them for us.”
He gave me a look of polite disbelief. “I could, but they’re really not ready. Wouldn’t it be better to grab fresh things out of the master closet? You did see the master closet, yes? Big room with lots of clothes? Next to the bath?”
“Of course.” I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to admit it. “There’s a change for both of us in there, is there?”
“Several, I should think. It is a master closet after all, in a magical mansion. It’s your subconscious of course, but I’d hope that it’s up to the task of dreaming up a solution for wardrobe emergencies. You do have a good imagination, don’t you?”
Melchior snorted, and I cast him a dire look. “Thanks, Haemun. If you’ll excuse us, we have to get dressed.”
“Which will of course involve getting undressed,” said Shara. Then she gave a deliberately theatrical headshake. “Well, children, make sure that getting ‘dressed’ doesn’t take too long; we’ll be waiting.”
Melchior whistled a sprightly little bit of binary, and an egg timer appeared. He flipped it over so that the sand began to run. “Go get ‘dressed.’”
Mustering what little dignity still remained to me, I stood up and offered Cerice my arm. Together we went upstairs and found the closet exactly where Haemun had said it would be. Cerice’s armor, carefully scrubbed, had been placed on a person-shaped rack just inside the closet on the left. Next to it hung a small selection of women’s clothes in Cerice’s size and colors. As she started to sort through them, it quickly became apparent that most of them were, shall we say, “not for strenuous use.”
“Your subconscious is incorrigible,” said Cerice, holding up a particularly flimsy and translucent bit of fluff.
To avoid having to answer that, I turned my attention to the space beyond the little patch of red and gold. The majority of the closet was filled with black and green, including several sets of racing leathers, and a suit of samurai-type armor that I wouldn’t have been caught dead in. I only turned back around when I heard a little gasp from behind me.
Cerice had pulled out a full-length brocade gown. It was elaborate and gorgeous and unlike any of the other women’s clothes on the rack.
“What do you suppose your hindbrain had in mind for this?” she asked, holding it up against herself. “I found it on the floor in the very back.”
“Court ball?” I said quickly.
But that wasn’t what it was. When I was in my late teens my sister Lyra had married. I’m not generally a student of women’s fashion, but I’d fallen in love with her wedding dress. It was simply perfect. Here was that dress once again, the only difference being that it was in Cerice’s colors. I wondered what that said about the way I felt about Cerice and about the fact that it was on the floor in the back and not a hanger up front.
“Nice,” said Cerice, putting it away.
I nodded but didn’t say anything more. The dress made me want to explore the whole place and find out what other surprises might lurk in the various corners. But the goblins were waiting, and we really didn’t have much time. We did, however, find a moment or two for getting “dressed” before we put our clothes on, and that necessitated a quick s
hower. But that would have been a good idea anyway. Then, once more outfitted for action, we headed back to the balcony and our appointment with the hound of hell.
I hadn’t noticed it when we’d arrived, but a permanent faerie ring made up a part of the basic structure of the balcony. Thick black whorls in the stone floor near the head of the stairs surrounded a perfect ring of green. Cerice placed Shara on her shoulder, rather like a well-trained cat. Melchior climbed into my bag, and away we went.
On the shores of the Styx we stepped out of a circle made of corroded copper coins, the dead man’s fare. A little shiver of foreboding slid its way from the back of my neck to the base of my spine. Normally when I came to the border of Hades, I had Melchior set us down directly across from the gate. This time we’d arrived a few hundred yards downstream, in a place where the river ran very close to the outer wall of the great cavern that held the underworld. No more than ten feet separated the dark waters from the damp stone, and the faerie ring occupied a good portion of that narrow way.
It would have been easy for someone picking their way along to step into the circle accidentally and find out why all those old folk tales warned against trifling with the gateways of the fair folk. I felt quite sure the possibility hadn’t escaped the attention of whoever or whatever had crafted the ring and wondered if there might be other pleasant surprises left around by the same soul.
“Nasty,” said Cerice, but she wasn’t looking at the ring.
“What?” I asked.
“This place.”
“It’s supposed to be,” replied Melchior, poking his blue head over the edge of my bag. “Keeps the tourists away.”
“It’s better than being on the far shore,” said Shara with a shiver. “There’s not much that’s worse.”
She hugged herself and looked away from the Styx and the wall beyond. It was sheer and slick as glass, rising fifty or so feet from the waters to a razor’s edge at the top. Another barrier, invisible but impenetrable, climbed from there to the cavern’s ceiling. I’d found out about that by talking with Dave.
“Not much at all,” I agreed, wishing I’d gotten things right the first time, so we didn’t have to come back.
“I wonder what the headwaters look like,” said Cerice, “whether it’s as bad there. Beginnings rarely are.”
“That’s Clotho’s granddaughter talking,” said Melchior. “This is a bad place from start to finish.”
“Is it really?” asked Cerice.
“Trust me on that.”
“He’s teasing you,” I said. “But he’s also right. The Styx is a loop. It has no source and no outlet. Hades is an island in the center of a river without end. The first time we came here, Mel and I walked all the way around.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” said Cerice. “You didn’t mention it to me when you came home.”
“It didn’t seem all that important since it neither helped nor hindered my plans for freeing Shara. Besides, that first encounter with Cerberus drove most everything else about the trip out of my head.”
“You mean the way he picked you up with Bob’s big old jaws and had Mort tell you that if you ever came back he’d eat you was a little distracting?” Mel offered.
“He what?” asked Cerice. “You didn’t tell me that either, just that he’d warned you off.”
“I didn’t want you to worry. He was much nicer the second time.” It sounded lame even to me.
Cerice glanced upward as if asking for patience. “You drive me crazy, you know that, right?”
Time to change the subject. “And here I just thought I drove you wild.” I waggled my eyebrows.
“That too,” she said with a little chuckle. “That too.”
“I hate to interrupt,” said Shara, “but could you save the flirting for a more festive locale?”
I nodded. “You’re right. Let’s get this thing done and get out of here.”
I struck out toward the gate. The ground was rough and thick with loose bits of obsidian and other volcanic rock. I hadn’t gone ten feet before I accidentally kicked a stone. It skittered across the cave floor before sailing over the edge of the bank and landing in the river. When it hit, the water came alive. Or rather, things that had been hidden beneath its surface started moving. Lots of them, and fast. A dozen, no, a hundred rippling vees appeared, all of them rocketing toward the center of the ring made by the stone.
When they reached it, the water started to look like the surface of a boiling cauldron. A moment later I got a look at the cause of the commotion. Eels, or something very like them. There were so many that a few were pushed briefly out of the water by the pressure of their brethren below. Long and sinuous with shiny black skin and shiny black teeth, they had slick death written all over them.
“That’s new since our last visit.” Melchior sounded shaky. “Looks like someone crossbred sea snakes with piranhas. I can’t say much for their taste.”
“Probably just like chicken.” I put a lightness into my words that I didn’t feel. “Isn’t that what everything tastes like?”
“Oh, you’re very funny,” said Melchior. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Cerice hadn’t said anything for a while, so I turned to look at her. She was very pale, even more so than normal if that was possible. Cerice doesn’t scare easily, and her attitude surprised me at first. Then I noticed the way she was holding on to Shara’s thigh. To the best of my knowledge in the many years of their partnership, Shara has never fallen off of Cerice’s shoulder, but you couldn’t tell that by Cerice’s white-knuckled grip. This was a mother afraid for her only child’s life, and I didn’t have anything reassuring to say to her. Instead, I reached over and squeezed the shoulder that didn’t hold Shara.
“We’d better move on.”
Cerice nodded, and we continued. A few minutes later, when we’d reached the point where a beach appeared between the water and the wall on the farther bank, a howl went up, a howl with words of warning in it.
“Sounds like Fido knows we’re here,” said Melchior.
I gave him an admonishing look. “I wouldn’t say that where he could hear you.”
“Neither would I. All the same, he knows.”
I nodded and stopped walking. Best to wait for him to come to us.
“Do we have an exit strategy if this conversation goes badly?” asked Cerice.
“Run?” I said.
“How about something a little more proactive?” She lifted Shara off her shoulder and knelt in front of the goblin. “Why don’t you set up an LTP link so we can gate out if we have to.”
“I’ll try if you want,” responded Shara, “but the mweb’s cutting in and out here, too. Any attempt to gate could go very bad if we get a service outage at the wrong moment.”
“Why didn’t you mention that earlier?” asked Cerice.
Shara shrugged. “Mweb problems have been so common the last few days that it didn’t seem worth mentioning.”
“But we’re in the main level of reality,” said Cerice. “This is where the system lives. Blackouts shouldn’t be possible.”
“Maybe the turbulence from all the lost nodes is affecting the servers,” I said.
For every world that went off-line, there would be a line in the network that no longer had an anchor point. If they were all flopping around loose, it could eat up a lot of processing power.
“Better not risk it,” said Cerice. “I—”
“Here he comes,” interrupted Melchior.
Cerberus had emerged from his den. He stalked to the edge of the water then very deliberately leaped in. Rippling vees exploded away from his entry point as the eels—showing more sense than I’d have expected—found someplace else to be.
The river was wide, but Cerberus is a big dog, and it didn’t take him long to cross the distance between us. As he climbed out, I remembered my last experience with a wet hellhound.
“Melchior, Hydrophobia. Please.”
The goblin whistled a spell, and a hu
ge transparent shower curtain appeared between us and Cerberus. It was just in time, as the great dog started to shake himself dry. When he’d finished, Melchior whistled the barrier away.
“And a soggy hello to you, too,” I said. “How are things?”
“Cut the crap, Raven,” said Bob. “You’re not here to make small talk, and we all know it.”
“Charming as always, Bob.”
“But he’s right this time,” said Mort. Then he winked. “Though I could sure go for a hand or two of cards.”
“That would be nice,” agreed Dave. “But it can’t be bridge. We’ve got too many players.” He addressed that last directly to Cerice.
Cybermancy Page 25