Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” Melchior’s normally pale blue face had darkened to something in the neighborhood of indigo. “Why are you always trying to get yourself killed?”

  “I’m not,” I said, “but the Raven might have other plans.”

  Melchior looked away.

  One of the problems with becoming a power is the loss of some degree of autonomy. Take Cerice’s comment about her temper. Among the things she would have inherited when she became a Fury was an extra-large helping of little-f fury. In my case, becoming the Raven had amped the daylights out of all of my worst tendencies toward risk-taking and mischief-making. Ravirn the hacker and cracker was a trickster. The Raven is a mask of the Trickster, one that all too often wears my face rather than the other way around.

  Take my response to Cerice as Fury. The old Ravirn would probably have been appalled on her behalf and at least tried to think before speaking. The Raven? Not so much. The part of me that was the Trickster didn’t care about whatever madness had driven Shara to use her position within Necessity to offer Cerice Tisiphone’s place as a Fury. Nor about the madness that had convinced Cerice to agree. It cared about winning the conversational duel no matter how much of a callous ass that painted me.

  On the lemonade-from-lemons side, the Trickster isn’t big on self-doubt, so I have trouble hanging on to morose. At least, when no one is actively shooting at me, I do. I rolled backwards and up onto my feet.

  “Forget it, Mel. I’m sure life will drop a bucket of bricks on us soon enough without my help.”

  “Now, that’s reassuring.” Melchior shook his head and started to pace. “Do you think she really meant that about Shara?”

  “The hiring-decision thing?” I shrugged. “I don’t see how else you arrive at Cerice as Fury. We still don’t know what happened with Necessity to get us sent off to the Norse MythOS. It’s possible that was a symptom of a complete and unfixable crash, and that Shara’s running the show now.”

  “Care to clue a guy in here?” Fenris asked me.

  “Sure. Necessity is our version of MimirSoft—the goddess in computer shape who keeps track of the gods and all the infinite worlds of probability. Because of a couple of minor miscalculations on my part, she caught a virus that just about ate the entire multiverse.”

  “To say nothing of the hardware damage your duel with Nemesis inflicted,” said Melchior.

  “Well, yeah.” I looked at my feet. “There’s that, too, but that wasn’t really my fault.”

  “So that mess you made with Mimir and Rune wasn’t exactly outside your normal mode of operations,” said Fenris.

  “More like his specialty,” said Melchior.

  The wolf whistled. “No wonder Odin wanted to get rid of you. Between that and your little selfaware laptop buddy here”—he indicated Melchior with his nose—“you’re something like the ultimate biological malware.”

  I shrugged. “I prefer to think of myself as a hacker and cracker, but you might have a point there.”

  “So who’s Shara?” he asked.

  “That’s complex. She used to be Cerice’s webgoblin and familiar. Laptop by day, miniature purple Mae West by night, or something like that anyway. Now the part of her that’s really her is trapped inside Necessity and—if what Cerice said is true—she may be running the whole show.”

  “Should I assume that’s your fault, too?” asked Fenris.

  I looked away.

  “Wow.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Melchior said, coming to my rescue, “but I’m thinking this might not be the safest place to hang out for any length of time. Shall we move this elsewhere?”

  “Good point,” I said. “It’s always harder to hit a moving target. How about we start by introducing Brer Wolf around? I suspect that if we don’t do it now, we’re going to get way too busy with other issues.”

  There were a million things I needed to be doing, starting with finding out what had happened to Necessity and how we’d ended up in the Norse MythOS, and moving right along to finding out what the hell Cerice and Shara were thinking. But just for today, I was going to play hooky from responsibility.

  “Did you have anyone in mind?” asked Melchior.

  I was about to answer when I felt a squeeze on my ankle. I glanced down. A severed hand clung there. Laginn.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to forget you. We’ll introduce you around, too.”

  Laginn used to be the hand of the Norse God of War, Tyr. That was before Fenris bit the hand off and a few hundred years of marinating in the Norse-style chaos that lives in the giant wolf’s belly gave it new life. Now, it is a he, as well as Fenris’s constant companion and occasional chew toy. They have a strange, semisymbiotic relationship. Which I suppose could be said of me and Melchior as well.

  “Introduce us around?” Fenris canted his head to one side, managing to look simultaneously confused and hungry. “Why?”

  “Well, I figure it’s my fault that you’re stuck here in the land of the Greek gods. That makes it my responsibility to help you get settled. You’re welcome to stay at Raven House for as long as you like, but that’s a pretty isolated corner of reality. I’m sure you’d like to make some friends beyond yours truly and find a better place to hang your”—I tried to think of a suitable substitute for hat—“collar?”

  “I hate that word; you should watch . . .” The huge wolf stopped and made a series of slow turns, looking rather like a dog chasing his tail at one-tenth speed. “Gleipner really is gone, isn’t it? I don’t think I fully understood what that means until this very second.”

  Fenris threw his great head back and let out a howl that probably terrified everything remotely edible within a ten-mile radius. “I’m free!”

  Then he actually did start chasing his tail. Just when that looked like it might be starting to lose its appeal, Laginn bolted past, running on tippy-fingers. Fenris leaped in pursuit, barking like a puppy the whole time.

  I couldn’t help grinning as the two dodged in and out among the weird detritus that dotted the surreal landscape. The worlds out at the edge of the Greek MythOS can get very strange, and Garbage Faerie is one of the oddest I’ve ever visited.

  It looks rather like what you might get if a high urban civilization turned over a hundred years of its trash and junk flow to a really twisted designer of Japanese formal gardens. Big-screen TVs lie cracked screen up, with delicate arrangements of pebbles tracing the fractures. Old train engines have been planted like the menhirs of Stonehenge, their original shapes all but obscured by the wild grape and morning glory that grow on them. It is beautiful and bizarre and I love it.

  The exuberant game of chase played between a wolf roughly the size and shape of an anorexic Clydesdale and the bitten-off hand of a god made it all the stranger and more wonderful. I laughed aloud for the sheer weirdness of existence. Fenris was a power, too, or had been in his home MythOS. Here, he would be much weaker but also free. Free of the mantle of a power and free of the silver cord of Gleipner the Entangler, which had bound him for more than a thousand years. What would it be like to shake all that off?

  I was feeling pretty good about that and my whole Big Fat Norse Odyssey up until Laginn leaped over the edge of the large and very fresh crater that dominated the scenery, and Fenris followed him down. That was when my smile died. The giant hole in the ground had once been a hill with a home under it, the home of a dear friend whose life had paid for the freedom of Fenris and his fellow Norse deities, a friend I had killed.

  “You miss Ahllan, too, don’t you?” Melchior walked over to stand beside me.

  “It’s more than that,” I said.

  Melchior looked up at me, his expression shrewd. “You believe you’re responsible for her death, and you’re feeling guilty.”

  “I am responsible for her death, Mel. I killed her as surely as if I’d put a bullet in her heart. I may have had the best motive in the world, but the details don’t change a thing.”

&n
bsp; “Bullshit.” Melchior’s voice was flat and the coldest I’d ever heard it.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Bullshit.’” Melchior glared up at me. “That’s guilt talking, not sense. Details mean everything. Shooting someone because you don’t like the color of their jacket is senseless murder. Shooting someone who’s about to kill you is self-defense. Shooting someone as part of an honest, trial-generated execution is justice.”

  “No matter how you slice it, somebody ends up dead and somebody else ends up a killer.”

  “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened there at the end,” said Melchior. “But I do know you and what you’re capable of. I also know, or knew, Ahllan. She was the closest thing I have to a mother. The computer that absorbed her memories told us that Ahllan believed what you did was right. Between the two, I know enough to call bullshit on all this ‘I killed her’ angst. There was a lot more in the balance than just Ahllan’s life. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that what you did didn’t have to be done?”

  I looked away. “I could have saved her.”

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  How could I explain it to him? Yes, I’d done no more than what I had to, but that didn’t make it any better. Ahllan’s life was over, and it was my fault.

  I was still trying to figure out what to say when Fenris bounced to a stop in front of me. “I feel better! So, where to next?”

  “I know just the place,” I said.

  It was the strangest game of Risk I’d ever played. The board lay on a huge gray slab of granite. On one side lolled Cerberus, or more accurately, Mort, Dave, and Bob, since the heads were each playing individually. Fenris sat to their left, looking rather like the world’s scariest puppy by comparison. The wolf of Asgard is the size of a draft horse and looks like he eats busloads of children as often as he can get them, but the hound of Hades is built more along the lines of what you’d get if you crossed the great-granddaddy of all bulldogs with a carnivorous elephant. Add a disembodied hand and me to the picture and place the whole thing on the banks of the Styx with the Gates of Hades in the background, and you get something that makes Dogs Playing Poker look downright Norman Rockwell by comparison.

  “You cheat,” growled Bob, a Doberman, and my least favorite head. He’d just lost a battle for Iceland.

  “How could I cheat?” replied Dave, the rottweiler middle head whom I usually partnered at bridge. “It’s luck. You roll the dice and take your lumps.”

  “He’s right,” said Mort, the mastiff.

  “He cheats,” said Bob.

  “Are you going to keep repeating that all night long, or are you going to finish your turn and pass the dice?” asked Fenris.

  The big wolf looked like he was having the time of his life, and maybe he was. I’m pretty sure that growing up in a place where everyone treated you as a monster because a prophecy said you were inevitably going to turn into one would have a distorting effect on your sense of fun. It might also turn you into a monster.

  That it hadn’t spoke to the innate resiliency of . . . people? Giant wolves? Gods? Don’t get me wrong; he was still a giant, slavering deity in wolf shape, if a much less powerful one. And he was potentially capable of all sorts of harm and horror, but none of that makes him stand out particularly from the rest of the divine crowd, Norse or Greek. Take my extended family for example . . . please. There’s plenty of ripping people to pieces, involuntary transformation, and old-fashioned warmongering to go around, and none of it for particularly admirable reasons. Speaking of that last, it was at about that point that Laginn and Mort formed a temporary alliance and drove my game armies into the sea.

  After I’d boxed my pieces up, I headed down to the water’s edge, settling near where Melchior was sitting with Cerberus’s webpixie, Kira—think iPhone meets miniature goth chick, and you’ve pretty much got the right picture. In pixie shape, she’s about three inches tall, blazingly hot in a dye-job black and pancake white sort of way, and straight from the capital city of badattitude land. The two of them were chattering away in machine language at about seven thousand times the data-transfer rate of English, and neither looked up as I passed them.

  The Styx is a looped river that surrounds Hades the place. Both lie in a gigantic cavern somewhere under the roots of Mount Olympus. The underworld gates, which lay just across the water from me, were huge iron monstrosities set in a stone arch. As usual, they stood open, offering both a threat and a promise. I felt it on an extremely personal level—Hades the god has promised me a special place within. I shivered at that thought but couldn’t look away. Just outside the gates is Hades’ main concession to modernity, a check-in line taken straight from the heart of America’s dysfunctional airport-security system, complete with a full five acts of security theater.

  “Hey, Boss,” said Melchior from behind me.

  “Yes?” I didn’t turn around.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, his tone shifting from demanding to concerned.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’re not arguing about the ‘Boss’ thing. That only happens when you’re in too much trouble to take the time, or when something’s really bothering you.”

  “Would it make you feel better if I grumped at you?” I asked.

  There was actually quite a lot bothering me, starting with Cerice. The more I thought about her becoming a power, the less I liked the idea.

  Mel sighed. “Forget it, Boss. The reason I spoke up is that you’ve got an incoming visual transfer protocol request from Eris. Do you want to answer or not?”

  “How’d she find out I was home so quickly?” The idea of Eris keeping a close eye on my comings and goings made me nervous. I turned around. “Initiate Vtp. Please.”

  “Done.” Mel opened his eyes and mouth as wide as possible. From each came a different beam of light—red, green, and blue—meeting about a foot in front of his face and forming a golden globe with a somewhat misty miniature version of Eris standing at its center.

  “Ravirn, dear child, I’d like to have a private word.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something at the moment,” I replied. The “dear child” made me very nervous—Discord is never sweet or gentle. “I can give you a couple of moments of Vtp time or maybe stop in a bit later in the week.”

  “You make it sound like I’d made a request. Silly boy.”

  Her hand suddenly shot forward out of the globe, taking on weight and substance as it grew impossibly long. Before I could do so much as yelp, she caught the collar of my jacket and jerked me forward into the globe. As I became one with the projection, I could actually feel myself shrinking and growing more diffuse. It was one of the stranger experiences of a rather strange life.

  I have traveled through the chaos between worlds many times. I have done it as a string of digital code moving along the carefully guarded channels of the mweb or as a deadweight dragged by a Fury. I have gone the route of curdled probability that lies at the heart of a faerie ring, or stepped straight from point A to point B by the fixed gate of a magical portrait. I have even flown the pathless infinities on my very own Raven’s wings.

  None of that felt half as strange as my current means of locomotion. It was as if I had become a field or wave function that somehow propagated itself through the stuff of chaos, an impulse encoded in the very motion of the Primal Chaos. When I arrived at the other end, I had the distinct feeling that none of the me that had started the trip had any kind of direct connection to the me that ended it. Deeply, deeply creepy.

  “What the hell did you just do to me?” I demanded of Eris in the instant that my mouth reconstituted itself.

  She stood atop a waist-high white marble pedestal in the shape of a fluted Ionic column at the exact center of a circular colonnade and temple. A bronze plaque on the plinth said DISCORD, in case I had any doubts. In the moment of my arrival, she wore the aspect of a white marble statue in the classical mode, complete with the traditio
nal clingy dress and strappy sandals. She stood as still as stone, and for reasons unclear, she had on a blindfold and was holding a set of bronze scales in the mode of Justice. Well, mostly in the mode. A severed thumb firmly weighted the left side of the balance, and the blindfold didn’t fully cover her eye on that side. Her left arm was partially hidden behind her. By stepping around to that side, I could see her hand, sans thumb, held discreetly open. A cascade of coins fell from nowhere into the hand, where they vanished.

  “What do you think?” Her voice seemed to issue from the air about a foot to my left. “It’s sort of a commentary piece.”