Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  In this multiverse, every split has to make it past Necessity before it generates a new universe, and mostly they don’t. Most splits she collapses back into a single primary line of reality. In particular, splits that might result in two versions of any of the pantheon’s powers get shut down ruthlessly. Necessity keeps all the major players singular and limits the results of our choices. At least, she used to. It’s no longer clear what powers Necessity has or is exercising. Or, for that matter, what powers the system exercises on its own without any input from the guiding intelligence of the goddess. We had broken things pretty badly, Persephone, Nemesis, and I.

  “Where are we?” asked Fenris as he wended his way toward the front of the room.

  “Prime/?” Melchior named the mweb address. “Decision Locus Zero and the exact center of the Greek pantheoverse.”

  “Planet Necessity,” I replied. “Our version of Mimir sequestered an entire human-free version of the Earth as a processing center.”

  Fenris sniffed the air. “So why does it smell mummified?”

  “This corner of it is,” I said. “The servers in this room are dead but not gone. At one time it was the second-most-important portion of Necessity’s network, the place where she kept track of yours truly along with a bunch of other, lesser lights.”

  Melchior snorted.

  I ignored him. “I figured it would be a good place to test out my shiny new access powers since the maximum-security protocols should still be in place, but there’s nothing vital to get hurt if things go horribly wrong.”

  “That’s reassuring,” said Fenris. “Is there a specific reason to think they might go that badly? Or is that just a general-principles thing?”

  As I started to answer, a sharp electrical crackling noise came from the front of the room, followed by a heavy thud like a blade falling and the fat sizzle of a really big system shorting out. In the next second, the calm blue of the standby lights on the servers all shifted to an angry red that suggested systemwide failure.

  I sighed. “Call it extrapolation from long experience.”

  “I’m guessing you want to go see what that’s all about.” Melchior sounded resigned. “I only bring it up because there is an alternative. Just this once, we could head for points elsewhere before the shooting starts.”

  “Maybe it’s mice.” I slipped past Fenris and began to creep toward the front of the room, beckoning for the others to follow. “Come on. Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if we ran away, and it turned out to be a bunch of cute little fuzzballs?”

  Fenris fell in behind me, with Laginn perched on his neck.

  Melchior trailed along at the back of the parade. “I’m actually very hard to embarrass. And besides, we both know it’s not mice.”

  “You can’t know that until we go look.”

  “I don’t need to know,” he replied. “I’m content with my ignorance.”

  By then I had almost made it to the front bank of servers, where the smell of dust and disuse gave way to the sharp, bitter odor of fried circuits. Very cautiously I leaned forward and peered around the nearest rack. From there I could see the patch panel and the associated switching computer that had once linked this room to the rest of Necessity’s network. What was left of them, really. Both had been badly damaged in my duel with Nemesis, though I’d later kludged the remnants into temporary usability.

  More recently— much more recently, judging by the smoke still rising from the computer—

  someone had severed the trunk cables and shorted the repaired switch.

  Melchior brushed against my knee as he looked around the corner. “No mouse did that.”

  “Maybe it was a really big mouse.” I left the others and crossed to the place where the foot-thick bundle of cables had been cut, kneeling for a better look. “A really big mouse with a very sharp blade of some kind. Very, very sharp.” Whatever had severed the cables had done it as cleanly as any cut I’d ever seen.

  Somewhere behind me, Melchior took a sudden harsh breath, and Fenris began to growl, very low and very quiet.

  “Squeak,” said a sour voice, also from behind me, though much closer. A woman. “Squeak, squeak, squeak.”

  The button of organic diamond on my palm seemed to catch fire as adrenaline surged through me. With the added impetus of my new Fury attachment, I could feel fight kicking flight’s ass as the reaction of choice. It took a huge effort of will to suppress that wholly alien urge to violence as first resort.

  “Not a mouse, then,” I said through clenched teeth. “Though just as gray, if I don’t miss my guess. Are you planning to kill me, Madam? Or may I turn around to see if I’m right?”

  “Why does it have to be one or the other?” she asked, and I knew that I had guessed correctly when I finally recognized her voice.

  Alecto, the Fury of Storm.

  CHAPTER SIX

  If Alecto had wanted to kill me out of hand, she could have. Since she hadn’t, I figured she must want something from me. Being very careful not to make any sudden movements, I rose and turned to face her. Alecto is the most reserved and strategy-minded of the Furies, and thus least likely to take your head off without a good reason, but she is still a Fury.

  She looked much as I remembered her, tall and curvy with granite gray skin, and wings and hair like the blackest thundercloud you’ve ever seen, complete with constantly moving threads of silver lightning. Occasionally, one of those would ground itself out on the floor with a sharp crackle.

  “If that wolf doesn’t stop trying to creep up on me like that, I’m going to tear your heart out.”

  Alecto’s voice was gentle, almost regretful, but adamant. “That’d really be a shame since I came to talk, and I’d rather not have to kill you right this minute.”

  “That makes two of us.” I looked past her to Fenris and nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure I could nail her before she got to you,” said Fenris, who had frozen midcrouch with Alecto’s threat.

  Alecto chuckled. “You’re wrong, wolf, but I like your style. Let me make the lot of you an offer. If you will agree to a temporary truce and sit down with me for a civilized conversation, I will agree to return to this exact position for a resumption of hostilities should the discussion prove unsatisfactory. Deal?”

  I nodded.

  “That works for me,” said Fenris, visibly loosening the muscles he’d tensed in preparation for a last great leap.

  “Can I vote for a head start toward the door instead?” asked Melchior. “Just give me three steps.”

  Alecto chuckled. “You’re smarter than your master, I see.”

  “Partner,” I said, simultaneous with Melchior’s indignant, “Boss.”

  “If the word displeases you,” said Alecto, “pretend I used another. We have more important matters to discuss while the privacy that the unfortunate equipment failure forces on us lasts.”

  Her eyes flicked meaningfully to the severed ends of the cable.

  “I guess that’s as close as I’m going to get to an apology,” said Melchior, then shrugged. “To be honest, it’s more than I expected. Thank you.”

  Alecto bobbed her head in the faintest of nods.

  I just nodded at her words. What in the name of all gods was going on here?

  “Would you care to elaborate on that last?” I asked, as Melchior whistled us up a set of seats appropriate to our diverse physical needs and a conference table to go in the middle of the lot.

  In a nod to mutual distrust, he put a glass top on the latter so that each of us could see what the others might be doing beneath its surface. I noted with approval that he’d arranged things so that he and I both had a solid wall behind our chairs and Fenris’s cushion faced the side of the room where someone coming at us around the racks would most likely appear.

  “Very nice.” Alecto slid into a chair whose slender back made comfortable accommodation for her wings. “One might think you’d had practice seating a Fury.” She turned her gaze my way, her expression h
ardening. “Speaking of which, how is my sister, Tisiphone? I would consider it a matter of good faith for you to answer that question before I address yours.”

  “At this exact moment?” I shrugged and took my seat opposite Alecto. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe better, since you’ve known her longer. When last I saw her? That’s more complex.” I pictured the mix of hope and sorrow in her eyes at the moment of our parting. “I think that in some ways she was the happiest she has ever been, free as she is at last from the weight of her role as Necessity’s enforcer and a power of vengeance.”

  “It’s an amazing feeling,” said Fenris, “freedom. Truly amazing.”

  Laginn hopped from his neck to the table and bobbed his version of agreement.

  Alecto’s eyes went far away then, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “But? There is a

  ‘but,’ right?”

  “There is,” I said. “Neither she nor I wanted to see me come back here.” I felt a brief tugging sensation in my chest and found that I didn’t know what to say after that.

  I’d had no choice but to leave, and I understood perfectly why she’d had no real choice but to stay. Things had gone exactly the way they had to, and yet I found myself regretting the course of events more with each day that passed. I missed the scent of her skin, the fiery fall of her hair, the sound of her laugh . . . everything about her, really. If I lived through the current mess, I knew what my next move would be, and woe to the god or power who stood between me and my exit from this MythOS.

  Alecto nodded, as though she’d heard the thoughts I couldn’t speak. “Thank you. I think that almost we understand each other. When you see Tisiphone again, tell her that her sisters miss her, but that Alecto, at least, would not ask her to return.”

  “I’ll tell her. And now that I’ve answered your question, I believe the floor is yours.” I flipped a thumb toward the ruined switching computer.

  “The only connection between this facility and the rest of Necessity was that cable. Because of an unfortunate accident, that link has been severed. Until it is repaired, none of the minds of Necessity can see what happens here. Not my mother, not Shara. No one. We are temporarily off the edge of the map.”

  “ ‘Accident’?” blurted Melchior. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all.” One side of Alecto’s mouth tilted up in the faintest of smiles. “You can’t imagine that I’d deliberately cut myself off from Necessity, can you? Not after all the effort we went through over the last year to get in touch with her again. No, it was a slip of that notorious Fury temper, nothing more. No one could ever have guessed that the hampered function of that patch Ravirn made to the system might drive me into such a blind rage that I would slash the cable. Or that the discharge from my wings into all that freshly exposed copper might cook the switch. Perish the thought.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “What?” The look on Alecto’s face as she said that was so utterly guileless that I wanted to laugh. “It’s really quite fortunate that venting my rage on the cable calmed me down enough so that we could talk rationally so soon after.”

  It was brilliant, too. I had no doubt that she had made herself just mad enough to break things, and not a jot more. I doubted that Megaera or Tisiphone could have managed the effort so closely. Both were subject to more elemental sorts of rage. Tisiphone tended to the quick, incredibly destructive wildness of a cat released from a recently shaken sack. She was a berserker. Megaera was implacable, a pit bull who would sink her fangs into a target and let go only when she or her target had been utterly defeated. Alecto’s rage, on the other hand, was a cold and calculated thing. Exact, meticulous, a scalpel instead of Tisiphone’s axe or Megaera’s bear trap.

  “How much time do we have before someone comes to fix things?” asked Melchior.

  “Enough,” said Alecto. “At least an hour. Perhaps as long as three. It depends on which of the minds of Necessity notices it first.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  Again, Alecto smiled her tiny half smile. “My own reasons and not for sharing. The better question would be ‘what?’ As in what did I want to tell you.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. What?”

  “You can’t trust Shara.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Melchior leaned angrily forward in his chair.

  I held up a hand to forestall the tirade. “Hang on a second, Mel. I’m thinking that Alecto has gone to way too much trouble to arrange a private meeting to just leave it at that. She has to know that we’re not going to take her word over an old friend’s under the circumstances. Right?”

  I raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Alecto.

  “Right, though again, I have to stress that I didn’t arrange anything. Our current, wholly unexpected privacy is an unfortunate consequence of my making a rage-driven error in judgment.”

  “Sorry. I keep forgetting.” I felt a strong temptation to ask if all the doublethink hurt, but forbore in the interest of keeping the discussion on track. “You were saying, Alecto?”

  “Shara. I don’t expect you to take my word. In fact, I don’t expect you to believe a thing I’m about to tell you. I’m just hoping that you will remember it when the time comes or circumstances give you reasons to doubt. There is something wrong with Necessity.”

  “You don’t say,” drawled Melchior, obviously still stinging from what he saw as an attack on a longtime friend. “We would never have guessed that without your amazing insight.”

  The lightning flashes in Alecto’s hair and wings picked up their tempo. “Don’t mock me, little man. Not if you want to live. I am a Fury operating at the ragged edge of my envelope. My patience has very finite limits under the best of circumstances, and the current state of affairs shortens the horizon considerably.”

  I didn’t like the threat there, and neither did Fenris if the flattening of his ears provided any signal to his mood, but I needed to know what Alecto had to tell us. I put a hand on Melchior’s shoulder and gently but firmly squeezed. He nodded and made a show of firmly closing his mouth. Laginn returned to a perch on Fenris’s neck.

  “Thank you,” said Alecto, and the lightning began to subside. “The reason I’m warning you against Shara is the same reason I might warn you against Necessity herself if I could do so without violating my nature as a Fury. There is something wrong with Necessity—the computer, not the goddess—and at the most fundamental level. I can’t say what, though I’ve been trying desperately to locate the cause.”

  Alecto flicked her wings and bounced from the chair, beginning to pace. As she did so, I felt a faint whisper of movement across my skin, as though the breeze of her wings had ruffled my—

  currently nonexistent—Raven’s feathers. It was a familiar and worrying feeling, as it usually presaged magical weirdness. I looked around uneasily but couldn’t see much of anything in the darkness beyond the first couple of ranks of server racks.

  “It could be that some remnant of the Persephone virus has reactivated itself,” continued Alecto.

  “Or perhaps there is some other intrusion into the network from outside—maybe a power who has used this moment of my mother’s weakness to try to subvert the system. Most likely, I fear, is some sort of short-circuit-driven madness that has infected even the most basic processes of the electronic mind of Necessity.”

  She pinned Melchior with a hard look. “Never forget that your Shara is doing all of her thinking with the same flawed mind that the rest of Necessity is forced to use. However much you love and trust your friend, know that I love and trust Necessity as much or more. And I say that she is acting and reacting in ways that are not what they should be, that are not even self-consistent.”

  Alecto turned away from us, and her wings drooped almost to the floor. Her voice lowered, too.

  “Megaera and I have parted ways over which Necessity is the true goddess. She is following orders from a part of Necessity that I find worrisome, an angry, bitter N
ecessity with a dark and terrible vision of the future.”

  “Call it a just vision, and you will come closer to the truth,” said a new voice. A voice that sounded as though it came from a mouth not entirely designed for human speech, and one I recognized.

  The fluffing of my invisible feathers directionalized itself then, drawing my attention up and off to my left.

  The scorpion-styled spinnerette scuttled into view there a moment later, crawling upside down along the cavern ceiling as easily as any of her lesser arachnid cousins might. She looked even less human in person than she had over Persephone’s video feed and somehow much more sinister.

  “I don’t believe I invited you to join the discussion.” Alecto’s voice came out calm and uninflected, but the lightnings in her wings and hair danced a wild gyre and increasingly jumped to the ground or the nearby computer racks, flavoring the air with ozone and burning circuitry.