Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “I am the Voice of Necessity,” said the spinnerette. “I go where I will in the kingdom of my mistress, and no one can stop me, not even a traitor Fury such as you or that ice bitch who serves the interloper.”

  Alecto’s claws slid from their sheaths, and her lightning redoubled itself as she opened her wings to their fullest spread. The little crackles that had accompanied her earlier anger gave way to a series of sharp booms like miniature thunder as the bolts grew longer and stronger. The nearest rack of servers shorted with a huge zorching sound and exploded into white fire.

  “I’ve had it with you,” snarled Alecto, and there was nothing calm, or even human, in her tone.

  “Now might be a good time for an exit stage right,” Melchior whispered.

  “Don’t you want to see how this turns out?” Fenris seemed entranced by the display.

  “No, not really.” Melchior shook his head. “I really am all right with not knowing some things. Especially if said things might hurt me.” He rolled his eyes. “Why can’t I convince anyone of that?”

  “I think Mel might have a point this time.” I slid from my chair and started edging toward the gap where we had entered.

  Fenris’s tail sagged, and his ears drooped, but he fell in behind me.

  “Uh, Boss?” Melchior hadn’t moved.

  “Yes?”

  “Why not just slash us a doorway into the great beyond?”

  I blinked. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. Occam’s expanded reach was too new. “Good question. Raven House, here we come.”

  I drew upon the well of anger that Shara’s forced modifications had left me to summon the sword and make the cut. There was something odd about the sound Occam made as it sliced the air this time, almost like an echo, but it really didn’t register fully until I’d stepped through the gap and into a sucker punch that left me curled around a ball of pain while I vomited my guts out.

  For what felt like a very long time, I could neither breathe nor think straight. Just as I regained enough coherence to wonder how many of my internal organs might have survived the impact, I felt something hard and sharp press down on my right wrist, pinning it to the cold concrete of the floor on which I lay. Looking up, I found Megaera standing over me. She had a grim smile on her face and had placed the claws of her left foot firmly across my sword wrist. Above her, a corrugated steel roof suggested some sort of big industrial space like an airplane hangar. It was chilly, probably below sixty, though well above freezing.

  “If you make any attempt to use the sword to cut yourself a door out of here, I will remove your hand,” said Megaera. “Do you understand?”

  I glanced around, hoping to find out what had become of my companions, but I could only see a lot of open space in the near distance and what looked like a couple of eighties-era mainframe clusters off on the far side of the hangar. Wherever I was, Fenris and Melchior were not there with me.

  Megaera increased the pressure of her claws, nearly breaking the skin. “Say yes or no.”

  “Yes or no.” I had to.

  “Not smart.” Megaera leaned down and backhanded me. “Yes, or no?”

  The place where her knuckles had met my cheekbone felt as though someone were making an ongoing attempt to drill for oil. The Trickster in me wanted nothing more than to tell her that was only 5.5 on the beatings scale and seriously underperformed the Fury standard as set by my exgirlfriend, while my brand-new inner anger-management problem was lobbying for sinking my teeth into her ankle. Oddly enough, that tug in two directions made it easier to think straight.

  I vetoed both suicidal impulses, and said, “Yes?”

  “Better.” She kept the pressure on my wrist but didn’t hit me again, which struck me as a win under the present circumstances.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” she asked.

  “Not a clue, but I figure you’re going to tell me whether I want to know or not, so it’s really not the uppermost question in my mind.” That would be: Why weren’t the others here?

  “I can’t imagine what Tisiphone ever saw in you,” she said.

  “Good looks? Boyish charm? Raw sex appeowww!”

  The second backhand landed exactly where the first had, to the millimeter. When I came back from the place the pain had sent me, I could feel my cheek swelling like a bag of microwave popcorn set on high. Apparently it was my week for injuries.

  “Whatever she saw,” said Megaera, “it can’t have been brains. Sometimes I am honestly surprised your skull hasn’t collapsed in on the sucking vacuum between your ears.” She leaned closer. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just kill you and put you out of my misery?”

  “Offhand?” I shook my head . . . which turned out to be a bad idea, at least according to my cheekbone. I had to force the rest of the words out past the big black cloud of pain that tried to take me off to dreamland. “No. But I’m pretty sure you can.”

  “What makes you so certain of that, Raven?”

  “The fact that I’m still breathing is a pretty good clue. If you had no use for me, I’d already be dead.”

  Megaera smiled nice and wide, one of the scariest expressions I’d ever seen. “Maybe you are dead, and I’m just dragging things out for maximum suffering. I am a power of vengeance, after all.”

  Didn’t that just sound like fun? Plausible, ugly, and scary as all get-out. Still, I had to keep up the side, so I pasted on a smile of my own.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You haven’t hurt me enough for that.” Then, before she decided to make a liar of me, I shifted the subject. “What did you do to my gate to bring me here without the others? That was a clever piece of work.” I figured a little flattery never hurts when you’re dealing with people who go in for the whole worshippers-and-burnt-offerings thing. Besides, it was true.

  “I sliced a gate of my own from the other side. It opened into the air between you and yours. After you joined me here, I closed mine, leaving your companions to pass through the one you’d made. Though”—and her smile shone all the brighter—“they may end up regretting that by and by.”

  “How so?” I felt an anxious little pain in my stomach as I realized that I hadn’t the faintest idea how a Fury-style gate actually worked.

  Megaera shook her head. “I think I’d rather just let you worry about it for now. It’s much more satisfying for me that way.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just get yourself laid? I know this nearsighted cyclops that’s always seemed a bit on the desperate si—” I bit my own tongue, but knew I’d already said too much.

  Shit. I had to get my attitude and my mouth to stop running around together without consulting my brain.

  The Furies are damned good at their job. Megaera delivered two very precise, very fast kicks with her free foot. The first came in under my hip and momentarily lifted me half onto my left side, twisting the shoulder of my pinned arm painfully. The second kick struck my briefly exposed lower back just over the kidney. My whole body felt like it had dissolved into a sort of jelly made entirely from berries off the agony bush.

  “I am so going to enjoy it when I finally get the go-ahead to kill you,” said Megaera.

  My very clever response came out something like, “Blarg,” which was probably for the best, considering the results of my previous efforts at wit.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” said Megaera. “I didn’t do any permanent damage. Oh, you’ll probably be peeing red for a couple of days, but that’s all. Think of it as a keepsake of our time together.”

  I chewed on my tongue some more, as the Trickster seemed to have won the argument with my shiny new inner Fury over the best way to commit suicide. It would have been a great time for the cavalry to come charging over the hill, trumpets blowing, but that’s never been the way my life works. And apparently today was no exception, as evidenced by the fact that the next arrival on the scene was a familiar-looking giant scorpion-lady. To add insult to injury, she seemed not the least bit the wo
rse for wear.

  “How did things go with Alecto?” asked Megaera. “Did she finally see reason?”

  “I’m afraid not.” The spinnerette sighed. “And I remonstrated with her most forcefully.”

  “Are you trying to claim that you just came from a toe-to-toe with a Fury, and she didn’t even muss your hair?” I demanded. “No mere spinnerette has that kind of power.”

  The scorpion-lady laughed. “Of course not. Haven’t you been listening? I am much more than a

  ‘mere spinnerette, ’ Raven. I am the voice of Necessity and, when She so chooses, She can speak quite firmly.”

  “I note that you didn’t answer the question I asked,” I said. “So, I’m not buying it. I’ve seen the Furies go up against Eris, and no one, not even a full goddess, comes out of a slugging match with Alecto without picking up a few scrapes.”

  “Do you have a better explanation?” asked the scorpion.

  I didn’t, but I still didn’t believe her, in part because she still hadn’t answered my question.

  “I could teach him to respect you,” said Megaera, sounding simultaneously angry and hopeful.

  “Or better yet, I could just kill him and get him out of the way.”

  “Not yet,” said the scorpion. “Necessity still believes he might prove useful in ridding the system of the other players. Especially with the powers so recently granted by that little fool of a webgoblin.”

  Megaera growled like a frustrated mastiff but didn’t argue. Instead, she asked, “Will she really come here today? You promised me that she would, Delé.”

  “She promised,” said the scorpion . . . Delé. “Mine were merely the lips She used. And, yes, She’ll come. I can feel Her approaching even now.”

  I could only assume that “She” was Necessity, or, at least, whatever entity Megaera acknowledged as such.

  Whoever said Necessity-like being might really be, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to make her acquaintance. So, as the cavalry trumpets still hadn’t started blowing, I decided that I’d better start arranging my own rescue. The only problem was how.

  I couldn’t do anything with my shiny new Occam version 2.0 without losing it—an eventuality I might have considered a fair trade if it hadn’t also involved the loss of the attached hand. I don’t whistle fast enough to LTP my way out of a paper bag in anything less then ten minutes, and I didn’t think that Megaera would let me get away with running that much code.

  That shortened the available menu to various flavors of chaos magic and the powers of the Raven. Unfortunately, since I really didn’t much like chaos magic, the only wild spells I’ve had much practice with were the ones for shapechanging and faerie rings. The former wouldn’t get me anywhere; they’d just rearrange the bits that Megaera wanted to break. And the latter don’t work on Necessity’s world.

  That didn’t mean that the Raven wasn’t the best chance I had, just that I needed to manage things without a lot of the usual bang and flash, like oh, say, the giant bird shadow that had always accompanied my use of chaos magic since I’d become the Raven. Was there a way to invoke the Raven without flaunting its plumage? I could feel sweat begin to bead on my forehead as I kept coming back to that question without finding any good answers.

  Delé the scorpion let out a sudden little gasp. “She is almost here.”

  Damn. I wasn’t going to be able to manage this. Not unless I got a lot smarter in the next couple of minutes, and that didn’t seem any more likely than the idea of some cosmic cavalry coming along to pull my fat out of the fire.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Think, damn it! I mentally yelled at myself, though it didn’t seem to help. Think, Raven! Then, No. Wait. Think, Ravirn, not Raven.

  The Raven was not the only route I could take to find chaos, just the easiest and quickest. The primal version runs in the veins of every child of the Titans. That chaos-touched blood is the ultimate wellspring of all our magic, and even the most ordered among us can draw it forth at need. I had tapped the flow directly more than once back when I was still a child of Fate in good standing, before I ever heard the name Raven. I had used the rough magic flowing in my blood to kill my cousin Moric and had made my first faerie ring in like manner. Why couldn’t I do it again now?

  I just needed to spill a little of my Titan legacy to provide a seed. Well, probably more than a little, considering the divine status of my captor. Of course, the bleeding would be the easy part. Figuring out how to convert magic to mobility posed a far greater problem. I’d already ruled out LTP, faerie rings, and Fury gates, as well as all the slower forms of running away that I could think of. What did that leave me?

  As I searched my memory for an answer, I found my thoughts turning to my most recent visit to Castle Discord and the means by which Eris had drawn me to her. It might only provide the ragged beginnings of a plan, but that was a step in the right direction—toward the exit.

  At the exact moment that idea occurred to me, Madam Scorpion let out a hiss like a satisfied steam engine, threw wide the arms of her humanoid half, and shouted, “At last!”

  A shimmering bubble of light formed in the space above and in front of her, seeming to congeal from thin air. I really needed to get past thinking and into skedaddling. The first step was blood.

  With a little mental wince, I jerked my right arm about half an inch, then yelped, “Sorry. Cramp!”

  Megaera snarled and tensed, but she didn’t take my hand off—she was too busy staring hopefully at that shimmer of approaching doom.

  Almost absently, she said, “I told you not to move. You won’t get another warning.”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything for fear of giving some hint of my hopes away. As a result of my sudden movement, I had five neat parallel slices across the flesh of my sword wrist and would soon have plenty of blood to work with. Now, if the powers that be just gave me enough time to figure out exactly what Eris had done to convert me from a loosely organized cluster of particles to a wave propagating itself through the stuff of chaos, I might make it out of there yet.

  A sharp, breaking-balloon sound drew my attention from my arm to the bubble of shimmering light as it popped, leaving behind . . . another shimmering bubble? No, this smaller sphere reflected light rather than producing it from within. The gazing ball of doom had finally caught up to me again.

  “That’s your—” I began, only to be cut off by Megaera’s glad cry of, “Mother!” and Delé’s hissing, “Goddess.”

  The smoke-streaked silver sphere rotated in the air, and again I had the distinct impression of a great mirrored eye turning to regard me. A very hostile eye. This time, though, it triggered a secondary sense of déjà vu, as of older memories half-buried.

  “Can I kill him now?” Megaera asked the sphere.

  Delé’s expression went vague and dreamy for a moment. “Not quite yet,” she crooned. “Not unless it looks like he might escape. But soon, my favorite daughter, very soon.”

  Definitely time to go. I closed my eyes, and ever so gently and quietly began to reach for the chaos residing in the slowly widening puddle of blood under my sliced wrist. I did so with a caution I’d largely discarded in the years since I’d become the Raven, focusing so completely on the task that the outside world seemed to recede into shadows around me.

  Gently . . . gently. Ahh. Almost there . . . A distant sound like tearing Velcro tugged at my attention. But I was so close . . . There! I had my connection. Now I just needed to make with the traveling-by-chaos-waves thing. The only problem was that I still hadn’t figured out how. It had felt so very odd. Wait—Velcro? Why did that ring an alarm bell? My eyes opened, apparently of their own accord, and I saw a bulging slice in the wall of reality. Beyond it stood Alecto.

  “Kill him!” snapped Delé.

  Megaera turned back toward me, her diamond claws flashing as she lifted her arm and—I preempted her. Without understanding any of the whys or hows, I forced myself to feel as I had felt when Eris transported me—to
become motion at the expense of substance.

  Megaera finished her strike. Too late. I had already ceased to be me in the traditional sense, vanishing in the very moment when her claws should have taken my head off. I slipped free of form and place, using the chaos in my spilled blood as a bridge to the chaos that contained all of reality. In the next moment, though I no longer had ears to hear or eyes to see, I could sense the impact of Megaera’s blow striking the concrete where I had so recently lain. The magic in her claws echoed through the thought-thin walls of reality, its vibration perturbing the wave that encoded the information describing the me I had just been and would be again, powers willing.

  There were just one or two teensy-weensy little problems, problems that were becoming apparent to me because of my new state of being as an informational wave function. I was thinking with my entire self, not just my flesh-and-blood brain, and that made certain things that otherwise might not have made any sense very clear. To start with, I hadn’t specified a destination, and that turned out to be an exceptionally bad idea.