Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  The food vanished, and a whole bouquet of nymphs appeared to fluff my pillows and fan my fervid brow. All of them wore the sort of too-tight fifties nursing minidresses normally seen only in the more tawdry sort of greeting card. I shook my head, and they vanished as quietly and effortlessly as they’d arrived.

  “I could spruce up your accommodations . . .”

  The rough stone bower became a beautiful miniature of the porch of the Parthenon, with my greatly expanded and fancified bed standing in front of the place where the door should have been.

  “Really,” I said. “I’m fine. Persephone has been seeing to all my needs.” I nodded toward the goddess.

  Zeus grinned broadly at me and opened his mouth to say something that would almost certainly have been unforgivable given her history. But then something hard and cold glinted way down in the deeps of those empty blue eyes, and he closed it again. I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that he’d accidentally revealed his true self. Anything he let me see, he let me see for a reason. With a sigh, he settled into an obviously comfortable and somewhat disreputable recliner that appeared beside my bed. It sat at the perfect angle for an intimate conversation. Around us, the temple melted back into its former shape.

  “Son, we need to talk.” He glanced obtrusively over his shoulder at Persephone. “Privately.”

  “I can still kick him out,” she said, then sighed. “I guess not. Zeus, I will remove myself, but don’t doubt that I’ll know about it if you try anything funny. If he is harmed in any way, you will regret it.”

  “I gave you my word once already, Persephone. Do you really want to suggest that I might be an oath-breaker?” His words came out gently, barely above a whisper, but they held an edge that reminded me that this was a god who had fought and won a terrible war against his own father—

  a war that had ended in the eternal imprisonment of the majority of the Titans, including that same father.

  “I suggest nothing, Zeus. I simply state fact.” Persephone’s voice was every bit as quietly scary as Zeus’s had been.

  Before he could respond, she’d already vanished. He turned back around and gave me a deeply out-of-character frown that made me momentarily wish I’d asked Persephone to see him to the door.

  “You are a distinctly unsettling addition to my old age, boy,” he said, after a rather long and uncomfortable silence. His eyes flicked to the button of diamond embedded in my hand.

  “Especially now, with that. I wonder what I ought to do about you.”

  “I think I liked it better when you were offering me breakfast in bed with the nymphs,” I said.

  “Aren’t you going to drop back into the big-dumb-jock act?” I noticed Melchior’s sleep light wink out completely in something of an editorial comment.

  “No, I don’t think that I will. In this case it would be effort wasted.” He leaned back and popped open the footrest on his recliner. “I don’t like effort. It feels too much like work. What do you want?”

  I blinked. “World peace?”

  What the hell was going on with the gods this week? I didn’t remember building a better mousetrap. Yet the path to my door was starting to look mighty well beaten. Okay, so I knew the answer to that one. Thank you, Shara. But still . . .

  Zeus’s frown returned, and that cold hard thing I’d seen in the deeps of his eyes came right up to the surface and gave me the sort of look a barracuda gives a wounded snapper. I suppressed a desire to scoot backwards out of my bed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m very tired and almost as confused. Was that a casual question? An accusatory inquiry? A bona fide offer? Give me something to work with here.”

  “Your girlfriend, Cerice, brought me some interesting news a few days ago.”

  “Ex-girlfriend. She currently hates my guts.”

  “Tell that to her,” said Zeus. “She’s obviously still pretty thoroughly smitten.”

  “Sure.” I so didn’t want to have this particular conversation with Zeus. “That’s why she’s started to make a habit out of selling me out to the pole powers.”

  Zeus lifted his eyebrows in a way that said tons about his opinion of my intelligence, or rather, lack thereof. “I honestly don’t know how you do it, boy. Two Furies, Discord, and even Persephone. Not quick wit, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s that whole endangered-puppy thing you’ve got going on.” For just a moment I found myself wondering if I’d just seen the unfiltered Zeus, then he sat up straighter and shook his head. “But that’s really not important at the moment. What’s important is your current involvement with Necessity and what needs to be done in the way of threats or bribes to get it to fall out as I’d like.”

  I wasn’t going to let him do his whole dazzle-and-distract routine this time. “So, was the Cerice thing just by way of an intellectual sucker punch so that I’d fold up in advance of whatever you said next? Or am I missing a step here?”

  Zeus rolled his eyes. “Considering your success rate, I’d always assumed that your bull-in-andbreak-things-like-an-idiot style was an act, covering a truly shrewd mind, but sometimes you make it very hard to believe that you aren’t as dumb as your actions. Cerice came and told me about you getting back from the Norse pantheoverse exactly in time to join the fun as things heated up in Necessity’s internal war.

  “She told me about how you got sent away, too, and that she was pretty sure that . . . oh, let’s call her ‘Bad Necessity’ was using you as a cat’s-paw against Good Necessity, with quite probably fatal results for you, and who knows what consequences for the rest of this MythOS. She suggested that it might be better for everyone involved if I removed you from the game temporarily while she finishes getting things fixed. She also told me that she’d be open to offering me some later favors in exchange. She noted that with Shara likely running the Necessity show for some time to come, she’d make a good risk on that front.”

  That stopped me cold. It had the ring of plausibility and was guaranteed to remind me that Cerice really had loved me once upon a time. Enough to save my ass from the Fates at a considerable risk to herself. It also fit with available facts. Of course, that would all be the case if Zeus was lying, too. He was very very good at lying.

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked after mulling things over for a bit. “I know you aren’t really all that interested in my well-being except inasmuch as it might benefit you. What’s in it for Zeus? Are you trying to convince me to step out of the way by using Cerice’s supposed statements as emotional blackmail? Or, are you trying to capitalize on my known tendency to push back when pushed and get me to leap into the depths of the Necessity mess? Or, am I missing something subtle, and you’re here for other reasons?”

  Zeus’s thundering laugh crackled again. “I am ineffable, you know. Or, at least, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be as part of that whole King of the Gods shtick. I could pretend that I’m here because I really do care about even the least of my charges, or because I owe you for past favors, but that would just make you more suspicious. Instead, I’m going to lay out the exact truth of the matter and leave you wondering what’s been left out, or if I’m flat-out lying. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “Rapturously so. Are you planning to get on with things, or can I afford to take a little nap while you work your way up to it?”

  Probably not the most diplomatic thing I’d ever said to a god, but not the least so either, not by a long shot. What can I say? I was tired, and increasingly angry and confused, and by and large, I can’t stand my family.

  “I’m not sure why, little Raven, but I really do like you. Damned clever if not wise, but more balls than brains even so. You actually remind me of me about a zillion years ago. So, here’s the deal. Necessity is royally screwed, possibly irreparably so. No matter what I or anyone else says, you’re going to end up neck deep in the resulting mess. If you can make it all better, more power to you. But I don’t think you can. I think that at some point you’re going to be in the position of hav
ing to pull the plug or do something else equally drastic.”

  I shrugged. There wasn’t much to say to that, and at least he was getting to the point.

  “If that should come to pass, I would very much appreciate a five-minute warning so that I can do what needs doing to make sure the next-generation order of the multiverse is one that bends to my will. If you do me that favor, I can promise you rewards beyond your wildest dreams. If you don’t, know that I can always do to the ‘Final Titan’ what I did to the originals. Understood?”

  Before I could answer or even get back the breath he’d knocked out of me with his mention of the “Final Titan,” Zeus had disappeared in a flash of silent lightning. He left behind his chair and an electric tingling that had every one of my invisible feathers standing on end.

  “We are so screwed,” said Melchior, who had flicked from laptop to goblin in the instant after Zeus left.

  I didn’t respond immediately. I was in shock. Once again, I’d misjudged. Apparently the target Shara had hung on my back was vying for space with an even bigger one picked up in the Norse MythOS. How did Zeus even know about that? Was there some critical god listserve I wasn’t subscribed to? And who else knew?

  I shook my head. “Gosh, Mel, what makes you say we’re screwed?”

  “Long experience with anything that you’re involved in.” He sighed. “Do you think Skuld was trying to set you up for a fall with that whole Final Titan deal? Or is it just that reality hates you?”

  “Tough call, that. On the one hand, Skuld is a Fate, or Norn if you prefer, or whatever they call them in Asgard. And we know how Fate feels about me. On the other, there’s a lot of evidence that the phenomenon reaches beyond predestination and into the realm of . . .” I reached for a word.

  “Divine Comedy,” supplied my grandmother Thalia from the edge of the clearing.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, wondering if the advent of my father’s mother might have more to do with my ongoing ruffled-feathers feeling than Zeus’s electrical exit had.

  “Hours, since not long after you chased Discord away, actually. I do wonder what she really wanted. Were her reasons akin to Zeus’s? Or something less self-serving?” Thalia looked thoughtful, then shrugged. “I suppose it makes little difference. I’m here because Persephone trusted me to keep an eye on you.”

  “Did Zeus know you were here?” Knowing his audience would change how I weighed what he’d had to say.

  She nodded. “Probably, though, if so, he was polite enough to pretend he didn’t. Which courtesy I don’t think you will be able to expect from your next visitor.”

  “There’s another one?” I closed my eyes for a moment and let my head slump back onto the pillows—Chaos and Discord but I needed sleep. “Who is it this time?”

  “Lachesis,” said Thalia, “and she’ll be here any moment. Persephone asked me to warn you since she couldn’t come in person. Herself is stuck playing hostess to Clotho and Atropos as she refused to allow more than one of them through to visit you. Don’t look so surprised, grandson. You have become the fulcrum on which the future pivots. Your webgoblin friend did you no favors when she deputized you. Now, I need to vanish again, and more thoroughly this time.”

  “Screwed beyond all words,” whispered Melchior, then lapsed back into his other form just as the footsteps on the path signaled the beginning of my next exciting episode of dancing with the pole powers.

  I noticed that my hands were trembling and shoved them back underneath the blankets. Lachesis may be my umpteen-times-great-grandmother, but our relationship is much closer than our degree of shared blood might suggest, or it was once. The Fates take a very close interest in the raising of their descendants. Much closer in my case than my mother or father ever had. Lachesis had stood at the center of my childhood universe, the stern but loving matriarch who provided me with what stability there was to be had growing up in the divine maelstrom that is the Greek pantheon.

  Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to tear out your own heart? I’d found out on the day I discovered that the goddess I called grandmother was fully complicit in Atropos’s plot to end free will, a plot they’d tried to manipulate me into joining. The grandmother I’d loved and trusted had forced me to choose between my family and my soul then. When I took the hard road and did the right thing, the woman most responsible for raising me, for making me the sort of person who could make that kind of decision, had cast me out forever.

  That was over two years ago, and I hadn’t seen her since. Not till today. I didn’t want to see her ever again and, childish as it was, I found myself turning away from the clearing as she arrived. On the table now in front of me, the gentle rhythm of Melchior’s sleep light grew a little ragged. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with Fate issues.

  “Face me.” Opening with an order, how classically Fate.

  “Go away, Lachesis. I don’t want to talk to you, and you can’t make me.” And I’m going to hold my breath till I turn blue if you don’t do what I want. Way to sound mature and in control there, Ravirn! You’re really showing her how far you’ve come.

  Lachesis drew a sharp breath, and I could picture the exact way her eyes narrowed as she did so.

  “As usual, Raven, you’re wrong. I may not have a direct hold on your thread anymore, but that doesn’t mean I have no leverage over you.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Allow me to demonstrate.” From behind me, I heard a twanging noise like the plucking of a harp string—the sound of someone’s Fate thread being played.

  In the same instant, Melchior reverted to goblin shape and jumped a foot in the air. “Yowch!”

  My awareness of the world vanished in an explosion of fire that started somewhere around my heart.

  Time lapse.

  “Ravirn! Ravirn! Ravirn!”

  Melchior kept screaming my name over and over again, though I could barely hear him over the roar of the flames. I knew he’d been doing it for a while, though it had only just begun to mean anything to me.

  “Melchior?” I called back, though I still couldn’t see anything through the wall of fire that seemed to surround and contain me— was me in some very real sense.

  “Oh thank goodness.” There was the beginning of relief in Melchior’s voice, but an underlying strain, too. “Ravirn, come back to us, please. Calm down. You have to calm down.”

  I focused my attention on his voice and tried to find my way through the fires. In an instant, they fell away, and I returned to myself again. I stood beside my bed, naked, sword in hand, its point bare inches from Lachesis, who stood in front of me, calm and detached as ever—exactly the goddess I remembered from my childhood.

  Wait a second—what?

  The past few seconds began to dribble back into my mind . . . The Fury awakening in my heart . .

  . Summoning my blade and slicing my way free of the covers as the first half of a move that launched me from bed to feet . . . Drawing my arm back in preparation for punching my sword straight through the chest of the one who had threatened my familiar . . . A cuff of velvet and steel closing on my wrist in the instant before my blade went home . . . A cuff that . . .

  Oh. I flicked a look in that direction to verify my guess. Yes.

  “Thalia, I’m all right now.”

  I wasn’t really. Until my fight with Fate, the webgoblin and webtroll AIs had kept the secret of their free will from Lachesis and her sisters, hiding the very existence of their own threads from the Fates. They had been able to do so because of their privileged position as the middle managers of Fate Inc., the data pushers who dealt with most of the actual day-to-day threadmanagement. Now, finally, the Fates had chosen to exercise the power inherent in the revelation of AI free will, their power over the threads of the AIs, over Melchior’s thread. Lachesis had just put me on notice that she held the ultimate tool of blackmail.

  “You can let me go,” I said to Thalia.

  “As you wish, grandson.” S
he emphasized that last word in a way that reminded me that though I had lost much that was dear when Lachesis cast me out, there were also things I had gained. The other side of my heritage for one. Family that wasn’t poison.

  At the moment, it seemed a small light in the face of a great darkness. I needed to take dreadful risks and play them exactly right if I wanted to come out the other side without Lachesis owning me. I closed my eyes and willed my sword away, willed the rage to subside a bit, though I knew it would lie close to the surface as long as Lachesis remained within arm’s reach. For several long beats, nothing happened. Then, against great internal resistance, I felt Occam slide back into the pocket dimension where it now lived between uses.

  “Is all that supposed to impress me?” asked the quiet, implacable voice of Fate—my exgrandmother’s voice.

  I took one more breath to center myself, then I opened my eyes and faced Lachesis, though I did not yet meet her gaze. She was just as I remembered her: fine-boned and beautiful, tall and slender, with skin that looked as white and cold as ice, and thick black hair that fell nearly to her waist. Clotho and Atropos look much the same, as like as though the three were triplets. Despite that, there is no mistaking them one for the other, for each stands clothed in the shadow of her separate office.