Spellcrash
Page 15
Clotho spins the threads of life, and there is a wildness about her that speaks of the boundless possibility of beginnings. Atropos wields the shears, and she walks hand in hand with death, carrying with her ever and always the end of all things. Lachesis, my grandmother-not, is the measurer of threads, and bears the weight of judgment. A weight that is heaviest in her eyes.
I met those eyes now. The eyes of Fate. No matter how many times I see them, it is always a shock, seeing everything I’ve ever done or considered reflected back at me. All my secret fears and ambitions, my hates and loves, my every action was there, so many data points for Fate to weigh and find wanting. I desired nothing more than to look away, to end that sensation of being judged. I didn’t. I was done with seeking this woman’s approval, done with giving a damn what she thought about me, done with letting her have any power over me other than what she could take by force.
I snorted a laugh then, brief and contemptuous. I couldn’t help it.
“Have you always been that heavy-handed, or am I just now noticing it?” I kept my gaze glued to hers as I spoke, forced her to look into Chaos just as I looked into Judgment. “What do you want?”
“Proper respect would be a start,” said Lachesis. “I am quite certain I taught you manners in the days before you forced me to cast you out—decent clothes and fair speech and proper deportment.”
“I take it you’re referring to the court garb and pretty words you always demanded of the children of Fate?” I asked.
An earlier, less angry edition of myself might have blushed then, embarrassed to stand naked in front of the goddess who had once been the queen at the center of my family’s courtly life—the one who demanded that everything be done just so as a mark of our respect for her. Not anymore. Rather, I found a grim satisfaction in the insult she would find in my failure to dress for her. It warmed the place in my soul where the Fury lived, and I realized in that instant that the nakedness of the Sisters of Vengeance was its very own special kind of armor—a way of saying,
“I don’t have to care what you think of me.”
“I can’t say that I believe you’ve done anything to earn such signs of respect from me, and you certainly won’t be getting them.” I smiled as insolently as possible and dropped into the chair so recently vacated by Zeus, though I made sure not to break eye contact. “So why not say your piece, then get out of my life again.”
Anger bloomed in Fate’s eyes, clouding judgment in a way that I had never seen before.
“Have you so soon forgotten the power I wield over you?” Lachesis snapped her fingers, and a life strand appeared in the air before her—I had to assume it was Melchior’s.
“Not at all.” I was terrified for my friend, but I couldn’t let it show—not if I was to have any hope of remaining a free agent. “And, if you demand it of me, I will assume a different aspect than the one you see here.” With a wrench of my will and a split second of absolute agony, I reshaped myself into the giant Raven that symbolizes my place as a power of chaos—the effort very nearly knocked me out. “Does this suit you better?”
Lachesis plucked Melchior’s thread with a sharp twang, and he let out a little whimper. Somehow, I managed to fight the fires back this time, but only just. Drawing on that rage for strength, I twisted my shape again, putting on the long-neglected aspect of a courtier in the Houses of Fate and rising from my chair. Looking down at the results, I had to suppress an urge to giggle at how very much it felt like playing dress-up.
High black leather boots gave way midthigh to emerald tights. A loose poet’s shirt of green silk showed beneath my sleeveless doublet, likewise of black leather. The latter had the outline of a green-eyed raven picked out on the left breast. I’d even added in a black cavalier’s hat with an extravagant green feather. This I promptly doffed as part of an overdeep bow that finally broke the line between our eyes in an act of faux submission.
“Better, Grandmother-not?” I kept my gaze fixed on the floor in front of her, though I caught Melchior’s sag of relief out of the corner of my eye and felt even worse about what must come next.
“Much,” said Lachesis. “Your look is significantly improved, as is your manner.”
I came back upright and met her eyes again. “And it only took the reduction of Fate’s power to basest blackmail to achieve it. How proud you must feel at such a tawdry victory over the pantheon’s least and newest power.”
Pure rage flared in Lachesis’s eyes.
CHAPTER NINE
I braced myself for what I had to do next even as Lachesis reached once more for Melchior’s thread.
“You leave me little choice, boy,” she said.
“Oh shit,” gulped Melchior.
“Don’t.” The one word was all I said, and that barely above a whisper, but I said it directly to Lachesis and made sure to maintain full eye contact.
“You would dare to command Fate?” she asked, and I could feel the bottomless anger of a goddess denied in her voice.
If her rage and words were all I’d had to go on, I’d have caved then, utterly, and completely promised her whatever she asked and worried about fixing things later. But I had one thing more. I had her hesitation. For the briefest moment her hand stopped moving, and I leaped into that breach.
“I would command Fate. I can’t stop you from taking revenge against me by meddling with Melchior’s thread. I can only promise you that he is your one and only point of leverage, and that if you harm him, I will make it the remainder of my life’s work to bring you down.” Lachesis opened her mouth in the beginnings of a laugh then, but I continued, shifting to the courtly diction of our shared past for emphasis. “Necessity is on her knees, her power broken. We stand on an Olympus in the midst of a spring that follows no winter, for Persephone walks free of the chains of Hades. Where once there were three ancient Furies, now there are two and another raw and barely a week old.”
I forced a cold smile that I didn’t feel. “Three statements of fact, my grandmother-not. They have one thing in common. Can you tell me what it is?”
She didn’t answer, and once again I changed my shape, discarding the court clothes of Fate’s House for the leathers and T-shirt of my own. Any second now I was going to keel over from heaping so much strain on top of deadly exhaustion.
“The Raven,” I said. Not that I’d really planned any of those results, but I didn’t have to tell her that, now, did I? “You do have powerful leverage over me, Lachesis. I admit it freely. But don’t you think it were best if you used it wisely? And also made very sure not to use it all up? Tell me what you want, then get out of my life,” I said, forcing spongy knees to keep holding me up.
Lachesis’s hand fell to her side, and she inclined her head in the faintest possible bow. “Well played, child. You learned more at my knee than ever I thought. So be it. Fate wants Necessity’s throne. Help us achieve that, and all is forgiven forever. Stand in our way, and we will destroy everything you love, starting with the webgoblin . . . with all the webgoblins.”
I must have flinched then, for the hint of a smile returned to Lachesis’s lips. “Your revelation of free will in your AI allies forced us to rethink many things about our operations. One of those was our dependency on artificial intelligence with its too-clear echoes of our earlier dependency on the equally unreliable spinnerettes. We are now ready to move away from webtroll-centered control of the mweb. The transition has already begun. It’s entirely up to you whether it will be as bloody as our move away from the spinnerettes was. Think on it.”
She turned on her heel and walked away without another word. When she was safely out of sight, I collapsed back into Zeus’s chair and tried very hard not to pass out. Thalia produced a glass of orange juice from thin air and insisted I drink it.
“I like that,” grumbled Melchior.
“What?” I asked.
“Your revelation of AI free will. My one true claim to fame, and it gets laid at your doorstep by every single member of th
e pantheon every time.”
By which I took it that Melchior was going to forgive me for playing dangerous games with his life thread. Good enough. We could sort out the details later when I was stronger and could do something about the mess. I finished my juice, laid my head back, and went instantly to sleep.
The gardens Demeter built for Persephone over the thousands of years of her daughter’s imprisonment are nearly as large as the city of Olympus and far more diverse. More than a hundred cultures are represented, with plants from every part of the Earth arranged in every sort of way from pleasure gardens that could have come straight from Versailles or the Forbidden City to the small personal sorts of gardens you might expect behind an English cottage or American bungalow. Nor are the gardens exclusively decorative.
In my slow walks over the previous few days, I’d seen a good many working gardens with crops as diverse as taro, coffee, and corn, making for a food-centered counterpoint to all the roses and chrysanthemums. It was exactly what I needed while I healed. That and the period of prolonged rest that the combined insistence of Melchior, Persephone, and Thalia forced upon me.
Today, Mel and I sat in the corner of an herb garden arranged along the lines of something you might find in the backyard of a Japanese teahouse, complete with a series of interlinked koi ponds. I was sprawled in a completely out-of-place but comfortable wicker chair that Melchior had conjured up for me, while he sat goblin fashion on a low teak bench.
“Boss?” asked Melchior.
“You’re never going to stop calling me ‘Boss,’ are you?” I sighed. “Of course you aren’t. What is it, Mel?”
“Are you up to Cerice yet, or should I tell her you’re asleep?”
“Asleep.” I felt well enough to finally be getting antsy about my convalescence, but I did not want to speak with Cerice, though she was only coming in at number three or four on my list of things I’d rather not deal with, behind Necessity, Fate, and possibly Discord. “Definitely asleep.”
“You’re going to have to talk to her soon. You know that, right?” But his expression took on the abstract cast it gets when he is splitting his attention between the mweb and the workaday world—and I knew he was making my excuses. It took a long time.
Why did I have to be stuck dealing with the wrong Fury? Every time I thought of Cerice, it reminded me of how much I missed Tisiphone. In appearance, she and Cerice weren’t all that far apart, tall and thin, pale, athletic. One an ice-blonde, the other a flaming redhead. They could probably have worn each other’s clothes . . . if they wore clothes. That mirroring effect made the differences in personality and expression all the starker. Cerice, even as a Fury, tended to the composed, her face closed, her blue eyes cool, her smiles thin and infrequent. Tisiphone, on the other hand, wore her emotions openly, quick with a snarl and quicker with a grin or a laugh—the fire of her hair a perfect match for the fire in her heart. Damn it, I wanted to get out of this mess and back to her.
Just then, Melchior’s eyes came back into proper focus, and his expression went sour and pessimistic, which is to say, it returned to normal. “Cerice didn’t believe a word of it this time either. Why won’t you talk to her? I mean beyond the obvious fact that she drives you crazy?
You’ve got to be recovered enough by now to deal with the inevitable.”
“Alecto.” I named the third Fury that had been much on my mind of late.
“Gesundheit!” said Melchior.
“Huh?”
“Exactly,” he replied. “What’s Alecto got to do with Cerice? Again, beyond the obvious Fury thing.”
“The more I think about Alecto’s suspicion that Shara’s been infected to some degree with Necessity’s madness, the more I think she might be onto something. I don’t want to talk to Cerice about it until I’ve had more time to think it over, and that puts me in a bad position.” I plucked a stem of mint and began slowly tearing the leaves apart—it smelled lovely. “I can try to lie to Cerice, but she’s always had a talent for seeing through my bullshit, and, from what I know of the Furies, that’s only going to have gotten stronger with her transformation. Even if I do manage to pull it off, that’s really just by way of creating a time bomb, since the truth’s bound to come out eventually.”
Melchior gave me a rather hard look. “Why not just start with the truth? I know it’s not your long suit, but crazier things have worked.”
“Three reasons. First, I don’t trust her anymore, and our little chat with Zeus only reinforces that impulse. Whether he’s lying, and she sold me out for reasons of her own, or he’s telling the truth, and she wants to remove me for my own good, doesn’t really matter. Either way, I’d prefer not to give her any openings to put me out of business. Second, I don’t know how Fury Cerice is going to react to anything she perceives as criticism of Shara. She’s never had a lot of give on that front, and now she’s added major anger-management issues and great power to an alreadyexplosive mix.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Finally, and this is by far the most important concern, assume for a second that there is something drastically wrong with the way Shara is thinking—let’s call it electronic paranoid schizophrenia, complete with delusions and the willingness to act on them as though they were reality. Assume further that Cerice goes straight to Shara with any speculations I make on the subject in an attempt to get Shara to cut off my access again. We know she’s trying to shut me down. What happens next? Remember that while Shara hasn’t yet chosen to exercise it, she can wield most of the power of Necessity anytime she wants to.”
Melchior sagged. “That’s not a pretty picture you’re painting. Not at all.”
I tossed little balls of shredded mint into the nearest pond and watched as a swarm of koi appeared to check on its edibility. “I notice you’re not trying to convince me I’m wrong, Mel.”
“I wish you’d mentioned some of this before.” Melchior slid off the bench and whistled up a tiny loaf of bread that he started feeding to the disappointed koi.
I shrugged. “That’s the first time I’ve really laid it out in a front-brain kind of way. I just haven’t had the mental energy to think about it. I take it that your lack of argument means you think I might be right.”
“It’s been known to happen. Your being right, I mean.” Quiet fell between us while Melchior continued to toss bits of bread to the fish. “I hate this,” he said, as the last strip of crust went into the water.
“Hate what, Mel?”
He turned to face me. “All of it. Every last stinking thing that’s gone wrong since your great-aunt Atropos started screwing with our lives. All this messing around with the big powers, the betrayals, the unwilling transformations, the deaths, the threats. What it’s done to you, to me, to Shara and Cerice. Lachesis turning up here with my thread in hand. It all sucks!”
“I’m sorry about Lachesis,” I said quietly. In so many ways, everything he was talking about was my fault. “And Shara, and for dragging you from one end of creation to the other and back again.”
“Don’t forget the side trip to another creation entirely,” said Melchior.
“I won’t. Not that and not Ahllan’s death. I’m especially sorry for that. You don’t have to keep at this, Mel. You know that, right?” I took a deep breath. “I won’t hold it against you if you decide you need to fold out of the game now that Lachesis has ahold of your thread.”
Melchior blinked several times. “I am sometimes amazed that you can remember to breathe since you have got to be the stupidest demigod this pantheon has ever produced. You can’t seriously believe I’m going to cave in to Fate now, can you?” He shook his head mock-sadly. “It’s clearly time we busted you loose of this place, as inaction seems to exacerbate said brainpower deficit. We’re partners, Mr. I’m-feeling-sorry-for-my-poor-little-Raven-self, and that’s not going to change this side of . . . well, this side of anything I can imagine.”
“But you just said . . .” Sometimes I didn’t understand him at all.
I laughed. “All right, little blue man, since you’re clearly staking a claim to be the brains of the outfit, what do we do next?”