Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “Tell Persephone thanks and good-bye, head back to Raven House, and get roaring drunk, then take our sorry hungover asses off to DecLocus Zero and play dodge the Furies while we try to pinpoint everything that’s wrong with Necessity and see if we can’t simultaneously wrest my thread from the hands of an unjust Fate. What do you think?”

  “That sounds like a terrible plan, and I for one am fully behind it.”

  It sounded even worse with the cold light of morning trying to yank my brain out through my bloodshot eyeballs and a very unhappy-looking Haemun standing beside my bed. He was tapping one hoof on the floor in a staccato beat that had hammered its way into my nightmares. At least that was how I figured it.

  In the dream, I’d been bound naked to a rock about seven feet to the left of the one that held Prometheus. Only instead of an eagle pecking at my liver, I’d had a small purple monkey in a golden crown who was using a stone banana to drive one bright shiny nail after another into my forehead. I’d woken up midway through number seven.

  “I don’t suppose you’re here to bring me breakfast?” I asked my satyr majordomo without much hope. Talking hurt, though not as much as the hammering hoofbeats.

  The satyr shook his head and kept right on tapping.

  “Didn’t think so. What can I do for you, Haemun?”

  “You can deal with the problem you left in my kitchen,” he snapped in a voice that struck me as about ninety decibels louder than it needed to be.

  In fact, between that, the hoof thing, and an eye-gougingly bright aloha shirt patterned with hundreds of huladancing rats, each one wearing its own miniature aloha shirt in a different print, everything about him was too loud this morning. I suspected a deliberate tactic and responded in kind.

  “Done.” I said it instantly, and quietly, entertaining vague hopes that quick agreement might make him go away and let me sleep a bit more. But he was onto my tricks.

  “Good answer,” he said, and pulled the covers free of my feeble grasp, dragging them right off the bed.

  While I was still gasping at the sudden chill, he stuffed my blankets into the hamper. I didn’t move, and he escalated, throwing wide the curtains and increasing the light levels from painful to unbearable. Acknowledging defeat, I grabbed my robe from the chair beside the bed and staggered off to the bathroom to drown myself. Well, run ice-cold water over my head, then drink as much of same as I could stand, but the drowning-myself option had a certain appeal—

  cool and soothing and final.

  After forcing down three or four aspirin and a half gallon or so of water, I headed downstairs, looking for protein and further hydration. Haemun, who had finished stripping the bed, followed me down.

  As I was about to turn left toward the dining room, he bellowed, “Right,” with brain-shattering malice aforethought.

  Rather than risk a repeat of Haemun’s deadly sonic attack, I took a right and headed straight for the kitchen. I didn’t know what to expect when I got there, but what I found wasn’t it.

  “Where’s the problem?” I asked after my second baffled circuit around his impeccably kept kitchen.

  The preponderance of bright Hawaiian prints and tikithemed cookware was a kick in the teeth to my hangover-impaired sense of aesthetics, but none of it was new.

  “There,” said Haemun, pointing at a large sugar jar in the exact center of the kitchen table, its squared sides perfectly aligned with the table’s in a sign of purest obsessive-compulsive neatness.

  I blinked at the jar. Brown sugar. Big deal. I still didn’t get it, unless the problem was that it was mislabeled. Though honestly, I felt that “sugar” really ought to be close enough by mythological standards. That was when the sugar moved, and not at all like sugar.

  Oh, the spinnerette.

  That would explain the tiny network of airholes that also spelled out sugar on the top of the jar. I hadn’t initially recognized them for what they were. The spinnerette pushed aside the finely shredded remnants of the tweed suit Eris had inflicted on me and peered out of the glass in my direction. Inasmuch as I could read the expression on its miniature face, it didn’t look the least bit happy.

  “Sorry,” I said to Haemun. “It slipped my mind. I’ll put it in the workroom.”

  But when I reached for the jar, Haemun rapped my knuckles with a wooden spoon. “You’ll do no such thing. Not if I have anything to say about it. You should let it out, and apologize.”

  I rubbed my temples. Despite the aspirin and water, my headache was not abating. In fact, it was getting worse, an effect I attributed to my trying to make my brain do things it had no business doing in its current state, like thinking. I sat down in the nearest chair and put my head down beside the sugar jar, peering at the spinnerette from a few inches.

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning, Haemun. I know you well enough now to assume you’ve got a point even if I can’t see it from where I’m sitting. Oh, and if you’ve got any pity in you at all, speak slowly and quietly.”

  Haemun smiled at me for the first time that morning and nodded. “I can do that, but let me get you a glass of juice and start some eggs. Food will do you good.”

  For the next few minutes I sat there idly watching the spinnerette agitatedly jump up and down and mouth things at me. It wasn’t until the food finally appeared in front of me that I realized Haemun hadn’t actually told me anything yet, and I started to wonder about delaying tactics. Then the rumbling in my stomach and the advent of a plateful of poached eggs served in papaya halves with an English muffin and a side of fresh pineapple convinced me to let it lie a bit longer. But when he still hadn’t said anything by the time I’d finished eating, I knew I was going to have to push.

  “So,” I said, “are you going to tell me about it, or am I supposed to simply intuit your story?”

  Haemun turned away from the stovetop, which he was wiping down for the fourth time, and started absently twisting the tea towel he’d been using between his hands. It was patterned with vintage surfboards on a green tie-dyed background, and very distracting to watch. Finally, he sighed and leaned back against the counter.

  “It’s really all just a feeling.”

  I nodded. That actually made me more inclined to listen to him carefully rather than less. Haemun is more than just the satyr he appears to be. He is the spirit of Raven House, and as such he reflects the will of its occupants in his actions and character. Not just my will, either. When Nemesis had briefly taken the place over, Haemun’s personality and manner of dress had shifted to accommodate the needs and desires of the Goddess of Vengeance. If he had a strong feeling about any resident of the house, even one as odd as a two-inch-tall spider-centaur trapped in a magic jar, I’d be a fool to ignore it.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, it started the night Thalia put that thing in there, even though I’d yet to see it at that point—this sense that something just wasn’t right in my kitchen, I mean. I got up twice in the night to check and see if I’d left a burner on or something like that. I couldn’t find anything wrong, though the second time I heard what I thought was a mouse. You know that nasty little chewing noise that stops every time you listen for it.”

  “I’d been wondering where you got to,” Melchior broke in as he came through the doorway from the main part of the house. “What’s going on?” He hopped up into the high goblin chair that Haemun pulled over to the table for him and glanced at the jar. “Oh, hey, is this that spy Thalia and Eris caught for you?”

  He sounded way too cheery to be the same goblin who’d matched me drink for drink the night before, and I gave him a suspicious look.

  “How come you don’t have a hangover?”

  “Oh, I did,” he said cheerily, “but I whistled it away. New spell. I’d offer to do yours for you, but the code doesn’t seem to work right on meat-people. I think I actually made Fenris worse, and that’s saying something. I’ve never seen anyone but Dionysus drink like that before. Of course, he is from a MythOS wh
ere heaven is one giant binge interspersed with bouts of head bashing, so maybe it’s in his DNA.”

  “I hate you, little man,” came the now-familiar growl of our lupine houseguest as he, in turn, came through the kitchen door. “And I’ll get even with you someday. That’s a promise.”

  Fenris flopped in the middle of the floor and pressed his head against the cold marble while Laginn massaged the back of his neck. I instantly felt better. There’s nothing like seeing someone who’s more miserable than you are to really make you feel better about life. I gave the newcomers a quick précis of what we’d talked about already, then turned back to Haemun and waved a hand for him to continue.

  “The next morning, when I came in to do up breakfast, there was a scraping noise on the table, and I noticed the little gal inside for the first time,” said Haemun. “She was sitting at the bottom of the jar shredding the edge of the tweed and generally looking miserable. Knowing what Thalia had said about her, I turned the jar around so I wouldn’t have to look at her and went to work. But the very next time I glanced over, there she was again, pulling out threads and looking sad. This time, though, I got the feeling she needed to tell us something important and that we really ought to listen to her. But I turned the jar around again. That went on for two days, with me feeling like it was a worse idea every time I did it.”

  “Could you just have been picking up her unhappiness about getting caught?” I asked.

  Haemun shook his head. “I’d have thought that myself if all I was getting was the sadness and wanting out. But that was only part of it, a part that got steadily smaller as the days went by. No, what she really wants is to have a word with us—you, really—and she thinks it’s for your own good.”

  “Maybe we should let her out, then.” I reached for the jar.

  “Hang on, Boss. We don’t know who she works for or what she can do. Letting her out seems like a really bad idea to me.” Melchior stepped from his chair to the table and bent to look at the spinnerette.

  Haemun made a little humphing noise that very clearly expressed what he thought about filthy goblin feet on his nice clean table, but Melchior ignored him and walked slowly around the jar.

  “Mel, she’s two inches tall; don’t you think we can handle it if she decides to go all kung fu on us?” I asked.

  “I’m not worried about her breaking anybody’s head,” said Melchior. “Casting spells or escaping, on the other hand . . .”

  “Let her out,” Fenris said firmly, though speaking obviously made his head hurt. “No one should be locked up on suspicion or without a chance to explain themselves. And no one should ever be caged just for what you’re worried they might do. That’s what Odin did to me, convicted me for offenses I hadn’t yet committed, then locked me up and threw away the key. If he’d been a human dictator, everyone would have called what he did a crime. Since he was the head of the pantheon and the leader of the ‘good guys,’ people applauded him for locking away a menace to society. But that didn’t make it right, just popular.”

  Melchior stopped his circling and looked at Fenris, his expression troubled. After a moment, he turned my way. “I hate it when people make moral arguments, and I’m on the wrong side of them, but he’s right, Boss. Until we have something more solid than the implications of that video from Persephone and some suspicions, keeping her in there puts us in the wrong.”

  He shook his head, then grinned ruefully. “Still, you’ve gotta love living in a world where the wolf of Asgard teaches you to be a better person.”

  When I popped the lid on the jar, the spinnerette leaped out onto my wrist and glared up at me.

  “**’* ***** ******* ****, ** ***** ***** *****!” she chittered at me in a mode I found very familiar.

  “Oh hell,” said Melchior. “That sounds an awful lot like the spinnerette that Necessity sent to ask us for help with Nemesis way back when.”

  “It sure does,” I agreed, “aphasia and all. And completely unlike the one Megaera’s taking orders from. What do you want to bet that Alecto’s right about which one is the true Voice of Necessity?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “*** * **** ** ****-****,” said the spinnerette, not very helpfully.

  “Do you have any idea what she wants?” I asked.

  Melchior shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t seem to have the same ability to project power as the last one, maybe because it’s still larval or something. I’ve never heard of one so small.”

  “**** ** ** ** ******!” She sounded very frustrated.

  “I’m sorry,” I told it. “I just don’t get it. Normally, I’d take you to Shara, but I’m more than a little bit leery of letting her know what I’m doing right now.” This not being able to trust your friends stuff really sucked. “I guess the best thing we can do is take you with us to planet Necessity and see if that triggers anything.”

  “Can I join you?” asked Fenris. “I need something to distract me from my urge to commit hangover-induced suicide.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I replied. “It’s not like anyone’s going to be particularly happy to see us even without a giant wolf. Of course, I don’t know where we’re going proximally yet.”

  Melchior snorted. “So we’re working without a plan again.”

  “No plan. No net. No worries,” I said.

  “I’ll make sure they put that on your gravestone,” said Melchior.

  “I was thinking more in terms of engraving it on the formal House Raven coat of arms,” I replied with a grin. “In Classical Greek, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Melchior. “Although I’d always imagined Latin for the house shield. Something along the lines of Caesar’s ‘ veni, vidi, vici.’ How do you say, ‘I came, I saw, I made really bad decisions’?”

  “*** ** **** ***?” the spinnerette interrupted, anxiously jumping up and down on my wrist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the thing had to say, but it sure did sound emphatic.

  “You bet!” I agreed just as emphatically.

  We had places to go and Necessity to hack, so I transferred the tiny creature to my shoulder and reluctantly dragged myself out of my nice comfy chair—the motion only made my head want to come apart a little bit. Then I led a small parade out onto the lanai, where I’d have more room to work.

  I produced Occam with an angry thought and a flourish. “Where do you want to start?” I asked.

  “I don’t suppose you can work that thing like you do the faerie rings and tell it to take us where we need to go?” asked Melchior.

  “Worth a try.” I reached into the chaos in my blood and through it to the sword . . . and got nowhere. “Nothing doing, Mel. Oh well. Let’s see, where to go . . .”

  That was when I realized a heretofore-unconsidered limitation on the power Shara had given me with Occam. Unlike the Furies, who were constantly being updated as to their position relative to everything else by Necessity’s cosmic locator system, I couldn’t create a doorway to just anywhere. I needed to have very definite knowledge about where I was going, either a point I’d been to before or something like it.

  “That does narrow our options,” replied Melchior when I explained it to him. “But it also makes the decision easier. Why don’t we start with Crete and the abacus room? That’s the oldest part of the whole network. There are bound to be some very interesting things to see there both in terms of figuring out the underlying architecture of the system and in terms of what the abacuses are actually hooked up to.”

  I frowned. “I don’t know, Mel. It’s also one of the most powerful systems in Necessity’s network, and that means it’s likely to be closely watched by all the players. I’d kind of like to take my first deep look around without having three Furies, two spinnerettes, and a giant gazing ball watching over my shoulder.”

  “You could send me and Laginn through first,” said Fenris. “I’m not going to be any help with the computer wizardry, but I’m an old hand at leading grumpy
gods on snipe hunts. I learned that job at Loki’s knee. Besides, it’ll give me a chance to pant out some of the leftover whiskey from last night.”

  The hand bobbed its agreement, then began happily dashing back and forth between the top of Fenris’s head and the base of his tail. It was nice to see that somebody had enthusiasm.

  “* **** **** ****!” agreed the spinnerette. At least, it sounded like agreement.

  I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea—I don’t much like sending friends out to do dangerous jobs for me, and this had the potential to be a really nasty one—but I really couldn’t think of a better alternative, so I nodded.

  “Thank you, Fenris. That’ll really help.”

  The giant wolf wagged his tail very gently. “Great. Let’s do it. I just wish there was some way for me to signal you once I’ve drawn any watchers out.”

  “Maybe Kira could help out there,” said Melchior. “Now that Necessity’s world is hooked up to the net again, there’s no reason she couldn’t play cosmic cell phone for the wolf here. Gods know she’s used to working with canines.”