“I have no idea,” said Melchior. “Do you think that might be what’s happening here, that there’s a physical faerie ring somewhere on the other side of the virtual wall of codespace? And that you’re somehow catching an echo of that?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of that would make sense of this feeling.”
“Hmm.” Melchior looked thoughtful. “That might also explain why the plunger thing had to come way out here to the network boonies.”
“What . . . Oh, right. Necessity’s world is as immune to ring-making as the mweb itself. Good point.” I pressed against the wall harder, setting the signature of the hypothetical ring in my memory. “Are you up for something risky and quite possibly stupid?”
“If I wasn’t, wouldn’t I have found other work by now? What’s the plan? Are you going to just cut a hole in the wall like you did back in the abacus room?”
“That’s not how I was thinking about tackling it, but I suppose it’s worth a try.”
I tried to imagine the response of one of the Fates if she found me cutting my way into the mweb server room in the Temple of Fate. Not pretty, but hey, I could always claim I was just doing what Lachesis had ordered me to do and cementing the bonds between Necessity and Fate. Yeah, that’d fly with my ex-grandmother and her sisters.
I used the anger that thoughts of Fate brought with them to summon Occam from its otherdimensional home. Lifting my blade, I pictured myself opening a doorway into the space beyond the wall, fueled the image with anger, and made a deep, drawing cut. Nothing happened. I tried again. Same result. That was when I realized that I had no real idea where the other side of that wall might be in physical space, having never been allowed anywhere near the mweb servers, and that I needed to. Apparently, “just over there” wasn’t enough of a location marker when point A was in virtual space and point B was in reality.
“No can do, Mel.”
“It’s probably for the better,” he said. “I’d have to go and fetch my body before I could follow you, and you’d probably muck things up in the meantime.
I stuck my tongue out at him, then used a mental picture of Atropos to pump up the anger needed for a cut from cyberspace to the computer room where Melchior’s physical form lay. There, I waited for him to take the long way round while fending off incomprehensible questions from our pet spinnerette and fighting fatigue to stay on my feet. Once he rejoined me, fresh-squeezed thoughts of Hades provided the angry-juice necessary to open a gate from there on to Raven House.
Laginn was waiting on the rail when we stepped out into the tropical night. The hand pointed one admonishing finger in our direction in an unmistakable you-wait-right-there-young-man gesture, and dropped to the floor before scampering off tippie-fingered. He returned seconds later with Fenris—Kira had apparently returned to Cerberus.
Haemun trailed behind the wolf with—bless his soul—a tray of food and drink perched in his hands. It wasn’t until then that I realized how incredibly hungry I was. Normally, cyberspace takes it out of me mentally much more than physically since the body goes into something very close to suspended animation when the athame goes in. In this case, having actually been there in some as-yet-unexplained way, I’d burned calories, too. Lots of them. And I hadn’t had great reserves to begin with. I realized then that I felt damned wobbly in addition to deadly tired.
“What happened?” demanded Fenris.
I snagged a sandwich from Haemun, dropped into the nearest chair, and took several bites before mumbling, “Eat first, questions later.”
I lay in my bed and stared blearily at the ceiling while the room slowly revolved around me, and all without benefit of alcohol. The combination of complete exhaustion and insomnia is one that has become all too common since I became my own personal night-light—Ravirn 3.0, now with glow-in-the-dark eyes™. A sleep mask doesn’t help when the light that’s keeping you awake is inside your own head.
When we’d first headed back to Raven House around midnight, I’d kind of hoped to keep our stop there to a matter of minutes so that any trail through the faerie ring wouldn’t have time to grow cold. Foolish optimism, that. Hours later and not feeling a whit stronger or more rested, I knew there was no way I was going anywhere short of noon tomorrow—and that only if I somehow managed a solid ten hours’ sleep between now and then.
So I lay in my bed, desperately trying to enter dreamland while worlds puffed out like candles in the darkness because I hadn’t yet fixed Necessity. The knowledge of the latter didn’t make my efforts at the former any easier.
I hadn’t felt so utterly miserable in years. Not since the day I’d realized that my grandmother Lachesis knew and had approved every horrible thing Atropos was doing to me in her efforts to force me to help her extinguish free will. Part of my angst came from the thought of what a broken Necessity meant for all those worlds and potential worlds—a big part, but only a part.
I’m honest enough with myself to admit the disconnect I felt from the people in all those places. I didn’t know a one of them, and chances were good I never would. On some level they would forever remain an abstraction. And on some level, that was probably a good thing. Otherwise, I’d have been paralyzed by the responsibility of it all.
As much or more of my misery fell into the “why me?” self-pitying category. Another fact I was sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge, even if it did make me feel like an utter shit.
“How did the ultimate fate of the multiverse land on the pantheon’s newest and least responsible demigod?” I grumped.
“Because Shara, or whoever is wearing her identity, thinks you’re the only one who isn’t going to use the problems of Necessity to make a grab for the brass ring of absolute power,” Melchior replied from the table, his voice coming out slightly tinny through the speakers of his laptop shape. His speaking startled me—I’d thought him asleep.
“That’s proximally. I was thinking more in terms of cosmically.”
“Well, we know it’s not the Fates, since your thread was removed from their power forever when you went through the gullet of Discord’s dragon. Since you’re a power, that would normally mean Necessity, but we know that’s not currently an option. That leaves bad luck of epic proportion, bad judgment of like scope, or a bad timing beyond the dreams of divinity. The winner is . . . a three-way tie! As once again Ravirn makes the universe-hates-me hat trick.”
I snorted, then faked a teary snuffle. “I’m so happy to get this award, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of the little people, starting with my own very short goblin companion, Mr. Melchior. Wherever you are, little dude, take a bow. This is as much your prize as it is mine.”
“Oh, stuff a sock in it, Ravirn, and for gods’ sake, go to sleep!”
And then, miraculously, I did.
“You’re sure this is a good idea?” Melchior poked his head out of the depths of my shoulder bag as we approached the permanent faerie ring embedded in the stone of Raven House’s grand balcony.
“No,” I said. “I’m quite sure this is a bad idea on a myriad of levels. It’s just that we don’t have a better one. Weren’t you listening when I outlined the plan?”
“You know, I never listen to a word you say after the word ‘plan’ comes out of your mouth. I figure if you’ve never stuck to one before, what are the chances it’s suddenly worth paying attention to this one. I see my job more as coming up with plan-implosion-mitigation spellware than working on the implementation of something that’s going to get tossed away three seconds after it goes live. It’s a more efficient use of my time and effort, and besides, it gives me broader range of potential I-told-you-sos.”
“Do you know what I really love about your partnership?” Fenris asked from his place beside the ring. “It’s the absolute confidence you show in each other’s good judgment. I’m happy to be even a small part of such a great team. Now, can we actually do something before my hair starts going gray?”
Laginn plucked a hair from the s
ilvery wolf’s back and held it up for inspection.
“Ooh, too late!” Fenris’s tongue lolled out, and he chuckled.
“**** **!”
“Right, point made.” I put a hand on the wolf’s shoulder, and together we stepped into the faerie ring.
In doing so, we simultaneously entered every ring in existence—for each individual circle of enchantment is but an aspect of the one primal ring. The raw chaos that maintained the rings instantly lifted my spirits and eased my remaining weariness, though it couldn’t banish it entirely. For ten breaths I let myself simply bask in the cascade of faerie’s rough magic, but not a moment longer. Just as chaos enlivens and energizes me, so, too, will it intoxicate and entrap me if I allow it the opportunity.
I called up my memory of the possible ring we had discovered yesterday and fixed it in the forefront of my mind. Using that as a guide, I engaged the ring network and slowly reached outward, trying to find the one I wanted. It didn’t take long—one of the benefits of my Raven’s nature is a deep connection to the underlying chaos of the network, which allows me to manipulate it in ways closed to more ordered sorcerers.
Despite the impulsive whispers of the chaos around me urging me to action, I did not immediately try to shift myself into that other ring. Instead, I carefully defined the conditions under which I wanted to arrive. The deathday-cake experience had shown me that I had an enemy able to work the rings against me. Normally I could count on the network itself to deal with the transition from the great ring on my lanai into one the size of a pinhead without making specific arrangements. But now I had to treat the system something like a hostile genie and force it to adjust our size and other attributes appropriately. Only after I’d completed that process did I move us.
We arrived upside down in darkness and stifling heat. I was just mentally congratulating myself on having included a stick-to-the-ring clause in my preparations when I felt something like a sledgehammer strike the bottoms of my feet through the ring’s surface, and we began to fall.
Damn it, not again!
Melchior whistled three strings of code faster than a hummingbird’s heartbeat. The first I recognized as a spell called “Fear of Falling”—it instantly transformed our blind plummet into a leisurely drift.
Way to go, Mel!
The next was “Redeye,” and it gave us sight in the darkness. The third spell I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a summoning of some sort, but nothing appeared immediately, and more pressing matters swiftly drove it from my thoughts.
The first of those was the enormous expanse of burning metal that was rising up to meet us. We had appeared in miniature within one of the mweb’s powerful servers. Upside down. On the bottom of a CPU. With the machine’s main heat sink directly beneath us. The infrared vision Melchior’s second spell had granted us left me in no doubt that it was hot enough to fry bacon.
Some distance to my left, Fenris let out a rather mournful howl, and I turned my head that way. That was how I discovered the spinnerette. It had been flung free of my shoulder but had somehow managed to catch hold of my bangs. Now it kept thumping against my forehead as I whipped my head around trying to make sense of things. I needed better control.
As I began to gather my will for a shape-shift, I was distracted by something sharp brushing against my shoulder. It spun me in the air and scored the leather of my jacket all the way down to the Kevlar. I turned my head that way but couldn’t see anything that might have been the cause. I don’t like that sort of mystery, but I didn’t have the leisure to worry about it. Instead, I reached inward and—Wham! Something smacked into the side of my skull hard enough to make sparks dance in front of my eyes.
This time I had no trouble spotting the culprit, though the blow to my head had left me seeing three of everything. Three of Mel, three of Fenris and Laginn, three of the spinnerette, and three of the all-gods-damned gazing ball of doom.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Falling. I really hate falling. Even the slow-motion kind of falling currently on the agenda. The biggest problem with falling is that inevitably you stop, usually quickly and painfully. I don’t even much like flying—it’s too much like falling turned on its side. But I’ll take that over the vertical sort any day of the week. I tried to gather my wits enough to convert the one into the other, but the intermediate stage, where I transformed from man into raven, kept eluding me. The gazing ball had really rung my bell.
Now I saw it coming back for another pass. I knew I should do something about that, but I was having trouble figuring out what exactly—figuring out anything, really, in all the confusion. That whole falling thing kept distracting me. The gazing ball was getting closer fast, and all I could think of as a response was how handy a really big Ping-Pong paddle would be just then.
That was when I saw the angel. She came through a rip in the sky and put herself between me and the gazing ball. Just as it was about to hit her in the face, she snapped her black-and-stormy wings in a sharp beat that lifted her relative to the oncoming sphere, then spiked it like a volleyball center with the perfect set. There was a deep “tonnnng” sort of noise, and the gazing ball rocketed off at an angle perpendicular to its original course.
The angel turned in the air and dropped down beside me.
Melchior poked his head out of my shoulder bag, and yelled at the angel, “It’s about time you showed up!”
“Complain later,” said the angel, who finally registered as Alecto. “Escape now.”
She caught the collar of my leather jacket and threw me at the faerie ring high above us. A half second later, I heard a sharp yip from Fenris and guessed that he had likewise joined the world of projectile motion.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gazing ball turn in the air and start to rise after me, seeming to expand as it came. I lost track of it a moment later when I hit the faerie ring and had to focus all of my scattered wits on making it hold on to us as it jumped and bounced. The ring seemed to be repeatedly slamming itself into my hands and knees, which would have been distracting under the best of circumstances. As it was, Fenris had to twice ask me what was going on before his question made any sense to my scrambled brain.
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing over my shoulder to check whether the gazing ball was about to squish us all to paste. Not that I could tell at the moment, but I wouldn’t have bet money against it either. “This is not normal faerie-ring behavior.”
“You don’t say,” growled the huge wolf. “I’d never have guessed that on my own.”
A deep thud just off to my right drew my scattered attention away from Fenris. Alecto was there, perhaps three yards away and pressed against the surface of the CPU by a smoky silver gazing ball that had grown from the comparative size of a medicine ball to something on the order of a small car.
“Would you get out of here!” Alecto yelled. “I can’t keep this thing away from you forever.”
Then she got her feet braced against the ceiling and shoved the ball down and away from us before dropping after it.
I nodded, but stayed right where I was. Despite having regained sufficient brainpower to do as ordered, I really wanted to understand what the hell was going on with this faerie ring before I left. That was the whole point of entering what we had known might be a trap, and I finally felt that I almost had an answer.
“Boss, can we just this once make the sensible choice and do what the Fury tells us to do?”
yelped Melchior.
“One more second, Mel. I can taste the answer.” Then I thought I had it and flicked us elsewhere to find out.
The transit took more effort than I expected, perhaps because of the pounding my head had taken.
“Castle Discord?” Mel sounded baffled at my choice of destination.
I nodded and held up a hand for silence. We stood in the lookout post on the back side of Eris’s golden-apple sun, high up on the very edge of chaos, and I needed to confirm the guess that had led me here. I turned away from
the others then and stared into the tumbling madness of the Primal Chaos that surrounded the castle. For perhaps a minute, nothing happened. Then I saw it. Order where there should be none, a pulsing, wavelike pattern propagating itself through the very stuff of chaos. My message in a bottle. I knew who our black-hat cracker was, and it felt like a kick in the guts despite the fact that she’d warned me herself not to trust anyone.
“Eris.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. I understood her involvement, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
“What?” asked Melchior. “Eris? What’s going on? I don’t get it.”
“That makes two of us,” agreed Fenris.
I pointed at the spot where the messages being sent from the thing that lived in Necessity’s kernel were making themselves manifest through the medium of modulated chaos. The same data-transfer technique Eris had used to pull me from the Gates of Hades to Castle Discord earlier in the week, the method that had gone so wildly wrong when I tried to execute it myself.
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