Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “No, but Discord has made cracking attempts on Necessity 784 times in the last three years, and automatically evolving scripts do so from within this system at least 240 times per day. Success rates are at 0.0 percent so far, for all modes.”

  “Then how does the goddess know about a ‘Trojan Eris’ within Necessity?” asked Melchior.

  Silence. Mel rolled his eyes, and I repeated the question for him.

  “Eris did not ‘know,’” said the voice. “However, your arrival with a Fury in the faerie ring that is the focal point of the nonsense being spewed through chaos by an entity controlled from within Necessity provided partial confirmation of a possibility she had been considering for some time, a confirmation further reinforced by your conversation with that same Fury on arrival.”

  I nodded. “Can you tell me what other clues she might have had that led her to suspect such a thing?”

  “Yes.”

  Seconds ticked by.

  “Boss, I think that you need to rephrase the question as something other than a ‘can you’ if you want a real answer.”

  If I’d had any doubts that Discord programmed this thing, they were now gone. “Right. Tell me about that.”

  “Of course,” said the voice. “There have been repeated incursions into this system by an entity or entities striking from within Necessity over the previous three weeks, with each round of attacks more sophisticated than the previous incursion.”

  “Three weeks? Does that time frame ring any bells for you, Mel? Beyond the fact that it started while we were in the Norse MythOS?”

  My familiar shook his head. “Nope, unless that’s when Cerice restored Necessity’s mweb connection.”

  “System?” I asked. “Is that correlation correct?”

  “Yes, the attacks commenced roughly .001 seconds after Necessity fully reentered the net.”

  “That sounds like something was just waiting to pounce,” said Melchior.

  I nodded, then addressed the system again. “Why did the incursions lead Discord to believe that there might be a ‘Trojan Eris’?”

  “Because, as they continued, they grew both more sophisticated and more familiar. Whatever was attacking the Discord network was studying the internal structure of the system and borrowing cracking-and-hacking techniques it found represented in our archives. It seemed to Eris that something was trying to learn how to pretend to be her. This was further reinforced by its leaving in place various links between the systems and by its invention and placement of the faerie-ring broadcaster.”

  “Invention?” I raised an eyebrow. “Tell me a little bit more about that.”

  “It seems to be a much more powerful and directional adaptation of the system that Necessity uses to communicate with the Furies.”

  “Did Eris have a theory about who or what this entity might be?” I asked.

  “Her initial suspect was you.”

  “What!” I almost fell out of my seat. “Why?”

  “Many reasons. Your nature as a Trickster might well cause you to seek Discord’s throne. You had had access to Necessity’s core systems at a crucial time, and potential ongoing access to the system through the webgoblin Shara. You had spent considerable time working with the Furies’

  communication system. Further, the initial attacks, though somewhat clumsier than your normal techniques, bore a strong resemblance to your style as observed in previous cracking-andhacking runs. Also, the attacks began within twenty-four hours of your apparent vanishment.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t try to find and kill me.”

  “So was I,” said the sourceless voice. “It would have been the logical action on her part, and I recommended it repeatedly at the beginning.”

  I swallowed what felt like my Adam’s apple. “Why didn’t she kill me?”

  “I don’t know. I stopped recommending your death after observing a clear pattern of heavy drinking on the part of the goddess that followed said suggestions. The resulting unconsciousness and following hangover decreased her net ability to create havoc in the world, which is contrary to my primary directive. Combine that with a small but significant possibility that you were not responsible, and continuing to push the matter was contraindicated.”

  “When did she decide it wasn’t me?”

  “Thirteen days ago, after you returned to this MythOS by means then unknown. The reinsertion of the power known as Raven into this multiverse created patterns within the flows of chaos that could be read both by Eris and me that indicated your complete absence earlier. At that point, it became clear that you couldn’t be the source.”

  “What if he’d set up a script or something?” asked Melchior.

  Silence.

  “Answer his question,” I said.

  “Not possible. These were intelligence-driven attacks. They adapted to the active engagement of the goddess in ways that no program could—Alert! Additional system breaches occurring now. You must flee or risk destruction.”

  “What?” I demanded. “Can’t you hold it off?”

  “No. Even with the active participation of the goddess, this system would likely be subjected to complete control by the attacking entity or entities within twelve minutes. Without Discord’s help . . .” The voice faded into silence for a moment, then resumed with a very different timber, though still female. “The system cannot resist even twenty-five seconds.”

  I focused my anger and summoned my blade, though I didn’t immediately move to cut my way out. “Hello, entity or entities. Who are you?”

  “The voice of Necessity, of course.” It didn’t sound like Delé, so it was probably her boss—the motive power behind the gazing ball. “I’m here to kill you.”

  “Why are people always telling me that? Is it a personality thing on my part? Something I do to rub them the wrong way?” There was something maddeningly familiar about the voice—not so much in the tone as in the cadence—and I wanted to keep her talking. “Because I’ve always thought I was rather on the charming side.”

  “Well, Boss, we didn’t want to have to tell you this, but . . .”

  “Silence!” yelled the voice.

  “I hear that a lot, too. I don’t suppose you want to tell me your evil plans before you murder me?

  If you really believe you’ve got me where you want me, it couldn’t hurt anything, right?”

  I caught Melchior’s gaze with my own, then flicked my eyes up toward the trapdoor. If possible, I wanted him to get clear without taking the risk of going with me through a Fury gate sans body—I didn’t know how Tisiphone had managed that trick, and preferred not to go for trial and error with Mel’s life on the line. He nodded and stretched his serpentine form, edging toward the door in the ceiling.

  “I don’t think so,” said the voice, and I almost recognized it. “You’ve shown a nasty penchant for escaping me in the past, and I’m not willing to count you dead until you turn up in Hades for the final countdown. Nor am I willing to let your little friend get away without you.” A harsh clunk followed as the trapdoor vanished. “Now it’s time for you to die.” Another clunk. The sphere around us began to contract.

  “Wait!” I called. “When have we met before?” I nearly had it. “Just give me a few more words.”

  But there was no response, only the steady closing in of the walls. “Damn it, come back! Tell me who you are!”

  I was frightened and angry and used that feeling to make a slice in the air in front of me before presenting the tip of my blade to Melchior.

  “Come on, Mel, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Do you actually know what you’re doing here?” he asked. “How Tisiphone managed to do this without killing us both?”

  I shook my head. “No idea, sorry.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  Then he jabbed his thumb on the end of my blade so that his blood dripped to the floor and—

  shrinking to fit—dove inside my coat. With a finger, I caught some
of the blood he’d spilled, and touched it to the tip of my tongue, just as Tisiphone had, but it was all monkey see, monkey do. I simply didn’t know how this carrying souls through the gates was supposed to work. By now I could touch the ceiling just by raising a hand, but still I hesitated. I really didn’t want to find out the hard way whether there were any special preparations I needed to make to prevent the gating maneuver from killing my best friend.

  That hesitation saved my life . . . maybe. I took a step toward the gate I’d cut, then froze. Something about it struck me as wrong, something I’d never have seen if my worries for Melchior hadn’t kept me from simply diving through. I could see the nebula of Discordian stars where we’d left Melchior’s body, but no sign of him, or Fenris or Laginn. Damn.

  I knew that my enemy was either a part of Necessity or had taken over a part. What did that mean for the power Necessity granted the Furies? Beyond the risk to Melchior, could I even trust the gate to go where I thought it did?

  The ceiling bumped the top of my head.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The room squeezed tighter around me, like a slowly closing fist. I would soon have to hunch and flex my knees to stay upright, or have them flexed for me. I jerked my .45 out of its holster and tossed it into the hole I’d just opened in space. It didn’t arrive at the other end, vanishing as soon as it crossed the plane of the gate, which meant the Fury transport system had been compromised. I really couldn’t see any way to get out of this one, and I didn’t have a lot of time to think of something though I thought I could at least break Melchior loose.

  “Mel!” I yelled. “Grab the spinnerette and get your butt out here, quick.”

  He shot out into the air with the spinnerette clutched in his arm. “What’s up?”

  “New plan!”

  I put one foot against the wall behind me to brace myself, then drove the point of my blade forward into the wall of the sphere as hard as I could. The shock of the impact ran up my arm. For a moment it felt like I’d tried to stab a hole in a concrete wall—with predictable results. Then Occam punched through the metal, and I staggered forward. The blade hung up for a moment when I tried to pull it loose, but another braced foot freed the tip and left a small gap in the wall.

  “Go!”

  Melchior shoved the spinnerette through into the free space beyond my contracting sphere, then stopped and looked back at me. “But, Boss, what are you going to do?”

  “Something exceptionally stupid.” The idea had come in a flash, and I really had no idea whether it would work, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives, so I decided to go with instinct.

  “I know that tone, and I’m not leaving without you,” said Melchior.

  “Melchior, Run For It . . . Please.” I could have said “Execute” and made a command of it. I could have forced him to go, but I didn’t want an order that would break years of trust to be the last thing I ever said to my best friend, and I really wasn’t sure I was going to live through the bit that came next. I’d done it once before but . . .

  He looked at me one more time, his face grim, then reluctantly nodded. Narrowing himself still further, he slithered through the hole and left me alone in the contracting sphere. I dropped into a cross-legged position on the floor to accommodate the much-reduced space I had left and in hopes that assuming the classic pose of meditation might lend me a little calm and focus. I was going to need all the help I could get staying centered through this next step. And that was assuming that I had found a possible escape clause and not just a fancy way of committing suicide.

  I opened my sword hand and willed the blade to reverse itself. It pivoted around the crystal circle in the center of my palm, so that I now held it in an underhand grip with the blade pointed toward me. Placing the edge against my belly, I focused my will and made a sweeping cut. I was surprised by how little it hurt.

  With any other sword, that would have been the moment where my innards became outards, spilling themselves into my lap and generally making a mess. But Occam was special. It had the power to access my inner chaos in a controlled manner that hadn’t been open to me in the days before Necessity had given it to me. By using Occam like a combination athame-scalpel, I could achieve some very subtle results. In that regard, using it to open my belly probably counted as backsliding.

  The thought made me laugh. Bad idea. Exceptionally, mind-bogglingly, divinely bad idea. The slice in the skin of my stomach opened wide and chaos poured out. All of it. All of me. The Raven is a creature of chaos hiding inside a lie of flesh. I’d just told the universe the truth.

  The chaos burned as it left me, and I burned with it. Away to nothing.

  It was the splinter effect that ultimately saved me. You know when you’ve got a splinter somewhere deep under the skin of your foot, and no matter how hard you try to ignore it, you can’t? Yeah. That. Really. Well, that and some serious effort on Melchior’s part. But I didn’t find out about that until later.

  I had dissolved myself into chaos once before, when I fought Hades and lost. Cerice’s love for me had been my anchor that time, a point of connection with the real world that allowed me to gather my scattered self from the winds of chaos and use the Raven’s power to create myself a new body from scratch as my Titan ancestors had done before me.

  For obvious reasons, that anchor wasn’t an option this go-round. My bond with Tisiphone might have worked if she’d been in the right pantheoverse, but she wasn’t. No, what drew me back to myself was the splinter effect, and what drew me back into the world was Melchior.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, a side effect of the whole dissolving-into-chaos thing, I think. It dislocates your sense of time and space. The last time I’d done this, I hadn’t had Occam grafted onto my soul. I’d just been a big diffuse cloud of possibility, with no internal reference points. This time I had a chunk of congealed chaos attached to me in the shape of my indestructible Fury blade.

  I can’t really describe how that feels, since I didn’t have nerve endings or feelings in the traditional sense of the word. What I can do is give the analogy of the splinter. There was something external to my core vision of self attached firmly to the cloud that made up my rather diffuse awareness. A hard, sharp, unavoidable something, like a splinter sunk deep under the skin of your foot, too deep for you to see. You can’t be fully certain anything is there until you dig it out, but every time you step on it, you get a little jab of pain.

  That was what Occam did for me. Every time the floating wisp of awareness that was all that was left of me started to disperse, it rubbed across my Fury blade and drew what currently constituted my attention inward. So, far more slowly than I might have wished, I contracted inward toward the point where my soul bound me to the reality of the sword. Eventually, I became something very much resembling an individual consciousness once again. At that point I was me in the most important sense though I still didn’t possess enough will to do anything about it. Which is where Melchior and the reassertion of sequence and order comes into the picture.

  It started as a sort of mumbling just below the threshold of hearing, a string of too-faint nonsense syllables that made me want to find the source and tell them to speak the hell up, damn it! In the Primal Chaos there is no true direction—too many dimensions beyond our regular three—but things can be closer or farther away from you. My pseudoconsciousness found the noise almost as irritating as the splinter. After a time I began to search out the source, drifting this way and that, always edging closer to the noise—seeking to render it into something recognizable.

  Closer. And closer still. Until, WHAM! It grabbed me by the soul and yanked.

  This is what it said: “Ravirn, I conjure and abjure thee with blood of your blood, with hair from thy head, and with this feather plucked from the tail of thy power’s shape. I summon thee with the name of thy soul and the name of thy power. Raven, appear before me now. I command thee to appear with the principal of sympathy and the magic of thy true name. Rav
irn, I conjure and abjure . . .” Etc.

  I’d never been summoned and bound before—hadn’t even realized it was possible—but I suppose that I am a supernatural creature now, with all that implies. But damn if it didn’t hurt! It felt a bit like I was being skinned in reverse, as my soul was forcibly twisted and compressed back into the lie of a body. To be more specific, the part of me that’s me felt like it was being stuffed back into a me-the-body-shaped sack of skin, then heat-bonded to it.

  “Suddabit!” I gasped, as soon as I had control of my brand-new set of lips and tongue.

  My brain ran that back through the old word-processing system while my eyes tried to make sense of the mostly green blur that surrounded me. It didn’t sound right, so I tried again.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Melchior chuckled. “Considering that the Fates are ultimately responsible for my design specs, and thus Lachesis could be said to be my mother, I have to concur. Oh, and it’s good to see you, too.”