Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  About then, my brain got the hang of processing visual input, and that feeling became mutual as Melchior entered my personal picture of the world around me—it was very good to see him again. To see again, period. He stood on the lanai of Raven House, with the big faerie ring behind him and beyond that the jungle and the bay.

  In one hand he held a feather and my hairbrush, in the other a tiny crystalline vial filled with a rich red fluid. I stepped forward to catch him in a hug—well, staggered, really, since I wasn’t used to having a body again yet—then screamed when I bounced face-first off an invisible wall made of pure pain. Somehow, I managed to stay upright.

  “Suddabit!” I yelped, rubbing at my numbed nose and lips.

  “Sorry about that,” said Melchior.

  Looking down, I spotted the lines of a hexagram carved deep into the marble of the floor, one that completely enclosed me. I raised an eyebrow, or made a valiant attempt to do so anyway.

  “Haemun’s gonna kill you.”

  “Actually,” said Melchior, “he did most of the chisel work.”

  “Really? How’d you convince him to help you make such a mess of the floor?”

  “That’s a long story,” said Melchior.

  “I’d love to hear it,” I said, “and the one about why you’re doing things this way instead of using a nice sensible piece of code. But both of those would sound better sitting down with a drink in my hand. This is the point where I’d normally suggest we adjourn to the bar, but I can’t help noticing that there’s one tiny little problem with my plan.” I indicated the hexagram that bound me.

  Melchior nodded but didn’t move.

  “I’m noticing a distinct lack of your letting me out of here,” I said, after a moment.

  “Yeah, and I’m really sorry about that. But the first couple of yous I summoned turned out to not actually be you, which has a lot to do with why we carved the binding in stone along about try number three. Likewise, the next couple of yous that showed up after that were also not you. As much as I want to open that hexagram, I need to make sure that this you is the real you first.”

  “Don’t I look like me?” I glanced down the length of my body and did a quick comparison with how I normally looked, a comparison made easier by my nakedness. Everything seemed to be there and in the right places, which was a relief.

  “Yes, and no,” said Melchior rather evasively. “But so did things one-through-nine.”

  “Those statements both sound pretty bad, but let’s start with that ‘yes and no.’ I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on that . . .”

  “Just as soon as I’m sure you’re you.”

  “Something about your tone tells me that this is going to require more than a game of twenty questions that no one but the real Ravirn could answer.”

  Mel nodded. “Yeah, and I’m sorry about that, too, but the whole twenty-questions routine is how you number three convinced us to let it out.”

  “I really don’t like the sound of that, Mel. Why would the not-me know things only the real me ought to?”

  “Again, something we can talk about once your identity is verified. Oh, and by the way, you owe Fenris the contents of a complete butcher shop among other favors for help with yous numbers one through three, five, and nine. If he hadn’t been here then, I wouldn’t be now.”

  “The more I hear about this, the less happy I become, Mel. Can we get on with things so I can hear the whole story?”

  “All right, and let me say in advance that if you do turn out to be you, I’m really sorry about this next bit.”

  Before I could ask, Melchior produced a miniature wax figure of me along with some pins and set them on the low table where he was sitting. The details that followed are tedious though only moderately painful, and made more so by the fact that the Ravirn figurine was followed by one of a little wax Raven, so I’ll skip over the ouchy bits. Sometime later, when I was done yelping, and Mel was done apologizing, he produced a chisel inscribed with long strings of arcane binary.

  “It’s about damn time,” I said.

  He paused then and looked thoughtful. “You know, before I let you out, I was wondering if now might not be a good time to renegotiate my salary.”

  “What!”

  Then he winked at me and grinned, and I broke down into semihysterical giggles. It was just that little bit too much.

  “Okay, and he passes the sense-of-humor test with flying colors.” A relieved grin spread across Melchior’s features. “I think this is the genuine article.”

  “That’s it, then?” Fenris slid out from the shadows under the overhang. “He laughs, and it’s really him?”

  “The right kind of laugh, yes,” replied Melchior.

  Something really unpleasant jangled at the back of my mind at that—a vague memory of past problems. “Why does my sense of humor need a test?”

  Mel looked up from the chisel he’d placed against the outer line of the hexagram and sighed unhappily. “The chaos gazing out of the eye balls of the other nine versions of you turned out to be nothing more than reflections, if you know what I mean.”

  “Gazing? Reflections? Are you saying the gazing ball was somehow inhabiting fake versions of me? I don’t see how—” And then I did. Eyes like smoky mirrors.

  “Nemesis.”

  “That was my thought,” said Mel.

  “And it’s why I offered to do the chisel work.” Haemun followed Fenris out into the sun. He had a robe draped over one arm, and now he bobbed the tray of drinks he also held, making the ice clink together. “I thought you might need one of these.”

  “Or six,” I replied.

  Nemesis. The Goddess of Vengeance. Apparently, I hadn’t destroyed her. Little spots of ice prickled here and there on my skin. That thing they say about if you would shoot at the king, be certain you kill him . . . Well, it goes double for goddesses.

  “I’m going for nine,” said Melchior. “One for each fake-you we had to dispose of.”

  Fenris lapped up another snoutful of single malt, then sat back and looked out over the bay.

  “Okay, shoot that one by me again. How can Nemesis possibly be running around loose after you used the powers of Necessity to destroy the body she was inhabiting and banish her to Tartarus forever? Wasn’t the whole point of the exercise to make sure she could never threaten Necessity ever again? Her survival and return makes no sense.”

  “Actually, I’m afraid that it does.” Now that I’d had some time to get over the initial shock of the idea, I was starting to think again—bad thoughts. “After Necessity cast her out the first time, Nemesis became a bodiless soul but retained much of her former power.”

  “Which ranks her up there near the combined strength of all three Furies,” Melchior said, glumly.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “later you’ll have to tell me more about Eris knocking Cerice on her ass.”

  I’d been gone from the corporeal world for something on the order of thirty-five hours, and a lot had happened. Things like Discord’s putting Cerice down for the count, then apparently vanishing from the face of the pantheoverse. We needed to move against Nemesis as soon as possible, but if we wanted to survive the experience, we needed to move smart. That meant gathering information and formulating plans.

  “Can we get back to Nemesis?” Haemun sounded fixated, and who could blame him after his experiences with the goddess? “Why isn’t she in Tartarus where she belongs?” Nemesis had really messed with his head last time around.

  “Actually, she is.” I held up a hand to forestall argument. “Not physically, perhaps, but magically, which is all that counts. When Shara chose to take Persephone’s place in Hades, she didn’t do it literally. She did it through the wonders of modern spellware by occupying the file space that bound Persephone to Hades. Each year for three months, Shara’s soul is trapped within the part of Necessity’s system that governs the placement of the goddess Persephone.”

  “Now Nemesis is doing much the
same thing, occupying the file space of her own imprisonment in Tartarus.” I took another sip of my drink—a lethal-grade margarita. “Which just happens to lie right in the heart of Necessity’s operating system. It’s as if the goddess Necessity has caught the ultimate computer virus in the shape of her own daughter, Nemesis.”

  Melchior’s eyes went suddenly wide. “Oh shit. Do you think that Nemesis lifted the file-space trick from us and Shara? That we’re responsible for this development?”

  “One way or another.” I tilted my hand back and forth. “Nemesis is at heart a sort of distorted magnifying mirror. She reflects the talents and thinking of whomever she wants to destroy, then adds her own power to the mix, creating a sort of amplified echo of the individual. When she assumed Dairn’s body, she also took on his hatred of me, then she used more powerful versions of my own hacking-and-cracking skills to try to kill me.”

  “Skills that she seems to have hung on to when she went into the machine.” Haemun got up and started to pace. “Is that because she’s still got all of us square in her sights? Or what?”

  “That’s part of it,” I agreed. “But it also has to do with her opposition to Necessity. My power, the Raven’s power, comes from Necessity. She gave it to me with the name. In fact, Necessity defines and delimits all the gods and powers and—”

  “Are you trying to tell me that Nemesis has all the skills and strength of your entire pantheon?”

  demanded Fenris. “Because if you are, I think I might have been better off staying behind in my home MythOS and fighting it out at Ragnarok.”

  “No.” I rubbed my forehead. “At least, I don’t think so. The only reason Necessity is capable of wielding as much power as she does is her nature as the Fate of the Gods and her processing power as a world-spanning computer. Under normal circumstances, Nemesis doesn’t have anything like that much capacity. Even now, inhabiting Necessity, she’s got to work under pretty severe constraints imposed by all the damage that’s been done to Necessity. Nemesis is currently limited by the very problems that allowed her to invade the system.”

  “Well,” said Melchior, “that’s different.”

  “What?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “This may be the first time that all the destruction we’ve helped heap on poor old Necessity’s head has had any hint of an upside.”

  “Call it the Trickster effect,” I replied with a bitter smile. “My biggest successes and my biggest defeats seem to go hand in hand.”

  “My father, Loki, is the same way,” said Fenris. “For every victory lap he starts to run, there’s always a banana peel waiting for him somewhere on the track. Does your Eris have the same problem?”

  “She does this week,” said Melchior, “and this week the banana peel has Ravirn’s names on it.”

  “What, just because I led a Fury into her living room?” Melchior shook his head. “Nah. From what I hear, Cerice didn’t even make her sweat. I was thinking more of when you completely nuked her server cluster.”

  “What?” I was missing something.

  “Your brain must still be scrambled,” said Melchior. “Riddle me this: What happens when you open a door from the very heart of Discord’s command and control system directly into the Primal Chaos?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I kicked back the rest of my drink—it was going to be a while before she forgave me for that, and Discord’s shit list is not a place I wanted to be. “How bad was it?”

  “For starters,” said Melchior, “the apple exploded.”

  “Discord’s prize from the Trojan War is gone?”

  Fenris nodded. “Golden applesauce everywhere. And then the stars in that artificial nebula started going out one by one. For a second I thought I was fresh out of this-MythOS friends. Then Melchior coughed up that spinnerette thing and started puking his guts out.”

  “What’s up with that, Mel?” I asked.

  He signaled Haemun for a refill. “I didn’t know what to do with her. You’d brought her in physically via the gate you cut, and I was leaving in spirit. So, I ate her. I figured that if I completely encapsulated her, she’d stand a better chance of coming through in more or less one piece, and I didn’t really have much time for coming up with alternate solutions after you dropped the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb.”

  “And?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Either it worked, or she had some other resources that she deployed. In either case, we arrived together, and she made her exit by kicking me straight in the gag reflex.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I hadn’t seen the spinnerette at all in the hour or so since I’d been recorporealized.

  “Sulking somewhere, maybe,” said Melchior. “She wouldn’t get near me again after we came out of what was left of Discord’s network—rode back on Fenris’s shoulders with Laginn. Then she scampered off and hid as soon as we got home. I haven’t seen her since.”

  I looked around but didn’t see any signs of the spinnerette. That made me nervous.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Melchior. “You look a whole lot less happy about that than I’d have expected. Should I have kept a better eye on her?”

  “It’s probably fine, Mel. We just never established who she was working for, and the whole idea of Nemesis makes me a little twitchy.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said, with deliberate nonchalance.

  The effect was damaged somewhat when he jumped half out of his seat and knocked over his drink a moment later. But only somewhat, as the rest of us had similar reactions to the enormous flash and boom that came from the permanent faerie ring on the lanai.

  I spun in my seat, making a mental note never to sit with my back to a ring again as I did so.

  “What the—Tisiphone! No, Cerice?”

  My confusion came from the fact that Cerice was on fire when she arrived, with bright yellow and orange flames chewing on every surface of her body. But only for an instant. As she stepped across the line of the faerie ring, the fires went out.

  She took one staggering step toward me, her arms outstretched. “Ravirn, I was wrong.” Another step. “I’m sorry.” Then she pitched forward in a faint.

  Her skin crackled when I caught her, and I froze for fear of causing further harm. “Melchior!”

  He’d already started whistling “Better Living Through Chemistry” as I leaped to catch Cerice. Now he sank a claw turned syringe into the side of Cerice’s neck and pushed the plunger, sending a huge dose of morphine into her system.

  Furies are heavy—four or five hundred pounds of heavy—and I hadn’t had time to plan my catch, just leaped forward and looped one hand under each of her armpits. I ended up in a lousy position, with my legs in something resembling a full-on fencing extension. Add to that, that I was none too steady myself after my recent return to the flesh, and it was a wonder I didn’t drop her or collapse in the first couple of seconds.

  But when Haemun offered to take some of the load or help me lower her to the ground, I actually growled at him. The less of her skin that came in contact with anything nonsterile, the better. At least that was what I told myself. I was just trying to figure out how best to get her to a burn unit when she moved in my arms.

  “Be still,” I said. “We’re working on it.”

  She lifted her head and met my eyes. “No, it’s all right.” It hurt me to look at the blackened skin and deep red cracks on her face, and I felt a terrible anger welling up in my heart, but I forced myself to smile and nod and keep making eye contact for her sake. Later, however, I would make someone pay for this.

  “I’ll be fine in a few minutes now that I’m out of the direct blast,” she continued.

  “Sure you will,” I said just to agree.

  But there was no need to humor her. Though I might have forgotten it in the moment, Cerice was no longer the demihuman child of Fate I’d once loved. She was a Fury, and virtually indestructible. Even as
I watched, the harsh red gashes began to close, and her skin softened and lightened, sloughing off the charcoal. Within minutes, she looked as though she’d never been injured.

  An amused smile grew on her lips. “Ravirn?”

  “Yes?”

  “You can let go of me now.”

  I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “No, actually. I can’t. Not from this position, not without dropping you.”

  She laughed quietly. With a snap of her wings she flicked herself back and up, out of my hands and onto her feet. I couldn’t compensate for the sudden change in my balance and lurched forward, stumbling. I’d have landed on my face if Cerice hadn’t put a hand under my chest, catching me as easily as if I were a cardboard cutout of myself, and setting me on my feet. Before I knew what to think about that, she stepped in close and gave me a kiss that tasted of first love lost and summer hillsides long ago.