Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “Thank you,” she breathed against my lips, then was gone, stepping back and away—

  unmistakably and unbridgeably separating herself from me.

  When she spoke again, it was with the hard voice of the Fury. “Shara sent me. She said to tell you it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

  I was just trying to figure out some response to that that didn’t include my telling Cerice that I currently trusted Shara’s word about half as far as I’d trust a promise of sobriety from Dionysus, when I got my second delivery of Fury flambé for the day.

  Alecto had clearly listened to those stop, drop, and roll ads back in the day, because Goddess, Gracious, Great Ball of Fire. She came out of the ring like a fiery bowling ball, and only varying degrees of fancy footwork saved the lot of us from playing the role of the pins. She did take out the table and several deck chairs before flipping into the air and sailing over the edge of the lanai to land in a smoldering heap on the jungle floor below.

  “Mel,” I said.

  “On it.” He started whistling “Better Living” again as he vaulted the railing.

  But Alecto was already on her way back, burns or no. She landed hard because of badly crisped wings and stomped over to face me. She looked scarier than ever. She’d clearly been burned much worse than Cerice, but where the fires had left Cerice barely functional, Alecto hardly seemed inconvenienced—just really really pissed. I couldn’t blame her there; I felt much the same way.

  “Nemesis is back!” Alecto snarled through fire-blackened lips. “She revealed herself a few minutes ago.”

  Cerice nodded. “That’s part of what Shara sent me to tell you.”

  “Actually, we’re on top of that one,” I said. “Though I don’t like that ‘part of’ clause you threw in there. I’m guessing that part two has to do with Nemesis advancing her schedule for world domination after I survived our encounter in Discord’s network, but I’m sure there’s more. No matter how much I’d love to believe that’s all you’ve got, I know there’s always another shoe waiting to drop with these things. Sometimes I think the deity in charge of dropping shoes on Ravirn is a centipede. So, what’s part three?”

  A look of pure pain rippled across Cerice’s features, but she quickly got it under control and opened her mouth to speak. Before she said so much as a word, though, she stopped herself and glanced awkwardly at Alecto.

  Great, more inter-Fury conflict with Ravirn playing man in the middle.

  While I could see the potential entertainment value of playing the role of the frosting in the middle of a Cerice/ Alecto layer cake under the right circumstances, I was pretty sure these weren’t them.

  “I don’t suppose this is something the two of you want to settle between yourselves while I go out for dinner and a movie with my buddies?” I asked, hopefully.

  Cerice growled at me, and Alecto . . .

  “Ouch,” said Melchior, “and here I thought Medusa was the queen of killer looks.” He shut up abruptly when Alecto turned her raging eyes his way.

  I stepped between them. “Look, Alecto, I know that you’re a Goddess of Wrath and all that, but just this once could you chill the hell out? It doesn’t sound like we have a ton of time for ripping each other apart at the moment.”

  For a second, I thought I had gotten myself off the hook for this whole mess by the unpleasant expedient of having a Fury turn me inside out. Then Alecto shook her head and stepped back. The anger in her eyes stayed every bit as intense, but it moved back into the depths, becoming colder and more remote.

  “Later, perhaps, I will break both of your arms. But it will have to wait until after we find out whether we all survive the coming pass.” She turned then to Cerice and extended her hand.

  “Little sister, I have not welcomed you properly before this; let me now amend my ways and greet you as both an ally and the sibling you are.”

  For about eight-tenths of a second, Cerice looked like someone had kicked her square in the stomach. Then her mouth shaped itself into a shy smile, and she stepped forward to embrace Alecto. It was actually rather sweet. Not that I was going to say anything about that. When Cerice finally moved away from the older Fury, she looked more settled somehow, less lost. Though I hadn’t realized she’d been looking lost beforehand, it seemed crystal clear in retrospect.

  Cerice turned toward me, opened her mouth, then froze again.

  “It’s all right,” said Alecto. “I don’t know what your Shara has told you, but in accepting you as a sister, I must needs also accept her as something of a foster mother in this hour of Necessity’s incapacity.”

  Cerice closed her eyes for a moment, then straightened her shoulders and opened them again, obviously working herself up to talk about things that she’d rather not. “Shara also sent me to ask you for a favor.”

  “There’s always something.” I braced myself. “I know I’m going to hate this, but go ahead and hit me.”

  “Nemesis has used her access through Necessity to seize effective control of all the pole-power networks. The first thing Shara wants you to do is force Nemesis out of the Fate Core,

  [http://Olympus.net] Olympus.net, and the systems of Hades, then to close the doors behind her.”

  I blinked. “That’s a heck of a first thing, but sure, why not? Then for the second round, I suppose I can do Discord, and clean up with a complete purge of the mweb before afternoon tea.”

  “No,” said Cerice. “Discord you’ve already covered. The effective destruction of her network means no more Nemesis-infection within. Your experiences there are what gave Shara warning to look at the other systems and the idea of a shutdown, though she didn’t at first understand that the entity she was battling within Necessity was Nemesis.” Cerice smiled a wan sort of smile.

  “Sorry to say, however, that you will probably need to take down the mweb to keep Nemesis from reinfecting the powers while we’re fixing Necessity. Nemesis has to be completely isolated until that’s done, so that she can’t escape again.”

  “You’re kidding, right? No, I can see by your expression that you’re not kidding. Insane, maybe, but not kidding.” I shook my head. “Is that all? Or does Shara expect me to rearrange the sun and moon and all the starlit skies to suit her fancy as well?”

  “That’s all she asks. But she also sent you a message.”

  “Great. What is it?”

  Cerice’s face and body went slack then, like a puppet whose strings have been let go. A couple of seconds later, she straightened up, but a different will seemed to be animating her features. In the manner of an extremely good actress, she appeared to have become someone else entirely. Someone I knew well. In that moment, Shara looked out at me through Cerice’s eyes. Or, more accurately perhaps, Necessity Junior looked out at me through the eyes of one of her Fury handmaidens.

  “This is probably the last time I will ever have the opportunity to speak to you, Ravirn. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s not nearly as up close and personal as I might like.” She winked and threw me a vampy smirk, and for just an instant I saw a ghost of the old Mae-Westian Shara through the strain and the stress that so obviously consumed her. “I’m sorry it had to be this way, with me piling the future of the whole damn pantheoverse on your shoulders, but I’m fresh out of options.”

  She looked down and away for a moment—hiding tears, I thought—then faced me squarely once again. “I failed. The damage to Necessity the computer is simply too great for me to be able to stop Nemesis from within by myself, and Necessity the goddess, if she still exists, is buried somewhere in the system beyond my reach. The computer mind we all share is functionally insane and growing more so every day, and only Nemesis thrives in the maelstrom. If you don’t succeed where I could not, the soul of Vengeance will own this entire MythOS, probably within a few days. Malice will rule over all. Malice untempered by mercy and walking hand in hand with madness.”

  Cerice, still in the mode of Shara, jerked and made a noise like static, then froze f
or a couple of beats before going on. “This will be my final communication, and you shouldn’t trust any further messages that appear to come from me. I can feel Nemesis knocking at the doors of my soul, and soon she will take the part of the computer that is me as she has taken so much of what once belonged to Necessity. Give my love to Melchior. Succeed where I could not. I know that you can. I love you all. Good-bye.”

  When Cerice came back into herself, there were tears streaming down her cheeks and the unwavering rage of the Furies shining in her eyes. “That was the last thing she said before the fires came, and I was forced to flee into chaos, thence to the faerie rings.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sometimes the only person you can talk something over with is yourself. Perhaps that’s why I ended up in front of the big mirror in my bathroom after I crawled out of the tub. Or maybe it was my eyes. My bodiless sojourn had cost me what little remnant of mortality they’d once held. Where once chaos had owned only my pupils, raising my eyelids now opened a pair of twinned gates into the Primal Chaos. Like Eris and Loki, I had lost my eyes to my power.

  “How can I see?” I wondered aloud.

  “You can’t,” said the face in the mirror. “Not in the classical sense. It’s all a part of the lie you tell the universe.”

  “Eris?” I asked, and for just a moment, the planes of my reflected face seemed to change, momentarily mirroring the Goddess of Discord.

  But then the effect was over, and I shook my head. Not Discord. The Raven. The Trickster playing tricks on himself. Or at least that was how it seemed to me. On impulse, I reached up and very gently touched my “eye” with my fingertip. I couldn’t feel the contact, from either end. When I pressed harder, my reflection showed my finger actually seeming to slide through the gate of my eye. I kept pushing until my entire finger had vanished from sight.

  It didn’t hurt, and no matter how I probed, I couldn’t feel anything with that finger. Nor did I have any sensation that might have suggested I was tickling my own brain. It was probably the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. When I pulled it back out, there was a brief moment where my finger looked as though it were made of very clear glass filled with chaos. Then it returned to the appearance of mortal flesh and blood.

  I felt a sensation like fingernails running gently from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck, and I shuddered. It came again, and I realized it wasn’t internal.

  “Cerice?”

  She faded into existence behind me—every bit as naked as I was. Standing like that, facing the mirror, brought back memories. We had made love more than once in this room, with our mirror doubles partnering our dance to that oldest of rhythms just on the other side of the glass.

  I felt myself responding in the predictable way, both to the memories and to the proximity of a beautiful woman on the edge of death. I wanted to turn and take her in my arms and make love to her once more, perhaps for the last time.

  Instead, I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Why not?” She sounded sad but not surprised.

  “Lots of things.” I continued to look into her eyes only through the mediation of the mirror.

  “What you have become. What I have become. The shadows that lie between us.”

  “I can make the wings invisible, ape the old me . . .”

  She did, and for a moment she was almost the Cerice whom I had once thought I might someday marry. But it was an illusion. She still had ice in her hair and her eyes, and that elemental nature provided another reflection. A reflection of the fiery-haired Tisiphone to whom I had promised to return.

  Finally, I turned to face Cerice. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, and I was.

  “So am I.” Then she faded from sight, and in that moment I knew it was well and truly over between us and that when I went to my closet to clothe myself, the dress my heart had spun for her would have faded away as well.

  I wanted to cry then, but I found I no longer had the eyes for it.

  “So, what now?” Melchior was sitting on my bedside table.

  “Good question.” I sat cross-legged on the bed facing him.

  I knew we had to move, but I wasn’t going to let myself be stampeded into accidentally doing something really stupid. If I was going to do something really stupid, I wanted to do it with malice aforethought.

  “Someday,” I said, “I’d like my choices to be between the frying pan and rum on the beach rather than the more traditional frying pan and fire pairing. The way I see it, we’re pretty much obligated to take down Fate and the other pole-power systems per Shara’s request, then plunge headfirst into a codewar with Nemesis. The question isn’t so much about strategy or end goals as it is about short-term tactics.”

  “On the plus side,” said Melchior, “we’ve got that lovely box filled with the tools of destruction that Persephone donated to the cause early on. It almost makes you wonder if she saw all of this coming.”

  “Who can tell with a goddess? For all we know, she’s got Cassandra tucked away somewhere and is actually listening to that cursed lady’s prophecies of doom. But I doubt it. If I had to make a guess, I’d say, ‘No, she didn’t foresee our current plight.’ If she had, she’d have gone for less of an overkill factor. The Persephone suite of viruses is really more by way of global nuclear war than the short-term knockout punch that’s called for here. She’s shooting to kill where we just want to put our targets down for a long winter’s nap.”

  “There is that.” Mel tapped the side of his head. “Without some serious modification, the things she put in here are likely to cause the kind of damage that requires shutting the surviving hardware down and reinstalling operating systems from scratch. That wouldn’t be too much of a loss with Hades or [http://Olympus.net] Olympus.net, but Fate’s another story. Even though they’ve been transitioning away from AI as much as possible, there are still a lot of webtrolls and webgoblins in our line of fire. We’re going to have to be extra careful with them.”

  “Which is about the only thing that’s going to preserve my personal sense of pride. If I just took someone else’s malicious code and released it into the systems in question, I’d be no better than any script-kiddie downloading malware off the net and pretending that using it makes me a real black-hat coder.”

  Melchior rolled his eyes. “Heaven forefend that anyone think the mighty Ravirn is anything but the king of code!”

  “Or, more seriously, that anyone but me is responsible for the pantheonwide computer Armageddon we’re about set off. The blowback from this is going to be worse than anything we’ve ever seen. All four pole powers are going to have reason to come after us in the aftermath, and I’d rather not put anyone I don’t have to in the splash zone. Especially Persephone. She’s suffered enough.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” Melchior stood up and stepped from table to bed, where he began to pace a slow circle around me.

  “Yes?” I asked after a while. “Did you have something to say, or are you just going to orbit me in silent worry?”

  “What comes next? Even if Discord forgives you out of sheer admiration for the giant ball of snafu we’re about to start rolling, that still leaves three pole powers in the looking-for-revenge column. That being the case, no one is going to bet on our long-term survival post compuapocalypse, with Athena, Hades, and Fate all gunning for us. Not at any odds.” He stopped and looked me straight in the eyes. “Not even me.”

  I shrugged. “I could make the argument that our chances of coming out the other side of this particular tunnel are so low that worrying about what comes next is just borrowing trouble. But I won’t. I’ve actually been thinking about it rather a lot.

  “The way I see it is thus: If we lose, we’re dead, and that’s that. If we win, Necessity will owe us a major favor, and she’ll be back on her feet and more than capable of telling everyone to leave us the hell alone.”

  “Unless she decides that the silly idiots who started the whole thing ought not to be rewarded for
doing so,” said Melchior. “If she blames us for Persephone’s virus, we could end up very much on her bad side. Even if she doesn’t, I’d hate for plan A to involve relying on the gratitude of a goddess.”

  I rolled backwards off the bed, landing on my feet, and started my own pacing. “Point to Melchior, and I wasn’t planning on relying on it long-term. I was just going to ask her to—” I stopped and looked at my familiar, realizing for the first time that I hadn’t run my thoughts about returning to Tisiphone past him at all.

  “I don’t like that expression, Boss. It has a tendency to proceed some attempt at noble sacrifice on your part.”

  “Not this time, Mel. It’s just that I’m feeling kind of selfish. I was about to say that the safest thing for us to do would be to cut out of this MythOS entirely and head back to Tisiphone, when I realized something. I’ve never even asked to see whether you’d want to come with me when I go. I oughtn’t spring things like that on you all of a sudden.”