Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  Just then I felt a tug on my leather pants, right above where they went into my boots. It was the spinnerette, returned from wherever she’d been hiding and determinedly climbing me.

  “Looks like everyone’s here,” I said. “That means it’s time to go. We can discuss our exact point of arrival on the way.”

  Alecto nodded and cut a hole through the wall of the world. This one was not a typical Fury gate, as we couldn’t trust those anymore, but rather a simple slit from reality into the Primal Chaos. With the mweb down and faerie rings barred from Necessity’s world, the only way we had to get from here to there was to fly through chaos on Fury’s wings. I tucked a laptop-shaped Melchior into the pocket built into the back of my leather jacket and stepped into Cerice’s arms. Then Alecto picked up Fenris, and we plunged into the maelstrom.

  Next stop: Nemesis.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Just let me fix my face, and I’ll be ready,” I told Cerice as we hovered within the tumbling coils of the Primal Chaos that lies just beyond the edges of reality.

  I pulled Melchior from my laptop pocket and handed him to Cerice. The spinnerette went with him. Together, Melchior and I changed. He into a goblin, me into a giant otter. I clapped my paws and waggled my eyebrows at Cerice by way of a prompt, but she shook her head.

  “A minute more. We need to give Fenris and Alecto time to begin their distraction at the cave of the abacuses.” Her face took on the cast of someone listening for faint and distant sounds. Finally, she nodded and set Melchior on my shoulders. “Now.”

  Six-inch claws cut a doorway into Necessity’s world, and we plunged from chaos into deep water. The chamber beyond the gate was almost impossibly vast, like an open-topped football stadium carved from living stone. A massive reef of yellow coral filled it from side to side and reached great pillars up toward the surface and a tropical sun.

  We had entered at a depth of perhaps thirty meters, and the light was dimmed and significantly green-shifted by the filtering effect of the water above us. Combine that with the irregular nature of the reef, and the wild cacophony of sea life in this world without human predators, and you produce a maze of shifting shadows. Any of them could easily have hidden the great silver ball of Nemesis’s disembodied eye, so I stayed within easy reach of my Fury protector. Paddling only as much as I needed to maintain my position beneath Cerice, I focused all my attention on the reef and tried to make sense of its structure.

  This was the replacement system for the more mundane computers that had once controlled the powers of the powers and the positions of the pantheon—the subnetwork that defined the true Fate of the Gods. It was one giant, living processor, grown specifically for the task, a merging of software and hardware into a single-purpose system that—theoretically—couldn’t be hacked. Somewhere in there lay a fat piece of coral carefully evolved to define the soul of Nemesis. If we could identify it and cut it free, then isolate or destroy it, we might just be able to make this a scalpel operation rather than a sledgehammer job.

  Yeah, right. What I was seeing was a whole lot of coral, and not a single divine nameplate. No ZEUS. No ERIS. No NEMESIS, SET CHARGES HERE. For the life of me, it didn’t look even a tiny bit like a computer.

  Oh, after perhaps ten minutes of staring, my special divinity was starting to pick up on unusual patterns within the reef, knobs and knurls and fans that repeated more often and more precisely than any true structure of nature. But that was more by way of identifying it as the construct it was than making any sense of associated functions. Given a week or two, I might start to understand the underlying principles, but that was time we didn’t have.

  I rolled over in the water, intending to let Cerice know this was a no-go, just in time to take a pair of powerfully driven Fury feet straight in the chest. The impact drove the breath from my lungs, momentarily stunning me. It also moved me just far enough down and back so that the big silvery ball that came rocketing out of a cave in the coral took Cerice in the shins instead of crushing the back of my skull.

  Blood clouded the water between us and muffled Cerice’s shriek of pain and rage. The thing turned around and started back our way. Unfortunately, at that point, Cerice was busy holding her broken bones in place while they knitted themselves together, and I was still trying not to suck in a lungful of water. Melchior began to whistle at that point, but the spell sounded terribly strange coming as it did through water rather than air, and I had no confidence it would work properly. Especially since it was a big spell, complex and self-harmonizing, relying on a lot of subtleties.

  Nemesis’s gazing ball of death came rocketing in, and I did what I could to take evasive action while waiting for Melchior’s spell to work, but the eye of Nemesis had grown in power since our last meeting, and the ball was way faster than me. I was about to find out what otter pâté felt like from the inside, when a pair of giant rubber paddles appeared between me and the eye of Nemesis. The left paddle pivoted on nothing and slammed that gazing ball like Dionysus shotgunning a beer. It shot away from me for about fifty feet before it hit a just-appeared rubbercovered globe that chimed and batted it in another direction with even more speed.

  What the . . .

  Melchior, his head enclosed in a big bubble of air like a fifties spaceman helmet, leaned down into my vision and grinned. “I call that one ‘The Real Pinball Wizard.’”

  Every time Nemesis’s silvery eye seemed to be getting itself back under control, another bumper appeared and bounced it in a random direction. Mel’s spell was doing great, right up until the eye hit a bumper and shattered it in the manner of a musket ball smacking into a snow globe. After that, the whole magical structure started to come apart. But the spell had bought us the two minutes we needed to regroup.

  By the time Nemesis’s eye was headed our way again, Cerice had restored her legs to functionality, and I’d cut us an exit back to chaos. With no chance of success here, there was little point in contesting the field.

  Strike one.

  It wasn’t until perhaps ten minutes later, after I’d reverted to my normal shape, that I noticed our spinnerette companion had abandoned ship somewhere on the watery side of the line. If I’d had any idea what her true agenda was, I might have known what to do about that. I didn’t and was still trying to decide whether I ought to do anything when Alecto and Fenris arrived.

  The former had a badly broken wing and some fresh burns, the latter a deep gash that ran back from a half-severed ear along the top of his head and down his neck to the shoulder. He also had a scattering of lightly singed fur and the sort of grin that suggested the other guy looked worse. Even Laginn looked beat-up, with two split knuckles and a torn-away thumbnail.

  “Megaera and Delé,” said Alecto before I could ask. “And we found nothing of any use.”

  “But Delé’s going to be limping along with five legs and one and a half claws for a while,”

  Fenris said with grim satisfaction.

  Call that strike 1.5.1. So, I’m a software guy, not a baseball guy. What about it?

  “So what’s next?” I asked. “We’ve played all the obvious cards. What do the Furies know about the structure of Necessity that you two haven’t been willing to share with me yet?”

  Alecto and Cerice eyed each other uncomfortably while the silence slowly stretched out between us. Finally, Cerice broke the look and turned my way.

  “I’m sure there are things Alecto knows that I don’t, but I can say that the place where Shara stashed her body—deep under this world’s Mountain of Olympus—is just above the physical location of the primary security servers. Alecto?” She turned a questioning look on the older Fury.

  Alecto sighed. “I have one thought beyond that, but let’s try security first. There is much that can be done from there, and I would not reveal all of my mother’s secrets, even now. Not unless need forces my hand.”

  This time we all went together, carving a door from chaos into the replica of Ahllan’s old living room.
It broke my heart to see Shara’s physical shell lying limp and empty in her tiny chair. Cerice wouldn’t even look at her former familiar, and I could tell from long experience and the tension in her jaw that she was fighting tears.

  Alecto was all business, heading straight to the place where the door would have been if the replica had fully matched the original. When she got there, she extended a single claw and sank it deep into the rock. With obvious effort, she began cutting an outline of the old door.

  “Is this your Shara?” Fenris asked as he pointed his nose at her empty shell, his voice gruff.

  “Yes.” Melchior’s voice sounded sad, almost dead.

  The wolf crossed to the tiny purple form and very gently sniffed her face, poking her cheek ever so lightly with the tip of his nose, before letting out a mournful whine. It was a strangely touching gesture, and I found myself once again aching to cry with eyes that didn’t allow for the possibility. And that just fed the deep, cold anger I felt at Nemesis. She needed to be destroyed.

  “I wish I had gotten to meet her,” said Fenris.

  “You’d have liked her,” said Melchior. “She was special.”

  “Come on.” Alecto pulled her freshly cut door out of the way and exposed a flight of stairs that were obviously of fairly recent vintage.

  “Wait a second.” Melchior had just put a foot on the top step, when he held up a hand and twisted his head from side to side as if listening for something. “Boss, incoming visual transfer protocol message from Shara@shara.gob.” His voice sounded doubtful.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The mweb’s down, or at least I hope to all gods it is.”

  “It is. This is coming over local wireless from somewhere down below us, and it’s very weak. I couldn’t even hear it until I hit line of sight with the base of the stairs.”

  “It’s Nemesis,” said Cerice, and the white-hot rage of the Furies rode just beneath the surface of her words. “It has to be. Shara told us not to trust any more messages purporting to be from her.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Melchior. “It’s got all of the right signatures and protocols. It feels like Shara.”

  “Ignore it,” said Alecto. “Nemesis consumes her hosts from within. It could easily be both Shara and Nemesis.”

  “It’s not directed to you, Alecto.” Melchior looked straight at me, his eyes pleading. “Accept Vlink?”

  “We can’t, Mel. It could be a virus designed to take you down, or a Trojan that lets Nemesis into your system.”

  “Please. I think it’s her. We’ve got to take this, Boss.”

  It was the “Boss” that got me. “I know that I’ve said this six thousand times already and that it’s not going to change a thing, but I’m not your boss. We’re partners. This is your decision as much as mine. If you don’t agree with me, take the call.”

  His expression darkened—he still doesn’t like making hard decisions when he can possibly avoid them—but then he nodded. “All right, then I say we take it. Vtp linking initiated.”

  Light burst from his eyes and mouth, creating a cloudy golden sphere. Shara appeared within, her expression oddly serene. But her calm wasn’t the biggest surprise. That came from the tiny spinnerette standing in the middle of her outstretched hand.

  “Shara?” Cerice’s voice broke. “Is that really you? Are you all right?”

  The purple webgoblin smiled with more than a hint of her old wicked sense of humor. “What would you say to yes on two, maybe on one, and hold three? I’m feeling better than I have in weeks, but I’m also really not feeling entirely myself. I’m doing my thinking with some very strange hardware.”

  “** ***’* **** **** *** ****!” said the spinnerette as it danced around on her palm.

  “You’re right,” said Shara, “but if I don’t explain at least a little bit, they’ll have no reason to believe it’s me.”

  “**** *** ** **** **,” agreed the spinnerette with a sigh.

  Shara nodded. “Will do.” She looked out at us. “Necessity tells me I’ve got to hurry. Nemesis is closing in on the systems that give Necessity control over the will of the Furies. Once she takes control of those . . .”

  “We’re all dead.” I swallowed heavily. When that happened, my allies would become my enemies, and I’d be all out of luck.

  “Or worse,” said Cerice, “puppets of Nemesis.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ Necessity tells me’?” demanded Alecto.

  “**** **!”

  “There’s no time,” Shara began, then stopped as Alecto’s fists clenched. “In brief, then. Persephone’s virus gave Necessity the computer equivalent of a major stroke, including something like complete aphasia. To work around that, Necessity created the spinnerette Ravirn named ‘the Left Hand of Necessity.’ When that one was killed by Nemesis, Necessity began to grow this replacement.” Shara held up her hand with the spinnerette. “But then Nemesis attacked again, this time from within, and Necessity was forced to send her new left hand through the abacuses to Ravirn in the Norse MythOS for safekeeping. There it went dormant until its return. When Ravirn finally brought it to Fate-of-the-Gods Reef, it slipped away to the place where the soul of Necessity is housed, which allowed it to enter the system and find me.”

  I nodded, and so did Alecto, though obviously reluctantly. That made a lot of sense. But we still couldn’t trust her, no matter how much we might want to. Not without some further proof.

  “One question more from me,” I said, as a possibility occurred to me. “How did you survive the attack of Nemesis?”

  “You already know the answer, don’t you?” Shara smiled as a teacher with a clever pupil. “I can tell from your expression.”

  “Maybe.” I had a damned good guess.

  “Necessity showed me how to live in the layers beneath the primary computing hardware of the security center. She’s been hiding from Nemesis in the depths of her own firmware and the drive controllers and a thousand other places all through the system that possess a little bit of computing power but aren’t actually central-processing units. That’s why I could never find a source for the fixes she was making, because they were coming up from the hardware level in an almost organic way. She came to me in the last moments before Nemesis was about to break down the doors of my soul and showed me how to escape because she couldn’t speak then to tell me.”

  “It’s Shara,” I said, certain now. “And the entity we dubbed WTF!?!?! is the real Necessity.”

  “I want to believe you,” Alecto said to Shara’s projection. “Truly. Help me. How can you understand the words of the spinnerette when no one else does?”

  “Because we’re thinking with the same brain. We share the same underlying structure of meaning.”

  The spinnerette turned to Shara. “********* **** *******.” Then it crossed its tiny arms and glared straight at Alecto. ******, *** **** **** **** ** ** **** . . . ******* *’* **** ******

  *** * **** **, ****’* ***, , , *****.”

  “All right,” said Shara. “She says: ‘Alecto, you must take them to my tomb—’”

  “What!” interrupted the Fury. “Why?”

  “‘—Because I’m your mother, and I said so. That’s why, Missy,’” finished Shara.

  Alecto froze, blushed, then looked at her feet, before finally nodding. “Definitely Necessity.”

  “****’* ** ****,” said the spinnerette, its voice warm and loving.

  Shara opened her mouth to translate, but Alecto forestalled her. “I think I got that one.” Then she turned and sliced a hole in the wall of the world. “And we are out of time. Come with me now to the Tomb of Necessity.”

  “Good-bye,” said Shara. “I can’t follow where you are going, but if you’re successful, we may meet again.”

  “I love you,” said Cerice, and Melchior echoed her a half second behind.

  “Me, too,” I added.

  “And I love all of you,” replied Shara.

  Alecto had already ducke
d through into chaos with Fenris close behind.

  “Take care of yourself, Shara,” I said as I stepped up to follow them.

  “I’d tell you the same,” said Shara, “but I’m no believer in miracles, so I’ll just say try not to die.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” And then I was back in chaos.

  Melchior came through an instant later, and Cerice a minute or so after.

  “Follow.” Alecto grabbed Fenris and began to beat her wings.

  Some measureless distance later, Alecto stopped, extended her claws, and swept them downward through the air in front of her. But what started as a classic Fury move ended jarringly about four feet through the cut when her arm slammed to a halt as if she’d hit an invisible wall.