Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (10 page)
“Yes, little man?” asked Eris.
“Nothing. I keep forgetting that I don’t want you to notice me. I’ll just be shutting up now and crawling back down into the bag, shall I?”
“Whatever makes you most uncomfortable,” said Eris. Melchior slipped out of sight. “Now, where was I? Oh yes, Nemesis. Shall we walk?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just started moving. “She’s not dead so much as bodiless.”
“Like Necessity?” I asked as I followed in her wake.
“No, not all. Necessity still has a body, several really, though they’re made of plastic and silicon rather than flesh and blood. She is as much a creature of hardware as she is of software, though where that hardware is physically housed is a secret known only to the Furies.”
And maybe Shara,
I thought, but didn’t say.
I thought, but didn’t say.
“Nemesis is something else again. Like Necessity, she had a body once, but she did not give it up willingly. It was destroyed in a battle with the Furies.”
“Is that what happened?” I asked. “Why?”
It was something I’d wondered about whenever my grandmother had mentioned the demise of Nemesis. That and how a goddess, a true immortal,
could
die.
could
die.
“She challenged Necessity, or rather, her existence was a challenge to Necessity’s authority, which is pretty much the same thing.”
I started to ask a question but got derailed because we’d reached the end of the glass tunnel and stepped through the gate into . . . the glass tunnel. Ahead, I could see us just stepping out the other end.
“The hell?” I mumbled.
“What? Oh, sorry. I forgot to turn that off. I like to walk here and think sometimes, and having to turn around can disrupt me, so I make it unnecessary. Hang on a second . . . is that better?”
It was. With no transition we were elsewhere. Or rather, elsewhere was here, since Eris didn’t move us at all. She mentally rearranged the castle around us. Now we stood in the heart of a huge shopping mall. All around us people bustled from shop to shop, people with golden apples where their heads should have been. It was distracting, but I didn’t mention it. That would only have given Eris more ammunition for later. Instead, I just waited quietly for her to continue.
“Nemesis is a goddess of vengeance,” she said. “At one time she was even The Goddess of Vengeance, visiting the wrath of the gods on the heads of men, and the wrath of Necessity on the heads of the gods. The only problem with the system was that she was a freelancer who didn’t so much take orders from the powers that be as listen to suggestions. Sometimes the heads she busted hadn’t earned the wrath of anybody but Nemesis, and sometimes the heads she was supposed to bust didn’t interest her.”
“I can see how that might not go over so well,” I said rather dryly. “Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other thing.”
My own experiences with the gods had shown me just how much they didn’t like to be thwarted, especially the hard-core control freaks like my grandmother Lachesis and the other Fates. And Necessity was the Fate of the Gods.
“Exactly,” said Eris. “Necessity liked the idea of Nemesis, but not the execution, so she came up with a less independent version in the Furies. Of course, Nemesis didn’t much like the idea of being cast aside for not just one, but three, younger women. I can’t say that I blame her. There were several battles early on, and mostly the Furies came out on the losing end. Even as a group they weren’t as strong as Nemesis in her heyday.”
I swallowed hard at that. I’d gone up against the Furies a couple of times and survived through a combination of luck and being a particularly entertaining squeaky toy—you know, the kind a cat doesn’t want to break all at once. Individually, any of them outclassed me on the divine scale. Collectively, I’d seen them take down Eris, and she and I had about as much in common in the chaos power department as Castle Discord and the kind of castle you make from sand.
“There’s no need to look quite so worried,” said Eris. “That was in the youth of the world, when she still had a body and wore the mantle of a great power. She is much reduced from those days, though it took the combined efforts of the Furies and the direct intervention of Necessity to reduce her so.”
“By direct intervention do you mean . . .”
“In the flesh, yes. This was in the days before she transformed herself into the computer at the heart of the multiverse. ”
“Nemesis is still around despite all that?” Eris nodded. “Then I think I’ve got every right to look this worried. Shouldn’t she have died at that point?”
“Probably, but I don’t think Necessity wanted that. If she’d died and descended into Hades, she might have drunk of the waters of Lethe. Then, her memories washed away, her soul could have returned. But her soul is the soul of vengeance, and she would have returned as a goddess in full to start the whole round all over again. Necessity didn’t want that, and she made sure it didn’t happen. I’m not sure exactly how she managed it, though I think Hades must have been in on the plot from the beginning. Disembodied, Nemesis does not represent a threat on the same scale.”
“She sounds plenty threatening to me,” said Melchior.
“I thought you decided to check out of this conversation,” Eris said with a grin.
“Yeah, Mel.” I winked at him. “I was actually kind of enjoying hearing about my impending doom without a string of ‘I told you sos’ and ‘Here we go agains.’ ”
He made a rude noise at me but kept his head out of the bag.
“So,” I asked, “if she’s been wandering around bodiless this whole time, how come I’ve never heard of it until now?”
“Because for more than three thousand years, no word has been heard of her. Where she has been all that time, I don’t know. Perhaps Tartarus. Believe me, I looked everywhere I could.”
“Why?” Apparently I wasn’t the only who was interested, as a number of the apple heads had gathered around us to listen.
“Because Nemesis in opposition to Necessity would create great discord.”
“Oh. Foolish question, I guess. I wonder where she’s been and why she’s come back.”
Eris smiled. It was not a smile of the kind that invites you to smile along. It was the kind a shark smiles at its soon-to-be lunch.
“The first is easy,” said Eris. “She has been wherever Necessity trapped her after the ambush.”
“And the second? The why?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much if I were you. You have a much more important question to concern yourself with.”
“Oh. What’s that?” I asked.
“How are you going to prevent her from killing you?”
“That’s an important one, yeah. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”
“No. Nemesis is vengeance personified. She will never give up, she will never back down, she cannot be killed. I don’t think you’ll get out of this one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Do you really believe I’m going to die?” I asked.
“I’m quite certain of it,” said Eris. “But I was also certain that you would die when you faced Hades in the heart of his power, and when you went up against the Fates.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Does that mean you’re certain I’ll die, but you expect me to get out of it somehow? ”
“No. Nothing so hopeful as that. I expect you to die. If you do, I have the satisfaction of being right. If you don’t, I have the entertainment of watching you slip the noose. Either way, it’s a win for me.”
“Happy to be of service,” I said, sourly.
“Don’t be that way about it,” said Eris. “There’s no reason to get mad at me for making the best of a bad situation. ”
“A bad situation for
me
, you mean. For you it’s like a damned sports highlights reel.”
me
, you mean. For you it’s like a damned sports highlights reel.”
I turned away from Eris and stomped off through the crowd of apple-headed not-people. I needed time to think without her picking at me, and that meant being where she was not. Though I like Eris far more than I should, Discord is both her title and her nature.
“Well, this is different,” Melchior said after a while.
“What?” I asked.
“Mall walking.” He gestured around us. “Are you thinking of taking early retirement?”
I glared at him, and he grinned back. I looked away first. If Eris was telling the truth about our arrival in chaos—always a dubious proposition—I’d risked his life unthinkingly. That smacked of our old relationship as master and servant—the one I worked so hard not to perpetuate. My chest felt as though my heart had put on some serious weight.
“Come on, Boss, smile. It was a joke.”
“My capacity for funny is somewhat limited at the moment, Mel.”
“It’s OK,” he said, very softly.
“What’s OK?” I asked.
“The chaos stuff. I’m fine, I didn’t dissolve, and it wasn’t weeks. Eris fished us out after a couple of hours. It’s really not much worse than a bad migraine.”
OK, so a migraine is much better than being eaten alive by the magical equivalent of acid. That didn’t make me feel much better about the whole thing. It could have gone the other way so easily, and a blinding headache’s not exactly a bundle of laughs either. How did you apologize for something like that?
“How’d you know I was thinking about that?” I asked.
“I’ve been your familiar for what, eight years, two months, three days, four hours, seven minutes, and three point two-two-nine-three seconds? I know how you think and what your expressions mean.”
“I didn’t think about . . . I didn’t think.” I felt I had a chestful of glass shards. “I’m really sorry, Melchior. Forgive me. Please.”
“Well, when you phrase it like that, how can I refuse? Besides, it was educational in a ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ kind of way.” He winked at me, and suddenly I knew that everything was fine between us though I still felt a little tender in the heart area.
“Thanks, Mel, that makes me feel sooo much better.” We had wandered into the mall’s food court. I sat down at one of those awful little tables and placed Mel in front of me so we could see eye to eye. “What
are
we going to do about Nemesis? ”
are
we going to do about Nemesis? ”
“I don’t know, Boss. One thing I think we should do is ignore Discord’s advice about the priorities of why and how.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, Nemesis has been out of the picture for three thousand years, and now, all of a sudden, she’s back and after your hide. Knowing why she returned might tell us how to keep her from killing us.”
“Killing me,” I said firmly. If I had to die, I didn’t want to take anyone with me, especially Melchior. “But you might have a point there. How’d you get so smart?”
He looked as though he were seriously weighing the question. “Well, clearly it’s not the company I keep.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Thanks.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
“So, do you have any ideas on why Nemesis might have decided to end her retirement just for little ol’ me, besides the obvious fact that her new body has a long-standing, murderous grudge against me, or was that a more general comment? ”
“Not really, but normally, when murder is in the works, you try to figure out motive and opportunity.”
“That first one would put Hades and Atropos at the top of the list,” I said. “Both of them have promised to kill me fairly recently. What do you think?”
“That making enemies of Death and Fate is not the best survival plan. Let’s see, what else do we know? How about this? Eris mentioned that Hades was probably in on what happened to Nemesis way back when. That might put him in a position to find her.”
“True, but it’s not just Nemesis. We shouldn’t forget she’s wearing Dairn’s body, and Dairn is House Atropos.”
“Does that make Atropos more or less likely to be involved? ” asked Melchior. “Dairn hates you for his own sake and might not have involved her. Also, would she really want her great-grandson to become a vessel for Nemesis?”
“If she thought she could control him? She’d do it in a black heartbeat. Atropos would be delighted to have a power—even a reduced power of the sort Nemesis has become—in Fate’s service. I don’t think she’d hesitate at sacrificing the part of Dairn that makes him Dairn if it meant having Vengeance under her thumb.”
Mel got up and paced around the perimeter of the little table. “I can’t argue with that, but would she know where to find Nemesis? Would she dare to defy Necessity?”
“Those are tougher questions. Fate’s awfully good at finding things out. Atropos has access to the Fate Core and all those life threads and the information they hold.”
“But Nemesis’s thread is held directly by Necessity, like the rest of the powers,” argued Mel.
A couple of apple heads carrying trays picked that exact moment to sit down at the table next to ours. For a moment I was torn between staying to see if and how they’d eat without mouths and getting away from them before I found those things out. Then I noticed that all they had on their trays was large sheets of caramel and Popsicle sticks—the makings of caramel apples—and decided it was time to move on.
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