Codespell (2 page)

Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell

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I felt . . . like getting up. I stretched and sighed. It was pretty clear the Dreamers had decided to skip my stop again. There was no point in tossing and turning until I woke Cerice. Sighing, I rolled out of bed. My silk robe, green and black—the colors of House Raven—lay over the back of a chair. I grabbed it though I didn’t need it in the warm tropical night. I also grabbed the invite as I headed for the lower levels. I wanted to look it over again.

Raven House is a great sprawling structure built mostly of green and black marble and aqua-tinted glass. The style is a surprisingly harmonious mix of nouveau-tiki and classical Greek. It sits on a mountainside overlooking the half-moon of Hanalei Bay on a version of Earth that hasn’t yet produced any human neighbors to spoil the view. As far as I’d been able to determine, I had the entire Island of Kauai to myself in this DecLocus. That’s Decision Locus for the less technically inclined, the designator the mweb uses for the data tags that keep track of all the infinite worlds of probability.

At least that’s how things are supposed to work. My little conflict with Hades had done even more damage to Necessity —the goddess in computer shape who maintains our physical reality—than it had to me. The system had gone seriously out of whack, with repercussions the pantheon was still discovering. Technically that’s all Persephone’s fault, but I suppose I have to shoulder some of the blame. If I hadn’t broken into Hades the place in order to bring my dead friend Shara back to the land of the living, the virus Persephone wrote to take over Necessity would never have gotten loose.

“Sir?”

I tried not jump out of my skin when a quiet voice spoke up from behind me as I reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Yes, Haemun.” I turned to face him.

The satyr served as Raven House’s resident staff. He claims he’s a product of my subconscious mind, but I have my doubts. I don’t think I’m twisted enough to have put a soul patch and the multiverse’s ugliest Hawaiian shirt on a man-goat with the voice of Don Ho. I really don’t.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Some slippers? A midnight”—he stopped and checked his watch disapprovingly—“ 3:00 A.M. snack. A drink?”

“How about that last, a mojito. I’ll be out on the balcony. ”

“Lanai,” he corrected me. “This
is
Hawaii after all, even though it lacks Hawaiians. We should endeavor to use the local syntax wherever possible, don’t you think?”

“Fine, I’ll be on the lanai.” That was another thing. Would my subconscious
really
act so difficult?

Haemun headed for the back of the house, and I headed for the front. The main balcony looked out across the bay. There were a number of lounge chairs scattered around, and I took one of these, whistling the brazier next to it alight with a quick burst of binary. That way I could pretend to read by something other than the light of my eyes. The heat felt nice, too; it was chillier outside.

The invitation really was gorgeous. A complex multilayered thing with cutout and pop-up effects, it mirrored the Parthenon when fully unfolded, complete with a visiting deity in the shape of the pop-up Zeus.

“Hmph, dead trees. How
antiquated
.” The little blue webgoblin hopped onto the arm of my chair, tapping the card with a sharp claw. “You’d think Zeus would get with the times. CEO of Pantheon Inc., and he can’t even send an e-mail.”

Melchior. Bald, blue, bad attitude, and about the size of a cat, at least in webgoblin shape. He’s smaller as a laptop, and quieter, too. Familiar and friend, he’s been with me for years. The relationship has changed quite a bit in that time, from master and servant to partners.

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re just jealous that I get real mail and you don’t.”

He sputtered at that for a moment before regaining his momentum and theatrically rolling his eyes. “Jealous? Of
you
? Right. You just keep telling yourself that while I tote up the list of deities who want you dead but don’t much care about me. Hades, Atropos, Lachesis, Clotho—”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “Those last three are all Fates. They should count as one.”

“Maybe for someone who isn’t actually related to them. But Lachesis is your grandmother and still out for your blood. That takes special effort, and it should get equally special consideration.”

“Hey,” I protested, “that’s umpteen-times great-grandmother, and it’s not like she’s
actively
trying to kill me.”

“Not that you know of.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. He might have a point. The Fates are subtle, and I couldn’t be sure they were off the case just because nobody had taken a shot at me in the last few days. I groped around for something else to say. I hate losing arguments with my familiar. He’s a foot and a half tall,
and
I built him—that should give me some kind of advantage. My eyes fell on the card in my hands, and I thrust it at him.

“Zeus likes me.” I refrained from adding a “so there” or sticking out my tongue. I might be feeling childish, but no way was I going to admit it to what amounted to a laptop with acute gland problems. “He’s throwing me a party.”

“Zeus likes parties. End of story.”

Well, there was that. Zeus is a party animal, a sort of divine hybrid of king of the gods and the ultimate frat boy, which makes a certain amount of sense I suppose. Fraternities refer to themselves as Greek and attach Alphas and Omegas to their front doors, and my family has provided plenty of inspiration on the drinking-and-debauchery front. For his casual sex contributions alone, Zeus deserves a special place in party history.

It’s actually kind of strange. Here we have the Lord of the Sky, God-King, and King-God who defeated and imprisoned his Titan forebears in the war known as the Titanomachy. Yet, when he’s not painted breaking heads, the myths are mostly about him seducing mortals. I guess that’s what happens when you try to run a multidimensional divine operation with a one-dimensional personality.

I looked at the invitation again.

Zeus wants you!

And,
House Raven will be expected to make a formal appearance.

That didn’t leave me much wiggle room. House Raven—the institution—as opposed to Raven House—the building I called home—pretty much consisted of me, and maybe Melchior. The latter depended on whether you counted him as a person or not.

Cerice’s matriarch—Clotho, the Fate who spins the threads of life—had thus far refused to accept Cerice’s resignation, which meant that technically Cerice still belonged to the Houses of Fate. Shara, Cerice’s familiar, would always have a home at Raven House, but her relationship to House Raven was even more tenuous than her mistress’s, since she was trapped within the computer-mind of the goddess Necessity for at least the next month if not forever. It was hard to guess what would happen to her with Necessity in such dire shape.

As for Haemun . . . Well, as the spirit of the place, he worked more for Raven House than he did for me. I really hadn’t had time to accumulate an entourage, and I preferred it that way. As a hacker and cracker, and a demigod of same, I tended to think of myself more as a lone coder than any kind of head of a Divine House. In fact, I really didn’t much like the whole idea of becoming a power, however minor. Of course, no one had asked me. They’d just gone ahead and made me one.

Just then, Haemun arrived with a mojito for me and a very small snifter of something amber for Melchior.

“Your drinks,” he said, leaning down with the tray.

“Thanks, Haemun.”

“You’re welcome, sirs. Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thank you.”

Haemun wandered off and I took a long sip of my drink— rum and mint, lime and sugar, a bit of soda and absolutely fabulous. OK, so there were a few perks to this whole House Raven thing. They didn’t begin to make up for everything I’d had to go through to get here. Or, I suspected, the grief the whole deal was going to buy me in the future. I tossed the card onto the table beside me.

Melchior picked it up. “This party smells like trouble.”

“Everything smells like trouble to you, Mel. I think I misprogrammed your paranoia levels.”

He nodded. “That’s possible, but it’s more likely the company I keep.
You
are a trouble magnet, and this party setup”—he tapped the card—“is begging to be exploited. It nails you down in one place at a specific time and announces the details to all of your enemies.”

“No one’s going to try to pull anything right under Zeus’s nose.”

Mel rolled his eyes again. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s any precedent for that. Like say, a golden apple with ‘For the Fairest’ tossed into another Olympian party by Eris, Goddess of Discord.” He snapped his finger. “Oh, wait, isn’t that how the Trojan War started?”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .”

“Is there another way to put it?”

I winced and tapped the part of the card that talked about House Raven being expected. “Unfortunately, being a chaos power doesn’t mean that I get to let what I want to do get in the way of what I have to do. If you can think of a good way to weasel out of this, now’s the time to suggest it.”

He shook his head. “I hate it when you resort to reason like that. It’s out of character.”

I could feel the muscles in my back and shoulders beginning to tighten and took another drink. If it were daylight, I’d have gone surfing to distract myself, but misjudging waves in the dark is a great way to become one with the reef. Besides, my glowing eyes tended to attract sharks. We got an awful lot of them in the bay, maybe because in this DecLocus, no humans had come along to prey on them. The eyes draw bugs, too.

I wondered if Discord had the same problem. Her eyes are like mine, only more so, two glowing balls of chaos. I liked Eris, even if she was crazy, but her eyes had always creeped me out. Now I saw their close cousins looking back at me every time I faced a mirror.

Melchior was probably right about the party, but I really didn’t have any outs. The great powers of the pantheon are Chaos, Order, Death, and Creation—Discord, Fate, Hades, and Zeus. With Order and Death already out to get me, I really didn’t want to piss Zeus off, too, no matter how stupid he was.

I sipped away at my mojito and tried to pretend everything would go fine. Yeah, right. About the only good thing I could see was a chance to plead my insomnia case to the Dreamers in person if they showed for the bash.

“Ravirn, be serious.” Cerice glared at the leather pants I’d just pulled out of the closet. “You can’t wear those.”

“Of course I can.” I slipped them on, ignoring her glower. “They’re comfortable and practical.”

The pants were racing leathers made by a little company called Tech Sec and lined with about seventeen layers of Kevlar. Great if you happened to crash your bike, better if someone started shooting at you.

“The invite said House Formal.”

She was wearing a red-and-gold-brocade dress that would have been perfectly appropriate in the court of Elizabeth I. It looked fantastic on her. Cerice is tall and slender, with china-pale skin and white blond hair. Her slit eyes are blue, her cheekbones high, her ears pointed, and her face shaped like a narrow heart. The children of Fate are at the root of the legends of elf-kind, and my own appearance is a black-haired masculine mirror of hers.

I stepped in close and planted a gentle kiss on her cheek. “I know that, Cerice. But I no longer belong to the Houses of Fate. I am my own House, and I don’t like classical. Not the way it is worn at House Clotho”—I tugged at her sleeve— “and not the three-thousand-year-old Athenian version favored on Olympus.”

She sighed and smiled. “I understand that, but if you’re going to go modern, couldn’t you at least wear a tux instead of riding leathers and a T-shirt?”

“The leathers stay. I like bulletproof.”

“Bullet resistant,” interjected Melchior. “There’s a difference. ”

I gave him a sour look. “I will concede the T-shirt.” I’d planned on doing that anyway, and this way I’d get relationship points for it as well. “What would you suggest?”

She headed deeper into the closet, returning a moment later with an emerald silk shirt with Edwardian ruffles. I took it dubiously and slipped it on, then added my jacket.

“Oh my.” Cerice grinned.

“Good?” I asked.

“Surprisingly so.”

A quick look in the mirror confirmed her judgment. Tech Sec leathers are custom-fitted, and a very silky black. With the jacket open and the ruffled shirt, the whole looked something like Edwardian Modern. Even the boots added to the effect, since I’d opted for Tech Sec’s English riding style. Nice.

That just left one thing. Stripping the jacket off again, I put on a low-profile shoulder holster and slid my .45 into it.

“Uh, Boss?”

“Yes, Melchior. What do you want? And would you
please
stop calling me Boss? We’re partners.”

“Whatever you say, Boss.”

“Melchior?”

“Yes?” He gave me an innocent look.