Codespell (21 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

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

BOOK: Codespell
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“Thanks, Mel.”
“You’re welcome. You might want this as well.” He reached in and came up with a silencer.
“Not a bad idea.” I screwed it into place.
“Well, I figured since we were sneaking and all. Of course, the boy-shepherd-meets-
Mission: Impossible
look is awfully silly.”
“You know, Mel, I’d never have figured that out without your help. Thank you.”
By then we’d reached the bottom of the stairs and the hall that ran from the enclosed porch behind the main balcony back to the kitchen and pantry. I headed toward the service area, as that was where Haemun’s rooms were and where he could usually be found. As I passed the laundry, I noticed a huge pile of black and green lying next to a couple of big dye vats. I was delighted to have the opportunity to exchange my gear for stuff I was more certain of liking and fitting into. I was much less delighted to find a large pile of Hawaiian shirts beside another vat deeper in.
“These are Haemun’s.” Melchior kicked at the pile.
“Let’s check his suite.”
It was on the end of the house opposite the master bedroom, and it had a ground-floor patio facing the Pacific. The last time I’d been there, the whole room had been done up in surfer drag. I called it that because I’d never been able to get Haemun to so much as try boogie-boarding, much less come out and ride the big waves on a real board. As far as I could tell, he just liked the look. Now, all of that was gone. The big waterbed with its longboard headboard had been replaced with a very Victorian canopy-type thing. The tiki art and Hawaiian motif rugs had likewise vanished, in favor of stark black-and-white prints of underfed nymphs in tight dresses and a white carpet. The closet, formerly full of Aloha shirts, now held polos.
I was poking around in there, when I heard a harsh metallic click from the door behind me—the slide of an automatic. I started to turn, keeping my body between my own pistol and the door.
“Drop it, or I’ll shoot,” said an almost familiar man’s voice when I’d barely gotten halfway around. “I’m quite serious. ”
I let the pistol fall to the floor and finished my turn. Standing in the doorway was Haemun. Like everything else, he’d changed. It was mostly carriage and expression. He looked tight and tense and blank, and he wore a black polo under a black sports coat. But that was all background to the gun, a Glock or some other midsize automatic. It was hard to tell when all I could see was the trigger guard and the gaping hole of the barrel pointed directly at my right eye.

 

CHAPTER TEN
“Very good,” said Haemun, after I let the pistol fall. I realized his voice had changed, too, developing an improbable British accent. “Step away from the closet and the gun now.”
I held out both hands in front of me. “Come on, Haemun. ”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “My name is Nous, Rham Nous.”
“Rhamnous?” said Melchior, sounding incredulous. “You’re kidding, right?”
The gun flicked to point at Melchior. “No, I’m not.”
“Why is that odd?” I asked.
“Rhamnous is where the sanctuary of Nemesis used to be, near Marathon,” said Melchior.
“Really?” I asked the satyr. “Are you named after the city? Or is it named after you?” Always a possibility when dealing with immortals and demi-immortals. “Or something else entirely?”
“I . . . I . . .” Rham Nous or Rhamnous, or however you wanted to say it, put his free hand to his forehead as though it pained him. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “You’re confusing me.”
“Asking you how you got your name is confusing?” I said. “That’s a little bit odd, don’t you think?”
“I . . . Shut up. Go sit on the bed and shut up. Take your damned pet with you.”
I scooped up Melchior and moved toward the bed. As I did so, Melchior pursed his lips, subtly asking if I wanted him to whistle up a spell. I very gently shook my head. Something deeply odd was going on here. I wanted to know more about it before I committed to anything drastic.
“So, how long have you worked for Nemesis?” I asked as I sat down with my back against the velvet-padded headboard.
There was a long silence, and the satyr rubbed his forehead again. I waited quietly.
“Why do you keep asking questions I can’t answer?”
“Just trying to make conversation,” I said. “It might be a while before Nemesis gets back, and it’ll help pass the time. Is there something else you’d rather talk about? You don’t seem to have a real good handle on your own personal hows and whys.”
“I do, too. I’m Nous, Rham Nous.”
“You did that bit already,” said Melchior. “What else have you got?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said the satyr. “I’m just doing my, doing my, doing my. Job.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about that. What is your job? Who do you work for? That kind of thing.”
“I . . . uh . . . I’m the spirit of . . .” He stopped and wiped his forearm across his face, lowering the gun in his other hand.
Melchior raised an eyebrow in question, and again I shook my head.
“What are you the spirit of?” I asked.
“Of . . . of . . . of this place!” he blurted, sounding momentarily triumphant, but his accent was slipping.
“And what is this place?” I asked.
“Nemesis Hou—” He shook his head. “House Nemes—”
“Raven House,” I said.
“Yes—no! I don’t . . .” He dropped the gun and put both hands to the sides of his head. “I feel really strange.”
“He sounds like Haemun, now,” said Melchior.
“That’s because he is Haemun,” I said.
“I am?” The satyr leaned back against the doorframe and slowly slid to the floor. “Are you quite sure about that?”
“I am,” I said.
“Then why was he pointing a gun at us?” asked Melchior.
“And why am I wearing this awful shirt?” asked Haemun, plucking at the polo. “And a jacket! How boring. How trendoid. How mundane. Of course, it’s sartorial splendor compared to the shepherd outfit you’re wearing.” Abruptly, he rolled over on his side and went to sleep.
“I don’t think I get it,” said Melchior.
“Blame my subconscious,” I said. “Back when we first came here, I wanted to find someplace safe, a refuge that would be secret and special. I asked the faerie ring to take us there instead of giving it a specific destination. We ended up here, and Haemun was waiting. Do you remember him telling us he was the spirit of this place and that if we had any problem with his appearance or the house’s, that we should take them up with my subconscious?”
“I do,” said Melchior.
“This whole place is supposed to reflect what I need, what the Raven needs, and that includes Haemun. He is as he is because that’s how I need him to be.”
“That doesn’t explain why he’s changed,” said Melchior. “Nemesis isn’t Raven, and this isn’t Nemesis House.”
“No, but Eris called her
my
Nemesis as though there were a personal component to the thing. What if a part of the nature of Nemesis is to reflect her target—through a mirror darkly if you will?”
“She becomes what she would destroy?” asked Melchior.
“Something like that. She takes something of them into herself at least. The modern sense of the word
nemesis
contains that aspect in the way it’s used. Maybe the usage comes from the nature of the goddess. If it does, if she
does
have something of me in her, then perhaps the house and Haemun can pick up on that twisted version of me and try to accommodate it.”
“That’s it exactly,” said Haemun from the floor. “At first I kept trying to escape. But after she’d been here for a while, I started changing to suit her needs. It was awful. She’s a twisted creature.”
“Then we’d better get you out of here before she comes back,” I said. “We’ll take you someplace safe so it doesn’t happen again.” I paused as a worry occurred to me. “That is, if you can leave this place. Can you?”
“I don’t know,” said Haemun, pulling himself into a sitting position. “Let me think about it for a moment.” He closed his eyes and seemed to be sinking deep into himself. After a while, he nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes, I think I can, if
you
need me to.”
“Ah, isn’t that sweet,” said Melchior. “It’s love.”
“It’s nothing of the kind,” snapped Haemun. “It’s formatting. I’m the spirit of this place, and this place is
his
place.”
“Come on, Haemun.” I crossed to where he was sitting and bent to pull his arm over my shoulders, almost knocking off the replacement leathers I was carrying in the process. “Let’s get you out of here before Nemesis comes back.” When I stood back up, I found him surprisingly light.
“I can’t go anywhere looking like this.” Haemun tugged at his polo. “What if somebody sees me?”
“Mel, grab some of Haemun’s shirts and bring ’em along. Pick up my gun, too. We’re getting out of here ASAP. I’m starting to get that ruffled plumage feeling again.”
It intensified as we hurried through the hall toward the front balcony and the faerie ring there. We were crossing the big enclosed porch when a blue bubble popped into existence off to my right.
“Spinnerette?” I asked, picking up the pace.
“I don’t know,” replied Mel. “Last time I was able to sense the echo of the incoming transfer or whatever it was through the mweb. We’re not connected here, so it’s going to be something of a surprise package, though it does look like the same sort of transfer spell.”
Even as he finished speaking, the spider-centaur appeared behind him.
“Shit,” I said. “Hoof it, Mel!” The thing might be harmless, or even beneficial—it
had
attacked Nemesis that first time—but I didn’t want to risk finding out it was just vying for the first bite.
We were almost to the ring when something punched me in the lower back, right above the kidney. My world dissolved in light for a second as the pain washed out the rest of the universe.
I came back into myself on knees and one hand. My right knee, the one I’d shattered fighting Moric, felt like someone had slipped a piece of red-hot iron in behind the cap. I still had ahold of Haemun, but he was slumped—unconscious, or nearly so. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and discovered Mel a few inches in front of my nose.
He grabbed my ears with both clawed hands and yanked. It hurt, and I scrambled forward to escape the pain. My knee hated the idea, and the rest of me wasn’t much happier. I was just opening my mouth to protest when he yanked again. Harder this time, much harder. I screamed but moved even faster. Then my hand found the edge of the faerie ring with a sharp crack . . . or maybe the noise came from elsewhere. Fresh pain flooded through my right leg, centered on the back of my thigh. I reached into the faerie ring and twisted with my mind.
We went elsewhere.
That was practically the last thing I remembered, that and crawling across dandelions. Then I went away for a little while.
When I came back, it was very briefly, just long enough to realize I was sleeping in my own bed. I felt a quiet sense of relief—it must all have been a nightmare. The next time I returned to myself it was because my nose was so stuffed I could barely breathe. From the feel of it, I’d probably snored myself awake.
I glanced around. Things looked wrong—too low and too organic, and it was dark, absolutely so. If not for the light of my eyes, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything. Where was I? I tried to sit up. My knee and lower back screamed, but not nearly as loud as the back of my thigh. What had happened? How had I gotten here? It felt like home, but it couldn’t be Raven House. The bed was all wrong and so were the echoes, but it still felt like my own bed and home.
“You up, Boss?” Melchior sounded worried.
“Yeah. What happened, and where are we?”
“Garbage Faerie, Ahllan’s old place. Don’t you remember bringing us here?”
“Not at all.” I shifted around to get a better look at him and, “Ow! What the hell did I do to my leg?”
“Not you. Nemesis. She shot you. Twice. Luckily, the Kevlar in the leathers you were carrying stopped the one that hit you in the kidney. I don’t think we’d be having this conversation otherwise. I’ve done what I could by way of healing magic on your thigh, but you won’t be running away very fast for a while.”
“Oh.” That was sobering considering the situation. “Garbage Faerie?”
“Yeah.”
When Ahllan had been running the familiar underground, she’d had her headquarters in a backwater DecLocus way out on the edge of possible realities. Despite the fact that there didn’t seem to be any humans in residence, the world looked basically like a giant garbage dump for a modern industrial civilization, one that hadn’t been used for a decade or three and was in the process of being reclaimed by nature. You constantly came across things like a cracked engine block with flowers growing out of all the cylinders or an old toilet with tiny tree frogs living in the miniature pond of its bowl.

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