Codespell (28 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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As I stomped past the door to the kitchen, Haemun stuck his head out. He was wearing a teal-and-crimson Hawaiian print apron—tiki gods making fancy French meals.
“Is there anything wrong?” he asked, wiping flour off his hands.
I ignored him and went right on by, then stopped and backed up. He represented another problem I should have dealt with before now.
“Sorry, Haemun. Long story. I was just going for a walk. Why don’t you come with me? I’ve been meaning to find time for us to have a chat for days.”
“You want to talk about Nemesis, don’t you?”
“If you’re ready,” I said.
“Not really, but now’s as good a time as any.” He shrugged and took off the apron.
I wondered briefly about where he’d gotten the thing. It hadn’t come with us from Raven House, and Ahllan’s taste certainly hadn’t run to anything that garish. I didn’t ask, though, because Haemun was a house spirit with his own small magics. I’d learned long ago that questioning house spirits about matters domestic led to sour milk, short sheets, and starchy underwear.
I didn’t say another word as we headed out the front door and down the path that led past the kitchen garden. It looked much better than it had in the first days after we arrived— Haemun had been weeding. At the bottom of the garden, I took a right. Left led up to the little hill where Cerice and I had first made love. I absolutely didn’t want to go there.
“Where are we headed?” Haemun asked after a while.
“No idea. I’ve never really explored the area. Most of the time I’ve spent here over the past two years I’ve had a seriously bum leg. First the knee, then the gunshot. You probably know the place better than I do.”
“I haven’t been this way before.” He sighed. “All right, the suspense is killing me. You said you wanted to talk about Nemesis, but haven’t asked a single question. What do you want to know?”
“I’d rather not push you if I don’t have to. How about you tell me about it like you’d tell a story, and we’ll see what happens?”
“All right, though there’s not much to tell. When—” Haemun paused and looked frustrated. “He, I guess. I thought Nemesis was a he at first anyway. When he arrived the second time—the first was when he ran through to the faerie ring chasing you—I tried to hide again as I had that first time. It worked for a while.”
“Then what happened?”
“I went to sleep on a pile of palm fronds out in the jungle and woke up inside on the lanai. Well, woke up isn’t really the right word since I was in the middle of serving him—I still didn’t know he was Nemesis—a mojito. Gave me the damnedest fright of my whole life, that did. One minute asleep, the next handing over a glass. I dropped the tray and the drink. He didn’t even blink at that, just reached out almost casual-like and caught the mojito before even a drop could spill. He smiled at me.
“ ‘Thanks, Rham Nous, that will be all for now,’ he said.
“And I said, ‘You’re welcome, Master.’ Well, my mouth said that—I didn’t have a thing to do with it. Then I bolted, straight out the back door and into the jungle. It wasn’t until I got out there that I realized I was wearing the wrong clothes, those awful monotone things with the jacket and—oh my. This is the strangest place I’ve ever seen.”
We had passed around the side of a low hill and found ourselves facing an ancient oak forest with trees four and five feet across at the base. It almost looked like something out of a historical painting. I say almost, because this was Garbage Faerie and nothing was quite as you would expect. In this case, all of the tree trunks had neon graffiti on them, reaching from the roots up to about ten feet. It looked as though a veritable army of urban vandals armed with an infinite supply of spray paint had swept through the forest.
Something wasn’t right about that. I walked to the nearest tree for a closer look. As I got closer, I saw that the colors were too vivid and the coverage too complete. The paint looked as it would have on a primed and perfectly flat concrete wall. There were no cracks or dim spots, no places where moss had obscured a bit of paint or the moisture in the bark had caused it to peel up.
I put my dagger into a crevice and pried a chunk of bark loose. It fell away, but made no change in the graffiti, a segment of the words “big bad wolf.” The color was just as vivid beneath the bark.
“That’s just bizarre,” said Haemun . . . the Aloha shirt-wearing satyr.
I jabbed the dagger into the exposed wood and gouged out a big splinter. The color went at least a half inch deep and possibly all the way to the tree’s heart. I really wanted to see how it looked on a sapling, but there were none around, just the ancient oaks and a litter of dead branches and leaves.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go deeper.”
“You’re the boss,” Haemun replied, somewhat dubiously.
“So, you were back in the jungle behind the house again,” I prompted.
“I was. I spent the whole day there until I fell asleep. When I next came back to myself, I was carrying a couple of dirty plates back to the kitchen. Ahi tuna—cooked very rare—asparagus, rice, and another mojito.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
“It should. His tastes were an almost perfect mirror of yours. Lots of fish and rice, fresh steamed vegetables, mojitos, daiquiris, the occasional beer. Desserts heavy on the chocolate and ice cream. In many ways it was like I was still working for you. He ate the same foods, wore the same clothes—though in different colors. He even spoke kind of like you do.”
“He did?”
Haemun kicked a fallen branch aside with one cloven hoof, startling an oily-looking rainbow bunny who departed for parts less inhabited at speed. “I think so. That’s how I remember it anyway, what I
can
remember.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“It’s strange,” said Haemun. “I ran away again, and not just once. But I kept waking up in the house, and not always after going to bed. A lot of the time I was asleep on my feet—I don’t have a better way to describe it than that—and things from those periods are very blurry and distant. Almost as though I were a passenger very far back in my own head and looking out through a distant windshield—a drunk passenger at that. Although, toward the end—when you found me—I felt as though I was moving back toward the front, as though soon I’d be seeing out of my own eyes again, except . . .” He shivered.
“Except?”
“Except it wasn’t going to be me anymore. It was going to be Rham Nous, and Haemun—” He swallowed hard. “Haemun wasn’t ever going to be coming back. Can we stop talking about it for a little while?”
“Sure.” We walked on in silence for a time, and I decided that the graffitied woods had a bizarre sort of beauty all their own. Twisted and slightly off, but haunting. Like everything in Garbage Faerie, really.
“It was the differences that really got to me though,” Haemun said abruptly, “more than the similarities. Somewhere in there, I came to know that it was Nemesis I was serving and that he was a she. That’s kind of muddled, but so was I. There was no moment of realization, no ‘aha,’ just the sense that I knew what she was and always had known it. That was the biggest difference, of course, vengeance personified versus . . . well, you.”
“Meaning improvisational screwup lad?”
Haemun grinned. “That, too, but that’s just the way you operate, not who you are. Down underneath it all is a sort of tarnished nobility, a cynical Prometheus if you will.”
“Me?” The idea made me squirm. “I’ll pass. Look what it got Prometheus.”
“I didn’t claim you were the original,” said Haemun. “More like he who would steal fire from the gods for the benefit of man . . . knowing that not only were the gods going to kick the crap out of him, but that mankind’s response was going to be a mix of yawns and complaints that now they have to keep feeding the damn thing.”
“That’s sweet, Haemun. I’m touched you see me that way, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Maybe,” said Haemun, “but it seems to me that if that were the case, you’d be quietly fixing bugs for Lachesis in a place with no free will and long, bitter winters.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I wasn’t a hero, not really. Just someone who kept getting stuck between a bad decision on the one hand and a worse on the other. Right? But the trees, for all that they were covered by words, held no fresh answers, and I’d already rejected Haemun’s.
“Tell me about Nemesis, about the differences,” I said into a silence that had grown uncomfortably long.
“As you wish. The main thing after simple identity was the emotions. Nemesis has no sense of humor. All she has is hate. Every second of every day, she radiates hate the way the sun radiates heat. It’s awful. I’m a house spirit. I serve Raven House and its master. That defines both who I am and how I act. Part of that is an ability to sense the moods and anticipate the needs of my house’s master.”
“Like the way you always wake up in the middle of the night to get me a drink when I can’t sleep,” I said.
“Exactly. In order to do that, I have to be in touch with the emotions and physical needs of the master of the house. When that was Nemesis, I was constantly awash in her hate and her anger—her need for revenge. At the moment those emotions are mostly directed at you.”
At the moment? Mostly? I stopped and leaned against an oak that declared, “Eris wuz here” in a warped-text rainbow. Since there was no golden apple to go with the words, I decided the tree didn’t know what it was talking about.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“I . . . This is hazier.” Haemun paced back and forth in front of me. “Both because of my own haziness and because of the nature of the beast. Nemesis is two creatures in one skin right now—the goddess and the body.”
“Dairn.”
“Yes and no. Most of Dairn is gone. I couldn’t sense his thoughts or personality at all—only his hates are left, only the emotions that feed Nemesis. And more than anything else, he hates you. I don’t know if Nemesis hates you because of that or if there’s some deeper reason. I just know the hatred because I felt it, too.” Haemun hugged himself. “I hated you so much it burned me, burned my soul. I will carry the scars as long as I live.”
I reached out and touched his shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about this any more if you’d rather not.”
“No, I’ll keep going. It’s important. If anything I know could help stop her, stop that hate . . . I, well I just have to do what I can, that’s all.” He took several deep breaths. “Better. There is another hate underneath the hate for you, older, colder, more patient, like something waiting in the darkness. Waiting for a chance at Necessity.”
“Waiting for what?” I asked. “My death? Does she have a checklist, and she needs to write me off the list before she goes after Necessity?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Haemun. “The two hates are intertwined somehow, tied together. Again, it’s hard to explain. It’s all emotion, all hungers and drives, no thinking. All I know for certain is that Nemesis sees you as the key to getting her revenge on Necessity.”
“I suppose that could make a twisted sort of sense if she sees me as a link to Shara and the damage the Shara virus has already worked on Necessity, but I really wish the giants of the pantheon would go back to swinging at each other and leave me out of it. I’m fighting way above my weight class in these battles.” I shook my head. “Let’s get back to Dairn. Do you think the goddess’s hate for me comes more from him or more from this perceived link to Necessity?”
“I don’t know. She lives to hate and destroy. I’m not sure it matters who or what, with the possible exception of Necessity. It might be that her hate for you came from Dairn, that all she needed was the pointer, but it could just as easily be whatever link she sees between you and Necessity.” He sighed. “I wish I could be more help, but that’s really all I’ve got.” He grinned morosely. “Unless you think a longer recitation of her menu would help.”
“I doubt it. Thank you, Haemun. I don’t know what I’ll do with all that yet, but everything I can learn about Nemesis in her current incarnation helps. Why don’t you head back to the hill house, and I’ll follow along behind. I need to think.”
“All right, but don’t take too long. You’re hungry, and you need a good breakfast. Here, this will take the edge off.” He handed me a pear and walked away.
“Thanks,” I called after him, and he waved over his shoulder.
So what did I have after all that? Not much really. Nemesis hated and mirrored me to some extent. I’d known that already, hadn’t I? I took a bite of the pear. It was soft and sweet, lovely really. I started walking back toward Chez Ahllan, eating as I went.
There was just too much that I didn’t know. Why had Nemesis merged with Dairn? Was it his idea? Hers? Some combination? Was that merging the way Necessity and I had gotten tied together in her mind? Did that even matter? Where had Nemesis been all this time? Not dead, obviously, at least not in the conventional sense. But how did you imprison a bodiless goddess? And how did
that
work? What was Nemesis? A goddess certainly, one with enormous power, who lived for revenge. But beyond that?
All I could say for sure was that she hated me, which emotion might or might not have come from Dairn. That and she was one hell of a coder. I stopped chewing. Nemesis had vanished over three thousand years ago, long before anyone had proposed even the idea of the computer. Where had she learned to code? That was a very interesting question, and I didn’t have an answer.

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