Codespell (4 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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At that point havoc should have ruled the field. It didn’t, and it took me a moment—and a mental replay of what had just happened—to figure out why. That’s when my exchange with Dairn went from moderately disturbing to downright frightening.
Melchior’s spell hadn’t failed. Dairn had canceled it by whistling one of his own, and not a general nullification charm either. He’d matched his own whistle to Mel’s for a bar, then shifted to a harmony, and finally a self-harmonized counterpoint that turned the original spell on its head.
He shouldn’t have been able to do that. It was the kind of magic that only webtroll supercomputers and a few of the powers, myself not included, could use. It took a great deal of effort to stand my ground. Effort I probably should have spent on running, but I really hated to run blind.
“Who are you?” I asked, still holding Melchior in the crook of my arm. It felt as though he might be trembling.
Dairn smiled, and his eyes flashed again. “Dairn, whom you abandoned to the faerie rings.”
I recognized the flash this time, a tiny spark of pure Primal Chaos within his pupils, and my own grew wide. At that, his spark grew brighter, and I recognized something else. The spark was a reflection of my own, not an internal light. His pupils were dark mirrors, like smoked glass over quicksilver.
“
What
are you?”
"Ahh, now that’s a better question. I am what you made me. I am your enemy.”

 

CHAPTER TWO
Dairn grinned and reached toward the breast of his jacket, as though he were going for a gun. Before he could complete the gesture, I heard someone call my name.
Dairn’s smile changed into a frown as he looked over my shoulder. Then he whistled something very fast and vanished.
I turned around and saw Tisiphone walking toward me.
Tisiphone. The Fury. Fire-haired, fire-winged, and beautiful. As always, she was naked, with the blue veins showing through her pale redhead’s skin. More fire blossomed in the hair where her long athletic legs met, and her high small breasts were also tipped with flame.
Her lips burn, too, or at least that was how I remembered them from our one brief kiss, hot and wild and vivid. I pushed those thoughts aside. I couldn’t have them. Not as long as I was with Cerice. Not as long as we were an us. But Cerice loved Ravirn, not chaos-eyed Raven, who frightened her, and Tisiphone . . . why, Tisiphone wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Ravirn?” she said again. She looked puzzled. “I wanted to talk with you. I’m glad to find you alone. You are alone, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you were standing by a mirror, but then . . . Did I see what I think I saw? If so, who was that?”
“My cousin Dairn, who hates me, but that’s not important. He’s gone now. How are you? How’s Necessity? Have you seen Shara?”
“What is this? An interrogation?” Tisiphone smiled. “Not so frightened of me as you once were, are you? That’s good. I don’t want you scared.” She reached up and touched my cheek.
I blushed. The first time I met Tisiphone, she’d come to kill me. That wasn’t the only time we’d clashed. She’d saved my life more than once as well. Our relationship had grown
complex
. She wanted me, and I wanted . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I wanted things to be the way they never had been—Cerice and me together without anything hanging over our heads. Sometimes I wanted something else entirely.
“Ravirn.” The voice was low, husky, hurt.
“Cerice,” I turned away from Tisiphone and took my glass from Cerice’s hand, “you’re back.”
“I am. Should I have bothered?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Tisiphone just arrived, too. She wanted to say hello.”
“Oh really.” Cerice sounded almost as icy as she had with the rent-a-clops.
“Dairn is here,” said Melchior.
Cerice’s expression went from cold to hot in an instant. Shara is Cerice’s familiar, a webgoblin every bit as precious to her as Melchior is to me. On top of that, at the time Dairn had shot Shara, his brother Hwyl had been in the process of clubbing Cerice unconscious. She’s had a rough couple of years, largely because she’d decided to save my neck once upon a time.
“Where is he?” she asked, draining her wine in a single long draft and dropping the glass. “I’ll kill him.”
I had no doubt she meant that literally.
“As much as I appreciate the sentiment,” I said, catching her wrist, “this might not be the best place for it.”
Cerice glared at me but didn’t try to pull away. That was good. I didn’t think that trying to kill Dairn would be a great idea right now, even if we could find him, but I wouldn’t have tried to restrain her beyond that first impulse.
“Is this a private moment, or can anyone join?” The woman’s voice was diamonds in the snow—frozen elegance—and all too familiar.
If I’d been paying attention to anything other than Cerice and Tisiphone, I might have seen her coming and had a ready answer or a dodge. As it was, my brain kind of shortcircuited for a few seconds as a third woman stepped into view.
“Hello,
Raven
.” Beautiful and regal, she nodded at me before turning. “Cerice, still slumming I see. I don’t know what you see in him. Tisiphone, don’t you have something better to do? Places to go? People to kill?”
She was tall and pale, with dark hair and dark eyes slit like a cat’s. She wore a long Elizabethan gown of green and gold. She was a thousand years old and as cold and cruel as a queen of faerie. Her House was Lachesis and her loyalty to my great-to-the-Nth-degree-grandmother was absolute. As with so many members of the Houses of Fate, Ravirn had died for her on the day Lachesis cast me out.
I forced a smile. “Hello, Phoebe.” Damned if I was going to call her mother.
What do you say to the woman who birthed you when she sees you as a walking corpse? If we’d ever been truly close, it might have been easier. I could have raged or cried or done something else equally dramatic. But for reasons structural, historical, and familial, we had little in common beyond blood and a few years in a shared house.
My mother’s sensibilities were formed around the time Charlemagne ruled France. She’d had more than a thousand years of living without a child before she had my sister and me, and only a score of years living with us. To expect her to feel for me as might a human mother who’d spent a fifth of her short life with her child would be profoundly foolish. Add to that the intergenerational warfare of my ancestors and my grandmother’s need to have all loyalty in her House flow first, last, and always to her, and our estrangement was no surprise. Despite that, seeing her hurt me. My usually glib tongue seemed to have found someplace else to be.
“Did you have something you wanted to say?” I finally asked.
She canted her head to one side and gave me her best disapproving stare. That was it.
“Look, Mom—I can still call you Mom, can’t I?—I don’t have all night. Make your point or get out of the way. I’ve played the hard-looks game with all three Fates, Hades, Eris, Cerberus, and”—I nodded at Tisiphone—“the Furies. On that scale you don’t even register.”
“You may not call me mom, mother, mater, or any other version of the term. When Lachesis disowned you, so did I.”
“Great. Then I’ll be going.” I moved to step around her, but she held up a hand.
“What you have done to our House is inex—”
“Your House, Phoebe. Not mine. Mine is House Raven, or didn’t you read the invite?”
“I’m not done,” she said, putting out a hand.
I stuck my untouched drink in it. “I am.” This time I went right on past her. It was that or punch her in the face.
“I blame your father’s blood for this!” she yelled after me.
“That was fun,” said Cerice, catching up to me as I ducked through the door to a nearby tent.
She sounded a little shaky, and after a quick look around revealed that Tisiphone hadn’t followed, I turned to take her hand.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.” She looked down, away from my face. “I’m sorry. It’s just, that she’s so . . .”
“Difficult? Yeah, my mother could teach Ares a thing or two about starting fights.”
“Ravirn!” She glared at me.
“Oh, you mean Tisiphone. Sorry. I tend to forget she exists when we’re alone.”
“You’re impossible,” she said, but the tension was broken, and she smiled wistfully at me. “And we’re a long way from alone.” Her gesture took in the crowd in the new tent.
I caught her in my arms. “I really am sorry. She found me, not the other way around, rather like my mother.”
“All right,” said Cerice, relaxing into my arms and resting her chin on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, too.”
We stayed that way for a long time, clinging to each other despite the wild crowd around us, like an eye of calm in the heart of a divine hurricane. I treasured the moment. But it cut me as well, because when we finally broke apart, I caught the tiny flinch she couldn’t quite suppress as her gaze met the chaos in my eyes.
“About time.” Melchior was tugging on my pant leg. “Give me a boost.” He reached his hands up, and I lifted him into the bag. “I’d forgotten what a royal pain your mother can be,” he said before he went back to laptop shape.
“I hadn’t.”
Cerice let out a bitter little laugh, and I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Sorry. The whole thing just made me wonder how
my
mother’s taking my resignation.”
“Hard to say. Clotho’s not as tightly wound as Lachesis, and that’s reflected in her children. Besides, as I recall, you only quit the job, not the family. I was cast out fully and formally.”
“Not to mention unjustly,” she said.
Her words were angry, as was her expression, angry on my behalf. It was sweet and fierce and more than a little bit sad. In many ways my outcast status hurt Cerice more than it did me.
“Let’s go find fresh drinks,” I said.
Another hour passed without any further sign of Dairn, my mother, or Tisiphone. Just Cerice and I walking hand in hand. Bliss. I was just thinking we should have another go at finding Zeus when a voice called out my name.
“Ravirn!”
It was nice to hear my preferred name instead of my shiny new one, so I was smiling when I spotted the speaker. Somehow I held on to that despite the face attached to the voice. It was old-home week apparently.
“Hello, Arion.” My father.
He grinned. “From your tone, I’d guess your mother found you first. Fates and their children. That woman is cut from the same cloth as all the others in the House. I swear there’s a mold somewhere in Lachesis’s office, and they aren’t born so much as stamped out.” He turned to Cerice and winked. “I except Clotho’s great-granddaughter here, of course. How are you, child?”
“I’m fine, Arion. Yourself?”
“As well as can be expected, considering my relationship with the boy’s mother.”
I blinked. “I take it you’re not getting along then?”
“Oh, as well as usual. We’ve been together six hundred years now, with all the usual fuss and bother: argument, making up, separations, enchantment, assassination attempts . . .”
“There’s not much question where Ravirn got his sense of humor, is there?” said Cerice.
Arion grinned. “Actually, that’s why I hunted you down. Your grandmother asked to meet you.”
I twitched at that. If Lachesis was looking for me, it could only mean trouble.
“My grandmother can go . . . wait a second.”
Lachesis wasn’t really my grandmother; I just tended to think of her that way since she had long been my head of House and preferred that we all refer to her so. I’d met my mother’s mother once or twice, but the generation gap between us was so great that we’d literally had nothing to talk about. She’d been born before the invention of steel. My father was almost that old himself but had somehow managed to stay contemporary in a way even my mother hadn’t managed. I’d always just assumed his mother had been killed somewhere along the line, as so many of my demi-immortal relatives had over the years. I know that both of my mother’s mother’s parents had gone that way.
“Wow,” Arion said to Cerice, “you can actually see the wheels turning in there.”
She smiled. “Sometimes it’s the only evidence that he thinks at all.”
“Who is my grandmother?” I asked.
“That’d ruin the surprise,” said Arion. “She’s got a tent set up right over here with her sisters.” He started off.
Sisters? Tent? I was too bemused by the implications of that to do anything but follow. As far as I could tell, the tents roughly corresponded to Houses. I say roughly because some were shared, and some Houses hadn’t bothered. House Raven, for example.
A moment later Arion had led me into the presence of a short, red-haired woman with deep laugh lines around her mouth and her green eyes.
“Ravirn,” he said, “this is your grandmother, Thalia. Thalia, Ravirn of House Raven.”

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