Cybermancy (26 page)

The satyrs broke their circle in the instant after we appeared, wandering off to chase nymphs and whatnot. There are no permanent rings on Olympus. Zeus does not allow it.
It’s
part of a long list of things he doesn’t allow.
Guns, for example.
Doesn’t like the noise, he says. Too much like thunder, and thunder “belongs to Zeus alone.” I took a moment to make sure my shoulder holster was fully concealed, and Cerice tucked her Beretta deep down in the bottom of her bag. Then it was time to part. Cerice was going down, and I was going up. Trails led in both directions.

“Be careful,” I said.

“You too.”
She gave me a quick kiss.

I just squeezed her tight for a moment, then let her go and started climbing.

“Are you ever going to get it together?” asked Melchior, once we’d gotten out of sight of the others.

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“I suppose that I do,” I replied. “But honestly, I don’t know. I think that’s more up to Cerice than me.”

He sighed. “That’s a dodge. But I won’t argue with you.” We walked a little farther. “Does Tisiphone really have a thing for you?”

“She says so, and it sure seems like it. But what do I know about Furies?”

He gave me a long, appraising look,
then
shook his head. “Huh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, but he didn’t answer in the few remaining moments before our path disgorged itself onto a broader road and we reached the gateway to the great
Palace
of
Olympus
. I tucked him into the bag as I looked it all over once more.

It was a big, sprawling place on the very top of the mountain, all white marble and fluted pillars,
a
stereotype of ancient Greece on a grand scale. Like someone had started with the Parthenon and just kept adding matching rooms. Once upon a time it had been painted in a wide variety of bright colors, just like the Greek temples in the world below. But first Rome conquered Greece, then it fell in turn to the barbarians who had ushered in the dark ages, at which point people stopped paying attention to the old temples, and the paint faded away.

I missed all that, of course, not yet having been born, but I hear stories. The big guy was pretty depressed about the rise of Christianity. Oh, he hadn’t been all that happy about Rome devouring Greece either, but that was mitigated somewhat by the Roman adoption of the Greek pantheon. Sure they called him Jupiter instead of Zeus, but at least they kept the sacrifices coming.

I’m told that when Constantine moved the capital and declared Rome a Christian Nation, Zeus just about had a stroke. Who can blame him? It wasn’t until the Renaissance, with its focus on rediscovering the
classics, that
he came out of his funk. By then all of Greece’s temples and statues were bleached ice white, and the revivalists, not knowing any better, did everything up the same way. That’s when Zeus had the paint scrubbed off everything on Olympus, said he liked it better that way anyway.
Pathetic, really.

The main gate was a wide-open doorway in the front of a little classical temple that straddled the road. I was just about to head on through when a large figure in gray stepped between me and the door. Did I say large? Cancel that.
Huge.

“Where do you think yer goin’?” boomed a voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the figure’s head.

I looked up, way up. Picture a fat rent-a-cop, complete with silly cap and riding boots. Inflate him to three
times
normal size. Give him mirror shades. Mirror
shade
, really, a single bright reflector covering a single eye centered in an enormous sloping forehead. You get the basic picture. I was face-to-belt-buckle with a cyclops, or perhaps
cycops
would be a better term.

This one was packing heat rather than the more traditional club, a revolver the size
of a
small cannon. One of his beefy hands lay none-too-subtly on the grip of the pistol. I was frankly surprised, since guns were officially banned from the premises.

“I asked you a question, boy!” bellowed the cyclops. “I expect an answer.”

I pointed toward the door behind him. “Through there, isn’t it obvious?” I hadn’t had many dealings with the various members of the cyclops family over the years, but I recognized the attitude this one was sporting. I knew that if I started backing down, he’d run me right over.

“And I suppose you just expect me to let you by?”

“I do indeed.”

“Not gonna happen. Not without you do some explainin’ about who you are and
what’s your business
.”

“Fair enough.
I was once a child of House Lachesis, the lady who measures out the length of your life. You may have heard of her, sister of the one who snips?” I made clipping motions.

He swallowed hard but came back quickly. “I note youse is speakin’ in the past tense there. Whose House do you belong to now?”

“My own, House Raven. At least that’s what Clotho called me when she named me a power. If you need a reference for that, I suggest you call Tisiphone. She can vouch for my status.”

“Tisiphone, the Fury?” Sweat was beading up along the line where his hat touched his forehead. One fat drop rolled down from temple to jawbone.

“No, Tisiphone, the house cat.
Of course Tisiphone, the Fury.
What are you?
Some kind of moron?
Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got business within.” I moved to go around him, but he sidestepped to block my passage. “You’re making me both late and angry. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to do either.”

“Sorry, sir.”
The cyclops’s voice took on a sort of oily respect. “It sounds like you’re legit, but I still can’t let you through looking like that.”

“Huh?” I had no idea what he was talking about now.

“Dress code.
New orders from Zeus hisself.
Nobody gets in without they go classical.” He jerked a fat thumb at a marble statue of a Greek shepherd boy wearing the traditional white, one-shouldered tunic. Beside it was a shepherdess wearing the matching loose dress.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

“Nope, that’s official O-lym-pi-an policy.” He sounded out each syllable.

“And what you’re wearing fits into that how?”

“Which side of the door am I on?” he asked.

“And the pistol?
Last time I stopped by, carrying that would have gotten you a date with Miss Lightning. ZOT!
Instant charcoal briquette.”

“It’s not technically a gun,” he said. “It’s an updated Gyrojet, fires a small rocket rather than a bullet. Subsonic, so there’s no bang, at least at first. It keeps the old man happy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you’re splitting hairs.”

“Not me, buddy.
That one’s straight from Athena. You can tell her that if you want, but ever since she jumped out of Zeus’s noggin, she’s been a little funny about that particular metaphor. Anyway, I don’t make the rules, I just enforce ’em. That means that out here on duty, I have to wear this.” He tapped a finger on his chest beside the copper badge inscribed with a lightning bolt. “And pack the heat as official Olympian external security. Inside, it’s a loincloth and club, ’cause that’s the way we always
gets
described in the litera-toor. Given my druthers, I’d let you in as is, but it ain’t happenin’. So,
either you
put on a tunic, you head back the way you came, or we have to work this out the hard way.”

He did not look happy at the prospect, but neither did he look like he’d back down. So I nodded. Starting a fight with the gate guard was not going to help me sneak into Zeus’s office.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaner tunic?”

The cyclops visibly relaxed. “That we do.
Tons of ’em.”
He gestured for me to follow him into the temple and nodded at a curtained-off alcove in one corner. “In the changing area, every size you could want.
Even got one for blue boy there.”
He jabbed a finger at Melchior, who had been keeping a very low profile.

“Not really,” said the webgoblin.

The cyclops just nodded.

A few minutes later we stepped out, ready to face the world. Well, not really. In Fate’s family everyone is expected to wear the garb of a sixteenth-century courtier at formal functions. I’d always felt a little self-conscious in tights, but I’d grown up with them. Turns out I hadn’t really understood what self-conscious meant. Now I did.

The tunics were one size fits all. Not in the classic there-was-one-size-and-everyone-wore-it-as-best-they-could way. No, this used magic. You put it on and it adjusted itself to your size. And whoever had decided what constituted “your size” had a very different idea about hemlines than I did. It covered the appropriate bits, but only just. Bending over, a stiff breeze, or, well, a stiff something else, would all endanger my modesty in a serious way. Also, the thing was more than a little on the sheer side. Again, I was technically covered, but only just. I found myself with a powerful desire to keep my bag firmly in front of me, or I would have if I’d been allowed to keep it. Instead, I had a borrowed leather wallet that slung over a shoulder but didn’t hang low enough to be of any use.

“Damn rent-a-clops,” said Melchior, tugging at his own hem as we exited the back door of the temple into Olympus proper. “This thing makes me feel naked.”

“Mel, you don’t
wear
clothes.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. Being naked and feeling that way are not the same thing at all. One’s natural, the other is
exposed
. The sandals suck, too.”

I had to agree with him. The pair of loosely foot-shaped pieces of leather held on by a bondage fetishist’s dream of a strapping system might provide some protection for the sole of the foot, but they were shit for traction. This was a problem, since the same idiot responsible for the rest of the décor had decreed the streets be made of gleaming slabs of polished white marble. Pretty? Yes.
Practical?
Not so much. I missed my boots and leathers, especially with the winter cold.

The shoes meant that most of my attention during our hike up to the top of the mountain and the biggest temple of them all stayed on my feet and not on the scenery. But hey, there’s only so much you can say about an architectural monoculture done up in stark white stone. It gets old fast, and I was glad when we finished our trip.

Another rent-a-clops stood on duty just outside the main door, this time wearing the requisite loincloth and carrying a club, and looking damned cold. He did, however, have a little white earpiece with a wire leading back over his shoulder and down to a suspicious-looking bulge under the back flap of his loincloth. When he gave me a fish eye but waved me inside anyway, I figured that the news from the front gate must have whispered itself in his ear. That put me inside the building, but only as far as the audience hall. I figured I’d have to work a lot harder for Zeus’s actual office, even if he never did go in there except for
affairs
of state.

The interior architecture was almost, though not quite, as monotonous as the exterior. There was lots more white marble, enough to make the place look like the world’s biggest and most expensive executive restroom. Even the cubicles, installed to house Zeus’s ever-growing support staff and tucked in neat rows behind the support pillars, were white marble. I gave them a wide berth as I made my way through the front room and toward the back and the stairs. Zeus’s office is a little miniature temple in the round, sitting like a cupola on the roof of the main temple. Through some magic of Zeus’s, it’s invisible from street level. An esthetic blessing, that—otherwise, it would look like some sort of growth.

When I’d been here last, I’d had time to marvel at the views, since it’s quite literally situated at the top of the world. I’d also wondered briefly about the fact that it was completely open to the elements and yet none of the papers on the desk ever went blowing around and it was a perfect balmy seventy-four degrees. But hey, what’s the fun of being a weather god if you can’t dick with local conditions in your favor?

I was still trying to figure out how I’d talk my way past the secretary and any other security when I stepped through the arch into the outer office. A big square room with no windows, it held a desk—white marble, what else—several really uncomfortable-looking chairs—same again—a stock of out-of-date copies of
Modern Mythos Magazine
—motto “All the Godsip fit to print”—and not much else besides the locked door leading to the spiral stairs and the big guy’s office.

Now, Zeus tends to hire the dim and curvy for receptionist duty—available in large quantities from the ranks of Olympus’s nymphs—but having one abandon her post just when I needed a break seemed a little too good to be true. It was at this point that I decided that either Tyche—Dame Fortune herself—was smiling on me from her own office, just down the hill a bit—or I was being set up again. Being of a suspicious nature, I figured it was probably the latter, but I really needed to have another crack at Necessity’s network, so I decided to pretend I believed I could have luck that good.

Taking one last look around to make sure I really was all alone, I slipped over to the desk and reached underneath to hit the door release. With a gentle click, the lock opened, and I was on my way upstairs. I’d gotten around one and
a half loops
of the stair when a third possibility suggested itself to me rather forcefully. Not only was the secretary not missing, but the big guy himself was in as well, and dictation wasn’t on the menu.