Cybermancy (34 page)

It wasn’t gentle, and I picked some up fresh scrapes and bruises as I rolled across the loose rocks and rough stone that made up the near bank of the Styx. Megaera came back about then, descending on me from above.

“You attacked Mort!” Dave bellowed in a voice that sounded like a bad actor auditioning for the part of a vengeful gang member in
West Side Story
.

Then he snapped Megaera out of the air. Tisiphone got to her feet about then and screamed something incoherent before lunging at Bob. I don’t know what Alecto and Mort were thinking at this point, but full-scale battle had been engaged between their respective counterparts, and they crashed together in an apparent desire not to be left out. Cerberus lost his footing and fell almost on top of me, forcing me to scramble like mad to get clear.

I ended up at the base of the long finger of stone that Shara had climbed earlier and quickly leaped up beside her. We were trapped there by the snarling tumbling ball of madness that was the Furies and Cerberus. Well, I had my distraction. I just needed to figure out how to get past the barrier of the river. I was glad the melee had separated me from Melchior and Cerice. That would make my plan for taking the next step alone much easier to execute. Now I just had to lose Shara and get across the damned river.

“What do we do now?” she asked, looking worriedly from the wild brawl to the black water that surrounded us on three sides.

The entire surface rippled and roiled with the nastiness Hades had released into the waters. Directly beneath us, the water was so churned up that sooty foam had formed in small clumps.

“I don’t know. Swimming doesn’t seem like a great option.”
And I want to leave you on this side of the Styx anyway.
She was half-rescued, and I didn’t want to have to rerescue that half later.

“Really?” said Shara, rolling her eyes. “You don’t say? No swimming. And here I was thinking you and I were finally going to get a chance to go skinny-dipping without Cerice around to spoil the fun.”

Before I could respond, the battle between the two tripartite heavyweights caught my attention. It was one of those brief moments of stillness that happen even in the worst fights, and I got a snapshot view of the state of things. Tisiphone had Bob in some kind of modified head-lock and was viciously smashing the balled fist of her free hand again and again into the center of his forehead. Either Alecto had caught Mort’s upper jaw with her hands and his lower with her feet and was desperately trying to force them apart, or Mort had grabbed Alecto and she was trying not to get munched. It was hard to tell which. Dave had Megaera’s waist clamped between his teeth and was shaking her brutally.

Then, with a sudden flip of his shoulders, Dave tossed Megaera aside. He yelped when he did it, so I’m not sure who the point belonged to, but I had more immediate concerns, as the tumbling Fury smashed hard into the base of our rock-spur refuge. It shook and tilted, sending Shara sliding toward the edge. Throwing myself flat, I flung out a hand and caught the scruff of her neck before she could go in.

“Nice save, little man,” said Megaera, whose presence I had momentarily forgotten. “Too bad it’s not going to do you any good in the long run.”

Oh shit. I felt a jolt along my spine like someone had plugged my tailbone into a light socket. This was it. But Dave snarled then, and Megaera turned away from me. I had a moment to feel relief that she hadn’t had the time to make good on her threat. Then she kicked backwards with her left foot, slamming the sole into the base of the rock like a sledgehammer. She used the impact to propel herself into the air and a swooping dive aimed at Cerberus.

I’m not sure what happened with her after that, and frankly, I didn’t care. The kick had been the last straw for our little refuge. The rock was tipping and sliding toward the dark waters and the hungriness that lurked beneath.

“Save
yourself
,” screamed Shara.

I might have been able to jump clear, if I’d let her go. But I wasn’t going to do that. Together, we slid toward the river and final oblivion.

My brain kicked into overtime, trying to find some way out, a loophole that I could slip through and save the day. There had to be a way. Darkness passed before my eyes. I thought it was all over for a moment, but then I recognized it as the shadow of the Raven, the spectre that had haunted me with increasing frequency as I made ever more use of the gifts of chaos.

I remembered Cerberus’s last words on the subject before the arrival of the Furies cut our conversation short—that I must “assume the role” of Raven or I would eventually face self-destruction.

Well, eventually had come more quickly than I’d expected, and the decision point was here. I could die as myself, or I could accept the new role I had forged in my battles with Fate and hope that the Raven could offer a solution where plain old Ravirn had none.

I turned inward, reaching for the place where blood and bone met chaos. As I did so, the shadow of the Raven slid over my own. For a brief moment the two shadows remained distinct,
then
they merged into one darker winged shadow. I had found it, the inner nexus between my own heart and the heart of change.

Now
, I silently whispered,
we become one
.

A burst of pure energy hit me like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was wild and raw and completely insane. I felt a bit like a mosquito might if it had bitten into a fire hose rather than the fireman holding it. Time stopped. Not really, but effectively. Just as my newfound powers had allowed me to simultaneously occupy a thousand different faerie rings and choose the one I wanted to step out of all in the blink of an eye, I now saw another series of possibilities and a way to choose among them, to make chance work for me.

The current arrangement of particles in my body was only one of a number of such patterns available to me. The vast majority of routes to rearrange them would result only in my tearing
myself
to pieces, a sudden explosive death. But there were other options, and I reached for one of those now.

It hurt! Chaos and Discord, but it hurt! I was trying to rip every single atom of my being away from every other atom and put them all back together again. And I was trying to do it in the femtosecond before the universe caught on to the trick and pointed out that it should have been fatal.

Shara slipped from my grasp as I ceased to have fingers, but before she could fall into the water I caught her again with one clawed foot. I didn’t want to take her with me, but it was that or let her fall. Bunching my shoulders, I threw myself skyward and spread my great black wings. I was truly the Raven now, in form and function, and I gloried in the moment.
The feeling of wind sliding through feathers.
The deeply rewarding effort of fighting up and away from the bonds of earth and soil.
The sheer sensuality of experiencing everything with a new skin.

In that instant, I understood that Raven the power was not some alien creature completely outside the domain of the old hacker Ravirn, but merely an extension of what I had always been. Quantum mechanics tells us that many things that really shouldn’t be possible are, though so unlikely that entire universes could live and die without their ever happening. The
atoms of my body rearranging themselves was
one such occurrence. Incredibly, almost mind-bogglingly improbable, but not utterly impossible—a tiny loophole in the programming of reality, and finding and exploiting loopholes is what I do. Becoming the Raven merely gave me a shortcut around a lot of the coding Ravirn would have had to do to achieve the same effect.

Simple, elegant, and incredibly dangerous.
I had no doubt of that last. One of the nice things about precoding a bit of magic, then running it through a spell-checker is that it gives you the chance to see whether you’ve made a mistake beforehand. If anything had gone wrong with the Raven transformation, I would still have been floating above the Styx, but I’d have been doing it in Charon’s ferry instead of on wings of magic. Whether I’d experienced beginner’s luck on this one or whether I’d touched on something deeper and more basic—the Raven form going with the name—I didn’t know. I did know that I would have to be more careful about shape changing in the future.

“He’s escaping!” The voice seemed to come from a great distance, traveling through
a slurry
of time and space to reach my consciousness. “Get him.”

I shook my head, trying to break loose of such petty concerns.

“Uh, Raven?” This time it was Shara.

I pulled myself back into the moment. “Yes.” My voice came out harsh and gravelly, half word, half caw. “What?”

“The Furies can fly, too.”

I looked down. The fight on the banks of the Styx had ceased, the three heads of Cerberus bent in close conference with the three bodies that made up the entity known collectively as the Furies. How I could tell it was the two governing intelligences consulting and not a conference of the constituent personalities I didn’t know, but I had no doubts.
When six heads bobbed in mutual agreement I knew things were about to get ugly again.

Cerberus turned away from the Furies and leaped into the water, swimming powerfully to get beneath me. A moment later, and with a single coordinated motion, the sisters of vengeance launched themselves skyward. I was above them, and I thought I might be able to keep my height advantage if I worked at it, but that was only going to work for a very little while. The Styx and both its banks lay in a cavern under Olympus. Up was a finite resource, and I didn’t want to get out anyway. I needed a plan. Well, actually I had one. It was just a bad plan. I’d come to the underworld to speak with Persephone, and I knew that if I wanted to do that, I had to enter Hades once again.

Before the arrival of the Furies, I hadn’t fully decided whether I was willing to take that risk, especially after Cerberus had pretty much confirmed that I hadn’t “escaped” last time. I’d been let go. I still wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but it did have the added advantage of putting me in one of the few places the Furies, and Cerberus, for that matter, wouldn’t follow. I turned in the air, lining up on the gate.

“Shara, I have to get to Persephone. I’ll drop you outside the gate before I go through.”

“No. You’re going to need a webgoblin inside.”

“I can’t take you back in there.”

“You have to. I need to see this thing through, and I don’t think you can solve the problem without a goblin.
Without me.
Besides, I’ve got to get my soul back in one piece before I crack. I’m coming.”

“You’re staying.”

“I’m coming.”

“I’m not taking you, and that’s final.”

Shara didn’t answer, and I took that as agreement. It might have been defiance, but I just didn’t have time to argue. I was almost to the roof, and the Furies were coming up fast.

“If I don’t make it out, tell Cerice I love her.”

“Tell her yourself,” said Shara.
“’Cause I’m not breaking that news for you.”

I felt the feathers of one wing brush against a stalactite. I had just run out of leeway. Folding my wings, I dropped like a stone. The Furies rolled toward me one after another, arrowing along an interception course, with Megaera flying point. It was going to be a close-run thing. We got closer and closer together as I headed for the floor, until finally we met in the air.
Or almost met.
I felt a stabbing pain in my tail and caught a puff of black feathers out of the corner of my eye as Megaera swiped at me and just missed.

I breathed a mental sigh of relief that turned into a curse as I realized how close I’d come to the ground. Cerberus himself served up the reminder, leaping for me like a lesser dog going for a Frisbee.

“Yarghh!” screamed Shara as she yanked her feet up to avoid Mort’s reaching jaws.

Then I was at the gate. “Good-bye, Shara.” I opened my claws.

“And hello,” she answered me back, catching a grip round my ankle and hanging on as I flew through the opening.

We had both returned to Hades.

Considering the commotion kicked up by our arrival, I decided not to hang around the gate, flying on toward the heart of Hades. But I knew that no matter how hard I flapped, I wasn’t going to get us where we needed to go fast enough, not if Hades started looking for us. So after I’d put some distance between us and the entrance, I spoke with Shara. I hadn’t wanted to bring her with me, but I’d have been a fool not to make use of her now that she was here.

“When we came to break you out, Melchior was able to get root access to Hades’ intranet so we pretty much owned the place.” My voice came out harsh and croaking, and I found myself wanting to “caw” at every full stop. “I’m sure he’s beefed up his security since, but if we can’t LTP this trip, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“I told you, you needed me,” said Shara. “Hang on a second. Melchior gave me the details on the system while you and Cerice were playing slot-in-the-RAM. I’ll see what I can do.”

She went silent, and I felt her body relax as her mind went elsewhere. She was gone much longer than Melchior had been. I began to worry that we were shit out of luck. But then I felt a slight tremor, and she returned to me.

“I can’t do root. Hades shut that down solid, but I managed to crack the IM daemon and go from there to Hades’ personal user setup, which gives me most admin privileges. Gating us around will be easy, likewise anything else the system is already set up for; but I won’t be able to cover my tracks very well, and I can’t guarantee I won’t set off any alarms.”