Cybermancy (35 page)

“After the mess at the gate, I doubt alarms are going to matter much in the long run. In fact, I doubt that we’ve got a long run. Can you find Persephone and take us to her?”

“On it.”
A couple of more precious seconds ticked past.
“Got her.
You’ll have to land so I can set up the gate.”

I bobbed my head and started a downward glide. We landed on a bluff overlooking a dell where the ghosts of trees played at being a forest. But they had no vitality, and I could feel the weight of death pressing down upon me like a great stone on my chest.

“You planning on staying a giant Raven forever?” asked Shara as she began the LTP process.

I cocked my head to one side and croaked, “Nevermore.” I couldn’t resist. If I got killed in the next few hours, I might not get the chance again.

Shara rolled her eyes and turned back to the business at hand. “I’ll take that as a no.”

I took a few hopping steps away and thought about turning myself back. I’d never done this before, so I didn’t really know how to go about it. I tried reaching inward to the place I’d touched earlier, my own personal interface with the Primal Chaos. It was like sticking my tongue in a light socket, or maybe inserting a cattle prod directly into my frontal lobes. Energy poured into me.

I no longer
had
a link to chaos. I
was
a link. It was wild. It was seductive. It was terrifying. Once upon a time I’d used a direct chaos tap to turn my cousin Moric into charcoal, and I’d almost gotten fried in the process myself. This was like that, only more so. I had infinitely more power available to me than I could possibly manage to control. If I wasn’t exquisitely careful, I’d end up a briquette. If I’d still been in my old shape, I’d have been pouring sweat. As it was, I could feel every barb of every feather on my entire body standing on end.

The temptation to skip the whole thing and live out whatever time I had left as a raven was strong. I thought about it. I really did. But in the end I decided I had to master this thing. Besides, I’d miss my opposable thumbs.
To say nothing of my lips.
So I dipped a mental toe into that incredible flow of power and tried to picture the outcome I wanted. Again I was presented with a million, a billion possibilities.

A myriad of paths led from raven shape to a spreading smear of plasma, even more to a loose cloud of carbon compounds, and one or two to an application of E=mc
²
that would completely eclipse the Hiroshima bomb. I steered my way between these options to the tiny subset that ended with me alive and in one piece, finally selecting the one that matched my internal image of myself—Ravirn, late of House Lachesis, child of Chaos and the Fates. Once I had that firmly fixed in my mind, I constructed a set of commands that would take me through the intervening steps, a reprogramming of my own internal reality.

It was harder than the transformation into a raven, much harder. Then, I hadn’t had time to really internalize all the ways the process could go wrong. I’d needed to act, and I had. But now, making the same decisions in cold blood and doing it with the unlife of Hades surrounding me—the ultimate reminder of the true and fatal meaning of a mistake—I shuddered. If I wanted to make Ravirn the master of the Raven, I had to master this. I knew that. But I didn’t know if I could.

“Ravirn,” said Shara, tapping her little purple foot. “The gate’s open.”

“All right.”
Now! Just do it.

I did. With a little mental twist, I set the transformation to running. Soul-searing pain filled every iota of my awareness. For an instant I existed only as agony, while my body ripped itself apart and reassembled in a new shape.
Or rather, an old one.
I was Ravirn once again.

“What’s with the court rig?” asked Shara.

“Huh?” I asked. Then I looked down at myself and swore.

I was no longer wearing the racing leathers I’d had on earlier. Instead, I’d reverted to the formal wear of my youth. Apparently, no matter how much I might claim to have completely given up any allegiance to my grandmother, some deep part of me still longed for the days when I’d been part of her House. Either
that,
or the Raven had a wicked sense of humor.

My motorcycle boots had stretched themselves thigh high and grown cavalier’s cuffs. Leather pants had vanished in favor of emerald tights. T-shirt had become tunic, likewise green. Instead of a jacket I had a black leather doublet. My pistol was gone, replaced by my much-loved but frankly obsolete rapier and dagger.

I swore again. I was really going to miss the built-in armor of my leathers and my pistol, but I didn’t have the time, and I wasn’t willing to take the risks necessary to get them back.

“Well?” Shara raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask. Let’s just go.”

“Step into the light,” said the goblin, bowing me before her. I did so, and she followed.
“Gating.”

The column changed from green to blue, and the world from outside to in. We stood on a narrow landing at the top of a long, curving flight of stone stairs. A thick door with a narrow window blocked our way forward. The bars were verdigrised bronze, as was the heavy lock. I leaned forward and looked through the window. Beyond lay an opulently furnished chamber with a huge bed and an elaborate table spread with a banquet in the traditional Greek style. For all that, it was still a prison. I needed only a glance at its sole occupant to know that.

Persephone.

Persephone sat on the floor in the corner, her back firmly to the tower room and its appointments. Her face was pressed tight against her knees, her arms wrapped around her shins, and she was shaking. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew that it would be covered with tears and that the pain I had seen there before would be even worse.

I glanced again at the table. On a gold plate in the very center sat a pomegranate, its rind half-peeled away, and a gap showing where a few—no, three—seeds had been pulled loose. Other details that I hadn’t seen, or hadn’t wanted to see, leaped into clarity.
The rumpling of the bed-covers, the fact of Persephone’s nakedness.

“Oh gods,” whispered Shara, who was peering through the keyhole. “This is the place where . . .”

“Where Hades imprisoned her the first time, preserved like some sort of twisted shrine.”

I felt rage pouring though me. I wanted to reach into the chaos again, to unleash the fury that had scared me so much earlier, to render this place down to its constituent particles. But that wouldn’t do either her or us any good.

“Persephone,” I called, as quietly as I could. She didn’t move.
“Persephone.”

She didn’t turn. “Go away.” The words were soft and dead, like a bird shot out of the sky. The pain in them made my joints sag like a rag
doll’s
, but somehow I stayed on my feet.

“Persephone, please.
I’ve come to . . .” I trailed off. How could I ask anything of this woman, this goddess of suffering? What had I done that would give her any reason to help me? But I had to try. “The virus, or whatever it is, that you released into Necessity’s network. What was it supposed to do?”

“Why should I tell you?”
Again, the pain.

She turned then, and I cast my gaze down toward the floor. I didn’t want to meet the anguish in her eyes again, or witness her nudity, her vulnerability.

“Aren’t you going to try to bargain with me?” she asked, rising and walking toward the door. “Won’t you offer to free me from this place in exchange for my help in whatever it is that you want?” There were razors in her words, and I felt them bite deeply.

“I don’t know,” I said, forcing myself to look at her, to meet those eyes. It was like seeing the tearing agony of my transformations set in stone, an agony that never ended. “I might have tried that if I hadn’t seen you like this. I did come here to bargain with you, to ask for your help in stopping the destruction. But I don’t know what to ask you now. If you want, I’ll try to get this door open.”

“This cell is only the symbol of my imprisonment. Even if I walked out now, I would still be in Hades and my jailer could put me back here anytime he wanted it. It’s not the cell I want to escape.”

“But that’s all I can promise,” I said. I was learning to live with the dreadful weight of her words.
“Shara?”

She whistled a burst of binary. It was a spell of unlocking, similar but not identical to the one I’d programmed with Melchior. The latch clicked, and the door opened. Nothing stood between me and Persephone. Before I could say anything Shara whistled another spell, clothing Persephone in one of Cerice’s outfits.

“Thank you, little one.” Persephone knelt in front of Shara.
Reached out.
Touched her brow.
Winced.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would tear your soul like that. I used you.”

“It’s all right,” said Shara. “You were driven to it.”

“No,” said Persephone. “It’s not all right. No thinking being should ever use another. Of all the people in all the worlds, I should know that better than any. I forgot it for a while. I was wrong. I apologize. If I could make it right, I would.”

“What were you trying to do?” asked Shara.

This time Persephone answered the question. “Win my freedom. What else?”

“How does wiping out mweb connections address that?” I asked. It was as much a hacker shop-talk question as it was one about the vital issue. Her tactics baffled me.

“Necessity’s networks govern more than the proper relationships between the worlds. They also dictate the fate and placement of the gods.”

Shara whistled. And well she might. That was two bombshells in one sentence, and I should have figured out the thing about the gods in advance. I’d had all the clues.

“I’d always thought of the mweb as just a way of linking different levels of reality,” I said. “Are you saying it controls their positions as well?”

“Yes and no,” said Persephone. “The part of the mweb run by Fate may control how you get from world A to world B, but it’s Necessity that says where those worlds should be, and even whether they should exist. Not every decision leads to a split in reality, only those that Necessity approves.”

“If she’s that powerful, how could you hope that just erasing the record of where you’re supposed to be would cut you loose?” I asked. “Wouldn’t she just fix it all later?”

“Is she fixing the problems my little virus has already created?”

“No. But now I’m not sure why that is.” I was getting more confused by the second. “If Necessity’s really the final arbiter of everything, why can’t she—I don’t know—just wave her hands and say ‘poof, all better now’?”

“Because she doesn’t have hands anymore,” said Persephone. “The gods are finite, the universe infinite. Surely you’ve heard that before.”

I had. It was practically an axiom in the Houses of Fate. The mweb and the Fate Core had both been created to manage a multilayered reality that had outgrown the control of the children of the Titans, and I said as much.

Persephone nodded. “Good, you’re halfway there. So, if that’s true, how is it possible for even Necessity to handle it all? If only the ever-expanding capacity of a massive computer network is capable of keeping an eye on everything, what does necessity make of Necessity?”

Then I saw it. Necessity wasn’t the Deus Ex Machina of Greek tradition. Not the God-in-the-Machine, but the Machina-Deus, the Machine-God.

“Necessity
is
the network!”

“She is indeed,” said Persephone. “And if you can once strike something free of her memory, it’s gone forever.”

I suddenly found myself sitting on the floor. I hadn’t just helped Persephone set a virus loose in Necessity’s network. I’d helped her set one free in Necessity’s mind. The Shara clone was messing around with the fundamental management structure of the whole shebang.

“You knew this when you recoded Shara?” I whispered.

Persephone nodded. “What did I have to lose?”

So she’d deliberately set out to hack the source code of
everything
. That took moxie. If the full truth of this ever came out, Eris was going to lose her place as the patron of hackers. Well, she would if Persephone’s hack didn’t destroy the universe.

“What’s happening with the world resource locator forks?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Persephone. “It’s not what I intended. Just as tearing this little one’s soul in twain was not what I intended. Something’s gone wrong with the plan.”

I’ll say it had!
Big-time.
But what to do about it now?

“You mentioned something about making it right,” said Shara. “About my soul, that is. Did you really mean it?”

“I did. It’s the least I can do. But I don’t know how to go about it.”

“Help us get into Necessity’s system,” said Shara. “Into Necessity herself, I guess. If anyone can fix things there, it’s Ravirn.”

Persephone looked at me, her eyes cold and hurting. “Why should the Raven want to do that? What’s the benefit to chaos?”

“None that I know of, but I’m more of an accidental chaos power than an active advocate for disorder.”

“Yeah,” said Shara, “he can do more damage by mistake than most people can manage with careful planning. Still, his heart’s in the right place.”