Cybermancy (6 page)

“I think we have a problem,” I said, staring at the words hovering above the screen.

Mel looked over my shoulder and whistled. It began as a note of alarm but quickly changed into the binary line of an escape spell. Nothing happened. It was like he hadn’t even run the program. He tried again.
Ditto.
Before I could think to do anything else, the office door opened. I reached for my gun, but my hand stopped halfway.

A goddess stood in the doorway.
Persephone, daughter of the Earth and Hades’ consort, the queen of the damned.
Hades, the place, is not Hell any more than Hades, the god, is Lucifer.
And yet . . .

No one comes to Hades for fun, and only the desperate few
visit
by choice. Persephone wasn’t one of the latter. Long ago Hades stole her from her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of the Corn and one of the many faces of Gaia. In those days, Persephone was the very embodiment of spring, its beauty made flesh. Hades saw her walking in the world above and kidnapped her, raped her, made her his wife. For Persephone, Hades is indeed Hell. Perhaps all the more so because she is free to leave for nine months each year.

When Demeter discovered that her daughter had been stolen, she ended summer, calling down an eternal winter where no seed could be sown in the frozen ground, no flower would grow on the vine, and no fruit might ripen in the tree. Finally, Zeus forced Hades to give Persephone up to her mother so that winter might end, but not before Hades made her eat three pomegranate seeds from one of the trees of the underworld and bound her to spend three months of each year at his side.

When Persephone returned to Demeter in the youth of the year, she brought the spring with her. When Hades summoned her back to the underworld, winter reigned again.

It’s one of the darker, starker tales of the gods. There’s no sugarcoating it, and even I can’t bear to joke about it. It makes me ashamed that Hades shares my blood. Now I discovered that the scariest part of the whole thing is that you can read the story in her face.

She was every bit as beautiful as ever.
Tall, lissome, long dark hair and perfect skin, the classical Greek goddess, only more so.
None of that mattered once you’d seen her eyes. They were winter and sorrow bound into living tissue.
Ever-changing, yet eternally frozen and monochrome.
Gray and bottomless, like the leaden clouds of December one moment, the white that brings ice-blindness the next, and as black as a frozen lake in between.
It took a huge effort of will to look away. When I did, all thoughts of weapons had fled. Adding to her pain was something I would not, could not, do. Instead, I placed my hands flat on the desk in front of me.

Long seconds slid past in silence. The Goddess entered the room and closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. More silence. I tried not to meet her eyes but knew it was only a matter of time. The tension visible in her body made me want to see what her face was doing. I glanced toward the screen, hoping to distract myself. Words appeared in the floating IM box, wiping away the older ones.

About time
, they said.
I was beginning to think you’d never look.

“I . . . What do you want from me?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on the box that hovered between me and the screen.

What do I want, little Raven? Why don’t you tell me?

“I’m not Raven,” I said, anger drawing the words from me before I could think. I almost looked at her again but remembered not to just in time. “Fate gave me that name, and Fate is my enemy.”

Even Clotho, who took your side against your grandmother and Atropos?
The Goddess’s words splattered across the IM box.
The name was a mighty gift. Do you not want it?

“I want to be me,” I said, “simply Ravirn and no more.”

But that name was a gift of Fate, too, or did you think your parents would have given it to you without consulting the matriarch of your line? And what makes you think that being Ravirn is a simple thing?

I didn’t want to hear it, or in this case, read it. I’d had this argument too many times with Cerice. I was who I was and not what Fate would make of me. Besides, the clock was ticking, and Hades might return at any moment. I didn’t know what Persephone’s agenda was or what it might cost me, but since my heart was still beating, she obviously wanted more than my life.

I’m fast and tough, a child of Fate and practically immortal, but Persephone’s the real deal, a goddess born. I am to her like a toy-box Mercedes is to the actual car, yet she had chosen to discuss rather than demand. I might as well push my luck.

“Give it a rest, Lady.” I heard Melchior slap his forehead but ignored him. “You want something from me. That’s clear enough. What is it? Come on, speak.” I looked up. It was a mistake.

“Do you really want to hear my voice, little Raven?” she asked aloud. Sorrow washed over me with her words, a wave of pain like the chorus of an undead orchestra. Her face reflected every ounce of that agony.

My hand went to my pistol, but this time it was because I wanted to blow my brains out. I stilled the impulse, but again, it cost me. So did refocusing my gaze on the screen. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she’d moved closer. Her presence washed over me like the heat of a fire.

“OK,” I said, and my voice sounded shaky even to me, “
so
maybe that was a little hasty. If you want to keep IMing me,
that’s
just fine.”

She laughed then, a sound like rain falling on a corpse.

You learn quickly. Perhaps I
can
make use of you.

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I wasn’t in a good bargaining position, and time was most definitely not my friend. “Look, as much as I’d love to keep up the charming banter, your husband might come by at any minute. That would cause us both some problems.”

True. So, let us be quick. You want to rescue the goblin from her durance vile, yes?

I nodded.

Some variation on that old story is always why the living
find
their way here. Usually I ignore them. But you are not usual,
Raven
.
Not at all.
It is in my mind that you may yet make it out of here in one piece. And so I am inclined to help you.

“That’s great,” I said. “I can use all the help I can get.”

“Truth,” mumbled Melchior.

I ignored him. “I’ll take what you can give. I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. But I would like to know what I’m going to have to do for you in exchange.”

For starters, there’s the simple knowledge that when Hades finds out about this, it will hurt him. That alone might be enough to buy my help. But yes, I do want something. What that is will become clear with time, Ravirn. From your reputation, I think I can say it will be something you won’t mind too much ;-).

Emoticons
and
my preferred name.
Fabulous.
Why did I suddenly think this was going to cost way more than I could afford? Experience perhaps. Goddesses are never nice to you unless they feel they have to be, and payback’s the stuff of Greek tragedy.

“Right.
Great.
I’m sure I’m going to love every minute of it. In the meantime, we’ve got a goblin to rescue.” I jabbed a thumb at Shara, who’d very sensibly taken refuge under the desk. Then I pulled her laptop case out of my bag. “Do you know how I can put the one back inside the other?”

Yes. But it can’t be done in the underworld. Before your conflict with Fate, no one knew of the free will of the AIs. Afterward, Atropos alerted Hades to the need to summon souls like your Shara’s and cautioned him to be very careful in securing them. She even sent him a program for the purpose.

I sighed. Story of my life—Atropos making things difficult, that is. “Would one of those precautions involve a spiritual recompile?”

It would indeed, one that automatically grabs any soul that comes in via the mweb, as your little friend’s did, since her body had already been repaired. The only way to reverse it is to send her back out the way she came in.

“You want me to e-mail Shara out of here?”

Exactly, and the file protocol is huge.

“I’d best get on it then.” My fingers began to fly as I composed one of the stranger notes I’d ever put together. A few minutes later I double-checked the
To
line, “Cerice@
harvard.edu/mlink/via-Clotho.net
,” then reached for the attachments button.

Shara caught my hand. “Wait.”

“What?” I asked.

“Just this.”
She planted a big kiss on my cheek,
then
gave Mel one as well.
“For luck.
Thanks.”

Her expression belied her words. What she really meant was, “In case I don’t see you again.” Of course, she couldn’t say that. Neither could I. So when I kissed her back and told her to pass it along to Cerice, I didn’t say why. I pulled a networking cable from my shoulder bag and attached one end to the computer and the other to the port concealed in Shara’s nose. A moment later she was gone, sucked down the line in a visual straight out of some crazy cartoon. I wished Mel and I could go out the same way, but that would require us to leave our bodies behind—a fatal and therefore very temporary arrangement.

“Now what?”
I asked Persephone.

Now we find out whether you’re a smart enough bird to fly Hell’s coop.
Then she was gone, too, leaving me alone with Melchior. Her floating IM box vanished, exposing the more mundane screen behind and the e-mail I’d been reading when she first arrived.
Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . .
On an impulse I forwarded it to myself, being careful to leave no trace of having done so.

By the time I finished that, Melchior had already begun running the spell that would move us from Hades’ office to some more congenial spot in the underworld. This time it worked without a hitch. I hate dealing with goddesses.

As the gate opened, he asked, “Where to?”

Perhaps because my meeting with Persephone had scrambled my brains, or perhaps because it was the only answer that had ever made any sense, I decided to return to my original plan. With the issue of Shara settled, there was no reason not to try it. I would trust to my friendships and my luck.

“Take us back to the front gate.”

“Are you sure about that? What’s the plan?”

“I’m going to play it by ear,” I replied with a smile. It was kind of nice to be one step ahead of my familiar for a change.

“I hate it when you say things like that,” grumbled Melchior. “I just hate it.” But he went ahead and stepped into the gate.

 
I’ll say this for the new computerized arrangement in Hades, it made the job of getting back to the top level a lot easier than it had been for Orpheus.
Quicker, too.
Just enter the coordinates in the master computer and poof. At least it did if you were a hacker like me. As far as the computerized routing systems were concerned, I
was
Hades. I love root-level access.

We ended up on a low hill overlooking the underworld gate, with Cerberus stalking back and forth on the other side. My watch said it was coming up on midnight. He hadn’t varied his routine one iota in all the hours I’d been gone. I’d kind of hoped something would come up to distract him, so I could fake my way out. Oh well. I did have an actual Plan A; it just scared the source code out of me.

“Come on,” I said to Melchior. “It’s showtime.” I stood and calmly walked toward the gate. Looking worried, Melchior followed. “Smile, Mel. If this doesn’t work, maybe you can make a break for it while he’s tearing me limb from limb.”

“You don’t have to outrun the
cops,
you just have to outrun your accomplice?”

“Something
like
that,” I replied. “It always worked for my older sister when we got in trouble. But I hope it won’t come to that.”

Boy did I hope it wouldn’t come to that! Lyra and I had never had to run from anything fatal, but she
had
gotten me into a world of hurt on occasion.

“Uh, Boss,” said Melchior.

“Yeah.”

“There’s three of him and two of us. I know no one has a better opinion of you than you do yourself, but despite that remarkable and wholly misplaced egotism, I don’t think he’s going to need to devote more than one head to the Ravirn Squeaky Toy Project. That leaves two free.”

It was just about then that Mort spotted us. Bob and Dave swiveled to look our way an instant later.

“Back so soon?” asked Bob.

I pulled the cards out of my bag. “Want to play?”

“We won’t gamble for your lives,” said Mort. “All that dicing with death stuff is a myth.”

“Technically,” I said, “so are you. That’s not why I’m here. No normal person bets on bridge. They just play it. You said we could have a game or two once I died. Now that I’ve seen what death does to people, that seems unlikely. The shades of the dead aren’t exactly high-quality opposition material.”

“Too true,” said Dave with a sigh. “They’re worthless. We just wanted to cheer you up.”

“Thanks for the attempt,” I said, uncasing the cards and stepping up to the very edge of the gate.
One foot more, and I’d be through it.
“Since my imminent demise is going to render my value as a fourth somewhat suspect, I thought we could go a couple of rubbers before you chewed me to pieces.” I flipped the cards from one hand to the other in a fancy cascade I’d learned while getting fleeced at poker by Eris and Tyche. “What do you say?”