Mythos (22 page)

I am a child of the Titans. The chaos from which they shaped themselves runs in my veins. Even the most mundane of blades will spill chaos with my blood. And Occam is anything but mundane. Created for me by the goddess Necessity, Occam is a powerful magical tool, one charged and activated by my inner chaos. When Occam pricks me, I do not bleed. Primal Chaos pours forth from the wound.

The blade touches a deeper level of existence. According to the goddess Discord, my very flesh is an illusion, a lie I tell the universe. Occam cuts through to the truth. In my home MythOS, the process allows me limited access to the administrative control functions of reality, power normally granted only to Necessity’s personal IT department—the Furies.

Here? I hadn’t known exactly how Occam would interact with the underlying MythOS of this pantheoverse, hadn’t even been sure it wouldn’t just skewer me as it might anyone else, but I’d had hopes and had acted accordingly, raising my power to the fullest. Hopes I realized as Primal Chaos burst from my chest in a great spray that blasted Hugin and Tyr.

The transformed raven screamed and dropped Occam onto the table. The god bellowed and threw his handless arm in front of his face. The table itself began to dissolve. Lunging forward, I pulled free of Munin’s grip and flattened myself on the table in one motion.

I took a moment to heal the hole in my chest then—the hole in reality, actually—before it could do any major harm. The magic required only the tiniest trickle of the power roaring through me from the Primal Chaos. Unfortunately, it also cut that flow off completely. Some you win. . . .

Still bent forward, I caught Occam’s hilt in my right hand in a reversed grip that laid the blade flat along my outstretched arm. Then I wrenched myself upright, driving the sword back into the space behind me. Munin screamed as the point struck him in the thigh and went deep.

Spinning to my right, I rose from the stool, twisting the blade and drawing another scream as I shifted the grip from my right hand to my left. Even as I did so, Tyr drew his own shining sword. My cue to leave, since I didn’t want to face a true god, even a temporarily blind one, blade to blade. I grabbed Occam’s cane-sheath with my free hand, wrenched my blade free of Munin, and scrambled for the exit.

Ducking through into the hall, I paused only long enough to push the door tight behind me and drop the bar into place. I didn’t think it would stop any of my pursuers for long, but even a brief delay would help. Five seconds and ten running steps brought me to the cell where I’d left Tisiphone and Melchior. The bar took another two seconds, and using Occam to lever open the lock ten more beyond. By then, the door of the cell where I’d left Tyr and the ravens was already shuddering under a series of heavy blows.

“Where have you been?” yelped Melchior, as I ripped the door open. “What’s going on?”

“Same as always,” I replied, stepping into the room. “We’re running away.”

“Exit stage right pursued by the forces of darkness?” asked Melchior.

“Pretty much.” I tossed him my sword as I replaced its sheath in the rig built into my jacket.

“What am I going to do with this?” asked Melchior.

“Hold on to it and hand it to me if I need it.” Then I bent and scooped the still-unconscious Tisiphone into my arms. “Damn, she’s heavy.”

Four or five hundred pounds of hyperdense muscle and virtually unbreakable bone. What I really wanted was to throw her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but her wings needed more managing than that.

“Come on.” I ducked back into the hall in time to see a good foot of blazing steel burst out through a wide crack in the interrogation cell. “Shit.” I turned the other way and broke into a lumbering trot.

“Now what?” Melchior demanded, as we ran.

“I don’t know. This is more an escape-of-opportunity kind of deal.”

“No plan,” said Melchior. “There’s a surprise.”

We passed around a corner and into a wider space, where we faced a choice. A doorway straight ahead led into another passage. A second led off to the right, while a wooden-treaded spiral staircase disappeared into a pitch-black hole in the floor.

“Which way?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I glared around. “I don’t know.”

Melchior suddenly pointed to the stairhead. “Down into the oubliette.”

“Why?”

He just pointed. About halfway around the first curve of the stair, a pale hand clung to the stone railing. It was bobbing impatiently, and there was no arm attached.

“Good enough for me.”

As soon as we started into the dark, Laginn slid away in front of us. The stair plunged down a stone shaft not much bigger than a well—making for a very tight fit with Tisiphone in my arms. We’d descended about three loops when I heard the crash of a shattered door falling somewhere above and behind us. I picked up my pace, dangerously jumping five and six steps at a time and dragging a shoulder along the wall as a brake. Melchior, still carrying my sword over one shoulder, emulated Laginn by clambering onto the banister and sliding away into darkness.

I was just starting to hope that we had somehow managed to evade pursuit when two bad things happened simultaneously. The first was an ominous crash from above. The second was that Tisiphone woke up . . . angry. I was suddenly carrying a bonfire. An animate, angry bonfire.

Tisiphone had trained the fires of her body not to harm me, and in our world they never had. But we were no longer in our world, and she was not entirely herself. The sudden blaze in my arms burned and momentarily blinded me. I missed a jump then, landing on my back rather than my feet and involuntarily throwing Tisiphone into the air as I started to slide and tumble.

The next few seconds as I bounced down the wooden stairs are a confused mess for me and probably will remain so for as long as I live.

Picture, if you will, falling down a flight of stairs. Make it a very long staircase and spiral so that dizziness plays into the disorientation of the fall. Paint in complete blackness below and a bright blazing ball of fire above. Imagine that the fire is falling with you, occasionally hitting you in the face or chest. Add that the fire is swearing and screeching like a harpy having its wings clipped. Finally, note that the stairs are wooden and bursting into flame as they are struck repeatedly by the fireball.

Then we smacked into the stone floor at the bottom of the stairs. There, flame completely enveloped me, wrapping my exposed head and hands in hot pain, though it didn’t actually set me afire.

I screamed and screamed again, wrestling desperately with Tisiphone as I tried to free myself from the fires. At first she fought me, and not gently. Who could blame her? She had taken the same tumble I had, starting from the more confusing state of deep unconsciousness.

All the while Melchior shouted at us both to “STOP! STOP! STOP!”

It wasn’t until she had me pinned, my wrists trapped in her right hand, her left raised to tear out my throat, that she seemed to recognize me. She froze then for a long moment. A moment later, with a beat of her wings, she lifted us both to our feet.

“Where are we?” she demanded, the rage still burning bright in her hair and wings. “What happened?”

“Later,” I said, tugging her toward the place where Melchior stood waiting in the only doorway—a low and narrow arch. “We’ve got to move.”

Embers and bits of flaming tread were starting to rain down from above. She nodded, but her anger did not abate. Together, we ducked beneath the low keystone and into the rough and narrow passage beyond. As soon as they saw we were coming, both Melchior and Laginn began to run.

A creaking added itself to the roar of flames in the stairwell then, and I broke into a hunching run as well—forced to stay low by the height of the passage. It had occurred to me what would happen when the whole great vertical fire weakened the supports of the stairs enough and dropped itself to the bottom. It was not a pretty picture. Neither in my head nor, when it happened several moments later, in reality.

The fire, driven by the air pressure of the collapsing mass, reached down the hall after us like the arm of some terrible faceless giant. It was accompanied by a deep groaning and grinding that suggested the stone walls of the stairwell had collapsed with the stairs. We ran faster, stopping only when the noise and the heat had died away to nothing, leaving us in a quiet, cold place deep beneath the ground.

It was the first chance I’d had to really look at our surroundings since I’d been stabbed. We stood in a wide place in the tunnel, where a second narrow passage came in from the right, making a sort of crossing chamber, perhaps ten feet long and six wide, with a ceiling high enough to stand upright. The walls were of limestone blocks.

I was still trying to process the details of our escape when Tisiphone caught my shoulders and turned me to face her. I couldn’t help but notice the myriad small cuts and fresh bruises she sported. She looked rather like I felt, actually.

“What in the name of all the gods is going on!” she demanded.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” I countered.

She snarled and punched the wall, shattering a stone block. Reaching under her wing, she groped for a moment before thrusting out her hand. In it she held the three silvery hairs Melchior had found earlier. Her fires danced higher, and I had to step back.

“These! These are the last thing I remember.” Her fires dropped then, darkening the chamber noticeably—as she provided our only light. “Do you know what they are, Ravirn?” Her voice was quiet, deadly, hurt.

“I’m not sure.” I had my suspicions, but I didn’t voice them.

“They are hairs from the head of a Fury. A Fury.”

I looked down, away from the incredible pain in her eyes.

“I have no icy sister,” she said, still in that deadly voice. “There are only storm and sea and fire. For four thousand years, that is the way it has been. For four thousand years we have done every single thing that Necessity asked or wanted. Four thousand years of loyalty beyond measure or question or love. For Necessity I would have killed even you, whom I hold dearest of any besides my sisters. Four thousand years, and how am I repaid?”

Tisiphone paused then, but I didn’t—couldn’t—answer her. She held the hairs up again.

“I will tell you how I am paid. With near-instant replacement. How long were we gone from our own worlds when you found these?” She bent her gaze on Melchior, who did not answer.

“Not even forty-eight hours,” she continued. “I gave Necessity four thousand years of loyalty, and she gave me forty hours in return.” She laughed, and it was a bitter thing, like bad water drunk only because of dire thirst. “Not that I should be surprised, knowing as I do how she treated her firstborn daughter. Nemesis. Our elder sister whom we replaced and imprisoned to serve the will of our collective mother, our beloved Necessity. May she know eternal torment.”

What could I say to that? I who had, if only for a moment, felt Necessity’s pain over her earlier betrayal of her daughter Nemesis? I who knew that necessity had driven Necessity to do something she had never wanted and could never undo? Nothing. I looked away.

Silence settled as dense and thick as a poisonous fog, and I didn’t know how to blow it away. But the pressure built, and I could feel my smart-mouth reflexes trying to kick in. I stifled them as best I could, hoping for a miracle that would prevent me saying something stupid and unforgivable. Just then there came a tap-tap-tapping from Laginn, breaking the tension. As soon as the hand had our attention, it pointed rather vigorously down the side passage, clearly indicating we should get moving again.

I nodded to the hand but realized there were a couple of things I wanted to do before we moved another step. First, I retrieved Occam from Melchior and resheathed it. Then I asked him to perform Lock and Load, the spell he’d cooked up to summon a replacement .45 the last time the ravens took it away from me. It was a fairly complex piece of magic, which took him several tries because of the limits of his pseudobinary skills, but eventually he managed it. I hate to keep a round in the pipe, but considering the circumstances, I jacked the slide and did it anyway before adding another bullet to the clip.

When I finished, Laginn started off at a brisk pace, and we followed. After a time, I filled a silent Tisiphone in on what had transpired during her unconsciousness. When I was done, she didn’t say anything. Not right away at least.

I was just trying to think of some other neutral thing I might say when she muttered something about frying some raven tail feathers. I chose to interpret it as a threat to Hugin and Munin rather than a reflection on any actions of my own.

“So, do you know where we are now?” she asked, sniffing the air and wrinkling her nose.

“Beyond being under Asgard city? No idea. You could ask Laginn.”

“Wherever it is, I’d bet blood there’s a sewer attached to it somewhere,” said Tisiphone.

Her prediction was borne out a few minutes later when Laginn led us to a very firmly closed door beyond which lay a much wider tunnel holding a river of sewage. Its surface lay a couple of feet below the floor of our side passage and a narrow walkway running along the nearer wall.

“Crap,” said Melchior, before whistling something that sounded like a root directive.

“Rather a lot of it,” I agreed. “I imagine that Valhalla, with its never-ending feast, produces a good bit of . . . waste biomass. Was that a bioware command you just whistled?”

“Yes, shutting my nose down,” he said. “Sorry I can’t do the same for you and Tisiphone.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Tisiphone made a face and shook her head. “It’s a good thing you can’t, or I’d be tempted, despite how much I rely on my sense of smell.”

We followed Laginn out onto the walkway and off to our left. For perhaps a quarter of a mile nothing changed. Then we came to a junction where a much smaller sewer entered, passing beneath us via a low archway. Just beyond, a wide platform hung over the passing sludge. In its center a hundred or so rats made a large circle, each holding the tail of the rat in front of it as they scurried along.