Spellcrash (13 page)

“How much time do we have before someone comes to fix things?” asked Melchior.

“Enough,” said Alecto. “At least an hour. Perhaps as long as three. It depends on which of the minds of Necessity notices it first.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Again, Alecto smiled her tiny half smile. “My own reasons and not for sharing. The better question would be ‘what?’ As in what did I want to tell you.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What?”

“You can’t trust Shara.”

“That’s bullshit.” Melchior leaned angrily forward in his chair.

I held up a hand to forestall the tirade. “Hang on a second, Mel. I’m thinking that Alecto has gone to way too much trouble to arrange a private meeting to just leave it at that. She has to know that we’re not going to take her word over an old friend’s under the circumstances. Right?” I raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Alecto.

“Right, though again, I have to stress that I didn’t
arrange
anything. Our current, wholly unexpected privacy is an unfortunate consequence of my making a rage-driven error in judgment.”

“Sorry. I keep forgetting.” I felt a strong temptation to ask if all the doublethink hurt, but forbore in the interest of keeping the discussion on track. “You were saying, Alecto?”

“Shara. I don’t expect you to take my word. In fact, I don’t expect you to believe a thing I’m about to tell you. I’m just hoping that you will remember it when the time comes or circumstances give you reasons to doubt. There is something wrong with Necessity.”

“You don’t say,” drawled Melchior, obviously still stinging from what he saw as an attack on a longtime friend. “We would never have guessed that without your amazing insight.” The lightning flashes in Alecto’s hair and wings picked up their tempo. “Don’t mock me, little man. Not if you want to live. I am a Fury operating at the ragged edge of my envelope. My patience has very finite limits under the best of circumstances, and the current state of affairs shortens the horizon considerably.”

I didn’t like the threat there, and neither did Fenris if the flattening of his ears provided any signal to his mood, but I needed to know what Alecto had to tell us. I put a hand on Melchior’s shoulder and gently but firmly squeezed. He nodded and made a show of firmly closing his mouth. Laginn returned to a perch on Fenris’s neck.

“Thank you,” said Alecto, and the lightning began to subside. “The reason I’m warning you against Shara is the same reason I might warn you against Necessity herself if I could do so without violating my nature as a Fury. There is something wrong with Necessity—the computer, not the goddess—and at the most fundamental level. I can’t say what, though I’ve been trying desperately to locate the cause.”

Alecto flicked her wings and bounced from the chair, beginning to pace. As she did so, I felt a faint whisper of movement across my skin, as though the breeze of her wings had ruffled my—

currently nonexistent—Raven’s feathers. It was a familiar and worrying feeling, as it usually presaged magical weirdness. I looked around uneasily but couldn’t see much of anything in the darkness beyond the first couple of ranks of server racks.

“It could be that some remnant of the Persephone virus has reactivated itself,” continued Alecto.

“Or perhaps there is some other intrusion into the network from outside—maybe a power who has used this moment of my mother’s weakness to try to subvert the system. Most likely, I fear, is some sort of short-circuit-driven madness that has infected even the most basic processes of the electronic mind of Necessity.”

She pinned Melchior with a hard look. “Never forget that your Shara is doing all of her thinking with the same flawed mind that the rest of Necessity is forced to use. However much you love and trust your friend, know that I love and trust Necessity as much or more. And I say that she is acting and reacting in ways that are not what they should be, that are not even self-consistent.” Alecto turned away from us, and her wings drooped almost to the floor. Her voice lowered, too.

“Megaera and I have parted ways over which Necessity is the true goddess. She is following orders from a part of Necessity that I find worrisome, an angry, bitter Necessity with a dark and terrible vision of the future.”

“Call it a
just vision
, and you will come closer to the truth,” said a new voice. A voice that sounded as though it came from a mouth not entirely designed for human speech, and one I recognized.

The fluffing of my invisible feathers directionalized itself then, drawing my attention up and off to my left.

The scorpion-styled spinnerette scuttled into view there a moment later, crawling upside down along the cavern ceiling as easily as any of her lesser arachnid cousins might. She looked even less human in person than she had over Persephone’s video feed and somehow much more sinister.

“I don’t believe I invited you to join the discussion.” Alecto’s voice came out calm and uninflected, but the lightnings in her wings and hair danced a wild gyre and increasingly jumped to the ground or the nearby computer racks, flavoring the air with ozone and burning circuitry.

“I am the Voice of Necessity,” said the spinnerette. “I go where I will in the kingdom of my mistress, and no one can stop me, not even a traitor Fury such as you or that ice bitch who serves the interloper.”

Alecto’s claws slid from their sheaths, and her lightning redoubled itself as she opened her wings to their fullest spread. The little crackles that had accompanied her earlier anger gave way to a series of sharp booms like miniature thunder as the bolts grew longer and stronger. The nearest rack of servers shorted with a huge zorching sound and exploded into white fire.

“I’ve had it with you,” snarled Alecto, and there was nothing calm, or even human, in her tone.

“Now might be a good time for an exit stage right,” Melchior whispered.

“Don’t you want to see how this turns out?” Fenris seemed entranced by the display.

“No, not really.” Melchior shook his head. “I really am all right with not knowing some things.

Especially if said things might hurt me.” He rolled his eyes. “Why can’t I convince anyone of that?”

“I think Mel might have a point this time.” I slid from my chair and started edging toward the gap where we had entered.

Fenris’s tail sagged, and his ears drooped, but he fell in behind me.

“Uh, Boss?” Melchior hadn’t moved.

“Yes?”

“Why not just slash us a doorway into the great beyond?”

I blinked. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. Occam’s expanded reach was too new. “Good question. Raven House, here we come.”

I drew upon the well of anger that Shara’s forced modifications had left me to summon the sword and make the cut. There was something odd about the sound Occam made as it sliced the air this time, almost like an echo, but it really didn’t register fully until I’d stepped through the gap and into a sucker punch that left me curled around a ball of pain while I vomited my guts out.

For what felt like a very long time, I could neither breathe nor think straight. Just as I regained enough coherence to wonder how many of my internal organs might have survived the impact, I felt something hard and sharp press down on my right wrist, pinning it to the cold concrete of the floor on which I lay. Looking up, I found Megaera standing over me. She had a grim smile on her face and had placed the claws of her left foot firmly across my sword wrist. Above her, a corrugated steel roof suggested some sort of big industrial space like an airplane hangar. It was chilly, probably below sixty, though well above freezing.

“If you make any attempt to use the sword to cut yourself a door out of here, I will remove your hand,” said Megaera. “Do you understand?”

I glanced around, hoping to find out what had become of my companions, but I could only see a lot of open space in the near distance and what looked like a couple of eighties-era mainframe clusters off on the far side of the hangar. Wherever I was, Fenris and Melchior were not there with me.

Megaera increased the pressure of her claws, nearly breaking the skin. “Say yes or no.”

“Yes or no.” I had to.

“Not smart.” Megaera leaned down and backhanded me. “Yes, or no?” The place where her knuckles had met my cheekbone felt as though someone were making an ongoing attempt to drill for oil. The Trickster in me wanted nothing more than to tell her that was only 5.5 on the beatings scale and seriously underperformed the Fury standard as set by my ex-girlfriend, while my brand-new inner anger-management problem was lobbying for sinking my teeth into her ankle. Oddly enough, that tug in two directions made it easier to think straight.

I vetoed both suicidal impulses, and said, “Yes?”

“Better.” She kept the pressure on my wrist but didn’t hit me again, which struck me as a win under the present circumstances.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked.

“Not a clue, but I figure you’re going to tell me whether I want to know or not, so it’s really not the uppermost question in my mind.” That would be: Why
weren’t
the others here?

“I can’t imagine what Tisiphone ever saw in you,” she said.

“Good looks? Boyish charm? Raw sex appeowww!”

The second backhand landed exactly where the first had, to the millimeter. When I came back from the place the pain had sent me, I could feel my cheek swelling like a bag of microwave popcorn set on high. Apparently it was my week for injuries.

“Whatever she saw,” said Megaera, “it can’t have been brains. Sometimes I am honestly surprised your skull hasn’t collapsed in on the sucking vacuum between your ears.” She leaned closer. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just kill you and put you out of my misery?”

“Offhand?” I shook my head . . . which turned out to be a bad idea, at least according to my cheekbone. I had to force the rest of the words out past the big black cloud of pain that tried to take me off to dreamland. “No. But I’m pretty sure you can.”

“What makes you so certain of that, Raven?”

“The fact that I’m still breathing is a pretty good clue. If you had no use for me, I’d already be dead.”

Megaera smiled nice and wide, one of the scariest expressions I’d ever seen. “Maybe you
are
dead, and I’m just dragging things out for maximum suffering. I am a power of vengeance, after all.”

Didn’t that just sound like fun? Plausible, ugly, and scary as all get-out. Still, I had to keep up the side, so I pasted on a smile of my own.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You haven’t hurt me enough for that.” Then, before she decided to make a liar of me, I shifted the subject. “What did you do to my gate to bring me here without the others? That was a clever piece of work.” I figured a little flattery never hurts when you’re dealing with people who go in for the whole worshippers-and-burnt-offerings thing. Besides, it was true.

“I sliced a gate of my own from the other side. It opened into the air between you and yours.

After you joined me here, I closed mine, leaving your companions to pass through the one you’d made. Though”—and her smile shone all the brighter—“they may end up regretting that by and by.”

“How so?” I felt an anxious little pain in my stomach as I realized that I hadn’t the faintest idea how a Fury-style gate actually worked.

Megaera shook her head. “I think I’d rather just let you worry about it for now. It’s much more satisfying for me that way.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just get yourself laid? I know this nearsighted cyclops that’s always seemed a bit on the desperate si—” I bit my own tongue, but knew I’d already said too much.

Shit. I had to get my attitude and my mouth to stop running around together without consulting my brain.

The Furies are damned good at their job. Megaera delivered two very precise, very fast kicks with her free foot. The first came in under my hip and momentarily lifted me half onto my left side, twisting the shoulder of my pinned arm painfully. The second kick struck my briefly exposed lower back just over the kidney. My whole body felt like it had dissolved into a sort of jelly made entirely from berries off the agony bush.

“I am
so
going to enjoy it when I finally get the go-ahead to kill you,” said Megaera.

My very clever response came out something like, “Blarg,” which was probably for the best, considering the results of my previous efforts at wit.

“Don’t be such a baby,” said Megaera. “I didn’t do any permanent damage. Oh, you’ll probably be peeing red for a couple of days, but that’s all. Think of it as a keepsake of our time together.” I chewed on my tongue some more, as the Trickster seemed to have won the argument with my shiny new inner Fury over the best way to commit suicide. It would have been a great time for the cavalry to come charging over the hill, trumpets blowing, but that’s never been the way my life works. And apparently today was no exception, as evidenced by the fact that the next arrival on the scene was a familiar-looking giant scorpion-lady. To add insult to injury, she seemed not the least bit the worse for wear.

“How did things go with Alecto?” asked Megaera. “Did she finally see reason?”

“I’m afraid not.” The spinnerette sighed. “And I remonstrated with her most forcefully.”

“Are you trying to claim that you just came from a toe-to-toe with a Fury, and she didn’t even muss your hair?” I demanded. “No mere spinnerette has that kind of power.” The scorpion-lady laughed. “Of course not. Haven’t you been listening? I am much more than a

‘mere spinnerette, ’ Raven. I am the voice of Necessity and, when She so chooses, She can speak quite firmly.”

“I note that you didn’t answer the question I asked,” I said. “So, I’m not buying it. I’ve seen the Furies go up against Eris, and no one, not even a full goddess, comes out of a slugging match with Alecto without picking up a few scrapes.”

“Do you have a better explanation?” asked the scorpion.

I didn’t, but I still didn’t believe her, in part because she still hadn’t answered my question.

“I could teach him to respect you,” said Megaera, sounding simultaneously angry and hopeful.

“Or better yet, I could just kill him and get him out of the way.”