Spellcrash (14 page)

“Not yet,” said the scorpion. “Necessity still believes he might prove useful in ridding the system of the other players. Especially with the powers so recently granted by that little fool of a webgoblin.”

Megaera growled like a frustrated mastiff but didn’t argue. Instead, she asked, “Will she really come here today? You promised me that she would, Delé.”

“
She
promised,” said the scorpion . . . Delé. “Mine were merely the lips She used. And, yes, She’ll come. I can feel Her approaching even now.”

I could only assume that “She” was Necessity, or, at least, whatever entity Megaera acknowledged as such.

Whoever said Necessity-like being might really be, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to make her acquaintance. So, as the cavalry trumpets still hadn’t started blowing, I decided that I’d better start arranging my own rescue. The only problem was how.

I couldn’t do anything with my shiny new Occam version 2.0 without losing it—an eventuality I might have considered a fair trade if it hadn’t also involved the loss of the attached hand. I don’t whistle fast enough to LTP my way out of a paper bag in anything less then ten minutes, and I didn’t think that Megaera would let me get away with running that much code.

That shortened the available menu to various flavors of chaos magic and the powers of the Raven. Unfortunately, since I really didn’t much like chaos magic, the only wild spells I’ve had much practice with were the ones for shapechanging and faerie rings. The former wouldn’t get me anywhere; they’d just rearrange the bits that Megaera wanted to break. And the latter don’t work on Necessity’s world.

That didn’t mean that the Raven wasn’t the best chance I had, just that I needed to manage things without a lot of the usual bang and flash, like oh, say, the giant bird shadow that had always accompanied my use of chaos magic since I’d become the Raven.
Was
there a way to invoke the Raven without flaunting its plumage? I could feel sweat begin to bead on my forehead as I kept coming back to that question without finding any good answers.

Delé the scorpion let out a sudden little gasp. “She is almost here.” Damn. I wasn’t going to be able to manage this. Not unless I got a lot smarter in the next couple of minutes, and that didn’t seem any more likely than the idea of some cosmic cavalry coming along to pull my fat out of the fire.

Think, damn it!
I mentally yelled at myself, though it didn’t seem to help.
Think, Raven!
Then,
No. Wait. Think, Ravirn, not Raven.

The Raven was not the only route I could take to find chaos, just the easiest and quickest. The primal version runs in the veins of every child of the Titans. That chaos-touched blood is the ultimate wellspring of all our magic, and even the most ordered among us can draw it forth at need. I had tapped the flow directly more than once back when I was still a child of Fate in good standing, before I ever heard the name Raven. I had used the rough magic flowing in my blood to kill my cousin Moric and had made my first faerie ring in like manner. Why couldn’t I do it again now?

I just needed to spill a little of my Titan legacy to provide a seed. Well, probably more than a little, considering the divine status of my captor. Of course, the bleeding would be the easy part.

Figuring out how to convert magic to mobility posed a far greater problem. I’d already ruled out LTP, faerie rings, and Fury gates, as well as all the slower forms of running away that I could think of. What did that leave me?

As I searched my memory for an answer, I found my thoughts turning to my most recent visit to Castle Discord and the means by which Eris had drawn me to her. It might only provide the ragged beginnings of a plan, but that was a step in the right direction—toward the exit.

At the exact moment that idea occurred to me, Madam Scorpion let out a hiss like a satisfied steam engine, threw wide the arms of her humanoid half, and shouted, “At last!” A shimmering bubble of light formed in the space above and in front of her, seeming to congeal from thin air. I really needed to get past thinking and into skedaddling. The first step was blood.

With a little mental wince, I jerked my right arm about half an inch, then yelped, “Sorry.

Cramp!”

Megaera snarled and tensed, but she didn’t take my hand off—she was too busy staring hopefully at that shimmer of approaching doom.

Almost absently, she said, “I told you not to move. You won’t get another warning.” I nodded, but didn’t say anything for fear of giving some hint of my hopes away. As a result of my sudden movement, I had five neat parallel slices across the flesh of my sword wrist and would soon have plenty of blood to work with. Now, if the powers that be just gave me enough time to figure out exactly what Eris had done to convert me from a loosely organized cluster of particles to a wave propagating itself through the stuff of chaos, I might make it out of there yet.

A sharp, breaking-balloon sound drew my attention from my arm to the bubble of shimmering light as it popped, leaving behind . . . another shimmering bubble? No, this smaller sphere reflected light rather than producing it from within. The gazing ball of doom had finally caught up to me again.

“That’s your—” I began, only to be cut off by Megaera’s glad cry of, “Mother!” and Delé’s hissing, “Goddess.”

The smoke-streaked silver sphere rotated in the air, and again I had the distinct impression of a great mirrored eye turning to regard me. A very hostile eye. This time, though, it triggered a secondary sense of déjà vu, as of older memories half-buried.

“Can I kill him now?” Megaera asked the sphere.

Delé’s expression went vague and dreamy for a moment. “Not quite yet,” she crooned. “Not unless it looks like he might escape. But soon, my favorite daughter, very soon.” Definitely time to go. I closed my eyes, and ever so gently and quietly began to reach for the chaos residing in the slowly widening puddle of blood under my sliced wrist. I did so with a caution I’d largely discarded in the years since I’d become the Raven, focusing so completely on the task that the outside world seemed to recede into shadows around me.

Gently . . . gently. Ahh. Almost there . . .
A distant sound like tearing Velcro tugged at my attention. But I was so close . . .
There!
I had my connection. Now I just needed to make with the traveling-by-chaos-waves thing. The only problem was that I still hadn’t figured out how. It had felt so very odd.
Wait—Velcro?
Why did that ring an alarm bell? My eyes opened, apparently of their own accord, and I saw a bulging slice in the wall of reality. Beyond it stood Alecto.

“Kill him!” snapped Delé.

Megaera turned back toward me, her diamond claws flashing as she lifted her arm and—I preempted her. Without understanding any of the whys or hows, I forced myself to
feel
as I had felt when Eris transported me—to become motion at the expense of substance.

Megaera finished her strike. Too late. I had already ceased to be me in the traditional sense, vanishing in the very moment when her claws should have taken my head off. I slipped free of form and place, using the chaos in my spilled blood as a bridge to the chaos that contained all of reality. In the next moment, though I no longer had ears to hear or eyes to see, I could sense the impact of Megaera’s blow striking the concrete where I had so recently lain. The magic in her claws echoed through the thought-thin walls of reality, its vibration perturbing the wave that encoded the information describing the me I had just been and would be again, powers willing.

There were just one or two teensy-weensy little problems, problems that were becoming apparent to me
because
of my new state of being as an informational wave function. I was thinking with my entire self, not just my flesh-and-blood brain, and that made certain things that otherwise might not have made any sense very clear. To start with, I hadn’t specified a destination, and that turned out to be an exceptionally bad idea.

The process initiated by Discord had involved the transformation of the informational totality of the Raven, the illusion of my reality if you will, into a tightly focused wave that propagated itself through a defined channel in the stuff of chaos in much the way that even quite faint sound waves will travel along a string pulled tight between two tin cans. What
I
had done was much more akin to dropping a rock in a puddle, which sent the wave that was me spreading outward equally in every direction.

Which highlighted my second problem. I simply didn’t have the amplitude available to a great power like Eris. As I traveled farther in every direction from my point of entry, I could feel myself quickly dissipating. When Eris had summoned me, she had used her vastly greater magical strength to create a clear channel for the directionalized wave-form version of me to travel through. Not only had I not known to do that; I couldn’t have managed it if I’d tried.

Because of that, I was going to . . . well, not die exactly, more like become one with the background noise of the Primal Chaos.

It was almost a peaceful feeling, marred only by the way the wave that was me kept breaking around an anomaly in the stuff of the Primal Chaos. It . . . I don’t want to say
itched
, because I wasn’t feeling things in that way, but it drew the attention. Like a hole in your boots that you rediscover every few minutes as you step in a puddle, and your foot gets wet.

Almost against my will, I found myself paying more and more of my steadily fading attention to the thing.
What was it, really?
I forced myself to focus.
Ah, a rip in the wall of reality. Another—

what did they call them? Fury gate. That was it.

There, I’d identified the problem; now I could let go and . . .
Wait.
There was more to it. From this side of the wall of reality I could sense the Fury gate as something like a drill bit punching its way through chaos to open a hole between points in two different worlds. The nearer endpoint was very close to me. Otherwise, I’d never have been able to touch it. More, it was in use. I could feel the presence of an individual traveling through the hole in chaos—and through my wave-form self—and out through that near anchor. Melchior! Too bad I would never see him again.
No, damn it!
I had to at least say good-bye.

I reached for Melchior, and though I didn’t actually touch him, the reaching gave me an idea.

Maybe I didn’t have to fade away after all. I focused my scattered attention even tighter, pouring all of the me that I could identify into and through that slender hole.

If I’d had a central nervous system at that point, it probably would have hurt rather a lot. Since I didn’t, I will simply liken the process to what a hundred gallons of sugary marshmallow goo must feel like as it is forced through the extruder to make Circus Peanuts. Only in this case, the end product of that extrusion was a reconstituted Ravirn lying facedown on a cold concrete floor.

Whoopee.

It felt rather like the current version of me had been made entirely of limp noodles, or congealed extract of pulled muscles—something profoundly ineffective and floppy at any rate. Given my preference, I would have stayed in my little heap on the nice solid floor just beyond the gate and napped until someone woke me with a tray of hot chocolate and toasted cheese sandwiches.

Except that said floor belonged to the same damn hangarlike building I’d just burned several ounces of blood and about a million calories to escape, and it was not a Ravirn-friendly environment. In fact, judging from what I could see by making the massive effort required to tilt my head to one side, it looked like the center of a really epic dustup.

A badly bruised Alecto and the gazing ball of doom were hammering away at each other like a couple of old-style bare-knuckles brawlers in a cage match, while Megaera and Cerice had tied themselves into a whirling Gordian knot of sharp, pointy, mutual assured destruction. The cavalry had apparently arrived to save me about two seconds after I’d made my own somewhat-boneheaded escape attempt. Sadly, they’d forgotten the trumpets, or I might have known to sit tight and avoid that whole wave-function nastiness. Of course, that would have ended with me getting beheaded, so maybe ending up nine-tenths dead
was
the best solution. And wasn’t that just the story of my life?

I wanted to take a little nap, and I might have if I hadn’t noticed that Madam Scorpion didn’t have a dance partner and apparently wasn’t the sort to play wallflower while waiting for someone to ask her out on the floor. Instead, she was coming straight for me with the obvious intent of waltzing violently all over my rather fragile-feeling self. I commanded my limp arm-noodles to get between me and the floor and make getting-up motions. Nothing much happened except for an odd sort of groaning noise that seemed to be coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my face.

Melchior stepped into my field of vision. “Boss, now would be a really good time to get up and go right the hell back through that gate! What were you thinking coming back here?” When I didn’t respond, he bent down to put his eyes on a level with mine. “Boss? Are you in there?” I smiled and reassured him I was fine, or that was how it went inside my head. The data stream coming in through my eyes and ears suggested that the only thing that changed was the frequency and tone of that damn moaning noise. Melchior glanced over his shoulder at the rapidly approaching giant scorpion-woman and started swearing and tugging at my shoulder.