Spellcrash (5 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “Raven House seems to self-repair.”

“Yeah, right, it does,” humphed Haemun, as he kept working on my hand.

Laginn seemed fascinated by the spinnerette—walking around and around the corpse. Then he stopped, and it started to circle him. Or maybe that was just the room spinning. Oh. Morphine and blood loss. Right.

Good night, Gracie.

When the world came back, I found that it had put me neatly away in my very own bed and tucked the covers in around my chin. Very considerate of it.

My room is on the second floor of Raven House and about three times as big as I would have picked out for myself if it had been a front-brain decision. Like the rest of the house, the décor is all black and green, with living moss where someone sensible might have picked out a carpet, and walls of gem-quality malachite. In recent months the ceiling has transformed itself into some sort of light-absorbing black stone pinpricked with about a zillion naturally phosphorescent spots that perfectly mimic the constellations of the night sky as they appear at midnight on midsummer’s eve. The furnishings are simple, stark almost—sort of IKEA meets and starts dating really expensive tropical hardwoods, and together they move into an old Spanish mission.

The room has two lanais, or balconies if you prefer, though the Hawaiian word is more versatile.

One faces the center of the island and the bulk of the mountains to the south. The other looks west over the bay. At the moment, a turn of my head in that direction showed the low-hanging sun above the waters. The door was open, and the evening breeze felt cool on my sweaty forehead.

Melchior had returned to laptop shape and settled himself on the nightstand. The steady dim/bright/dim cycle of his indicator lights told me he was sleeping, though he’d left his lid open—a clear invitation to wake him when I got there myself. I paused before doing so to admire my handiwork. I’d built his current laptop body from my own specs, rather than following one of Lachesis’s recipes as I had for Melchior 1.0, and I was pretty proud of the results.

He is currently the multiverse’s only quantum-processing, webgoblin, subnotebook—less than half an inch thick and weighing in at just under a pound. His top surface is a very pale blue with an outline of his face etched into it, an outline that doubles as an exterior monitor. He is deeper blue underneath, with loops of LEDs like dragon scales that throw off an eerie glow.

I’d given him bands of blue anodized aluminum around the edges, and surrounded his screen with a frame of brushed aluminum broken only by the blue goblin-head logo on the bottom right.

His keyboard was a block of underlit white surrounded by more blue aluminum. A goblin-head trackpad sat beneath that, and I tapped the right ear to bring him awake. The motion brought a twinge from somewhere deep under the bandages wrapping my right hand.

Whazup,
printed itself across the screen, and the logo blinked blearily at me—all a put-on, of course.

I grinned and carefully typed,
Me for one. Did I miss anything?
One-handing it wasn’t much fun, but neither was it a totally unfamiliar experience.

Not really. You didn’t want to be awake for the stitches anyway. Fenris backtracked the
spinnerette to a fresh faerie ring, which cut the trail dead. We decided to leave the next move till
you woke up. How do you feel?

I paused to stretch my right hand, then started typing. It involved a lot of backspacing but ultimately came out as:
Pretty good actually. There’s some pain, and the way that stitches tug
when you move them always creeps me out a little bit, but I seem to be able to straighten my
fingers all right. Give me a chance to take a bath, and I’ll be ready to go have a look at that
faerie ring. I’d rather not have any rogue rings on the island. Can you shift over and give me
some help with bagging my hand?

“Done,” said Melchior, flickering from laptop to goblin in an instant. The quantum shift was less elegant but much faster than his old morphing transformation.

The bath was wonderful even if I did have to take it with my injured hand duct-taped into a plastic sack. Once I was out, dry, and free of the sack, I hit the closet for a fresh set of motorcycle leathers. I don’t get to ride my bike nearly as much as I used to, but I really like the armor factor. Especially since the Kevlar lining that Tech-Sec puts in all their stuff will stop small-caliber bullets. By the time I got all geared up, the sun had touched the horizon, which meant putting the hurry on if we wanted to get this done tonight. Kauai, without people, gets damned dark after the sun goes down.

We made a nice little group of weirdos on our way down to the faerie ring, even without Haemun. One giant wolf with a disembodied hand riding on his back, one knee-high bald blue goblin peering out of a new Tech-Sec laptop bag, and me—a pointy-eared, cat-eyed, goth refugee from the Houses of Fate. The ring itself had opened about a mile from the house in the place where the Tropical Taco van used to park on most of the main bands of Decision Loci that make up the Greek MythOS. The ring itself was a neat circle of taro plants in the middle of an ankle-deep pond.

“What’s the plan?” asked Fenris.

“Enter the circle and wing it.” I got a good grip on a handful of his fur—lose contact with someone in a faerie ring, and you may never find them again.

“Why is it that ‘wing it’ is always part of the plan with you?” Melchior glared at me from his seat in the bag.

I pointed at my face with my good hand. “Hacker.”

“I know that, but sometimes I feel like it might be nice to at least think about the next step.”

“I have, and this is it.” I stepped forward into the ring and elsewhere.

Faerie rings are a by-product of the chaos that divides the multiverse, intrusions of raw magic into the workaday world. Though no two rings appear exactly alike, they are all a part of the sea of Primal Chaos from which everything came, and so, in a fundamental way, there is actually only one ring. Step into any ring, and you have entered
the
master ring. The real questions are where and how and
if
you will ever step out again.

As I entered, I drew the power of the Raven around me, a power of and over chaos, reaching through it to twist the ring to my will. I had once used the same power to summon the world of Raven House into existence. Or possibly, to take me through to a world that already contained the refuge I needed. The result was the same either way. Now I commanded the ring to find the place the spinnerette had entered and to bring me there.

The sunset jungle vanished, replaced by . . . disorientation. I stood in a circle of blackened silver spoons atop a slightly larger circle of congealed yellow fire, the whole surrounded by the endless churning irrationality of the Primal Chaos. Direction and motion ceased to mean anything. There was no way to tell if I was hanging upside down from a star or standing atop a thrown stone skipping across the great sea of beginnings.

“Where are we?” demanded Fenris in a voice that held more of the animal than anything I’d heard from him before, as much wolfish whimpering as words.

I had trouble focusing enough to answer. Chaos hits me like a combination of strong drink and pure bottled happy. I stepped to the edge of the ring and peered out over the side of our tiny platform. Direction reasserted itself.

We were up. What lay on the underside of the circle was down. Best of all, I knew right where we were. Walking on the sun. Castle Discord is an ever-changing island floating in chaos. Most of the time, it pleases Discord for her home to have a sun in the form of a fiery golden apple. Our ring was on the back of Discord’s sun. But how had the spinnerette gotten here?

No sooner had I formed the question than the ring offered its answer. This time we stood in a tiny circle of corroded copper coins on the shores of a great black river. A little shiver ran through me as I recognized our point of arrival.

“Hades.” The dark walls of the multiverse’s largest infinite security prison loomed just across the river.

“Is that where we played Risk?” Fenris pointed with his nose.

“It is,” replied Melchior. “Someone standing right here would have had a perfect shot at Ravirn’s back.”

“And afterward that ‘someone’ could have paid my fare with one of the coins from this ring.” I didn’t like the implications of the spinnerette’s route thus far. Not at all. “Five will get you ten our next stop is Garbage Faerie.”

“That’s a sucker’s bet,” replied Melchior, “at any odds and even with money found on the banks of the Styx.”

For years, the only ring entrance to Garbage Faerie had opened out of a circle of crushed beer cans on the slope above Ahllan’s home. Now both slope and home were gone, devoured by the chaos I had unleashed in my duel with Nemesis. So was Ahllan, likewise devoured by something I had unleashed, though in another time and place.

With Ahllan’s ring closed forever, I had opened a new one yesterday to take us to the near shore of the Styx and Cerberus, a circle of three-dimensional circuit-board sculptures of forget-me-nots. Someone else had built the one that brought us back to Garbage Faerie now.

“I think somebody really doesn’t like you,” said Melchior.

I had to agree. We had arrived high in the canopy of the graffiti-oak forest that lay not far to the west of the crater where Ahllan’s home had stood. The broad limb provided a perfect sniper’s post. That was grim, but not nearly so grim as the circle of crucified ravens that made up the faerie ring. Each was pinned by its wings to the simple cross hilt of a short sword driven deep into the limb. The only good thing about the tableau was that the nature of faerie rings meant the dead ravens had probably been spun into existence without ever actually having lived. Even so, I felt an anger building in my heart at the sight.

“The dislike is mutual, Mel. I’d very much like to have a word with whoever set that spinnerette to this task.”

I reached into the faerie ring again, commanding it to take me back another step. Nothing happened at first, and I felt great resistance, as though some other power of chaos opposed my will. In fighting the resistance, I realized that each step of our path back through the spinnerette’s past had come a little harder. Perhaps we were finally getting close. I pushed. Hard.

Breakthrough.

The bottom dropped out. The four of us were tumbling through darkness, falling away from a bright ring of candles and black frosting roses circling the rim of an enormous cake stuck upside down to the ceiling of a great cavern. Across the center of the cake, written in black frosting, was the legend “Happy Deathday, Raven. Die, Die, Die!”

“Boss—” Whatever Melchior wanted to say was lost as he ducked down and zipped the case over his head just before we plunged deep into icy water.

I let go of Fenris so that I could swim. He immediately pulled away from me, heading back toward the surface. I kicked after him, but no matter how hard I paddled, I just kept sinking. I told myself to stay calm and
think, damn it
.

That was when something hard and heavy clipped me between the shoulder blades. It felt like a bowling ball rolling up my spine and drove the breath out of me in one huge gasp. My little remaining composure left me with the last of my air. I’d have screamed if I had anything left.

But all I could do was watch the bright bubbles shooting up and away from me. All but one, that is.

A single silvery bubble hung between me and the others, began moving back toward me even.

As it got closer, I saw a dark and distorted reflection of myself growing on its surface.

What in the . . . Oh shit!

I threw my left arm up protectively in the instant before the falling bubble would have caught me full in the face. The impact still broke my nose. Blood gushed out into the water, darkening my vision. Somehow I managed not to suck in a lungful of water despite my anguish, but if I didn’t get air soon, I would die.

I looked around frantically, hoping for some inspiration. All I saw was the bubble, which slipped up a few yards and off to my left. It turned as it moved, somehow giving the impression it was staring at me like some disembodied eye, despite its lack of features. I wanted to ignore it, to focus solely on the more immediate problem of drowning, but I didn’t dare let it out of my sight.