Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (25 page)
“Depends on how you’re counting, Boss,” said Melchior. “You’ve only slept once since then, but it’s been something like forty-five hours subjective. You were on your feet for nearly that long between sleeps.”
I blinked. “Really? I know I’ve been having insomnia, but forty hours awake?” It didn’t feel anything like that long. “Maybe I should go sit down again before it catches up to me.” I limped back to the bed.
Melchior shrugged. “Maybe not for you, but I sure felt it.”
“I wonder what’s going on there,” I said. Then I shook my head. “Questions for another time when we have less on our agenda, I guess. I’m sorry, Tisiphone, I asked you a question and then didn’t let you answer it.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s actually kind of fun watching the gears in your head turn.” She looked at Melchior. “Is his brain actually powered by his mouth? Or does it just look that way from where I’m sitting?”
“It’s a mystery,” said Melchior, “but I do occasionally wonder whether he wouldn’t simply cease to exist if you disconnected his mouth.”
“I babble, therefore I am?” Tisiphone grinned.
“Something like that,” agreed Melchior.
“Chaos modulation?” I asked, pretending I couldn’t hear them. “Spooky ripping the stuff of reality transport? Explanations for same?”
“Let’s start with the first,” said Tisiphone. “It’s all about the wings.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“If you keep your mouth shut, you’ll learn faster,” said Melchior.
“He’s got a point,” said Tisiphone. “Watch.”
She stood up and stepped away from the bed, opening her wings to about eight feet—a small fraction of her total span. An instant later the fire of her wings brightened, though for the first time since I’d met her, her hair didn’t follow suit. Then the flames began to dance and jump, changing their intensity from point to point in a way that reminded me of an elaborate fractal pattern.
“Beautiful,” whispered Melchior, and it was.
“But how does it affect chaos?” I asked. “Sure, it’s
magical
fire, but it’s still just fire, isn’t it? And what about Megaera and Alecto?” Whose wings were storm and seaweed respectively.
magical
fire, but it’s still just fire, isn’t it? And what about Megaera and Alecto?” Whose wings were storm and seaweed respectively.
“It’s not flame at all,” said Tisiphone. “No more than Megaera’s wings are actually the weeds that swallow ships.” As she said this, the stuff of her wings shifted and changed, though they retained their shape. The patterns remained as well, writ now in the whirling tumble of chaos. “I don’t really have wings, just raw chaos grafted onto my flesh and tamed by will and the power of Necessity.”
“Huh.” I never would have guessed, though I probably should have. “You send messages by creating patterns like you’re doing now?”
“Yes,” said Tisiphone. “Fractals and other forms that range the edge of randomness.” Her face fell. “But Necessity isn’t answering.
“All right,” I said. “I need to mull that over for a bit. How does the”—I made a clawing motion—“magic transport system work?”
“Very well, thanks.” Tisiphone grinned and looked vague as she let her wings resume their flame form. Then she shrugged. “Seriously, I don’t know all the underlying details. Our claws are also artifacts of chaos. With them we can temporarily punch a hole from here into there and pass through. Once we’ve left the world we’re in, we use our wings to fly through chaos to the next one.”
“That raises more questions than it answers,” I said, getting up to pace again. “You know that, right?”
“Like what?” she asked, furling her wings so that I wouldn’t run into them as I limped around.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” asked Melchior.
“Maybe a little,” said Tisiphone. “I know what we do is unusual, but it’s how we’ve always done it and it seems normal to me. What are the questions?”
Melchior put his face in his hands.
“One,” I held up a finger, “when you rip a hole through to the Primal Chaos, why doesn’t it pour through and destroy everything in the immediate area? When I make holes in the walls of reality, bad things happen, like I get eaten by chaos and only come back weeks later at the cost of glowing eyes and who knows what all fresh new personality quirks. And remember what it did to Hades, both the place and the god. You said it looked like Hades was hit by a combination tidal wave and giant tornado followed by a force-ten earthquake. ”
“Wait. You heard that?” asked Tisiphone. “I thought you were still adrift in chaos then.”
“It was overhearing that conversation between you and Cerice that reminded me I existed and gave me back my name and my sense of self. In a very real way, it was the two of you talking that brought me back.”
“I didn’t know that.” Tisiphone smiled then, almost shyly. “It’s sweet.”
“Could we not go there just yet,” said Melchior. “I foresee more distracting male-female biological interactions down that road. As entertaining as the thumping and howling was last time, it’s going to seriously reduce the overall quality of the conversation. How about I throw out question number two?” He paused, and we both glared at him. “No objections? Great. Once you’ve passed through into chaos, how do you know where you are and where you’re going?”
“What do you mean?” asked Tisiphone. “There’s nothing to it, well except that we can’t get to Necessity right now, probably because of the soul lock. We just know where we are.”
“That doesn’t strike you as the least bit odd?” asked Melchior, choking.
“No. Should it?”
I stopped in my pacing and just stared at her.
“Damn right it should,” said Melchior. “At least according to Persephone. And this ‘knowing’ thing still works?”
“Of course,” said Tisiphone, “but I don’t get it. What’s Persephone got to do with this? Beyond writing the virus that infected Necessity, that is?”
I looked at Melchior, but he shook his head. “You were there,” he said. “You tell it.”
“When I rescued Persephone, she explained her thinking in creating the virus. Part of that was telling me about Necessity and the reason she made herself into a computer. It was because the infinitely expanding nature of the multiverse was too complex for any biological intelligence—even a divine one—to keep track of. The mweb and all its huge computing capacity exists to keep track of where everything and everyone is and should be, and you’re asking why always knowing where you are freaks us out? Don’t you understand what it means?”
“Oh,” she said in a very small voice. “I’ve been doing this for something like four thousand years, since long before Mother transformed herself into a computer. It just never occurred to me to . . . Oh my.”
“ ‘Oh my’ is right,” I said. “I think we just found our point of entry. The only way you can just ‘know’ where you are is if at some level, you’re still in contact with the part of Necessity that keeps track of where everything is. If we can tap that line and get Shara to tell us where she is, we’re in and—” A new idea hit me, and I sat down.
There was no chair, so I landed on the floor. My wounded thigh screamed, but I ignored it. This was too big.
“What is it?” asked Melchior.
“Yeah,” said Tisiphone.
“You flew here,” I said, “through chaos.”
“Sure,” said Tisiphone. “And?”
“And you knew where here was despite the fact that Garbage Faerie is cut off from the mweb. Don’t you see what that means?”
“No, I— Oh. It means that at some level Necessity retains the data on where this world is relative to all the others. It’s all still there.”
“It’s all still there,” I agreed. “We
can
fix Necessity. It’s just a matter of how.”
can
fix Necessity. It’s just a matter of how.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“A little dirty,” I said, leaning in and blowing a cloud of dust off the pegboard of the tool rack. “Otherwise, not too bad. I’m glad the cousins did most of their damage up above.”
Ahllan’s basement workshop was one of the least-trashed areas of the house, though the open light shafts had allowed a certain amount of weather to find its way down from the outside.
It was a big, rectangular space with worktables running the length of the side walls. On the right, shelves of jars held all manner of alchemical ingredients above a slate table cluttered with chalk, various alembics, string, and all the trappings of the traditional sorcerer’s art. The workspace on the left was set up as an electronics repair and assembly station, with computer enclosures, soldering irons, racks of chips, and other parts scattered amidst test equipment.
The air was just a touch damp and flavored by the concrete smell of old basement and an undertone of fried transistors. A partially effaced hexagram decorated the end wall opposite the steps, and a heavy door underneath them stood firmly closed. It was painted gray and blended with the wall.
“Where does that lead?” I asked Melchior, pointing at it.
I’d only been down there twice before, and both times I’d been too preoccupied to notice the door.
“Ahllan’s wardroom and sanctuary,” said Melchior, opening the door and stepping through. “And beyond that, the clean room.”
I followed him, and Tisiphone followed me. The space beyond was shaped like the inside of a drum and deathly quiet, insulated from the rest of the world by powerful built-in wards, both traditional and more high-tech. A permanent hexagram twelve feet across took up most of the floor. I knelt to examine it. The borders were two-inch-wide channels filled with . . .
“Melchior, is this actually a continuous circuit?” I asked, tapping the layer of glass that had been laid down over lines of circuit—green silicon boards laced with gold conductors.
“Yes. Ahllan built it herself. It’s a chaos-powered multiprocessor computer dedicated entirely to warding. It’s all connected up on the underside, with core chips soldered beneath each of the outer angles. When it’s active, nothing passes in or out without the consent of the master controller. It’s as near perfect a magical insulator as I’ve ever seen.”
I whistled. “Nice, but what about mweb access?”
“Since this world is off the net now, it’s moot, but there are network jacks at the inner angles, and the whole hexagram can be tuned to act as a high-density buffered data antenna.”
“Activation?” I asked.
He pointed at a narrow oak cabinet built into a niche on the far wall beside another door. “That’s got a full set of candles and stands if you’re feeling traditional. Otherwise . . .” He whistled a short burst of binary, and red lasers flickered to life at the outside corners, beaming bright spots onto the ceiling and connecting the hexagram on the floor to a second one set into the stone ceiling above.
“What a setup.” I shook my head. “I wish Ahllan were here to explain it all to me. We never got a real chance to talk shop after I found out she had once been a Fate server. I think I could have learned a lot from her.”
“I wish she were here, too,” said Melchior. “I miss her.”
“I would have liked to have met her,” said Tisiphone. “When my sisters and I raided this place, she hid in here with Cerice and Shara until we left. Megaera wanted to question them, but Alecto and I convinced her it wasn’t worth the effort of breaking such powerful wards, not when your magical scent led straight into a hex gate set for Castle Discord. ”
Melchior looked up at Tisiphone, his expression troubled. It was easy to see he didn’t much like to be reminded of Tisiphone’s coming here as an invader. I didn’t either, but I did like Tisiphone, quite a lot. It was a strange feeling.
“How could you tell where the gate went?” asked Melchior. “It’s a one-way, with all sorts of variables that Ahllan had to juggle on the fly.”
Tisiphone shrugged. “It smelled of Discord.”
“Fair enough,” said Melchior, though the answer obviously didn’t satisfy him. “I suppose that’s all ancient history at this point. At the moment, we need to invent a way to use your link with Mother Necessity as a communication channel to Shara, so she can tell us how to get from here to there. You have any ideas about where to start on that, Boss?”
“No, but I’m willing to play hardware hacker and fake it.” I turned back toward the door. “Let me dig through the equipment bins and see what I can come up with.”
“All right,” said Melchior, as we passed out into the main part of the basement again. “I’ll get to work on cleaning this place up while you do that. If we’re going to be here for any length of time, we’ll want the whole shop up to Ahllan’s old standards. Especially the clean room and the workbenches.”
“What about you?” I asked Tisiphone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the hacker. Necessity does most of her own deep IT work even if she uses us as her hands when she needs them. I don’t think I’ll be much help on the hacking front, and I don’t clean. Perhaps I’ll go have a look around after.”
“After what?” I asked.
“Pouncing you.” Then she leaped, catching me around the shoulders and pulling me over.
I think I shrieked. I know I jumped. But it was actually as gentle as a tackle could possibly be. She turned in the air so that I landed on her instead of hitting the stone floor, and she cushioned both of us with her wings. I ended up lying atop her and staring into a pair of mischievous blue eyes while my heart hammered out a toccata and fugue in panic minor. I was still trying to figure out what had happened when she caught my face in her hands and pulled me down for a very thorough kissing.
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