Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (3 page)
“You were saying . . .”
“Are you sure you want to bring a gun along? You do remember that Zeus has banned them, right? ‘Nobody thunders but me’ and all that jazz.”
“I was going to conceal it with a spell,” I said. “Besides, my rapier and dagger don’t go with the outfit.”
“So you’re leaving them behind?”
“Well, no. I was going to ask you to tuck them away somewhere.” I flapped my fingers mystically. Melchior often parked my blades in a sort of pocket of folded space when I didn’t want them visible.
“Why not have me take the gun, too? It’d be safer.”
I wanted to argue, especially after he’d reminded me what a lovely target this party made of me, but he was right. I handed over the .45 very reluctantly. He took it and whistled a quick string of binary code. The spell opened a hole in space, into which Melchior tucked the pistol. My blades followed a moment later, but he kept it open and gave Cerice a rather pointed look.
“What?” she demanded.
I grinned. “If I’ve gotta, so do you.”
“Oh, all right.” She reached under her skirts and produced a small Beretta semiautomatic. It went wherever it was Mel had parked the rest of the stuff, and he closed things up. Cerice’s slight but smug smile as he did so suggested to me that she was holding out. I didn’t call her on it.
“Are we ready?” I asked.
“As we’re likely to get,” muttered Melchior. “I just wish we could travel like sane people and LTP it.”
That would have been nice. Despite my newfound facility with faerie rings, I also preferred locus transfer protocol gates. But the damage to the mweb had removed the world that held Raven House from the net and cut off all mweb-based magic in the process. That left us no other choice.
“You want to walk or ride?” I asked him.
“Ride, I think. I’m less likely to draw divine attention if I play inanimate object for most of the evening, and that’s the way I like it.”
“Fair enough. Melchior, Laptop. Please.”
He grinned and began to melt into a blue puddle—the first step in the shift from webgoblin to laptop. He could have done it on his own, of course, but he seemed to prefer the old ritual of command and performance when running most of his spell programming. Kind of odd, actually, since the “please” we’d substituted for “execute” made the whole thing as voluntary as if he’d initiated the spell himself.
But then, he was a bizarre little mix of hardware, wet-ware, software, spellware, and whatever spiritware Tyche and Eris had snuck into the webgoblin specs to give them free will. As far as I can tell, AI is at least as weird as the regular sort of I. When he was done, I lifted his laptop form—a translucent blue clamshell—into a Tech Sec shoulder bag and bowed Cerice out the door in front of me.
The faerie ring was embedded in the marble of the grand balcony, a circle of black veining within the green stone. Taking Cerice’s hand, I stepped into the circle and went . . . elsewhere.
Faerie rings are a form of chaos magic that acts as a loophole in the idea of place. Outside, you’re somewhere specific. Inside, you’re not. Every single ring is at one and the same time both itself and every other ring. When you cross back over the border on the way out, your odds of stepping out of any other circle are perfectly even. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, most people experience the rings sequentially, seeing potential exit points in a series of flickers, like high-speed channel surfing.
That’s how it worked for plain old Ravirn—very dangerous and very scary. But the Raven is a power of chaos, which gives me unusual power over the rings. Now when I enter one, I somehow experience the whole damn system simultaneously and can simply step out into the world of my choice. Convenient but, in its own way, even scarier.
This time the Olympus ring was a chain of braided flowers, bright in the afternoon sun. They lay on the floor of a small marble temple, the pantheonic equivalent of a gazebo. On my last visit to the mountain, it had been a circle of dancing satyrs. Athena is the head of Olympian security, and she does not allow permanent rings.
As we stepped over the flowers, a small, fat satyr pranced up to greet us. He had more flowers in his hair and looked to be a sweet-natured thirteen. In reality, he was probably in his late hundreds and as steeped in vice as the rest of his half-goat relatives. That impression was reinforced by a glance over his shoulder to the place where a half dozen of his fellows were hunched over some kind of game that involved dice and lots of drinking from unmarked brown bottles.
“Raven and consort, so good of you to come. If you’ll just follow me, I’ll lead you to the party.”
“I prefer Ravirn,” I said.
“And consort?” demanded Cerice. “Don’t I even get a name?”
“Look,” said the satyr, “I don’t write the cards, I just read ’em.” He waved a slender calling card at us.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Out of the arrivals box. Security’s pretty tight for this gig, and Athena’s people are monitoring all the incoming traffic, both LTPs and on the ring network. Whenever any of the invitees comes in, a card pops up with titles and whatnot on it.”
“What if someone isn’t invited?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s not really my department. I assume all hell breaks loose. It hasn’t happened yet, and I hope to miss it if it does. Now, are you coming?”
He led us to a large field with dozens of pavilions. A line of slender posts linked by golden rope surrounded the area, and we walked along these to a place where the rope spiraled around a taller pair of poles to form an arch. A pair of ten-foot cyclopes in security guard uniforms and mirrored shades stood to either side of the opening.
The satyr handed the calling card over to the nearer of the two. He read it carefully and painfully, silently sounding out the syllables. When he finished, he turned his head so that the single lens of his mirrored shade was aimed right at me and frowned.
“I remember you,” he said.
He didn’t sound happy. Neither was I. The last time I’d come into contact with the rent-a-clops types that supplied muscle for Athena’s security operations, we hadn’t exactly seen eyes to eye. In fact, there’d been some shooting involved. Mostly them, at me, with high-caliber Gyrojet pistols, but it hadn’t all been one way. It was going to be very embarrassing if I got into a fight with one of the security guards and got thrown out of a party in my own honor.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You missed. I missed. Can we just call it even?”
“I don’t t’ink so,” said the cyclops, cracking his enormous knuckles. “I really don’t. One of these days, you and me are gonna have a long talk in a dark alley somewheres.” He shook his head with some disappointment. “But it ain’t today. Today is professional, not personal. Zeus invited you, so I gots to let you in, but Athena said to make sure I frisked you first. You wanna assume the position? Or do I gets to go personal on you ahead o’ schedule?”
What I really wanted was to go back to Raven House, but all the reasons I had to come to this event still applied. Besides, I didn’t think I’d be allowed to simply walk away at this point. With a sigh, I put my hands on top of my head.
The ’clops looked briefly triumphant when he found my shoulder holster, but that faded as soon as he saw it was empty. At the end of the pat down, he turned his gaze on Cerice.
“Don’t even think it, eyeball.” Her voice was quiet and almost sweet, and that made it even scarier. “If they ever found your body, they’d develop drinking problems over the missing bits.”
The cyclops stepped aside and waved us in, looking more than a little pale as he did so. Once more we followed the satyr, this time threading our way through a milling crowd heavy on his goatish cousins, nymphs, and booze, on our way to the largest of the tents.
As we stepped inside, he loudly announced, “Raven and consort.”
“That’s Ravirn,” I said.
“And Cerice,” she added.
“It’s not like anyone’s listening,” replied the satyr before he ducked back out of the tent.
He had a point. The party had clearly started without me, and his bellow probably didn’t carry more than a couple of yards. Hundreds of figures crowded the pavilion, filling the place with noise and movement so wild I had a hard time making sense of it. If anyone noticed our entry, they didn’t show it.
“Now what?” I asked Cerice.
“Mingle and look for Zeus, I guess. We can’t leave until that’s out of the way, and even if we decide to stay, it’s the polite thing to do.”
I nodded. “Sounds good.” I hoped to find Morpheus in there somewhere as well, but I had my doubts. “Let’s see if we can’t get a couple of drinks on the way.” Taking Cerice’s hand, I plunged into the crowd.
Snapshots from a divine madhouse.
Eris, Goddess of Discord, playing cards with her half brother Ares and Hephaestus, the smith who hammered out Zeus’s lightning bolts. The boys were losing. I’d been there and didn’t need to add to Discord’s wins tonight, so I kept going.
A half dozen satyrs stood by a bar where Dionysus poured drinks from a jug that never emptied.
I got Cerice and me a couple of glasses. It was wine, clear and golden and sweet and tart and hot and cold all at the same time.
I sipped at it as we passed the head table, a crescent of white marble slabs enfolding a grotesquerie of a fountain— all little cupids and spouting tritons with dark wine pouring from the tips of their weapons. Zeus’s golden throne stood empty in the center of the tableau, so we moved on.
In the corner of another tent, a lamia, a sphinx, and a chimera sat around a small table swapping hero recipes.
At some point, Cerice left me to find us more drinks. While I was waiting, I saw a familiar face with an unfamiliar expression. My cousin Dairn, smiling. When he saw me, he waved, as so many others had.
I waved back unthinkingly, then froze. Dairn is a grandchild of Atropos, who wants me dead, and one of the greatest archers ever to live. He has tried to kill me on three separate occasions. The scar had not survived my rebirth, but he once put an arrow through my left forearm.
The last time I’d seen him, I’d pushed his unconscious and hamstrung body into a faerie ring, more than half-hoping he’d lose his soul in that magical maelstrom as so many had before. It seemed fair payment for the arrow that had cost my friend Shara her life. I hadn’t heard from or about him from then till now, and I’d assumed he was dead.
As he headed toward me, I opened my bag and pulled out Melchior, quickly flipping up his lid.
Run Melchior,
I typed.
Please.
I typed.
Please.
I set the laptop down as it began to shift into Melchior’s webgoblin form. I wanted my hands free, and I wanted the backup. As Dairn got closer, I did a double take. Rather than the tights and tunic I would have expected from a child of House Atropos in good standing, he wore motorcycle leathers that mirrored mine. Nor were they in his traditional colors—a mixture of browns. His ruffled shirt was a rusty red, the leathers dark and silvery, almost like a blackened mirror.
“Raven,” he said, raising an empty hand. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I nodded a greeting but didn’t take his hand. I didn’t want to get that close to him. Something wasn’t right, and it was more than a change of clothes and colors. After a moment, he dropped his hand, though he didn’t look put out. In fact, he smiled and his eyes seemed almost to twinkle.
“It’s that way is it, Raven?”
“Ravirn,” I corrected him. “I don’t see how it could be any other way. Not after our last meeting.”
“Are you thinking of the part where your toy computer hamstrung me, the bit where you stole my webpixie, or the end, when you pushed me into a faerie ring bound and unconscious and left me to die?”
He said it all with a grin that set a chill to the back of my neck. His voice was light, almost teasing, like nothing unusual had happened between us. Like I’d done him some sort of favor, even. It was much more frightening than the rage or indignation I’d have expected from someone like Dairn and deeply out of character, more the kind of thing Eris or Athena would have used to throw an enemy off-balance. I’d known Dairn most of my life, and he simply wasn’t that sharp.
“Actually,” I said, being careful to keep my tone as light and friendly as his, “it’s before that, where you helped to take my girlfriend hostage and murdered her familiar. You do remember that, right?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I served my House, and besides, decommissioning a webgoblin hardly counts as murder. You don’t really believe all that rot about them being people, do you?”
Somewhere down around my knees Melchior began whistling a string of angry binary. It was too fast for me to parse, but I could tell the end result wasn’t going to be healthy for Dairn. Since that would have violated Zeus’s party rules, I reached down and caught the scruff of Mel’s neck—too late. By the time I’d lifted him into the air, he was already finishing whatever spell he’d started, though it sounded very strange at the end.
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