Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (36 page)
Still, I couldn’t stop feeling the chaos thrumming across my skin like a song in the back of my head, a chorus in some alien tongue I could almost make out. I found it very hard to keep from humming along, and so I didn’t pay much attention to the trip. Not until Melchior jerked in my arms, though he didn’t stop pointing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The signal’s getting kind of ragged, like something’s interfering with it or with . . . Shara!”
“Can you tell which it is?”
“Is something wrong with Necessity?” demanded Megaera, her face sheened with sweat.
“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “I can’t signal her back without a set of wards to modulate, and that’s impossible here.”
“Fly faster!” I said.
Megaera shook her head and spoke through clenched teeth, “I wish I could.”
A few more minutes passed, moments in which I found it easier to stay tuned in to the here and now instead of the chaos chorus. The tension and worry seemed to help.
“I’m losing her,” Melchior said abruptly. “The signal cut out completely for a moment there.”
Megaera nodded. “I can barely keep track of where I am.”
“How far do we have left to go?” I asked.
He shushed me and looked thoughtful, and I found myself wishing I could hear her with his ears, because the chaos chorus had picked up a bit of volume again. Finally, he shrugged. I swore. Megaera hissed. Time passed.
Then, “Gone,” said Melchior.
Megaera shrieked something inarticulate, thwarted rage plain in her face, then turned away and vomited into the void. I wanted to shriek, too. Chaos whispered to me through every pore, and this time I listened. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
“Now what?” asked Melchior.
“I . . . Hang on.” I had just had one of those belated realizations, where something has happened that you register but don’t notice. “The chaos chorus has changed.”
“The what?” Melchior looked bewildered.
“Don’t worry about it. Just ask me another question.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
That was it. “No.” Yes! The chaos song changed, I could feel it echoing through me. “Megaera, go that way.” I pointed along a bearing slightly to the left of the one Melchior had been holding us to.
“Why?” She sounded positively defeated.
There, stronger. “Because I can feel the flow of chaos, and it’s telling me to go that way.”
“All right,” she said, though she looked worn and doubtful.
I might not be able to hear what Melchior had, but I could listen to chaos, and it had been talking to me all along, telling me things about probability and uncertainty and potential. When an uncertainty was introduced into the matrix of the universe—would we or wouldn’t we make it to Necessity, was I insane—it rippled through chaos. I could feel my way into the uncertain, and if Necessity really was the point of maximum uncertainty . . .
“Keep asking questions.” They both looked at me as though I’d answered the madness question the other way, but I ignored that and made them keep asking questions until . . . “Here. Cut us a hole right here. This is Necessity.” I was sure of it.
“You’re a funny one,” said Megaera, her voice weak and thready, “but what the hell.”
Before I could respond, she’d sliced a hole into the universe and pulled us through.
We emerged in a room that was large and white and utterly wrecked. It had been a computational center once, the kind you might find in any large institution, with dozens of server racks arranged in neat rows beneath an acoustical-tile ceiling, though it appeared to be older equipment. Now it looked as though a minotaur with anger-management issues had decided it looked like a great place for experimenting with vandalism therapy. The racks had literally been pulled apart. The computers lay shattered and scattered about the room, and a huge hole gaped in the near wall. Parts of the dropped ceiling had collapsed, and a thick layer of fresh dust covered everything. I suspected that we had arrived at the ELF control center.
Megaera made the sort of noise you might get if you doused a lion’s tail with gasoline and lit it on fire. It was somewhere between a snarl and a yowl, and I felt it in my spine. I’d have pulled away from her then, but the hand curled around my hip had grown six-inch razors at the tips of its fingers and I didn’t want to self-amputate any of the things those points were resting near.
“I hate to be a bother, but could you maybe move your . . .” I raised my eyebrows and pointed downward.
Megaera didn’t answer, and she didn’t move, just stood there and sniffed the air. I was trying to decide what to do next when she let out another yowling snarl, and I found myself spinning half-around and sitting down. On the floor. Hard. But not bleeding, which was a fair trade in my book. I landed facing the hole in the wall and Megaera’s rapidly receding back.
“Was it something I said?” I asked aloud.
“Maybe it was your breath,” said Melchior. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”
I laughed, though I didn’t find the situation the least bit funny. If you’d asked me the week before what view I would most like to see of an angry Megaera, I’d have described the scene as it stood, with her heading away at speed and me not bleeding to death behind her. Now, with Nemesis running around somewhere in the vicinity, I found that I really wanted Megaera back.
I said as much to Melchior as I climbed to my feet, and he nodded. “Me, too. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on our own. So, now what? Do we follow Megaera?”
“I don’t know, Mel. On the one hand, that’s probably the path Nemesis took, and if we follow it, we might catch up with her.”
“And on the other?”
“That’s probably the path Nemesis took, and if we follow it, we might catch up with her.”
“There is that,” he said. “What about Tisiphone?”
“She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”
“So why are we walking that way?” he asked.
“Because I’m a freak of nature,” I answered.
"I can’t argue with that, but did you want to be more specific ?”
I peered through the hole. A dark hallway lay beyond, its floor marred by deep gouges as though someone had dragged a clawed and unhappy something away down its length.
I sighed. “It’s a horrible birth defect, actually; I was born with no sense of self-preservation.”
“So we’re going after them?” he asked.
“Yep.” I stepped through into the hall.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Me, too, Mel. Me, too.”
About a hundred yards farther along, we came to a series of doors and another nexus of destruction. It was hard to tell with only wreckage to read, but it looked as though Tisiphone had decided to fight back again, and the battle had crashed through into several of the rooms off the hallway, destroying their contents, including a small router closet, a bank of uninterruptible power supplies, and another server array. Again, it looked like older units.
A freshly torn-off door opening onto a utility-type stairwell suggested that the trail led up from there. Broken-off bits of railing and chunks of concrete cluttering the steps seemed to confirm that as we followed the damage upward. After a dozen or so flights, I noticed a change in the air.
“Mel, does it seem to you as though there’s a bit of a draft? And not the sort that comes from an out-of-control air-conditioning system?”
He nodded. “Not unless Necessity has a sea-scents attachment built into her climate-control system.”
Another couple of turns confirmed it. There was a cool breeze blowing down from somewhere above, a distinctly temperate and ocean-smelling breeze. That was wrong. Salt air and computers of the sort we’d been passing did not mix well. I reached for my sword, and only when I found the sheath empty did I remember I’d lost it to Nemesis. Along with my pistol and dagger. I was unarmed.
I looked at the empty sheath. “That’s not good. Mel, do you think you could do something about it?”
“Sure. Let me just try a spell.” He let out a burst of whistled code that switched from his normal style to self-harmonizing halfway through.
Sudden cold weight dragged my empty hand down. A sword . . . fish? I let go with a startled yelp and leaped up several stairs as the rather large and angry fish started flopping wildly on the landing.
“Oops!” said Melchior. “Sorry. I guess I’m not used to this quantum stuff yet. Let me fix that.”
He whistled again, this time with harmony right from the start. The fish vanished, hopefully back to wherever it had come from.
“Now, a sword.” He pursed his lips for a third whistle, one that again sounded slightly off.
“Not in my”—something filled my hand—“hand.”
It was a slender black cane with a glittering grip like a diamond grown into the shape of an angel with wings of fire. Tisiphone.
“That’s not right,” said Melchior. “It’s like I’m getting some sort of interference. Hang on, and I’ll try again.”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “The weight on this feels a little off. Let me just check . . . Ahh, nice.” With a push and a twist the grip slid away from the wood, revealing a gem-bright blade. “A sword cane, and a very nice one, too.” The blade was four-edged. Bad for slicing, but a thrust would leave a wicked wound with a cross section shaped like a plus symbol.
“But it’s not a rapier,” said Melchior. “Let me give it another shot.”
I shook my head, then tried a few experimental thrusts before taking the point between two fingers and trying to flex the blade. It didn’t move, so I jabbed the tip into a gap in the wall for added leverage. The concrete cracked instead.
“It’s OK, Mel. The balance is good and the—it’s sure not steel . . . the whatever it is of the blade is better.” I slid the sword back into the cane and locked it in place, giving the figure of Tisiphone an extra squeeze. “Why not quit while we’re ahead?”
He looked disgruntled but finally sighed his agreement. “You’re probably right. I can see this is going to take practice. Do you want I should try for a pistol?”
“Maybe we’d better leave things that go bang for a later date and a less-enclosed space.” I pointed upward with my new sword. “I’d rather not experiment with explosives until you’re very confident about the results.”
“Fair enough.”
A few moments later, we turned the corner on the last landing before the top. Before what was left of it, really. The stair had clearly once ended in a rooftop enclosure of some sort. Now it ended in empty air. Climbing over the broken remnants of a concrete wall, we stepped out onto a large meadow of dune grass. Bits of the stairhead littered the field around us, but they were the only evidence of artificial construction. Beyond the edges of the meadow, there was nothing but sky and sea. If I hadn’t just climbed out of it, I wouldn’t have believed I was atop a building. Nor was there any evidence beyond the broken concrete that either the Furies or Nemesis had passed this way before me.
I walked to the nearest edge and looked out and down. It was a hundred-foot straight drop to the gently rolling surface of the surprisingly weedy water, and nothing more than a few grassy islands were visible between me and the horizon. I made a quick circuit of the island and found the view similar in every direction—no way to tell where we were, beyond someplace mild on an ocean. The illusion of a purely natural setting was reinforced by the irregular shape of the tall island and the lack of windows in the stone of its sides.
As for Megaera, Tisiphone, and Nemesis—there was no sign of any of them or any way of guessing in which direction they might have gone.
“So now what?” asked Melchior after we’d circled the island a few more times.
“I don’t know, Mel. I really don’t.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Maybe Shara can help,” said Melchior.
“Huh?” I’d been watching the thick weeds drifting back and forth in the surf—there was something familiar there, though I couldn’t quite decide what.
“Shara? Webgoblin. Curvy, purple, about so tall.” Melchior held a hand up to his own height. “The one who’s currently running the show here. You remember her, right?”
“Yes, Mel. Sorry. I guess I’m just tired. That’s a great idea, but how do we reach her? We don’t have a Fury to play walkie-talkie with anymore.”
“No, but we do have a huge building filled with computers that are hooked up to the giant, networked entity that is Necessity. At least we do if Nemesis didn’t destroy them all.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’re an idiot?” he said with a smile.
“Oh, that’s right.” I grinned back, but I wasn’t happy about missing something that obvious.
Melchior started down the stairs, and I followed after. Why was I so distracted? I felt almost as scattered as I had in the Primal Chaos.
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