Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (9 page)
Eris is a creature of change. Her hair and skin are gold or black . . . and both at the same time. Like taffeta, how she looks depends on how you look at her. Some things change less than others. She is always tall. She is always beautiful, though sometimes it is the unattainable perfection of a marble goddess and sometimes the pure lusty sexiness of a Kama Sutra angel. She is always, always dangerous.
Today it appeared that she had decided to spare me the come-hither that hurts—she
is
a virgin goddess and only turns on the carnality to create trouble. She was just under seven feet if you didn’t count the six-inch stiletto heels on the flimsy-looking sandals whose straps twined like golden black snakes around her feet and ankles, twisting and climbing up her bare calves to just below her knees. A short split skirt of something like silk clutched at the curves of her hips and thighs, shifting its colors at the slightest movement. Above she wore an equally clingy blouse. It was nearly transparent, and I could see . . .
is
a virgin goddess and only turns on the carnality to create trouble. She was just under seven feet if you didn’t count the six-inch stiletto heels on the flimsy-looking sandals whose straps twined like golden black snakes around her feet and ankles, twisting and climbing up her bare calves to just below her knees. A short split skirt of something like silk clutched at the curves of her hips and thighs, shifting its colors at the slightest movement. Above she wore an equally clingy blouse. It was nearly transparent, and I could see . . .
I swallowed and shook my head.
Damn it!
She was doing it to me again, more subtly this time, jacking up the sex appeal slowly as my eyes climbed upward.
Damn it!
She was doing it to me again, more subtly this time, jacking up the sex appeal slowly as my eyes climbed upward.
“Would you please stop that?” I asked, and only as I missed the harsh cawing undertone of my words did I realize I was no longer a literal raven. I had been transformed once again. “You’re quite terrifying. You know that, don’t you?”
Eris laughed, and the sound was beautiful and terrible, like windows breaking in the city of the gods. The sex appeal blew away in the puff of wind that ruffled and opaqued her blouse at the same time it disarranged her hair. The marble goddess had arrived.
“Oh, Raven, I do miss you when you aren’t around. But it’s your own fault. It wouldn’t be such fun if you didn’t fall for it every time.”
“Don’t call me Raven.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.” She mimicked Melchior perfectly, and I realized for the first time that I didn’t see him.
“Where’s—”
“In your bag,” she answered, “sleeping it off.”
“Sleeping what off?” I demanded.
“The chaos time.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said.
“Don’t you?” The question was not a question, it was a challenge. Her tone said that the only reason I didn’t know the answer was that I was fooling myself somehow.
“Tell me that again but look me in the eyes this time,” she said. “You haven’t yet. I think we both know why, and it’s not just because you so like looking at the rest of me.” She ran her hands down her sides suggestively, and for an instant the sex appeal was back. “Come on, you know you don’t want to.”
This challenge I understood, and I had to answer it or lose face, to say nothing of self-respect, so I forced myself to look into Discord’s eyes. Of course, I saw myself looking back. The chaos that had devoured my pupils owns all of Discord’s eyes. It had scared me when mine were still black slits. Now, it was utterly terrifying. They say the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and in meeting hers I was forced to acknowledge my own recent soul-deep transformation.
“Better,” she said, and smiled. “Much better.”
“It hurts,” I answered. It did. “In so very many ways.” Not the least of which was the sudden deeper understanding of all that had come between me and Cerice.
For an instant a look of something very like sympathy flickered across her face. But it came and went too fast for me really to tell, and the look that replaced it was more than a little smug.
“Pain is how you can tell you’re alive. If you wake up some morning and nothing hurts, it means you’re dead. And then you go to Hades.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “I don’t understand
why
you don’t get more dinner invitations.”
why
you don’t get more dinner invitations.”
“It’s because my eyes glow in the dark,” she replied.
I sighed and lifted my hands in surrender. Fencing with Eris, whether physically or verbally, is a losing proposition. She always plays for blood and nearly always gets it.
“Chaos time?” I asked, trying to change the subject back to what had happened with Melchior.
“When you transported yourself here.”
“You lost me.”
“Castle Discord is not a place,” said Eris.
“I know that. It’s a Greatspell of some sort, a permanent piece of magic surrounded by the stuff of chaos.” I gestured at the churn flowing around the glass tunnel.
Castle Discord is off the net, way off, floating completely alone in the place between the worlds. It is not attached to any DecLocus and has no world resource locator fork.
She nodded. “That, too, but I meant something else in this case. When you enter a faerie ring, you enter all faerie rings. You know that, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know why?”
“I—” It had never occurred to me to think about it. “No.”
She pointed through the wall. “That out there is the very stuff of randomness. Potentially it can become anything at all, even a god.”
“The Titans,” I supplied.
“Exactly. They self-organized from chaos, created structure from its antithesis. They are hybrid beings, chaos arranged by will into the illusion of order.”
“It’s an awfully solid sort of illusion. You, me, all of us in the pantheon are their children. Wars have been fought between the generations. Are you saying
we’re
all illusions, too?”
we’re
all illusions, too?”
“Yes and no. The Titanomachy was real enough. Most of the children of the Titans are creatures of order, whatever their actual allegiance. Zeus is no illusion, not physically. Nor is Tartarus, where he imprisoned the Titans after the war. Neither are the Fates, for that matter. There is much that is real in the pantheosphere. You, however, are not. No more than I am.”
My stomach did a backflip with a triple twist and failed to stick the landing. I felt sweat break out on my forehead. I couldn’t possibly be an illusion. For one thing, no illusion would feel so queasy.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“A few weeks ago, you broke down the wall between the Primal Chaos and Hades, let the stuff out there”—she pointed through the glass once again—“into the realm of order, into the land of the dead. Chaos devours everything it touches. It devoured you, rendered your body back into the stuff of potentiality. And yet here you stand.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Don’t be a fool. When you entered the faerie ring on your way here, you wore the body of a giant raven.” She spread her arms and they became great black wings. Flapped them closed, and they returned to arms. “Now you do not. You are a shapechanger, a power of chaos. You are no longer your skin and its contents. You
are
chaos.”
are
chaos.”
She stepped forward and pinched my cheek between her fingers. “This is an illusion, a lie you tell the universe. Just as everything here”—she gestured at the bridge and the doorways at either end—“is another kind of illusion. Castle Discord is also chaos, shaped by will and magic into my ever-changing home. When you forced a faerie ring to appear in a part of the castle that didn’t then exist and stepped through, you stepped into chaos. That is part of my defenses. ”
“If that’s true, why wasn’t I destroyed? Or if I was, why did I come back so quickly? It took weeks for me to get back after what happened in Hades.”
“Because you are what you are, the same as the stuff beyond my walls. And who says it
didn’t
take weeks. How would you know?”
didn’t
take weeks. How would you know?”
My stomach felt even worse, though I was certain I hadn’t been without a body for weeks—I didn’t feel the way I had after coming back the last time. But if Eris was right, I’d unwittingly and unthinkingly taken Melchior into the Primal Chaos.
“What happened with Melchior?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Your will protected him from the stuff of your being, but the psychic pressure of being trapped out there was very hard on him. He is a manufactured thing, a creature almost wholly of order.”
“He’s a person, not a thing!”
“In soul, yes,” said Eris. “And that part of himself he has aligned with you, a creature of chaos. His physical nature, on the other hand . . . he is a computer, one of the most ordered of constructions.” She sighed. “I see that still you doubt. Perhaps a more thorough demonstration.”
Eris closed her eyes for a second. Then opened them. Wide. Wider. Her lids separated an inch, two, five. The chaos in her eyes swallowed her entire head. Then her body. Her shape stayed the same, but she became a clear vessel filled with chaos. She spread her arms as she had earlier. The lines of her body relaxed and stretched until a huge bird shape, defined only by the chaos within it, hung in the air in front of me.
Then she reversed the process, coloring herself in, starting with her tail feathers. A great raven with chaos-colored eyes faced me for one instant. I blinked, and in the beat between the closing and opening of my eyes she became Eris the goddess once again, dressed now in black-and-gold motorcycle leathers much tighter and better tailored than my own. It was only then that I realized my aloha shirt and board shorts had gone wherever it was I’d left the wings and feathers.
I couldn’t help it, I slapped myself. Broken-glass laughter filled the air as I rubbed my now stinging cheek.
“You are such an odd child,” said Eris. “The lie you tell the universe is the same one you tell yourself. To wear the flesh is to be the flesh in most respects. How else do you think the Titans produced ordered offspring?”
“So I take it this means I don’t get a free pass into the genuine immortals club? If someone kills me, I still die?”
“No you don’t, and yes you will. Someday perhaps, when your power has grown and your image of what you are has changed, the lie you tell the universe will come to include that sort of clause, but only if you live long enough. I have real doubts about that.”
“Me, too,” said a disgruntled voice from my bag.
I unzipped the top, and Melchior poked his head out.
“I take it we’ve arrived?” he asked.
“We have indeed.”
“Does that mean that you’re arguing metaphysics with Discord instead of getting down to business?”
“As usual,” said Eris. “He’s so easy to bait. Why
did
you come all this way for a visit?” She gave me the perplexed look of a particularly harmless old grandmother.
did
you come all this way for a visit?” She gave me the perplexed look of a particularly harmless old grandmother.
“Dairn,” said Melchior.
“Of Atropos’s brood?” asked Eris. “Colors, mottled browns? An archer? Shot you through the arm, I believe? Not very bright?”
“That’s the old description,” I said. “Things have changed.”
I quickly filled her in on our more recent encounters.
“You’re sure he was the shark?” she asked at the end.
“Not sure—” I began. But that wasn’t right. “Yes, I am, though I can’t say why.”
“I can,” said Eris. “It was because you saw yourself in the mirrors of his eyes.”
“Well, they are
mirrors
,” I said, trying to sound perplexed.
mirrors
,” I said, trying to sound perplexed.
“And earlier you saw yourself in
my
eyes,” said Eris, “but we both know that neither of those things is what I meant. No, what I meant is that you have seen your Nemesis.”
my
eyes,” said Eris, “but we both know that neither of those things is what I meant. No, what I meant is that you have seen your Nemesis.”
I didn’t like the weight she’d given to that last word, not at all. “Don’t you mean nemesis?”
“No. I don’t. No more than I mean necessity when I say Necessity.”
“So then, we’re talking about Nemesis the goddess, right? I just want to be clear on that, because I’ve always been taught that she was dead.”
Eris nodded. “Yes, and she is.”
“Fabulous, I’m being pursued by a dead goddess. What fun.”
“That’s a new one,” said Melchior. Then he shrugged. “Of course, if anyone can find a way to make something like that happen, it’s you, Boss.”
“Thanks, Melchior, that really helps.” I turned my attention back to Discord. “I don’t suppose you’re pulling my leg, joshing with old Ravirn to make his life a little more discordant? ”
She laughed and a tableful of wineglasses fell to ruin in the sound. “No, I’m not. Oh, I would, but in this case I don’t have to. Unpleasant truths are infinitely more useful in my business than unpleasant lies. Surely, you’ve learned that much about me by now?”
“I have, I just keep hoping it’ll turn out I was wrong. So, tell me about the dead goddess who wants my head.”
“All right. To start with, ‘dead’ is somewhat imprecise in this case.”
“I would never have guessed that, what with her wandering around and trying to kill me instead of resting in peace in Hades.”
“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to irritate Discord? ” she asked. “Because I’d be perfectly happy to play the irritation game if that’s what you want.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Stress makes me sarcastic.”
“There’s news,” said Melchior, “along with ‘Zeus likes nymphs’ and ‘Morpheus is dreamy.’ ”
“And ‘like master like familiar,’ ” said Eris.
“Hey,” snapped Melchior, “that’s . . .”
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