MythOS Read online

  “You say that like it’s somebody else’s fault,” said Melchior. “Hades didn’t just spontaneously decide to let Persephone go and cancel winter. She’d still be his prisoner if you hadn’t stepped in.”

  “Just in the wrong place at the right time,” I said. “Or perhaps the wrong place at the wrong time. Depends on how you feel about getting on Death’s to-do list.”

  “How about right place, right time?”

  “No. Hades is never the right place.” I shivered, though not from cold. “Do you suppose the weather change will ripple out to other Decision Loci?”

  “I doubt it. Once a new world’s split off from the old, there’s not supposed to be any more interaction. Well, aside from you and your family and the mweb.”

  “No,” I agreed. The mweb is the magical network Necessity built. It connects the various levels of reality, allowing the Greek pantheon and all of its many children to access worlds as easily as normal mortals do websites. “But with Necessity messed up, who knows what might be moving through the network. You still haven’t told me if you want to come out.”

  “I suppose,” he said after a long moment of silence. “I feel awfully safe under all this leather and Kevlar, but the view’s lousy.”

  “I’m so sorry, your highness,” I said with a chuckle. “I just wasn’t thinking ‘picture window’ when I had Tech-Sec make my new riding gear.”

  Reaching back, I caught hold of the zipper that ran along the lower edge of the raven’s wings and slid it aside. The deep pocket beneath held a subnotebook. It was pale blue, with the darker outline of a goblin’s head etched into the top—bald with long, pointed ears and a sharp chin. On the underside of the case lines of LEDs traced glowing dragon’s scales.

  “Run Melchior. Please,” I said, placing the computer on the ground.

  The spell prompt worked its desired magic, and the laptop began to flicker. Almost too quickly for the eye to follow, its flat shape alternated with a bald blue goblin only slightly larger than a house cat but infinitely more contrary. After a few moments, the strobing effect stopped, and only the goblin remained.

  “A little sloppy with the new transformation,” I noted.

  “I get nervous. Even nine months on I’m not completely comfortable with this whole quantum-computing thing. I liked binary—something was either a one or a zero, none of this spooky both and neither. I’m always afraid I’ll end up leaving my ears in some sort of horrible in-between state.” He reached up and checked, exposing a mouthful of pointed teeth with his smile a moment later. “Einstein was right about quantum mechanics; it is disturbing. Melting smoothly from shape to shape was a whole lot more comfortable.”

  “So run the old process in emulation,” I said. “You’ve got tons of spare computing capacity.”

  He blinked several times, looking thoughtful. “You know, I might just try that. In the meantime, shouldn’t we be moving? We don’t want to bump into any Furies, not after the warn-off Tisiphone gave you last time you suggested we drop by Necessity central.”

  Melchior’s mention of the fiery-natured Fury gave me an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the strangest relationship I’d ever had. I didn’t know (A) whether we were still dating, (B) if she was in love with me, (C) if I was in love with her, and (D) whether she’d try to kill me if she caught me sneaking in here or just jump my bones. The mixture of dire threats every time I mentioned anything to do with Necessity and the way it usually came up after she’d stopped in at Raven House for a bit of rompery was sending me seriously mixed messages.

  “I thought you said Shara turned off the alarms.”

  “All the ones she knows about,” replied Melchior. “Necessity is a huge interconnected network of systems installed over hundreds of years, and Shara’s only firmly in charge of the primary security software. You never know what else might be tucked away somewhere she can’t reach.”

  “There’s a lovely thought. I wish you’d mentioned it earlier.”

  Melchior raised an eyebrow—a habit he’d picked up from me—and I looked away. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t or, more accurately, shouldn’t have known already. Shara, the former familiar of my ex-girlfriend Cerice, had ended up running much of Necessity after the mess with Hades and Persephone gave the computer-goddess the digital equivalent of a massive stroke. While Shara was a truly stellar individual, and a damn fine fusion of the various warez that make up an AI, she simply didn’t have the capacity to run everything as Necessity had. Not even close.

  While I contemplated that, Melchior whistled up a connection to Shara. She appeared in the center of a golden globe of light projected from Melchior’s eyes and mouth. Vividly purple and decidedly female, Shara shared Melchior’s pointed ears and teeth but added some serious curves and a thick head of hair.

  “Hey, big boy, it’s been far too long between . . . contacts. We’ve got to fix that.” She winked suggestively at me, her voice and mannerisms echoing the late Mae West. “I still can’t believe Cerice let anything as yummy as you get away.”

  I grinned. It was nice to see her returning to her old flirtatious self—dying had taken a lot out of her, not to mention starting the whole mess with Hades and Persephone.

  “I missed you, too, Shara. I wish we had more time to catch up but we are right in the middle of a cracking job. . . .”

  “And you need information, and you’re in a terrible hurry.” Shara sighed. “Point taken. I still don’t know exactly what happened to our friend Ahllan, but I did manage to find out where it happened, or rather, what part of Necessity was activated in the process.”

  “That’s a start,” I said. “What can you tell us about it?”

  “Well.” She paused. At first I thought she was just taking a deep breath, but then she seemed to freeze, her eyes going glassy as the whole projection shimmered reflectively.

  “Mel, what’s up with Shara? Is that a signal problem, or is the encryption—”

  “I can tell you that it’s one of the oldest structures in the system,” said Shara, continuing as though nothing untoward had happened. “It may even be the oldest.”

  I glanced a nervous question at Mel. He gave me a thumbs-up out of sight of his video pickups, and I relaxed. Whatever had happened, we were still talking to Shara. Between magical soul-signatures and encryption, a goblin-to-goblin link is basically impossible to spoof. Doubly so between webgoblins who knew each other as well as these two.

  “Did things just stutter on your end?” I asked Shara.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Give me a second.” Her face took on the distant expression of a webgoblin accessing outside data sources. “Odd. I’m showing a hiccup in the communications feed and garbage data in a number of processor nodes. At least I think it’s garbage data. Necessity is such a big system, and there’s so much I wouldn’t understand even without the complications caused first by Persephone and then Nemesis. It’s probably just a glitch, but if you want to abort and try again later, I’ll understand.”

  “No, if you think it isn’t serious, that’s good enough for me. I’d hate to have to try this again. My nerves are frazzled enough as it is. Mel?”

  “I’m with Ravirn,” he mumbled around the stream of light coming from his mouth.

  “All right,” said Shara. “Let me give you the coordinates. . . .”

  “It all started with Crete?” asked Melchior, as we glided in to land beside a low mound on the shore of the big island.

  “Maybe we’ll find out,” I cawed in reply.

  Melchior is not the only shapechanger in our partnership, though my process is messier and more painful than his. Once I’d set Melchior down, I folded my wings and turned my attention inward. When I touched the place where magic and blood were one and the same—the inner chaos inherited from my Titan ancestors—a great black shadow fell over me like a cloud passing between the Earth and the bright moon above. It was the shadow of the Raven.

  I let the darkness settle over me, conforming to my current body, before I reshaped both shadow and self with a wrench of my will. For just an instant, I felt as though every atom of my body had been individually heated to incandescence. The agony of it drove the breath from my lungs and made sweat pop out all over. Then, almost as quickly as it had come, the pain vanished. The huge raven I sometimes become was gone, replaced by Ravirn. I quickly ran through my normal post-transformation inventory of appendages by number and composition. I prefer to leave the feathers with the other body, though the inner Raven is with me always.

  Of all my magic, shape-shifting is least comfortable and most dangerous, because of both its nature and my own. I am a hacker of spells, composing and performing much of my magic off the cuff and on the spot. With the more modern digital-programming magic, where I work through Melchior and have the luxury of spell-checking in emulation first, I have some margin for error. Not to mention a second pair of eyes examining my code. But with the primal stuff of deep chaos, it all happens in the moment. There is no beta-testing, and even though I’ve done the Raven/Ravirn thing often enough to feel pretty sure it will all work out fine in the end, I can never be certain I won’t make a mistake and turn myself into a loose cloud of disconnected organic material.

  “So now what?” I asked, once I’d confirmed I was all there and all me.

  “Just a second,” replied Melchior, tapping his claws on something hard. “I think . . . Yes! Got it.”

  I turned in time to see a series of cracks in a nearby boulder flow together into the irregular outline of a door. Beyond, broad stone steps led under the hill. Necessity is nothing if not a traditionalist.

  I asked Melchior to refresh “Redeye,” and he whistled the binary with a speed and sureness I could never match, demonstrating
another of the many reasons I prefer codespells to chaospells.

  “After you,” he said. “Height before intellect.”

  “Why don’t we go together?” Catching him by the back of his neck, I lifted him onto my shoulder.

  The stairs wound deep into the earth, halting in front of a heavy steel hatch. Words had been carved into the stone above in the most archaic Greek I’d ever seen. It took me several seconds to parse it out, and I wasn’t sure what I had when I was done.

  “Central Temple for the . . . Calculation of the Fates and Locations of . . . Mel, what’s that odd word?”

  “Pantheoo, panth . . . Hang on. I’m not sure you’re putting it together in the right order. Maybe something like ‘Divine Center for Panth’—no—‘Pantheoretical Calculation and the Fate and Stations of the Gods Themselves’?”

  “Should ‘calculation’ be ‘computation’? Normally I’d say that made more sense.”

  “I don’t know; the implication seems closer to calculation.” Mel shook his head. “Why don’t we just see what there is to see?”

  When I grabbed the handle, a magical crackle rolled across my skin from the point of contact, as though the feathers I didn’t wear in this shape were all slowly rising to stand on end. I paused and put my ear to the door. I don’t know what I expected—maybe the hum of hot vacuum tubes, or some such evidence of primitive computing systems. What I heard was a series of sharp metallic clicks almost too rapid to count as separate sounds.

  “What’s making that noise?” I said.

  “I don’t know, but there’s really only one way to find out. Unless you want to turn back now.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Better to get it over with.”

  The door was unlocked, though whether that was because Shara had arranged for it or because such security was unnecessary here, I couldn’t say.

  “That’s different,” Mel said, a moment later.

  I didn’t respond, just stepped over the threshold and into one of the strangest rooms I’d ever seen. It was huge, stretching off into the gloomy distance, and it smelled of dust and copper. Where I had expected ranked racks of computers I found huge abacuses, several hundred of them, their metallic beads clicking back and forth at dazzling speeds.

  The nearest stood ten feet tall, with hundreds of thick bronze wires in two horizontal bands. The wires in the top set each held five heavy copper beads, the ones on the bottom only two. All of the beads at every level seemed to be in constant motion, clicking and clacking, and calculating Necessity-only-knew-what at speeds that probably exceeded early modern computers.

  “What’s it for?” I finally whispered.

  “I don’t know,” replied Melchior, hopping down and padding over to look up at the clattering beads. “More important, what can we do with it? Do you know anything about using one of these?”

  “Not a bit.” I circled the nearest abacus. It didn’t appear connected in any way to the others, or to anything at all. How do you program a computer with no interface, no visible inputs or outputs, and an unknown programming language? “I don’t even know whether it’s a peripheral legacy system that wasn’t worth the hassle of upgrading or if it provides some core function so vital that it can’t be interrupted even for an instant.”

  “I think it’s Necessity’s soul, and that you should step away from it very, very carefully.” The voice belonged to Tisiphone, and her tone did not invite argument or any response beyond obedience. Knowing Tisiphone as I did, I recognized the threat of extreme violence just beneath the surface of the words.

  Moving with exquisite caution, I put my hands out to the sides with my palms open and clearly visible to anyone standing behind me. Then, just as carefully, I began to back up, not stopping until I’d reached the nearest wall. Melchior mirrored me a few feet away.

  “That’s a good start,” said Tisiphone, fading into existence between us and the abacuses—or rather, letting her chameleonlike camouflage drop away. “Now I want you to stay right where you are and hold very still, while I make sure you haven’t hurt anything.”

  “Would you rather we stepped out into the hall,” I asked, careful to move only my mouth, “put a heavy iron door between us and that?” I indicated the bank of abacuses with my eyes.

  The expression she turned on me was hard and cold, devoid of any of the affection she had shown me so often in the past, even at times when we were at odds. This was a Fury right on the edge of killing, one who had closed down every mortal part of herself in favor of the role of Necessity’s personal assassin. My throat and stomach felt as though I’d recently dined on several pounds of finely ground and deadly dry sand. For a long second, I thought she might kill me on the spot, but finally she shook her head.

  “No, Ravirn. If I let you out of my sight, you’ll be gone from this DecLocus faster than a rat down a hole. I want you where I can see you and put my hands on you quickly. No movement. No magic.”

  “I take it now would be a bad time to suggest a kiss hello, then?” I couldn’t help myself—it just slipped out.

  There’s something about being on the edge of death that seems to disengage all the safety features on my mouth. Now I watched Tisiphone and waited to see if that bad habit had finally gotten me killed. Her deadly expression seemed to freeze completely, and she took two long strides that put her face within inches of my own.

  “A kiss before dying?” she whispered. “Is that your request?”

  “Yes . . .” I trailed off and let it hang for a moment. Then I winked at her. “Preferably long before, but I suppose I’ll take what I can get.”

  “You’re mad,” she said, “and maddening,” but her expression softened just the tiniest bit, as though a smile might be trying to tug up one side of her mouth. “Don’t. Move. I’ll be back.”

  She turned away from me and went to inspect the abacus Melchior and I had been standing beside. When her back was fully turned I wiggled the tip of my left pinkie, the one I’d so recently grown back.

  “I saw that,” said Tisiphone, this time with a definite hint of a thaw in her voice, a thaw that was gone a moment later. “Don’t make me kill you, Raven. I don’t have a real wide margin at the moment, and it’s going to get even narrower once my sisters hear about this.”

  “So there’s no chance of keeping this just between the two of us?” I asked. I noted that she’d called me Raven this time, and wondered whether that was her way of acknowledging that not all my risk-taking was voluntary.

  “Boss, would you please stop digging?” said Melchior, before Tisiphone could respond. “I know you like holes, but do you always have to make them deeper?”

  “The little man gives wise counsel,” Tisiphone said as she moved deeper into the room.

  “Somebody appreciates me—glrgh!” Melchior’s words trailed off as his mouth and eyes shot wide and beams of light poured out of them, one red, one green, one blue, meeting to form a golden globe in the air.

  Firelight flared from the direction Tisiphone had gone—her internal flames leaping high. “What are you doing!” she demanded, her voice rapidly approaching.

  In seeming answer, Shara’s image formed in the heart of the globe.

  “Ravirn, I’m sorry I have to send this as an emergency override,” she said, “but you need to know that Ne—” She froze again then as she had earlier, her eyes glassy and vacant.

  Again I felt the nonexistent feathers rising on my skin. The globe holding her image shimmered as dozens of pinpoints of dark silver static like tiny mirrors flared and sparked, rapidly spreading until the whole became an opaque silver ball. In that same instant Tisiphone came around the last abacus, her wings and hair burning so brightly it hurt to look at her.

  “What’s happening?” she screeched, and I heard the echoes of her sisters speaking through her lips—the tripartite voice of the Furies coming through one mouth.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Mel?”

  No response. I turned my head and found that he looked just as frozen as Shara.

  “Mel!”

  Still no response.

  “Melchior, cut Vlink. Please.”