Cybermancy (38 page)

The Primal Chaos,
Xaos
, is the source of all things and the matrix in which reality is embedded. The Titans formed themselves from the stuff using nothing more than an act of
will,
and it flows in the blood of their children and their children’s children unto the last generation. For any child of the Titans the Primal Chaos is no farther away than a moment’s thought, or a heartbeat, or a razor’s edge. For the Raven it lay even closer. With a flick of thought I opened a door in my soul and let the stuff of creation roar through it.

I felt it fill me to the brim and beyond. It was hotter than the plasma that fuels the sun and colder than the liquid helium that rains out of an outer planet’s skies. It was pain and pleasure and sheer condensed sensation. I was baked and boiled and frozen and fractured, all from within. Then it overflowed. Mad, swirling, impossible colors shot from my eyes and mouth, from the pores in my hands and follicles on my scalp. A great tumbling ball of the stuff built around me and rolled outward, an ever-expanding sphere of destruction. It burst over Hades like a wave, knocking him down and tumbling him as easily as a twig in a tidal bore.

He tried to get to his feet, but the flow never stopped or slowed, just kept building and building. Where it touched, things melted, the walls, the floor,
the
very substance of reality. I was no exception. This was not a process I could control or—realistically—survive. The chaos that ate away the building housing Hades’ office and even the bedrock on which it stood would also devour me. I had become the Raven, a creature of chaos, and more resistant to its extremes because of that. But resistant is not immune. Even as I watched the stuff of creation destroy the heart of Hades’ domain and burn and bite the god himself, I could feel the thread of my own existence unraveling away into nothingness.

I was hurting Hades terribly, but I would not, could not win. Just as I was thinking that thought, the chaos ate through a final wall, the one between the universe and the sea that surrounds it. In the blink of an eye, here became there, the stuff of Hades poured into the Primal Chaos and vice versa. There, in the heart of creation and destruction, I felt my flesh fail and my soul fray, then nothing at all.

Nevermore.

“Ravirn,” said Cerice, her voice barely a whisper.

Ravirn.

“Oh my dark bird, where have you gone?”
Cerice sounded drunk.

“Shall I bring you another daiquiri, Madame?” The voice belonged to Haemun, and it held a note of chiding.

“Two, and keep them coming.”
Drunk and bitter beyond the power of speech to express.

Came a ripping then, a tearing in the air.
Another voice.

“Nothing,” it said.
“Nothing at all.
He’s really gone.” It was Tisiphone, and she sounded nearly as broken as Cerice.

“But he didn’t show up in Hades?”

“No. But I’m not sure that means anything. The Primal Chaos is the exception to a lot of rules. Alecto thinks it destroyed him completely, that there was nothing left to make that final journey across the Styx. Not that he’d have wanted to go anyway. Hades is a miserable place under normal circumstances, and right now it looks like it was hit by a combination tidal wave and giant tornado followed by a force-ten earthquake.”

“Good,” said Cerice, her voice bitter. “I hope the god is in as bad a shape as the place.”

“Worse,” answered Tisiphone. “Burned and bitter, but returned from his jaunt into chaos.”

Cerice gave a small sob. “What about Shara?”

“It’s complex, though she’s not in Hades either.”

“Tell me.”

“She’s inside Necessity’s system, merged with it somehow. She seems to be occupying the memory space that used to hold Persephone’s tie to Hades, freeing the goddess to return to her mother, where she is now.”

“I don’t understand,” said Cerice.

“Neither do
I
. Nor my sisters for that matter, though Megaera has a theory.”

“And?”

“She thinks that Shara’s soul will stay in the system, tied to the bits holding the bond, until the first day of spring, when she’ll be released to do as she pleases.”

“And when winter comes?”

“Back into the machine.”

“I guess that’s better than Persephone’s lot. I’ll have to build her a new case. The old one went with Ravirn.”

Ravirn.

I heard another sob.

“I’d be careful when I put the new one together,” said Tisiphone. “Shara’s time with Necessity may have changed her.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Cerice. “Oh,
Tisiphone,
thanks. For looking for him, and for telling me what you found out. You didn’t have to do that, and I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, though I didn’t do it for you. I still don’t like you, but I owed it to his memory. Good-bye, forever.”

The ripping noise came again.

“And good riddance.”
Very drunk.

I felt bad about that.

“Oh, Ravirn, how could you?”

Ravirn.
I liked the sound of that. I? I. I!

“Haemun!” yelled Cerice. “Where’s that damn drink!”

“Here, Madame.”

“Thanks.” There was a long pause. “I’m sorry for yelling at you. You don’t need that.”

“It’s all right, I understand.”

“Let me offer my apologies properly.” Cerice started to whistle, something in binary, a spell of creation.

She was out of tune.
Badly.
And the spell went
wrong,
as such things do under the circumstances.

“What the—” Cerice whispered.

Another rip, this one felt rather than heard.
A small hole between here and there.
Pure chaos poured through into the world beyond. I went with it.

By will alone the Titans formed themselves from the stuff of creation. By will alone I duplicated the feat. Ravirn could never have managed the trick. But the Raven is a thing of chaos. And I am the Raven. From chaos was I born, to chaos returned, and from chaos born once
again.

I stood on the balcony of Raven House. It looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it. Black and green and perfect. It was home, and Cerice was there, sitting in a chair with a drink in each hand.

“Ravirn?” said Cerice. Her voice held both tears and pleading. “It can’t be you.”

I smiled. It felt wonderful to smile.
To feel the muscles sliding under my skin.
To have skin.
To have identity even.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “I’m likely a hallucination. Where’s Melchior?”

“It is you. Nobody else could be so difficult in the very instant he’s returned from the dead. Melchior’s inside somewhere, drunker than I am. You scared us both nine-tenths of the way to death.” She dropped her drinks, and the glasses shattered on the floor.
“You bastard!”

Then she threw herself out of her chair and into my arms. “I hate you!”

“I love you,” I said, and realized it was still true. Hers was the voice that had called me back from the
sea
of
Primal Chaos
. My name on her lips with love behind it. “I really do love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, squeezing me so hard that my ribs creaked. “But if you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Wouldn’t it be a bit late for that?” I asked.

She leaned away from me and opened her mouth to speak, then stopped, looking more than a little shocked.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing important,” she answered, but I could see that whatever it was, it frightened her. “I love you, and it’ll wait. For now, I just want you to hug me a little longer. Then we’d better find Melchior. He’s missed you as much as I have. Did I mention that I love you?”

“You did, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

“I love you.”

 
“Your deal,” said Dave, with a doggy grin.

I passed the cards from one hand to another in a fancy cascade. As they went, I adjusted probabilities and stacked the deck. Then I passed them back the other way and un-stacked it.

I looked past Cerberus to the Styx and beyond. Hades the place is not Hell, and Hades the god is not Lucifer; but I would never cross that river willingly again, not with Hades back on his throne, with its empty place beside it. I had hurt Hades, probably more than anyone since Cronus the Titan, who had fathered and devoured Hades, but nothing can make an end of Death. I knew he would be there waiting for me for as long as it took, because though I am a power, I am not immortal. I shivered.

Things had changed since I’d sat in that very spot all those weeks ago contemplating a reprise of the journey of Orpheus. I had changed. And all my relationships had changed.

The most visible manifestation of that was the thing that had so startled and disturbed Cerice, and one that made my skin crawl when I first saw it in the mirror. My eyes no longer match my colors, emerald and ebony, iris and pupils. Now chaos dances in the slits of my eyes, and in the dark, they give their own light.

The internal changes are bigger. Orpheus made his passage to the underworld on the strength of his music, his special divinity. I had hoped to make mine a copy of his.
Foolish, really, to think that I could get in and out of that final gate without playing my strongest card.
Little surprise that my first trip turned out to be nothing more than the first leg of the real journey.
My special divinity is exploiting loopholes, first in programming, then reality, and now chaos itself.

“Are you going to deal those cards or marry them?” growled Bob.

“Deal,” I said, flipping him a card from the bottom of the deck. I did it the old-fashioned way, with sleight of hand. Anything else would have been cheating.