Mythos (15 page)

Ahllan seemed to be alive, but I couldn’t rouse her. As I knelt beside her, Tisiphone paced and swore and snarled. Her hair and wings flared and crackled, merging into a single tower of flame that shot high above her. I felt exactly the same way.

She’d started out by sniffing around and trying to find a trail, but had failed utterly—Loki hadn’t left any traces beyond the faerie ring, and neither Tisiphone nor I had managed to find anything within that might help. What we had found—really what Tisiphone had found—was the blood and the Fury claws. She paused now and glared at me, holding out her palm. A half dozen shards of organic diamond blinked in the sun.

She let out a catlike yowl of pure rage. “Damn Persephone to eternal torment for her interference with Necessity! And damn you for whatever you did that got us sent here. What in the hell is going on back there?”

I shrugged, a motion that reminded me of the ten prickling wounds in my back from Tisiphone’s claws. I wasn’t about to argue with an enraged Fury, but I wasn’t willing to cut her a whole lot of slack at the moment either. I had my own problems, like the kidnapping of the person closest to me in all the worlds of possibility and the injury of a grand old troll whom I loved like a mother. Well, like somebody else’s mother. Mine was a thousand-year-old nightmare who would rather see me dead than seated across the table at a family gathering.

“I don’t know, Tisiphone, and I’m not entirely sure I care. What I do know is that I have to get Melchior back, and I have to take care of Ahllan.” Who still wasn’t waking up—damn it!

The claws of Tisiphone’s toes dug deep scars in the dead lawn as she stormed over to stand above me. Flames trailed behind her like a demon-bride’s train, and if I had hurt less, I might have even been intimidated into apologizing for whatever was happening back in our home pantheoverse. Instead, I just met her gaze and waited to see what would happen next.

“How did they do that?” she demanded abruptly.

“Do what?” I asked, momentarily derailed. I had no idea where she was going.

“This!” Her wide-flung arms took in the fallen Ahllan, the missing Melchior, and the fresh faerie ring. Her fires suddenly died down to practically nothing, and her next words came out in a whisper. “How could I not have heard what happened here?”

That was a good question, actually. Tisiphone’s ears were exceptional. The very first time Tisiphone and I made love, she’d heard Melchior tiptoeing down the hall outside the room mid-bout despite the rather loud and vigorous nature of our pursuit.

“I don’t know,” I said, then paused as an idea occurred to me. “Maybe it was some sort of acoustical magic, or maybe it was the same reason you haven’t been healing as fast here and now as you’re used to.” Maybe she wasn’t exactly a Fury there, just as I wasn’t exactly the Raven.

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice low and worried—she clearly thought I knew something she didn’t.

“I’ll tell you all about it after we get Ahllan taken care of.” I begrudged every second invested in something other than finding Melchior, but I loved Ahllan, too, and owed her my life.

“All right. I’ll carry her,” said Tisiphone.

Her expression was surprisingly tender as she bent and scooped the old troll into her arms. She did wince a bit when her still-healing right arm took the strain, but didn’t utter a word of complaint.

I’d heard the code trigger for the York Miniature shrinking spell enough times that I managed to get it right on my third try despite my distress. Tisiphone carried Ahllan back to the chapter house and put her gently on her own small futon. I tugged a blanket up to cover the troll, checked her pulse and breathing, then stepped far enough away from the bed that she wouldn’t be disturbed by my whispered swearing.

“I hate this,” growled Tisiphone, when I’d wound down a bit. “Things are screwed at home, and they’re just as screwed here, and I don’t know what to do about either. I don’t like uncertainty. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on or who the players are. And I absolutely despise unpaid debts. What are you going to do about Ahllan?”

I blinked. The changes of topic and mood were starting to give me a bit of whiplash. “I don’t know. I’ve never been much good with healing spells under the best of circumstances. Without Melchior to run the code, all I’ve got is chaos magic, and since that’s subtly different here as well, I really don’t want to risk it. I think I’m going to have to plug in and see what I can do from the inside. Not that I really want to do that either.”

“But you will if you have to. . . . Right?” There was a hint of desperation in her tone that I just didn’t understand.

I nodded. “Of course I will. But, if you’ll permit the question, why so concerned about a troll you barely know?”

Tisiphone blushed. It was the strangest thing, completely out of character, reminding me again that she might not be a Fury in this pantheoverse.

Tisiphone mumbled something about “debts.”

“Huh?”

I was getting steadily more confused, not to mention angry about wasting time talking when we should have been acting. Knowing Melchior was out there in danger and probably getting farther and farther away made me want to scream. But I had to take care of Ahllan, and Tisiphone . . . Tisiphone mattered to me. A lot. Maybe more than a lot. And she seemed to need me now in a way she never had back home.

“I owe Ahllan an apology,” whispered Tisiphone into the silence that had fallen between us.

“What!”

Tisiphone’s color darkened, and when she answered, her voice held more of its normal controlled rage. “I owe her an apology. For what I did to her home way back when. We spent some time talking yesterday. She didn’t deserve what the Furies did to her—what I did to her. I was following Necessity’s orders—and I won’t apologize for that; I literally had no choice in the matter—but I decided I needed to let her know that I wished I hadn’t had to do it. Oh, and speaking of which, I’m sorry I lost my temper with Fenris back there and sorrier still for those holes I put in your back.”

Remorse, from a Fury? Suddenly, and despite everything else on my huge
to-do right godsdamned now
list, telling Tisiphone about what Odin had said about foreign powers moved to the front of the line.

“First, apology accepted,” I said. “You didn’t mean to hurt me, and that was easily in the top twenty dumbest moves of my life. That all it cost me was a little blood and pain is practically a miracle. Consider it forgiven and forgotten. Next, sit down for a moment, would you?”

She did, and I launched into a full, if auctioneer-speed, version of my encounter with Odin and the ravens. When I finished, she had a rather odd look on her face, one I couldn’t read.

“I’ll have to think about that for a while,” she finally said. “When we have time to think again. In the meantime, hadn’t you better work on Ahllan?”

I winced. Despite all hope to the contrary, the troll hadn’t woken on her own. That meant I had to take the next step.

“We sure can’t leave her like this. Are you willing to take another look around outside for any clues Loki might have left while I get Ahllan ready for a connection?”

“There’s nothing there,” snapped Tisiphone. “At least
I think
there’s nothing there.” She growled, a low, piercing sound like an angry cat, then bounced to her feet and started pacing. “I hate the idea that I might have to doubt myself. Doubt what I am.”

“Will you look?” I asked. “If you don’t find anything, I’ll make a quick attempt at fixing Ahllan. If you do, we’ll have . . . we’ll have a hard choice to make.” One I didn’t want to face—go after Melchior immediately at unknown cost to Ahllan, or work on Ahllan with the possible costs going the other way.

Tisiphone nodded and headed for the door.

“Do you need me to whistle you out?” I asked.

She didn’t even slow, just called disgustedly over her shoulder, “I may not be a Fury here, and I may not be able to stop whatever is happening to Necessity back home, but that doesn’t make me helpless.”

I didn’t respond, going instead to Ahllan’s bedside. I’d plugged in to her internal cyberspace once before, when I needed to fix Melchior. But she’d taken on mainframe shape for me then—she was that old. A big rectangular machine studded with blinking lights, she’d come equipped with a flip-down keyboard and a green screen CRT. She’d also had a small box crudely welded to one side with a DIY networking port upgrade that made her compatible with modern athame technology. The aftermarket nature of that last worried me.

With Melchior I knew right where to plug in no matter which body he wore. Ahllan, on the other hand, might not even have a flesh-port. I quickly checked her nose and ears—the normal jack points for a webgoblin. Nothing.

Damn.
I closed my eyes and tried to put myself fully inside the hazy memory of plugging in to Ahllan. I’d been half out of my mind worrying about Melchior and running a major sleep deficit on top of that. And hey, but didn’t that sound awfully familiar right at the moment?

Slowly, more of the day came back to me. She’d transformed herself manually, using an external switch of sorts. Could I induce her to shape-shift from the outside? Since I’d had the same thing pulled on me quite recently, much to my distress, the idea made me mighty uncomfortable, but I had to plug in somehow.

What had she done to initiate the change?
Let’s see
: she’d run a claw along a scar just below her left ear—opening up the old wound—hadn’t she? I checked the side of her neck. Yes, there. I touched the scar gently. It sank under the pressure of my finger. I pushed harder. The scar slid open like a zipper and faint green light poured out, though she didn’t change.
But there had been two scars, hadn’t there? Yes.
I repeated the operation. More green light, but no transformation.

Now what?
It was looking increasingly like I was going to have to make a thorough body search. With a sigh, I peeled the covers back and looked Ahllan over with an intensity I’d been avoiding since we’d arrived. She was old—ancient by computer standards—and I’d been doing my best to pretend it hadn’t affected her. I didn’t want her to grow old and die any more than Melchior did.

As a part of that, I’d been kind of pretending that if I kept my earlier image of her in my mind instead of absorbing the new one, it would somehow make the ravages of time not have happened. Now I had to face them directly.

Her brownish skin, once uniformly rough and full like the bark of some old tree, had loosened and wrinkled so that it seemed to hang on her, and patches had grown lighter or darker. Small breasts that had barely registered when full now seemed to hang like empty sacks. Her long, strong fingers had bent and twisted at the knuckles. I doubted she could fully straighten most of them anymore. She still had her tusks, but many of her other teeth had fallen out—a fact I discovered when I opened her jaw looking for that hidden port.

“What are you doing?” Tisiphone asked quietly over my shoulder.

I hadn’t heard her come in—I never did—and I’d had to work at not jumping out of my skin. Tisiphone takes a catlike glee in sneaking up on people, so it was an exercise I’d had a lot of practice with, and I felt I was getting pretty good at it. I made sure to adopt a not-quite-bored expression before I looked at her. The effect was somewhat marred by the strain that twisting around put on my perforated back and the indrawn breath I couldn’t quite suppress because of it, but I still felt I’d done pretty well.

Tisiphone grinned and shook her head. “Your heart rate gives you away, you know, even when you don’t jump. That and the sweat.”

So much for patting myself on the back. My girlfriend was a living lie detector.

“Here,” she said, handing me a green Forestdown Estates tee shirt. “I borrowed this from the gift shop. You can put it on after I bandage you up, and you can tell me what you’re doing here while I work.”

“I’m trying to find a networking port,” I said as I unzipped my jacket. “Ahllan’s an old enough model that her original hardware’s incompatible with my generation of athame.”

The blood had dried enough that getting my old shirt off reopened wounds and started me swearing again. After I wound down, I explained what I needed from Ahllan and what I’d tried.

“I’ve got nothing on Loki either,” she replied when I finished. “Nor the Fury blood and claws we found, for that matter. They smell wrong somehow, maddeningly so, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Let me have a try with Ahllan.” Tisiphone leaned past me and started sniffing along the troll’s body, moving quickly from head to feet. When she was done, she shook her head. “Not in this shape.”

“You can tell by smell?” I asked.

Tisiphone nodded. “The only metal on her is the fillings in her teeth. That means no contacts, which means no networking port. Let me see. . . .” Tisiphone bent and looked into Ahllan’s neck scars. “Huh, I wonder.”

She extended the claws of her index fingers about an inch and carefully jabbed them into the holes hidden beneath the scars, probing. I winced, but didn’t interfere. A moment later there came a very definite pair of clicks.

Ahllan’s flesh began to twist and shift. It was a slow transition, rough and mechanical and jerky, more like poorly done stop-motion animation than the way a modern webgoblin melted from shape to shape. Her mainframe form looked the worse for wear, too, with corrosion visible on all her metal surfaces and her plastics dull and spider-webbed with cracks, not to mention the numerous telltale flashing red lights where there should have been green.

Tisiphone eyed the old mainframe dubiously. “I hate to see you trusting your soul to hardware in this condition.” She tapped the aftermarket network connection with its rusty welds.

“I’ll admit I’ve had plans that made me happier,” I replied. If Ahllan pulled a massive meltdown or otherwise checked out with my awareness aboard, I’d probably end up going with her. “But I have to try.”