Mythos (18 page)

As I said,
classic
Tisiphone.

We were still no closer to finding Melchior, but I’d had another idea in that regard, one that involved a different use of faerie rings. We retired to the ring within the miniature of Shakespeare’s home to pursue it.

“How is this going to go again?” Tisiphone asked, as we prepared to step into the ring.

“Hopefully, the same way things worked when I found my way to Raven House.”

Then I’d asked the faerie-ring network to carry me to a place of refuge. Now I wanted it to help me find Melchior. I might not be the Raven here, but I was still a power of chaos. Taking Tisiphone’s hand in my own, I stepped into the ring. As had become the norm, I had the experience of being in that one and all other rings concurrently. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. In just the day and a half since I’d built the first, Loki or some mechanism he’d set up had created a vast and expanding network.

Take me to Melchior,
I willed the rings. Nothing happened.
Help me find him!
Nope.
I need information. . . .

But I wasn’t going to find it there apparently. I started to lead Tisiphone back out of the ring, then paused. Something new had occurred to me. Could I perhaps use the rings another way, as a sort of lens? I focused my attention outward rather than inward, trying to peer out into the locations containing the myriad rings I simultaneously occupied.

The effect was immediate, intoxicating, and headache-inducing. A fly’s eye has thousands of individual lenses, each with its own cornea and photoreceptors and each of which brings in an image of the surrounding area. What I was seeing was akin to what a fly saw, with two major exceptions. One, each image came from a different place. Two, I didn’t have the right set of tools to process the information. The fly’s brain comes equipped with special neurological software and hardware that’s evolved to take all of the images and merge them into a wide-angle composite view of its surroundings. For the fly, the system is a highly advanced visual processor optimized by evolution for its needs. For me, it was optical gibberish and an instant skull-splitting migraine.

My head wanted to come apart, but I refused to give up. There had to be some way I could make this work. There had to be. I tried letting my attention flicker from image to image. Better, but still not that useful. There were simply too many for me to manage in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe if I went the other way? Tried for a gestalt vision as I sometimes did while hacking—envisioning the structure of the code as a sort of three-dimensional crystal? Could that work? I tried to both look and not look, to see all the myriad views while not actually focusing on any of them.

For long seconds, the only thing I achieved was an intensification of my headache. But then little details began to pop, mostly details of absence—no Melchior there or there or there—but also points of presence—a rook on a twisted oak branch in that scene or a crow pecking at roadkill in this one. More and more I was seeing spots of black: crows, jackdaws, magpies, rooks, ravens—the entire family
Corvi dae
in all its feathered glory. No, not ravens. Ravens, the Ravens of the Norse mythos.

Or Norse MythOS. The rules of magic for this place and time, its mystical operating system, treated my internal Raven differently than the one back home. Here Hugin and Munin gathered information for the king of the gods. Odin’s Ravens. Thought. Memory. Intuition? Or Impulse? On a burst of the latter, I pushed my awareness outward, tried to connect it with the dots of black that speckled my gestalt vision of the faerie-ring network, and made . . . CONTACT.

I
vanished into
we
.
Man
became
many
. Raven the individual dispersed into ravens, the Flock—a biological parallel-computing cluster in the mold of the UNIX-based Beowulf system. The information flow increased dramatically, but the difficulty of processing it vanished. Instead of trying to see ten thousand vistas through one pair of eyes and process them through a single brain, each part of my extended consciousness dealt with its own surroundings, forwarding only that portion of the scene that was relevant back to the central processor—me.

Ringscape after ringscape was discarded from the list of possible interest until one alone remained, a rook’s-eye view. In it a red-haired giant of a man knelt beside a traditional mushroom faerie ring in the midst of a pine wood. We/I tried to get a better look at him, intensifying our/my/ the rook’s gaze. As if in response to that focus, the man looked upward, meeting our/my/the rook’s eyes, and nodded a greeting.

“Intuition,” he said. “We should talk.”

The voice was as familiar as the face—a face I’d seen a thousand times and one that flat-out didn’t belong here. Zeus.

Cognitive dissonance.

Fundamentally incompatible ideas crashed together inside the flock mind, shattering it back into its component pieces. I fell out of we, but not before locking down my destination and conundrum. With a flick of my will I shifted us from the ring where we had entered to the one where a god who had no right to be here waited for us.

“What the hell do you think you’re trying . . . to . . . pull . . . ?” My voice had started the sentence out with a yell, but by the time I reached the end, it had trailed into a confused whisper.

“Zeus?” I said, though I knew the answer even as I spoke.

This was not the thunder god I knew. Not Zeus, king of the gods of Olympus. If nothing else, Zeus’s eyes had never been so bloodshot, not even after the heartiest night of partying. Yet . . . the echoes of that god were plain in this god’s face and manner—I had no doubt that I faced another god.

“Who are you?” whispered Tisiphone from beside me. I found the stunned wonder in her voice reassuring—a sign my confusion was fully justified.

The man in front of us looked from me to Tisiphone and back again, repeatedly. His grin grew with each pass until he finally burst out laughing, a deep, infectious boom of a laugh that rolled like thunder—Zeus’s laugh almost, but maddeningly not quite. Little bolts of lightning flickered in his beard when he laughed, just as they did for Zeus.

“Firebird and blackbird, what a perfect pair,” he said in a voice that was and was not Zeus’s. Then he laughed his thunderous laugh again. “And both agog in the noonday sun. Do you really not recognize me, then, flame and shadow?”

“No,” I said, though I was beginning to have the distinct feeling I should.

“Does this help?” He tapped an iron-gloved finger on the great-headed hammer hanging from a blackened metal hammer loop on his thick belt, producing a dull “clank.”

I shook my head.

“Thor?”

“Oh. Oh! OH!” Suddenly I had it, and why he looked so much like Zeus, too.

If it hadn’t been for the brain crash his Zeus resemblance had induced, I’d have had it a lot sooner. Thor! God of Thunder and wielder of the hammer with the unpronounceable name. No wonder he looked so much like Zeus. They were in the same business. The resemblance
was
uncanny.

Both were big, muscular men—seven feet or more and broad-shouldered. They could have easily worn each other’s clothes. Both had thick beards, though Zeus’s was a reddish gold, and Thor’s was a gold-tinged red. They both had broad, open faces and curly hair.

There was one huge difference, though—their eyes. Zeus’s are perpetually wide open and vacant, making him look somewhat dim and naive. It’s a lie of course; he’s a shrewd old bastard and deeply jaded. Thor’s were . . . distracting. At first glance they looked horribly bloodshot, the eyes of a drunk hitting the end of a three-day binge. But on closer examination, the red threads no longer looked like blood. They looked like lightning, constantly moving and flashing and forking. I’d have bet money that in the dark they gave off even more light than mine.

The two gods’ attitudes were different, too. Zeus is a joker of the hail-fellow-well-met variety and his own best audience—he laughs constantly. But it’s an act, a hard, clever soul playing at gentle dimness to take in the rubes. Thor laughed easily, too, or at least gave the impression of it, but it came off as the good-natured laugh of a wise man who enjoyed life to the full despite its kinks and twists.

Gods are bigger than life, and their personalities reach well beyond the bounds of their skins. To spend time around a god is—to a certain extent—to spend time within the god, and this one felt homey.

“I knew it would come to you eventually,” Thor said, just as my cascading realizations started to settle down. “
Intuition
indeed.”

“I take it from that, that you know of me as well,” I said.

Thor nodded. “Odin is my father. Though he didn’t mention the lady when last we talked.” He indicated Tisiphone with a jerk of his chin. “Neither her name nor her beauty nor any mention of her nature. What, and who, are you, my dear?” Thor pulled the iron glove off his right hand and offered it in greeting.

Tisiphone inclined her head but didn’t take the hand. “I am Tisiphone, sometimes called Vengeance, and
no one’s
‘dear.’ Especially not the son of the god who kidnapped and imprisoned my lover.”

“Ah, yes, that.” Thor chuckled and left his hand extended. “That was not the wisest thing my father has ever done, and I would have counseled him against it. But then, his inability to
see
Raven here has blinded him to more than just the future. I won’t apologize for a mistake that wasn’t mine, but I won’t try to repeat it either. On that you have my word. Come, step out of that ring, the both of you, and talk with me awhile.”

“What have we to talk about?” asked Tisiphone, impatience plain in her tone.

“Loki for one,” replied Thor. “At least I suspect we have something to talk about there since you are standing in the midst of a devilish bit of new magic he’s brewed up, and no one who’s ever had dealings with him has done so without ultimately coming to regret it.” He turned his gaze my way. “Though, I must admit that your eyes suggest you might have more in common with Loki the Trickster than would make me entirely happy.”

Tisiphone laughed and finally shook Thor’s hand. “There, you may have hit the mark. Ravirn tends to leave a trail of not-entirely-happy souls wherever he goes as well. Come on, Ravirn, we’ve got to find Melchior, and from the sounds of things, Thor is an expert on the Trickster.” She winked at me. “The
other
Trickster, that is.”

I humphed, but followed Tisiphone out of the faerie ring. She had a point, a number of them, actually, though I was nowhere near as annoying as Loki. At least, I really hoped I wasn’t. I was honest enough to admit that Hades, the Fates, and at least one of Tisiphone’s sisters might see things very differently.

Thor extended his hand to me as well and with a bit of an anticipatory wince I put mine in his. Several amazingly long seconds later he returned it to me, somewhat smaller and the worse for wear—because of intense compression—but still basically intact.

“Come,” said Thor, “sit with me by the fire and we’ll talk.”

He led us a brief way through the trees to a place where a goat-drawn chariot sat in a small clearing. There was no fire when we arrived, but Thor fixed that by the simple expedient of raising his hammer and pointing it at a fallen log. Lightning shot from its head and instantly ignited the wood. Then Thor slid the hammer, now glowing a dull, angry red, back into the metal loop on his belt.

“I’d cook you up a bit of roast goat,” he said, pointing at the chariot, “but there’s a lot of daylight left, and I may need them to take me somewhere before tomorrow morning.”

“That’s all right,” I said, though I was more than a bit confused by the offer. “We haven’t really got a whole lot of time for things like dinner at the moment either.” Besides, I hated goat—a matter of some contention at family parties. “Speaking of which . . .”

“Loki,” said Thor. “I presume you’ve a bone to pick with him since his was the name that conjured you out of your ring. What has he done to
you
?”

“He kidnapped my best friend,” I growled.

“We’re hunting him now in hopes of making a rescue,” added Tisiphone.

“Typical.” Thor shook his head. “Loki is the trial of the Aesir, and one we too often fail, I think.” He tapped the still-glowing hammer. “I would not have Mjolnir were it not for Loki, nor would Odin have his spear or Frey his great golden boar. All were part of the Trickster’s payment for stealing the hair of my wife. Mighty gifts, and we will have dire need of them come the hour of Ragnarok, but leaving the thief his life was a dear price. Dearer, I think, than Odin—who sees deep into the future—will yet say.”

Thor stopped speaking and glowered into the fire, missing my nod. I was sure he was right. The more time I spent here, the more I remembered from the Norse myths I’d read in that long-ago class, though I’d have happily committed nine kinds of larceny to get my hands on a copy of the textbook and a couple of hours to reread it. Unlike my own family’s story, the Norse gods’ tale had a distinct and unpleasant ending, one involving Loki’s leading an army of giants against Asgard. Of course that left two questions begging.

One: Did they know about it? Odin had certainly seemed to when he spoke of Ragnarok and his family’s dark ending, while Thor did not. Denial? Selective memory?

And two: Was the war to come
the
future? Or
a
future? Fate could be a slippery thing, or at least that was my experience. Of course, how much that experience meant in this place with its chaos that was not my chaos and binary that was not my binary was an open question.

Thor finally looked up. “One day Loki is our greatest ally. The next, our fiercest enemy. No surprise, I guess.” He pointed at the burning log. “Loki is Fire, aiding and destroying by turns. But then”—he glanced from me to Tisiphone—“I think you may know something of fire. Tell me a story. If it is a good one, I will help you find Loki and rescue your friend. If it is not, I will tell you one in return, and we may part ways in friendship.”