Mythos (2 page)

Which leads to reason two: the webtroll Ahllan, one of Melchior’s oldest and closest friends, not to mention the former leader of the familiar underground and current victim of that aforementioned conflict with Hades. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, she’d vanished in a way that involved the near-limitless powers of Necessity. If we wanted to know where she’d gone and why and, more important, how to get her back, we had to go to the source.

My third reason was less noble and one I hadn’t even shared with Melchior. To see if I could. I’m a hacker and cracker right down to the marrow, and, even damaged as she was, Necessity was the hardest target imaginable. The idea of cracking Necessity scared the crap out of me, but if I could do it and get away with it, it would be the hacker equivalent of pulling the sword from the stone.

“Hey, Ravirn,” Melchior whispered into my earpiece, “focus.”

I started, and he chuckled evilly.

“Relax,” he said. “Shara turned off the alarms and unlocked the locks. All we have to do is open one little door.”

Shara was our hidden ace, once a webgoblin, now a part of Necessity’s security architecture and our key to many locks. All of them, really, except this first one. For that, I had Occam.

I reached back and grabbed the sword-cane tucked behind my left shoulder, swinging it around in front of me. Three feet of ebony with a steel base. The hilt was made of something like organic diamond, grown into an exquisite sculpture of a goddess, fiery-winged and naked. Tisiphone the Fury, my sometime foe, sometime lover.

A twist loosed Occam from its sheath. It’s an unusual sword, a doubled blade with a plus-sign-shaped cross section, not great for hack and slash but absolutely deadly for thrusting. The blade is made of the same organic diamond as the hilt, the stuff of Fury claws, and security magic. With it, and under certain circumstances, I can pretend I’m a fourth Fury, one of Necessity’s sys-admins . . .
reality’s
sys-admins.

I pressed my right palm against the blade, then paused. Once I took the next step, we were committed and, quite possibly, dead. It wasn’t a decision I wanted to rush.

Melchior sighed. “Are we going to do this? Or are we just going to float here until the Primal Chaos devours us?”

“Patience, Mel. We’re perfectly safe.”
I hope,
I added mentally.

The Primal Chaos is magic in its purest form. Pure, raw creation. It both contains and gave birth to the near-infinite parallel worlds of reality. It’s incredibly dangerous stuff, except to those like me . . . maybe. When I became the Raven, I joined Team Chaos, theoretically immunizing me from the normal effects.

Unfortunately, that immunity doesn’t fully extend to those around me—which was why Melchior was riding inside my jacket in laptop shape. There’s also the part where I’m not immune to its
abnormal
effects, the ones reserved for creatures of chaos, even minor powers like me. For example, the present circumstances have pretty much the same effect on me that hanging around in a billowing cloud of marijuana smoke would have on a human.

Have I not mentioned the bit about being nonhuman? Sorry. I’m a mortal child of the gods. On my mother’s side I descend from Lachesis, the second of the three Fates and the goddess who measures the threads. On my father’s side, I trace my line to Thalia, muse of bucolic comedy. And yes, Fate and Slapstick
are
the two forces that dominate my life. It’s less entertaining than it sounds; picture a cream pie with broken glass in the bottom.

The name of my soul and my power is Raven. It is not the name I was born with, nor one I would ever have chosen. It was laid upon me in one of those tragicomic cream-pie moments by Clotho, the Fate who spins. The name has shaped me, as names must, made me more impulsive and sarcastic. More prone to take risks like, oh, say . . . cracking Necessity.

I still prefer to be called Ravirn, but whether I like it or not, I
am
Raven and one face of the Trickster. Because of that, both my triumphs and mistakes have grown in scope, and all too often, one flows so smoothly into the other that it can be hard to tell which is which. I was really hoping this would be a day of triumph, but I never know.

“Bossss!” It was Melchior. “Hellooo, are you still out there?”

I pulled my attention back to the here and now—damn chaos . . . damn good chaos. So sweet. I shook my head and blinked several times.

“Sorry, Mel. I lost my concentration again. Chaos.”

“Uh-huh, that was really my point. That we want to be on the other side of the wall of reality.”

“Right. Good point. Oh, and Mel?”

“Yes?”

“How many times have I asked you not to call me ‘boss’?”

“Two thousand three hundred and twelve, if you count this one. Why do you ask?” he added brightly.

I sighed. “It’s not doing me any good, is it?”

“Could we get back to breaking and entering, and save the big existential questions for later?”

“Right, that’s what I thought.”

Sliding my right hand along Occam’s edge opened a deep cut in my palm, a cut that filled with chaos rather than the blood a more normal blade would have drawn. Then, taking the hilt firmly in my wounded hand—to make a bond between the sword and the stuff of my soul—I slashed a vertical hole in the wall between reality and chaos, or more accurately between chaos and one specific corner of reality.

I slipped through the rift and out onto a dark hillside where the smell of pines hung heavy in the air. Behind me, the hole sealed itself with a zipper sort of sound, and I felt a trickle of cold sliding down my spine like icy water. Reality shouldn’t do that. Open the walls of reality with any tool other than a sharpened bit of Fury-stuff and Primal Chaos pours through from there to here with generally catastrophic results. I’d killed a cousin that way a couple of years back—an act that still haunts my nightmares—and I’d very nearly done the same to Hades later—likewise the stuff of nightmares, though for very different reasons.

“Melchior?” I whispered, doing a slow turn and scanning for movement. “I need a touch of night vision, please. Then why don’t you come out and play?”

Through my earpiece I heard him whistle “Redeye,” a binary program, or codespell if you prefer. It would temporarily allow me to see in the infrared.

“How do things look out there?” he asked.

“Nothing’s tried to eat me yet.” I turned again, surveying my surroundings with improved vision. “Nothing’s moving. Northern hemisphere, pine forest, probably late summer, though it’s hard to tell. With Persephone free, the seasons are all askew in the top dozen DecLoci.”

“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.