Mythos (3 page)

“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.”

Nothing.

“Melchior, cut Vlink. Execute.”

I hadn’t used the execute command in more than two years, not since the day I’d discovered Melchior was more than just an automaton, that he had free will and was as much a person as I. I didn’t want to use it now either—it was a violation—but between the threat of the Fury and the message of my feathers, I knew I had little choice.

Melchior’s mouth shut with a snap, and he closed his eyes as well but gave no other sign of life. The light that had streamed forth from those portals flicked off, but the floating silver ball remained. Tisiphone struck it a spearing blow of her right hand, her claws extended six inches from her fingertips. There was a sharp ringing as of two swords struck together, and Tisiphone slid backwards, driven by the force of her own attack encountering a seemingly immovable object.

She hit it several more times in quick succession, each with the same result. Then the sphere moved, rising and turning. Though it had no apparent features, I got the impression of a great disembodied eye trying to get all three of us into the range of its vision.

I wanted to run, but Tisiphone stood between me and the door. I feared she might kill me out of hand in her current state. Quickly but cautiously, I scooped up Melchior—he was stiff in my arms.

“Tisiphone?” I said.

“Silence.” Her voice was sharp, angry, and scared. I raised my hand like a student asking permission to speak, but she only said again, “Silence.”

“What have you done to her?” she said to the sphere in that same voice.

It was only in that instant that I realized her “silence” wasn’t an order. It was an observation. The abacuses had stopped clicking. They were still. The sphere started to swell, growing quickly from the size of a beach ball to something bigger than a car. As it lifted toward the ceiling, the nearest abacus started clicking slowly, first one bead, then another and another, all moving from left to right. Almost against my will, I stepped toward the abacus. Tisiphone blocked my way.

“No, Ravirn, I won’t—”

But whatever it was that she wouldn’t, I never heard it. Instead, there came a single enormous metallic clash as all the remaining beads in the room suddenly moved from left to right. The great silver ball started to drop toward us, falling like a hammer.

Then everything went away behind a curtain of blackness as though all the lights in the universe had gone out.

When the light came back, everything was different, as if someone had changed the sets during the blackout between acts, someone with a very strange sense of humor. The cavern with its abacuses and falling silver sphere was gone, replaced by a dying lawn under a westering sun and a stately Gothic cathedral. The only problem was that, with the exception of its towers, this cathedral stood barely chin high.

“Where are we?” I said, glancing around to see whether we were about to be attacked by Lilliputians.

“Lost,” said Tisiphone, very quietly. Her voice had reverted to the one I’d heard only in our private moments. “We’re lost.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. The Furies are never lost; Necessity always keeps them informed of exactly where they are in relation to everything else. Even broken as she was, Necessity had never failed in that task. “You can’t be lost. It’s not possible.”