Mythos (35 page)

“What is it?” Tisiphone asked bluntly.

Loki looked taken aback for a moment at being questioned, then he shrugged. “Brisingamen.”

“Bless you,” Melchior said in his own voice.

“It’s the necklace of Freya,” Fenris said tolerantly. “A gaudy thing. All thick gold and oversized gems. It makes the wearer sexually irresistible to all who see them.” He gave his father a curious look. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Steal it,” said Loki, then his grin slipped. “Well, get caught attempting to steal it, actually. I had this marvelous idea for using it to . . . Well, maybe I’d better keep that to myself. Let’s just pretend that as a purely intellectual exercise I cased Freya’s palace a while back and figured a way to lift the thing right from her sleeping neck.

“I hate to throw away all that effort, and I hate even more the fact that when I get caught, everyone will think I wasn’t clever enough to pull off the theft. But I can’t think of anything else that’ll drag old Heimdall away from his post faster than a chance to ogle Freya in her nightgown up close and personal. He uses that long vision of his to do it from afar often enough that
Peeping Tom
might better be changed to
Peeping Heim
.”

“Assuming that works, how will
we
know when to move?” I asked. “With Ahllan in her current state, we’re not going to want to hang about in the net any longer than we absolutely have to. Even if we could, we wouldn’t dare do it anywhere close to Heimdall. If we can see him, he can see us.”

“Let me think about that for a moment,” replied Loki. “I’ll be too busy playing decoy to do much in the way of signaling, and any flare I sent up would likely make Heimdall suspicious. Hmm.” His eyes went far away.

Melchior cleared his throat in a way that very much suggested Ahllan. “I’ve got another complication to add to the pile,” he said in her voice. “I don’t want you doing this remotely, not any more of it than you absolutely have to. As soon as you can make a gateway at the other end, I want you to bring your bodies through after you. That way if I die while you’re working, I won’t take you with me.”

“No,” said Melchior, “you’ll just leave us physically trapped within Odin’s sanctum sanctorum. All I can say to that is you’d better not die on us, old woman.” His voice came out fierce and hard, but there were tears in his eyes.

“You’ve been in worse places,” she answered back. “You’ll be fine. But just to please you, I’ll do my best not to die at an inconvenient moment.”

“Jormungand,” said Loki.

“What about him?” I asked.

“He wanted a piece of this if we could find one for him. Now I’ve got it. He can conceal his head under the waters below Bifrost. I’ll scream bloody murder when Heimdall comes after me. That’ll alert Jormungand, and he can pop up a coil back here. Hopefully, the noise I make will also draw the attention of the rest of the Aesir. Hmm, this will all take some setup, and I’d best be about it.” With a snap of his fingers, he dissolved into flame and vanished into an air duct.

“I guess that’s the plan, then.” I pointed at Tisiphone, Fenris, and Laginn. “That leaves you three as backup if we need a rescue or another distraction.”

Two voices cried, “No,” in perfect synch with Laginn’s silent gesture of refusal.
What a surprise
.

“Look,” I said, “we really don’t have time to argue about this. Fenris—”

“I know I can’t come,” he grumbled. “Not with this thing tied around my neck.” He jerked on the silver cord. “It would probably decapitate me if I tried to project myself into the network, but I want Laginn to go in my place. We’ve a bond after all our years together, and he can act as my proxy.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Now, Tisiphone . . .”

“I’m going.” There was no arguing with that tone, and I knew better than even to try.

It would have to be a combination of sweet talk and hard reason. I reached out and caught her by the elbow, trying to draw her toward the hall. I might as well have tried to move a mountain.

“Please,” I said.

“Don’t wheedle, Ravirn. I’m going.”

“Pretty please,” I said, and batted my eyelashes at her. “I just want a moment alone with you.”

She rolled her own eyes but finally nodded. “All right, but don’t think I’m changing my mind.”

When we reached the hall, I stepped in very close to her. “Can you give us some real privacy?”

“You’ve got something nasty up your sleeve. I can just tell.” She sighed, took me in her arms, then wrapped us both in her wings, hiding us in a cocoon of fire. “I don’t know if this would shut out Loki since he’s a power of fire,” she whispered in my ear, “but it should close out the rest of the world. Now, why are we out here instead of in there preparing for our foray into MimirNet?”

“We
are
preparing a foray into MimirNet. This is part of it. I need you to stay here, Tisiphone.” She didn’t answer, so I continued. “It’s not that I don’t want you to come with us. In fact, given any choice in the matter, I’d much rather have you along as muscle. The problem is that if I bring you, that leaves no one here keeping an eye on Ahllan and the good people of Rune. Fenris I mostly trust, but the rest . . . Do you trust Loki? Or any of his surrogates here? After what happened to Ahllan and Melchior?”

“Not as far as Melchior could throw him,” she said grudgingly. “We may be on Loki’s side at the moment, but I don’t believe he’s on ours.”

“Neither do I, and I really don’t want to leave an ailing webtroll where his research staff can get their paws on her and claim her death was due to ‘natural causes’ if they need to. Especially not when she’s our only ticket back out of MimirNet central once we’ve outlived our immediate usefulness by solving Loki’s main problem for him.”

She pulled her head back and met my eyes. Behind the fires there, I saw a darkness and loneliness she’d never exposed before.

“I don’t want to let you go anywhere without me,” she said, her voice much more sad and less angry than I expected. “It is such a rare thing for me to get to lay aside the mantle of the Fury, to spend time as Tisiphone and nothing more. I don’t want to give you up even for a moment of it, but you’re right, and parted we must be.”

Something about the way she held her head made me wonder if she didn’t want to say more. Instead, she leaned closer still and kissed me, squeezing me tight as she did so. A moment later, she let fall the curtain of her wings, gave me a second, lingering kiss, and released me.

“We’ve much to do and little time,” she said, indicating the door of the computer room.

The next twenty minutes were spent scrambling to get ready, the twenty after that, impatiently waiting and checking and rechecking our gear. We had all the usual stuff including my pistol and sword. Though Occam was broken, I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the blade behind—I’d really liked having a magic sword—and had affixed it to its usual place on the back of my jacket.

When the signal finally came, I opened my left hand on the table’s edge, and Laginn climbed atop my palm and laid himself out like the second layer of a very strange cake. As soon as he settled, I plunged the athame through both hands and sent our souls into the net. Melchior was already there, waiting in the giant version of his winged-snake form.

Together, we hurried down the steps from Melchior’s inner space to the margin of the network. There, he reared up—a serpent preparing to strike—and a cone of red light shot forth from his open mouth. It rendered a portion of the invisible wall both visible and permeable—a clear nod to our allies at Rune and the receptionist’s version of a door buzzer. When I mentioned it, he smiled.

“I may not like Loki, but he does have style to burn. Now, if you’ll just climb aboard, we need to be moving.”

A saddle formed just forward of Melchior’s wings, and I mounted, taking Laginn on my shoulder when he refused to ride inside my jacket. Melchior shot forward, and the rainbow blurred beneath us. Junctions zipped by so quickly that they flowed together visually, becoming a sort of rainbow fan that opened out on either side of the main path—a surreal echo of Melchior’s own winged shape.

We paused at the entrance to the final trunkway that was the main body of Bifrost. A stop that lasted just long enough to check whether Heimdall had indeed left his post. He had, and we moved on to the far end of the rainbow. I’d like to say we found a pot of gold there, but that would make me a liar. There was no gold, only the gateway to MimirNet.

I’d also like to say it was guarded by spirits of fire and water and air whom I had to defeat to win entrance; but that, too, would make a liar of me, though a lesser one. The spirits were actually those of encryption, authentication, and filtration. The first I cracked, the second spoofed, the third bypassed.

The details are too minor to recount. I had grown up hacking and cracking the systems of Fate, and the least child of my former family’s three houses would have been embarrassed to claim triumph for beating a system as lightly defended as MimirNet’s core.

You could mark the weakness of it down to Odin’s faith in his iron rule over the end user, his trust in his equally rigid management of network access, his confidence in Heimdall, or simply the fact that in this universe the forces of chaos had chosen to build an alternate infrastructure rather than assault the existing one, thereby leaving Odin without a worthy opponent to keep him on his game. Whatever the cause, the effect was the same—a gate so flimsy it could barely hold back the wind.

Once inside, the absolute control invested in the admin became mine to use as I would. Temptation to explore the system from within, to own it completely, tugged at the cracker in me. I put it aside for the moment. I would wait to indulge myself until later, after we had finished our mission—if there was a later.

Before anything else, I had to ensure our short-term survival. That meant reuniting body and soul. Back home, it would have been a trivial matter to bring them hither. Simply open a locus-transfer-protocol link and whistle them up, but a traditional LTP—if such an application even existed here—would have required an actual authorized MimirSoft computer on both ends. While Ahllan, backed by the power of RuneNet, was a truly formidable device, she was most definitely not a MimirSoft box. That meant a certain amount of duct-tape-and-string-style hackwork.

So let it be written, so let it be run. The appropriate codespell, that is. Not too very many minutes after we’d left Rune in electronic shape we stood within Yggdrasil, creatures of the flesh once again.

“Ever have a streak where everything goes right?” I said as I settled back into my body.

“No,” said Melchior, suspiciously eyeing the long rows of beige boxes.

“Me neither.” I sighed. “So, what do you suppose is going to go catastrophically wrong this time?”

“Besides Ahllan’s dying?” he asked, his voice bitter. “I don’t know, but if that’s by way of the appetizer for our usual seven courses of disaster, I’d rather skip straight from here to dessert.” He threw me a smile when he said it, but I could tell it reached no deeper than his lips.

Then he followed Laginn over to the nearest rack of servers and poked at one of the casings.

“This place looks like the end result of a fire sale at
boringhardware.com
,” he said. “Does Odin really run all of existence from this room? If so, how does he stay awake?”

I shrugged. “Lots and lots of coffee?” The glare of the fluorescents and the endless rows of identical servers did make for an awfully dreary work environment, but we weren’t there for a job interview. “Come on, let’s find an access point and see what we can make this system do for us.”

That proved easier said than done. Much. Oh, there were tons of PCs with monitors and keyboards to provide us entry to the system, and getting root-level access was pretty much a cakewalk. The problem was that MimirNet didn’t seem to hook into Mimir-proper in any way we could actually use. The command structure all flowed in one direction—from Mimir to MimirNet and from there to the user. There were also no crosslinks to the abacuses or any part of the system aimed at the control of the universe. As far as MimirNet was concerned, the abacuses didn’t exist, not even on the blueprints of the facility. Despite the fact that I could see the door from the machine I was using, MimirNet told me the room beyond didn’t exist.

I could do anything I wanted to any MimirSoft computer from here. I could turn the personal machines of every single Asgardian into spam-sending zombies, but none of that would move us so much as a single step in the right direction.

“Now what?” asked Melchior from his cross-legged position on the desk beside the computer.

Laginn jerked his thumb at the door to the abacus room, and I had to nod.

“I think he’s right, Mel. We need to try something different.”

Mel sighed. “That’s about where I was, too, but I hoped someone else would have a better suggestion. After our last experience with legacy hardware of the Bronze Age variety I’m a little hesitant about getting close to the stuff again.”

“Believe me, little buddy, I’m none too thrilled by the idea myself.”

That didn’t stop me from getting up and heading for the door, or the other two from following me. The door had no handle or other means for opening it, and I didn’t have the spear Odin had used as a knocker last time, so I started off by leaning in close and listening. Faint but clear came a continuous cascade of sharp metallic clicks—the copper beads doing whatever it was they did.

I touched my hand to the center of the door, about where Odin had knocked. A magical crackle rolled across my skin from that point of contact, and I shuddered but didn’t pull away. I felt the feathers I didn’t currently possess slowly rise and stand on end while every nerve in my body screamed about how this was a Very Bad Idea. I ignored the internal warnings and ever so gently pushed on the door. It moved soundlessly inward, and I followed it.