Mythos (37 page)

The specific thing that drew me back to myself was a rather important one. Odin. Leaning quietly on the wall beside the opening to Mimir’s Well. He had been there for a while. Since the moment I’d entered the room, in fact. He was invisible. But I still knew he was there.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he asked, flickering into visibility. “This knowing things.”

“Does that mean you can see me now?” I asked.

“Only through the eye of my flesh, but you knew that.”

I laughed, though not with amusement. He was right, though I hadn’t known I’d known it until he pointed it out. I was really beginning to dislike omniscience. Mel wouldn’t be thrilled about it either—once Odin released him and Laginn from the frozen state he’d put them in—he thought I was too much of a know-it-all as it was.

“You could have chosen to save her,” said Odin with a sad smile.

Driving his spear into my heart would have hurt less.

“Thanks,” I replied. “I really, really needed to hear that. I didn’t save her. End of story.”

“But it isn’t. This is one fork of that first split. Not only could you have saved her; in another world you did.”

“Great, the other me must be feeling pretty good about that right now. The me here in front of you? Not so much.”

“I don’t think that you is any happier than this one. That you has to live with the fact that he chose the life of a friend over everything he and that friend believed. That you has to bear the weight of an entire pantheoverse surrendered to Fate. That you has to live with having made puppets of every living thing. I don’t think he’s any happier.”

“So we’re both depressed. Somehow, knowing that doesn’t make it any better.”

Odin snapped his fingers, and a handkerchief appeared between them. He blew on it, and it flew to me. As I snatched it from the air, I realized I was crying. Knew that I had been for some time. Tears from my right eye. Blood from my missing left.

“Nothing makes the hard choices any softer,” said Odin. “Nothing ever will. Take my choice not to stop you just minutes ago. I could have prevented the rip you have torn in my nice, neat, clockwork universe. Never doubt it.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I asked.

“It would have made a waste of all the effort I went through to put you in a place where you could do what you have just done.”

“I don’t understand.” But I did, because I knew the mind of Odin. “You couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make the choice that would lead to the split.”

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t. Ragnarok is terrible enough. What you did opened the door to universes where things will go even worse. If I had done it, it would have been beyond all bearing.”

“But it also created a path to one where the catastrophe is averted. Why didn’t you . . . ? Oh.”

I couldn’t hold on to omniscience. It was beyond the capacity of my demidivinity. I had made my choice based on the limited knowledge I could focus on and the whisperings of my heart. I had done it knowing full well that the memories would fade, that over time Lesmosyne would draw the worst of the pain from my heart. Odin had no such release. Had he made the choice I made, he would never have been able to step beyond it.

“It’s because you can’t see me,” I said. “You know neither my future nor my past. I am the closest thing you can do to forgetting.”

“Yes. Did you honestly think that I love my children any less than Loki does his? That the deaths of my sons and daughters did not cut as deep? That I did not wish with all my heart that I might save them? I could not bear what was to come. But even less could I bear the worse things that now lurk on some paths to the future.

“When you came into this world, and I could not see you through my blind eye, I realized I had the rarest of opportunities, and I seized it. I made sure that you had freedom to move, and I learned what I could of you through as many sources as possible. I guessed that your nature would draw you and Loki together, and I thought that you might become friends. That or bitter enemies. Then you met Thor and told him of your fight with the Fate of your own multiverse, and I dared to hope that you would fight every bit as hard against the Fate of mine.”

Odin smiled, and it was like the sun ripping storm clouds asunder. “Do you know what it means for me to have hope? To
not know
even for an instant, and so to dare to dream.”

Then his gaze flickered to the water of Mimir’s Well, and he laughed, rich and full and freer than he had in all the years since he traded his eye for knowledge. Knowledge he never would have wished for if he had known the cost beforehand. But such is the nature of knowledge and ignorance.

“Of course you know,” he said. “For this one time in my life, I know less than the man I’m talking to. It’s marvelous.”

“It’s also not true,” I replied. “The knowledge leaks out my ears at ten thousand times the rate that it comes in via the void of my eye. I know but I don’t
know
.”

“True enough, but you’ll forgive me the chance to wallow in ignorance. There is some truth in the saying that ‘ignorance is bliss,’ and it is a bliss I’ve not tasted in many, many long years. I must drink it deep while I have the chance.”

That made me more than a little nervous. “You say that like you’re not expecting to be ignorant for long. Since I am the very heart of your not-knowing, it suggests a certain expectation on your part that I won’t be around to be unknown for much longer.”

Odin’s smile this time was grimmer. “Wisdom rides at the right hand of knowledge. You’ve just demonstrated both. No, you will not be staying. I need you to do me one more service.”

“What’s that?” I asked, my worry growing.

“Nothing too awful,” he said. “I want you to go home, and I want you to take Fenris with you.”

“Why . . . ? Oh.” I looked into Odin’s eye, and I knew the answer.

Fenris was Odin’s fated slayer. By removing him from the here and now, I would ensure at least one of the futures where Odin would have a there and then. He would know beyond any shadow of a doubt that in one place and time he didn’t end in the belly of the wolf. And the fact that I, who he could not
see
, had caused that particular split would make a hole in his foreseeing, a place where he could have hope, that most precious and rare of commodities.

I also knew how much it mattered to Odin. If I did not act as he wished in this, Odin the Hopeful would give way to Odin the Lord of Battles, and he would be most displeased with me. Though Odin could not
see
my future, in the present moment, I could. If I did not rid him of Fenris, I would die, and I would most definitely not be heading for Valhalla. Odin the Chooser of Souls would see to it that mine found its way back to home and Hades’ overwarm hearth.

If I’d known less about the gods than I did, I might have resented such a banishment so soon after services rendered. But I do know gods. I had done Odin a favor, a favor of epic proportions, and he was duly grateful. He was also a god, and that meant he expected worship and obedience. To put it more succinctly, he was only as grateful as the
next
favor.

So, in a few moments I would leave there and return to Rune, where I would make every effort to convince Fenris to depart this world for my own. I would even lie and tell him that was what had to be if he wanted to create the split in the universe that his father had given so much to achieve.

“I’ll just be off to take care of that, then, shall I?” I asked.

Odin nodded. “Yes, you shall.”

Then he crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall, and I knew that our audience and accord were at an end. He was done with grateful. I turned away from Odin and the recent past and toward Melchior and the near future.

In that very instant Odin said, “Oh, and one more thing . . .”

“What now?” I grumbled, turning back toward him.

“This,” he replied, and let loose a pitch that would have been the envy of any Major League pro.

Odin’s fastball struck the left side of my face with tremendous force, knocking me half around. Blinding pain stole my breath and drove me to my knees. My whole head seemed ready to burst apart as I clutched at my thighs and tried to blink away the agony.

What had he just done? And why? I didn’t understand. I didn’t . . . know. I realized then what Odin must have thrown at me. Not
knew
it. Realized it. I climbed back to my feet and looked at Odin through both of my eyes.

“Why?” I asked, and it felt so good to be clueless once again.

“Do you remember what Skuld said that day beside Mimir’s Well?”

I shook my head, and Odin summoned a ball of light to hover in the air between us. Within it I stood beside Odin and together we faced Fate.

“The head belongs to Mimir,” said the Odin in the picture nodding toward the well, “onetime Lord of Memory and Information.”

“The first Binary God,” said Fate. “The first leg of the triangle, just as Odin is the second, and the third is yet to come. Isn’t that right, Mimir?”

With that, Odin banished the image. “You will not be that third leg. Not while I live and not after. I don’t know what else your future holds, but that’s not on the list. You are Zeus’s responsibility, not mine, and I will not allow that to change. Go home.”

Odin started quickly snapping the fingers of both hands, creating a wild, staccato wall of sound. Then he was gone. Or rather, we were.

“—you completely out of your mind?” yelled Melchior as we appeared in the computer room at Rune. “That was your eye! Your freaking eye! What do you . . . ? Uh, Boss?”

“Yes,” I said, bending down so that my eyes met his and blinking innocently, though I could already feel my left one starting to swell shut. “Were you saying something?”

“I, uh . . . eye . . . you . . . your . . . What just happened?” he finally demanded suspiciously.

I had just started to frame my answer when Tisiphone caught me by the waist and lifted me high into the air.

“What happened? How did you get back? When Ahllan screamed and went limp I thought . . .” She pulled me in tight.

“Ahllan!” cried Melchior, running to the troll’s side.

Simultaneously, Fenris yipped, “Chew toy!” I could hear nine kinds of worry in his tone as he asked, “What’s going on? Did it work?”

The two-headed giant shouted something about RuneNet then, but I couldn’t make it out amidst the general bedlam that broke out. The next several minutes went by in a blur of shouted questions and evasive answers, while I desperately tried not to look at Ahllan.

Eventually people came to understand that, no, I wasn’t going to give a detailed explanation, and, yes, we had won . . . sort of. At that, the madness died down enough that I could no longer hide myself within it, and I had to face the ultimate result of my actions.

“Let me see Ahllan,” I said to Tisiphone, and she let me slip free of her grip.

“Ravirn,” said Tisiphone, “she’s gone. There was nothing I could do.”

“I know,” I replied over my shoulder. “It’s my fault.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” said Tisiphone as she trailed after me. “There was nothing you could have done. She said so herself, more than once.”

“She was wrong.”

Melchior stood beside Ahllan’s chair, his forehead pressed against the side of her hand, his shoulders quaking ever so slightly. Silent tears ran down his cheeks and dropped to the surgically clean floor of the computer room. I took a moment to fix that picture of him in my mind. Here was one consequence of my actions, and it was important that I remember it.

The Raven is a Trickster, all intuition and impulse—clever triumphs over impossible odds equally distributed with ill-timed insults hurled into the teeth of the gods. My power is an irresponsible power that cares only about winning the game and damn the consequences. I am the Raven, and every fault of the Raven’s is also mine. But I am also Ravirn, and where the Raven would forget the cost, I needed to remember. It was that or surrender myself wholly to my power. Death would be better.

Death. I had looked into the eyes of the power that wore that name and come away alive but forever changed. Now I lifted my gaze from Melchior to Ahllan’s face and looked into the eyes of a friend’s death and was likewise changed. Again, I fixed the moment in my memory, letting the pain wash over me, saving it up as a counterweight to the Raven’s blithe disregard of consequences. Oh, I knew that Lesmosyne would dull the worst edge of my sorrow given time, but I would not let her rob me of all my grief. I owed Ahllan that and more.

“I am so sorry,” I whispered, leaning forward to close her eyes.

“Don’t be,” said a bodiless voice that both was and was not Ahllan’s. “She would not have wished it.”

Melchior jerked like he’d been plugged into a 220 outlet when he was expecting 110. “Ahllan!” He whipped his head back and forth, searching for the source of the voice.

“I’m afraid the answer is both yes and no,” it answered, and I noticed that the blinking lights of the RuneNet servers pulsed in time with the words. “There is a seed of her within me, but the Ahllan you knew is no more.”

“RuneNet?” said Fenris, looking both worried and hopeful. “Is that you?”

“Physically,” said the voice. “I occupy these machines”—the lights all blinked on, then off, then on once again—“but I am much more than RuneNet ever was. I am Mimir’s Mirror. If you must have a name to call me, how about Reginkunnr? It means child of the gods, and I am that.”

“I’m confused,” Melchior said, giving me a hard look. “What really happened with Mimir? I feel like I’m missing some pieces. I saw you tear out your eye and throw it into the well. Now it’s back. I might believe I’d hallucinated the whole thing if you weren’t developing the world’s nastiest black eye. I’m also wondering about the
way
you told Ahllan you were sorry and the way . . . Regin answered you back. That sounded guiltier than condolences.”