Mythos (4 page)

“I don’t need this,” she snapped at me. “Not from you, not from anybody.”

She extended the claws of her right hand and sliced them through the air to open a gate into chaos as I had opened one out of chaos earlier. There was only one little, tiny problem—nothing happened.

Maybe we really were lost.

Tisiphone’s claws sliced the air again. Again, nothing happened. Her look of concern gave way to one of panic as she tried repeatedly to open a doorway into nowhere and failed each time. I looked at the miniature cathedral and realized for the first time that the leafless trees growing beyond it were normally sized, as was the split-rail fence I’d missed until then. I felt slightly relieved at that, and more so when I saw the touristy plaque labeling the cathedral a miniature of York Minster. But I still didn’t know where the hell we were. Or how we’d gotten there, for that matter. That was when another, darker worry popped into my head.

What if our problem wasn’t one of location? What if the reason Tisiphone couldn’t exercise her admin powers over reality was because the system that granted them had gone down? Tisiphone had called the abacus network Necessity’s soul. What if all that fuss and bother was Necessity well and truly crashing? What if the computer that ran the universe had . . . died? I was still trying to get my mind around that idea when Tisiphone turned my way.

“Why are you just standing there doing nothing?” she demanded. “Don’t you want to know where we are? Or how we got here?”

“I . . .” How to bring this up gently? “Has it occurred to you that the problem might not be at our end?”

“What do you . . . Oh. Shit. Melchior?”

“Yes?” He startled, looked very nervous, and who wouldn’t with an upset Fury glaring at him?

“Can you connect to the mweb?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I’ve been trying since we arrived, but I’m getting nothing. It’s simply not there.”

There was a time when that would have hit him almost as hard as not knowing where she was affected Tisiphone, but the world that held Raven House—our home—had been off the net so long that Melchior was more used to being disconnected than not.

Tisiphone closed her eyes, and her face sagged. “I don’t want to think about this.”

I stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. The fire of her hair and wings flared suddenly bright and hot, and she glared at me so fiercely I stumbled backwards.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, very quietly. “I don’t know what’s happened with Necessity, but if it’s bad, you and I are going to have a problem.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“If you think even for a moment that I’ve forgotten where I found you and what you were doing when all of this started, you are seriously mistaken. Necessity is my mother. If you’re responsible for harm coming to her, there will have to be consequences.”

She held my eyes one moment more, then with a powerful leap and a beat of her wings launched herself skyward.

“That went well,” said a new voice—male and sardonic, verging on snide.

I turned around and found myself facing a stranger. He was around my own height of six feet and athletically slender. His brush-cut hair and thin scruff of beard were dish-water blond. Despite the roundness of his face, he looked somehow lean and hungry. He had circular rimless glasses and wore a plain black long-sleeved tee, blue jeans, and black sneakers. He also had a dog, a very strange dog, black to match his shirt.

A giant of a standard poodle in a lion cut, it must have stood thirty inches at the shoulder and weighed a hundred pounds. I’ve never thought of poodles as being particularly fierce or intimidating, but this one broke all the rules. He was a huge brute, with hungry eyes and a big, ugly-looking iron thorn stuck deep in his lower lip like some weird doggie piercing. To make matters worse, he was leashed with only the thinnest of silvery cords, barely more than a thread, that went from his neck into the pocket—and presumably hand—of his master. Despite the dog’s demeanor, he ignored me in favor of quietly munching away on a long tuft of grass at the base of the signpost declaring the miniature YORK MINSTER.

As I met the man’s mocking eyes, I couldn’t help but remember that my own were still the slit, chaos-pupiled version I tried to hide from all but my pantheonic fellows. Though, if he noticed either that or my pointed ears as out of the ordinary, he made no sign. Of course, since he seemed more amused than alarmed by the flying departure of a naked and fire-winged goddess, he was probably not your standard-issue human-type being.

“Do I know you?” I finally asked. He didn’t seem familiar, but many of the gods and other Olympians are shape-changers.

“If by that you mean, do we know each other, the answer is no. Though the chances are good that you know of me, or at least have heard my name.”

Great, one of my god-cousins feeling self-important—something I adored. “And your name would be?”

“I don’t think I’m willing to share it just yet. Not till I know considerably more about you. For example: Which side are you on? Where did you find the luscious redhead with the fiery wings? More to the point, what is she?”

“Now pull the other leg,” said Melchior, who had put me firmly between himself and the huge dog.

“Also, what is that?” asked the stranger, indicating Melchior with his eyes. “I’ve not seen its like before. Some kind of black elf or kobold, perhaps? I don’t suppose you want to sell it?”

“Sell me?” growled Melchior. “How dare you! I’m not some
thing
to be bought and sold—I’ve got free will.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” asked the stranger, looking genuinely baffled.

I was about to respond when the poodle made a really horrendous noise deep in its throat. At that, Melchior shot up the back of my leathers to my shoulder. The dog made the noise again. This time his whole body convulsed. It was only with the third repetition that I realized he was about to throw up. Which he did, directly at my feet. I jumped back about a yard and opened my mouth to complain about the dog’s behavior. Nothing came out. I was too shocked.

Instead of a simple puddle of vomit, the poodle had coughed up a lot of something that looked very like the eternally changing stuff of Primal Chaos, except that someone seemed to have added sparks and ice crystals to the mix in an attempt to jazz it up a bit. In the middle of it lay . . .

“Is that a human hand?” I asked.

“No.” The man’s answer was flat and final.

It was also quite obviously not the truth, or at least not the whole truth. It was definitely a hand. For several seconds it lay there between us, palm up, as the not-quite-chaos slowly ate a hole in the ground. The poodle very gently nudged the hand with its nose. In response, the hand clenched itself into a fist and rolled over. For the first time, I got a good look at the jagged tooth marks that showed where the hand had been bitten off its wrist.

The dog nudged the hand again. In a stunningly fast move, the hand extended its fingers and thumb, rising onto them rather like some bizarre spider. For just one instant longer, it stood perfectly still, then it bolted, exhibiting that same wild speed. The poodle immediately let out a gleeful bark and launched itself after the hand.

“Not again.” The stranger sighed as the slender cord tying him to the dog went taut.

Then the force of the dog’s charge yanked his hand from his pocket—the cord was wound tightly around his wrist—and pulled his arm straight out in front of him. A moment later, he was dragging along in the wake of the chase, swearing vigorously in a language I didn’t recognize. In seconds the whole group had passed out of sight.

“That’s got to be the strangest thing I’ve—” began Melchior, but I held up a hand.

“Hang on a tick.” I had just noticed an odd and ongoing sliding sort of noise and wanted to find out what it was.

A seemingly endless silvery cord was zipping along the ground, one end vanishing in the direction of the strange chase, the other disappearing off through the empty parking lot to the northeast. I knelt for a closer look.

“Is that the leash?” asked Melchior, hopping down beside me.

“I think so, but that’s not half so bizarre as this.” I indicated the puddle with one finger but didn’t touch it. “Primal Chaos? Or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “It looks like chaos, it’s dissolving the ground around it like chaos, and mostly it’s changing like chaos, but then there are the ice and sparks.”

“Which are flickering in and out but are very definitely ice and sparks.” I nodded.

Maybe Tisiphone had been right in her first call, and we were someplace beyond the edge of the map. If so, how had we gotten there? More important, how did we get home?

“Do you want to try a spell?” I asked after the not-quite-chaos had largely burned itself out.

“I don’t think so,” replied Melchior. “I can’t reach the mweb, and if we really have landed someplace where the chaos has gone funny . . .”

I nodded. All magic taps chaos for power, and the rawer the method used to make the connection, the more dangerous the magic. My shapechanging, for example, lies at the extreme wild end of the spectrum, a straight channeling of chaos that’s very dangerous even for a chaos power like me. At the far end lies mweb-based magical coding. There, the power of chaos is channeled into the ordered network of the mweb by webtrolls supervised by the Fates. When a webgoblin like Melchior runs an mweb-based program, he is using a carefully coded spell to achieve extremely predictable results.

Between those two poles you have traditional spells, which use ritual and will to channel the power into a desired result. It isn’t as dangerous as wild magic, but it’s not even a little bit safe. You also have independent codespells, magical programs that use the methods of the modern digital sorcerer but create a direct chaos tap for power rather than draw on the mweb. We had recently upgraded Melchior to optimize him for the latter, but all of our upgrades relied on an understanding of a Primal Chaos that didn’t look like this stuff.

“Any other ideas?” I finally asked.

“Not a one.”

“Me neither.”

I heard a very high-pitched whistle, like a mosquito performing a spell, and something crunched in the grass off to our left.

“I’ve got one,” said a half-familiar voice.

I looked up and found myself facing—

“Ahllan!” yelled Melchior, bounding across the grass to throw himself into the welcoming arms of the old webtroll.

A bit over three feet tall and a bit under that wide, Ahllan has a massive jaw with huge, sharp tusks like a boar’s, a big nose, and lumpy skin the color of a peeled apple left out on the table for a day or two. Her claw-tipped fingers touch the ground when she stands straight, and the arms attached to them are as thick around as my thighs.

“Where are we?” I asked. “What’s going on? Where have you been?” I had about a million more questions, but Ahllan held up a shushing finger.

“We don’t have time for any of that. We have to get under cover.” She turned, still holding Melchior, and took a long step toward the front of the miniature York Minster. When I didn’t move to follow, she growled, “Forestdown Estates. It’s a tourist attraction, and we’re in the Canadian Maritimes. I’ll tell you all about it. Later. When we have time. Now come on!”

She didn’t look back. Rather than be left behind, I trailed after her.

“Melchior, you’ll go first,” she said, when we reached the front of the cathedral.

She whistled a short burst of something very like binary and set him down so that one of his toes touched the steps. He immediately shrank to the scale of the cathedral.

“Inside, quick.” Melchior went up the stairs and through the open door. “Your turn.” She whistled the codespell trigger again and gestured me toward the door.

I went, shrinking as Melchior had. A moment later Ahllan joined us in the entryway, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.

“That’s better. Come on.” Ahllan hurried toward the base of a flight of spiral stairs. “We need to see what happens next.”

A few moments later, we came out on top of the cathedral’s south transept and dashed across to another set of stairs. Finally, we arrived at the top of the crossing tower. There, Ahllan whistled another short spell in pseudobinary as soon as she’d stopped panting and wheezing.

“That should hide us from prying eyes, but we’ll have to be quiet.” She shook her head. “I can’t keep doing this kind of thing. I’m getting too old.”

I really wanted to know what had happened to her since last we’d spoken, but I didn’t have the heart to push when she was so winded. The troll seemed to have crossed some aging line since I’d seen her last, moving from vigorous middle age into, well, not exactly frailty—she had just run up several hundred stairs—but something considerably less hardy and physically intimidating than when I’d first met her. Before I could figure out what to say, she pointed to an older man coming slowly toward us across the lawn and made a throat-cutting gesture, then ducked down so that only her eyes remained above the level of the parapet.