Mythos (6 page)

“That wasn’t exactly Shara,” said Melchior, “but more like an evil software clone created by the goddess Persephone.”

Then he proceeded to explain the nine kinds of hell that had broken out in our little conflict with Hades the previous year. When he was finished, Ahllan didn’t say anything immediately, just fetched the tea and sandwiches.

“Can we go back to the Norse gods thing now?” I asked, when she rejoined us.

“I don’t know nearly as much about them as I’d like.” She sat down with a sigh and smile. “Ah, that’s ever so much better. Where was I? Oh, right. It’s only been in the last month or two that I discovered the existence of Odin and Loki and their kin. There’s a local analogue of the mweb, but it’s seriously encrypted and I haven’t been able to crack it yet, so I don’t know whether this—call it a pantheoverse—whether it’s another multiverse like we have back home with near-infinite DecLoci, or just this one world, or what. I don’t even know who runs it. Odin seems the most likely from the legends I’ve been reading, but there’s always the problem of human interpretations of god motives and stories. To say nothing of the known unreliability of gods.”

I nodded. Gods lie, rather a lot, especially to humans. Usually it’s to make themselves look better, but they have other less fathomable reasons as well.

“I—” Ahllan began, then stopped as the grating sound of stone sliding on stone came through from the main part of the cathedral.

“What’s that?” asked Melchior.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard it before,” replied Ahllan.

“Then we’d better go have a look.” I hopped to my feet and checked to make sure Occam was loose in its sheath.

The sun had finished setting while Ahllan made dinner, and it was quite dark in the hall and the cathedral beyond. I noticed a damp, earthy smell that hadn’t been there earlier. If I’d dared, I’d have asked Melchior to run “Redeye,” but I didn’t know how the spell would work here—another thing we needed to talk to Ahllan about.

As we entered the transept, the grating noise came again. It sounded like it was coming from directly across the cathedral, but I couldn’t see anything in the dim light. I drew Occam and advanced slowly. Ahllan paralleled me a few yards to the right, and Melchior trailed behind. As we approached the far transept, I thought I saw something move, something low to the ground and dark.

“It’s over by the crypt,” said Ahllan.

More grating. This time I could see one of the stone slabs of the floor heave a little bit. Once, twice, three times. A couple of the others had already been displaced. It moved again, falling to one side. A huge pale hand emerged from the dark opening beneath, or rather, a normal hand made gigantic by comparison to our shrunken selves. It was not attached to a wrist, and I was pretty sure I recognized it. Then, like some obscene spider, it scuttled toward us.

As the giant hand got closer, I found myself wishing it had come in the same way we had, with the concomitant reduction in size. I also found myself wishing I could swap Occam for an axe. If removing it from its arm hadn’t managed to kill the hand, I somehow doubted that sticking it with what was, at Occam’s absolute size, basically a really sharp toothpick was going to slow it down much, even if it was a magical toothpick. The same went for itty-bitty bullets from my teeny, tiny gun.

Before I got the chance to test my theory, the hand slid to a stop. It was still several of our yards away, and it started tapping two fingers as though it were thinking about something. That was what it looked like to me anyway. After a good minute of tapping, the hand rocked back onto the stump of its wrist and opened itself wide, palm forward, as if to say, “I come in peace.”

“What the heck,” I said, putting my sword back in its sheath. I extended my own hands, palms forward. “Hello, are you friendly?”

At that, the hand formed itself into a loose fist and bobbed something like a bow several times, looking for all the world like a nodding head.

“Was that a yes?”

Again the bob.

“If that’s a yes, what’s a no?”

It coiled its pinkie and ring finger as though it were making a fist while simultaneously raising the index and middle fingers together for a moment before bringing them down emphatically to touch the tip of its thumb.

“That’s a no?”

The bob.

“Not a yes?”

The closing of the fingers and thumb.

“You might just have something.” Melchior came up to stand beside me.

“What are you?” I asked.

The hand looked frustrated. I can’t explain how; it just did.

“I think it’s the hand of Tyr,” said Ahllan.

The hand pointed at her, then bobbed.

“Tyr?” I asked.

“Like Ares,” supplied Ahllan, “only courageous and honorable.”

“That’s hard to imagine.” Ares, the Greek God of War, was all for battle and slaughter as long as it didn’t involve any personal risk on his part. “Anyway, how did that”—I pointed at the hand—“end up inside a really big poodle? And why is it still alive?”

“I can’t answer the second question. As for the first, I don’t think it was really a poodle. I think it was Fenris Wolf in disguise.”

The hand bobbed, though that didn’t help me in this case.

“Fenris Wolf?” I remembered Odin using the name, and again it rang vague bells, but I really didn’t remember much from that class.

“One of Loki’s children by the giantess Angrboda,” said Ahllan.

“Does that make Fenris a god or a monster?” asked Melchior.

“That’s hard to say,” said Ahllan. “From what I’ve been able to tell, Fenris is hunger made divine flesh.”

“A god of hunger?” I said. “Doesn’t seem like a sensible way to run a pantheon.” But then, I know Zeus well enough that I probably shouldn’t throw that stone.

“Look”—Melchior pointed at the hand—“if it’s not going to try to kill us, can we get back to dinner? I’m really, really hungry, and I’d rather not try a chaos tap with the local version looking like it does.”

“Sorry, Mel.” I turned back toward the chapter house. “Yeah, come on.”

Melchior’s current body was optimized for power drawn straight from the Primal Chaos, but he could make do with alternate sources, say AC from a power cord, or chemical energy in the shape of food. Since he much preferred the latter when he had to make do, I needed to get him fed.

We’d gone about three steps when Ahllan made a coughing noise. The hand had popped up onto its fingertips again and, somehow managing to look diffident, had started to follow along.

“Oh, right. I didn’t meant to be rude. Do you want to join us?”

It did a sort of push-up version of the yes-bob.

Melchior grinned. “Gee, Dad, it followed us home. Can we keep it?”

I laughed. “We’ll see, son. If we do, you’ll have to promise to take it for walks and feed it and . . .”

There was a thought—what did the thing eat? Did it eat at all? I’d never had to look after a disembodied hand before.

The hand rolled back onto its wrist, opened wide, and shook itself gently, for all the world like a man throwing his head back and pretending to laugh.

“Is that your version of ‘ha-ha, very funny’?”

The bob.

Just when you think life is as strange as it can possibly get, someone gives you a hand—and a sarcastic one, no less.

We all took a little break from talking and thinking while we finished dinner. Well, everybody but the hand, which neither talked nor ate, and could have been thinking for all I knew. Then it was time for the next round of twenty questions with the resident troll.

“What’s up with the Primal Chaos around here?” asked Melchior.

“I don’t know,” said Ahllan. “I hadn’t actually
seen
any of the local chaos until Fenris barfed some up, though I knew it tasted very different from our own homegrown version. I
can
hazard a guess as to why it looks the way it does.”

“Which is?” asked Melchior.

“In the Norse version of creation, the world was formed from the body of the frost giant Ymir, who was in turn formed by the interaction of frost and fire in the great chasm of Ginnungagap.”

“Ginnungagap?” I said. “That’s a mouthful. I take it you’re thinking this great chasm with its mixing of fire and ice is the local equivalent of the Primal Chaos?”

She nodded. “The stuff of chaos seems to function pretty close to the same way, and it
would
explain the sparks and snowflakes.” She looked at Melchior. “The important thing to know is that you can survive on it if you need to, though I suspect it’s not the most healthy of diets for someone from our home reality.”

“What about that weird binary you’ve been spouting?” I asked. “It sounds very wrong.”

“It’s still all ones and zeroes. This pantheoverse just needs a different set of commands before it’ll listen to you. I’ll beam Melchior the basics, but I can promise it’s going to take a good long while to get a handle on the bigger sorts of spells.” Her eyes went distant for a moment, as did Melchior’s, while the information was exchanged.

“Thanks,” he said, finally. “That’s really, really strange stuff. I wonder why they did it that way?”

“I think it’s got something to do with the proprietary nature of the local magical struct—”

She was cut off by a “thud” that shook the whole building. A moment later, a bright, fiery light flared outside the window and continued to flicker. I leaped up and hurried to the door. There was little point in trying to see out the stained glass of the chapter-house windows. Ahllan came behind me, carrying Melchior and followed by the hand—hmm, if it was going to stay around, we would need to find out its name.

A moment later we were peering through a spyhole Ahllan had installed. At first glance I couldn’t see much beyond a huge wall of low flames. Then I remembered to adjust for my reduced size and realized I was seeing a burning wing. Tisiphone! But she didn’t seem to be moving, and her fires normally burned higher and hotter. I raced for the cathedral’s front door while Ahllan whistled the triggering sequence for the built-in size-changing spell.

Tisiphone lay crumpled on her side to the north of York Miniature, facing away. I wanted to rush over and take her in my arms—our current conflict notwithstanding—but I knew better than to startle her when she was injured or semiconscious. She had deadly reflexes and claws that could cut through inch-thick steel. I had a couple of long, thin scars on my left thigh from bumping the side table next to her while she was sleeping.

Since I rather liked the look of Occam’s cane-scabbard, I paused to snap a branch off one of the nearby trees before making a wide circle around to Tisiphone’s front. She continued to lie motionless, her eyes closed, but I stood there several seconds longer to see if the vibration of my walking would rouse her. It had on other occasions.

Nothing.

By the light of her fiery wings and hair, I surveyed her. She was still as beautiful as the first time I’d seen her, and as terrifying. She was naked, of course; the Furies disdain the use of clothing. Waist-length red hair and an angel’s wings burned brightly but without smoke. So did her nipples and the hair at the juncture of her thighs. Her skin was a white as pale and translucent as fine china, and the blue lines of her veins were clearly visible. She was shaped like a runner, long and slender and athletic, with high, small breasts and not an ounce of fat. Her eyes, when open, held flames as well, the irises dancing red and orange while rolling smoke filled her pupils. Her finger and toe claws were at full extension, six-inch daggers of organic diamond painted red by the light of her fires.

New since the last time I’d seen her were the deep bite mark on her left forearm and the four parallel gashes running raggedly across her temple. Both injuries looked quite nasty, but I didn’t worry about them. I had seen her come back from much worse in a matter of hours without so much as a scar.

No, my main cause for concern had to do with her continued unconsciousness. Even if Cerberus himself had given her the mauling, I’d have expected her on her feet and raring for a rematch by this time. Deciding I’d waited long enough and then some, I very cautiously reached out with my stick and drew the end lightly along the bottom of her foot.

Nothing. Not even a twitch. I tried again, with the same result. I moved closer and very gently prodded Tisiphone’s calf. Still nothing. Hip. Ribs. Shoulder. I waited several minutes and tried again. All the same. With a little prayer for intercession from my cousin Tyche, Goddess of Fortune, I dropped the stick and took Tisiphone’s arm, very gently shaking her. When that didn’t get my head sliced off, I began to get a very uncomfortable feeling in the depths of my stomach.

Bunching her wings as much as I could—she’d taught them not to burn me—I knelt and lifted her in my arms. She was seriously heavy. Her wings are more a tool of magic than flight, and she is both tall and very muscular. I’m stronger than any human, but Tisiphone outclasses me in that department as an Olympic weight lifter does a two-year-old child.