Mythos (9 page)

“Only if you want it to.” Loki tapped the inner surface of the foot again.

This time I was close enough to see the LCD display embedded there. He tapped a lightbulb icon, and the device went dark, though the projections remained. I noticed another icon, a circle with three smaller circles within, one red, one green, one blue. The green was lit up, so I tapped the blue. Instantly the color of the projected keyboard shifted from emerald to cobalt.

“So, why did you mention this Zeus?” asked Loki as I pulled up some sort of first-person shooter game. “You’re not going to try to convince me you’re from another world with different gods, are you?”

“Nope.” I ran my finger around the edge of a circle of blue light that had come up beside the projected keyboard when the game started, and the view on the screen rotated to match the gesture—a virtual trackball. “I’m not going to try to convince you of anything. What you want to believe is entirely up to you.”

“Actually, it’s not,” said Loki, and something about his tone made me stop playing with the microcomputer and look him in the eyes. “Wanting to believe something and actually believing it are not at all the same thing. Take, for example, the idea of you being from outside the ’gard-game completely.

“I’d really love to believe that, because it would mean the universe isn’t as I have always understood it to be and that things don’t necessarily have to go the way it’s been foretold they will.” He rubbed a point between his eyes as though in anticipation of some great pain. “Unfortunately, I
don’t
believe any of that. At the moment, I believe that you are the result of some game of Odin’s, a scheme to entrap me, perhaps. What do you say to that?”

“Here.” I picked up the microcomputer and flipped it closed, handing it to him. “You’ll be wanting to take this with you when you go.”

“Are you throwing me out?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.

“No.”

“Then what makes you think I’m leaving?”

“You’ve called both Melchior and me liars in the last five minutes, and you claim to believe we’re only here to trap you. What earthly reason could you have for staying?”

“Maybe I intend to force the truth out of you,” said Loki.

“I don’t think that would be wise,” said Tisiphone, though she didn’t drop her camouflage.

Loki turned toward her voice and looked over his glasses.

Then he nodded. “Perhaps you’re right, my dear. Perhaps you’re right.”

He tucked the microcomputer into its sheath, nodded, and stepped into the faerie ring, vanishing. I hurried to the window to see whether he would come out in the bottle cap.

“Well?” asked Melchior.

“Nothing.”

I returned to the ring and placed my hand inside, feeling for the network. In just the time it had taken me to cross the room and come back, a dozen more rings had been added to the network, though which of them he’d exited through I couldn’t tell. As I stood up, Tisiphone faded into view.

“Interesting,” she said. “Dangerous, too. I couldn’t tell when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. That’s unusual.” She nodded at the faerie ring. “Was he telling the truth about those?”

“I think so,” I replied. “As far as I can tell, that was the first ring in this DecLocus, and the one I stepped out of at the other end was the second, though he’s opened a bunch more now—made it into an actual network even.”

Tisiphone sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “So, I’m guessing we won’t be getting home that way, then.”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t get it to connect to any of the worlds maintained by Necessity.”

Tisiphone turned away, looking into the flames on the hearth. She stayed that way for a long time without speaking.

“Are you all right?” I asked finally, stepping forward and running a hand gently down her back between her wings.

“I don’t actually know.”

She didn’t turn around, and I moved closer. As I did so, Melchior caught my eye and nodded toward the door before heading out.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.

Tisiphone continued to stare into the fire but nodded ever so slightly. “Have you ever wanted to be furious? Genuinely furious? And found that you couldn’t?” As she spoke, she idly rubbed the healing wound on her forearm.

I paused and thought about how I had felt when I discovered that Persephone had used me to set a virus loose on Necessity. The virus had very nearly destroyed our entire pantheoverse, and I had been set up to take the blame. I’d wanted to be angry then, to hate Persephone for what she had done to me and what she had nearly done to everything else, but I hadn’t been able to do it because I’d understood why. She’d done it to escape from Hades, from the god who had taken her from her mother and raped and imprisoned her. From the god who had done that and intended to keep doing it, over and over again three months out of every year until the end of time. Instead of being angry, I’d nearly given my life to set her free.

“I have indeed,” I said very quietly.

“I haven’t,” said Tisiphone. “I’m almost four thousand years old, and my rage has never failed me. Until now.”

“I’m sorry. That must be . . . hard for you. What
are
you feeling?”

She turned around and gave me a bitter smile. “Funnily enough, I’m angry. Angry enough to kill whoever put us here, but not angry enough to enjoy it, and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad one, because I’ve never been here before. What do you think?”

“That you are beautiful and strange beyond words,” I said, because she was, though I feared it might have been my interfering with Necessity that had brought us to this place and thus given birth to that anger. “Is there anything I can do?”

The bitter left her smile, and she caught my wrists, drawing me closer. “Perhaps there is.” She placed my hands on her hips and leaned in to kiss me.

I kissed her back with the words “angry enough to kill” echoing in my head, and the danger made it all the sweeter.

 

 

“Well, that’s different,” I said.

I slowly circled the long, narrow strip of seaweed steaming amidst the dewy grass beside the entrance to York Miniature. The hand followed me. The seaweed had arrived a few minutes earlier with the dawn and a sort of sizzling-popping noise as though someone had tried to cook bacon on a really hot CPU. The sound had woken me from a sleep barely an hour old and been quickly followed by a message from Ahllan asking us to meet her there.

“What is it?” Melchior asked, poking the green stuff with the same stick I’d used to try to rouse Tisiphone the previous night.

“I don’t know,” replied Ahllan, “but I’ve got a pretty good idea of how it got here.”

“The same way we did.” Tisiphone’s voice was flat and hard as she sniffed at the seaweed.

Ahllan nodded. “It certainly made the same sound you did when you arrived, but what makes
you
so sure?”

“This is from Megaera’s wing.” Tisiphone picked up the strand of green and flipped it this way and that. “The right one, I think.”

That sounded ugly.

“Do you think that whatever happened to us . . . ?” I trailed off at the look on Tisiphone’s face.

“Very nearly happened to her? Yes, I do, though I couldn’t begin to tell you what that is. I’m guessing she was better prepared, or simply faster at getting out of the way. Whatever the reason, it didn’t work, and the individual or individuals responsible are in for some serious trouble.” She held the seaweed up. “This is really going to piss her off. Growing wing bits back itches like you wouldn’t believe.”

For the first time since we’d arrived, I found myself happy to be stuck in the wrong pantheoverse. Megaera despises me at the best of times. After the break-in that had started the current mess and with an unpleasant regeneration to look forward to, she’d be delighted to put me out of her misery once and for all. Maybe I could even delay our return a bit.

“You know what this means?” asked Tisiphone.

“That Megaera’s been winged by the enemy?” asked Melchior.

Tisiphone ignored him. “Getting home just got a whole lot more urgent,” she said, though she sounded more glum than worried. “I just wish I had some idea of how to do it.”

So much for dragging my feet. “I suppose that means it’s time to take a look at the local version of the mweb.”

“I wish you better luck with it than I’ve had,” said Ahllan. “It’s a really tough nut. Come on, I’ll set you up.”

Ahllan had placed her wardroom and sanctuary on the topmost level of the central tower of the Glamis Castle miniature, right under the little copper dome. The circular room duplicated the one at her old place in Garbage Faerie, including a pair of permanent multicore computer/ hexagrams built into floor and ceiling. Even on standby as they currently were, the warding computers significantly damped outside input, rendering the room eerily quiet and peaceful.

We’d dragged an easy chair and a small desk up from two floors below, passing through her combined electronics lab and wizard’s workshop on the way. A room that held everything from the latest flash memory drives to jars of dried frog parts, and smelled like it. The chair and desk ended up side by side in the middle of the hexagram.

“Sure you don’t want to join us?” I asked Ahllan—Tisiphone had elected to remain at York Miniature with Laginn.

“I’m sure. I’ve given Melchior everything I know about how the system works and if you don’t have me along, you’ll start with a completely fresh perspective.” Ahllan sighed. “I suspect I’m losing the flexibility of mind you need for cracking anyway. Age and obsolescence catching up with me, I guess. Good luck!” She flipped us a half-ironic salute and headed down the stairs.

I set Melchior on the desk, where he started whistling the wards into place. Bright lasers in red, green, and blue connected the hexagrams above and below as the twin computers kicked into high gear. While he was doing that, I reeled a couple of yards of network cable out of the second pocket in the back of my leather jacket, plugging one end in to the socket of my athame. When he’d finished and shifted back to laptop form, I plugged the other end in to one of his networking ports. That left only the hard part.

I can’t count how many hundreds of times I’ve sent my soul into the network, but somehow it never gets any easier. I leaned back in the chair and braced my left wrist on its arm, palm up, and poised the tip of my athame above my hand. The scars were thick there, dozens of thin white lines that I found myself idly tracing with the tip of the little dagger. Back and forth, up and down, a little harder each time until a tiny flower of blood sprouted under the point. Time to go.

I pushed down hard, driving the slender blade deep. The pain as it emerged through the back of my hand drenched me in sweat, but I didn’t stop there. I didn’t stop until the simple crossguard pressed tight against my palm, and I was gone. Through the looking glass and into the universe on the other side of the monitor. I left the pain behind in my body, a part of the disassociative process that allowed my soul to roam the electronic ether.

I arrived as I so often did in a room with blue pebbled-leather walls and a brass spiral staircase leading up. This time, bookshelves lined with mythology texts punctuated the wall opposite the single large, irregular window that dominated the room. You couldn’t tell from where I stood, but from the outside, that window looked like nothing so much as a large fanged mouth set in a huge blue face. Melchior’s face. For the moment I was quite literally inside his head, a protected antechamber on the doorstep of the net.

At least, that was how it usually worked. By stepping through the window and walking down a stairway in the shape of Melchior’s forked tongue, I would normally have entered the mweb, or possibly some sheltered annex such as Eris’s server farm. Not this time. This time the window looked out on a whole lot of nothing. There was no “there” there. I leaned out the window and looked into the emptiness.

“That could pose a problem,” I said.

“Give me a minute,” came Melchior’s voice from above.

It issued from the mouth of a tiny blue serpent at the top of the stairs, a serpent with Melchior’s bald blue head and a pair of feathered wings. It flew down to land on my shoulder.

“That’s a new look,” I said.

The winged serpent was a projection of Melchior’s attention and presence in cyberspace. Most of him would stay with his computer body, powering our odyssey and supplying apps and hacks as I needed them, but the serpent avatar represented his essence, the
I
in his personal AI. Usually he went for a mouse or a bat, something smaller and less showy.

“Do you like it?” he asked, opening the feathery wings. “I thought it looked more quantum, more in keeping with my status as the world’s first quantum laptop.”

“How so?” I asked, baffled.

“Quetzalcoatl.”

“Bless you,” I responded.

“No, Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent of Aztec myth. Landing here in Midgard—that’s what the local pantheon calls Earth—made me want to dig around a little bit in the history of other pantheons. That’s what I did most of last night. I found this.” He indicated his current shape with the tip of his forked tongue. “Quetzalcoatl is both serpent and bird, two things simultaneously, like a quantum bit—a qubit—is both a one and a zero. They even both start with
Q
. Elegant, yes?”

I had to grin. “Bizarre, but elegant. Suits you to a
T
, or perhaps even a
Q
.”

Melchior gave me a hard look. “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?”

“No, not really. I’m laughing at the idea that I could ever have believed you were anything other than your own person. Not only are you stranger than my design for you imagined; you are a good deal stranger than it could have imagined. So, what happens next?” I gestured toward the window.