Spellcrash (36 page)

“To-may-to, to-mah-to.” I rocked my hand back and forth. “I’ve some ideas there, but we’ll have to see how it works out.”

Let me draw back now and move my attention to another place and projection of myself—this one a small temple-cum-office on the roof of the great Temple of Zeus and simultaneous with the first. There, one of the many fragments of me sat in Zeus’s chair facing Athena and her father.

“Zeus, buddy, talk to me.” I held a pencil between the tips of my fingers, playing with it idly.

“Explain why I shouldn’t take this opportunity to rearrange things so that people who threatened my life back a few days like . . . oh, say,
you
, are no longer running the show around here? Why I should not do to the old powers of the pantheon what you and yours did to the Titans before you?”

Athena bristled, and I could read pure hatred in her mind, but Zeus just smiled and conjured a cigar from thin air, lighting it with a tiny bolt of lightning.

“Because you’re far too fair-minded for that,” he said, settling into a mirror of my chair.

“Despite many lessons to the contrary, you still believe in the way things ought to be. That doesn’t include bloody vengeance, and we both know it. The abuse your generation suffered at the hands of mine has not twisted you as badly as the abuse we suffered from the Titans twisted us. In this, at least, you have transcended your elders.” He laughed then. “Though, as your presence here attests, you’re not above a bit of petty revenge and wanting to make me sweat. Which I can hardly blame you for. Actually”—and his smile took on a smug edge—“this might even work out better for me than if I had become Necessity. I get to keep right on working the whole pleasures-of-the-flesh aspect of godhood while you do all the heavy lifting. Remind me to send you a birthday cake in a year, wouldn’t you?” I really, really wanted to smite him, but the big bastard was right. I wasn’t going to rain fiery destruction down from the sky because I
did
believe in the way things ought to be. Fortunately, at the moment, the way things ought to be included raining cream pies down from the sky and rinsing them off with a river of seltzer water delivered by a team of satyrs in clown suits. To his credit, Zeus was deeply amused by the whole thing. The last I saw of him, he was laughing his head off. Athena, not so much. And
that
was very sweet indeed.

Another temple, another tiny but important fragment of my attention facing another pole power.

Or in this case three: Clotho, Atropos, and my grandmother Lachesis. Fate.

For long seconds, nothing happened. We stared at one another in fraught silence. I thought of all sorts of dramatic things that I could do now that I had all the power in the universe at my fingertips. None of it seemed worth the effort.

Finally, Lachesis broke the silence. “If you’re expecting an apology, Ravirn, you will be waiting forever.”

She couldn’t have taken me more by surprise if she’d slapped me.

“So it’s Ravirn now, is it? You would give me back my name now that I hold the stronger position? Restore me to the loving bosom of the family? Make me one of you again, now that it serves your purpose? How incredibly sleazy.”

Lachesis shook her head. “You still don’t understand us, do you? Not even with all the resources of Necessity at your disposal. I give you back nothing and expect nothing from you in return.

You have reclaimed your name by right of conquest, and I merely acknowledge that victory.

From a child of Fate you have grown into the Fate of the Gods. The Fate of Fate, if you will. Just as we rightly exercised our best judgment on how to handle your fate in days past with no regard for your relationship to us, now you will do the same with our fate. That is the way of our House, and I would expect no less of you now that you have finally come into responsibility. Do what you think is best, and you can do no wrong.”

“I . . .” What could I say to that?

Nothing that could change the minds of my grandmother and her sisters about the inherent rightness of their position. Nothing that would change anything about anything that had or would happen. They would never acknowledge the terrible wrongs they had done me as anything other than what had to be short of my committing equally terrible wrongs against them. I burned to do just that, to make them pay for the pain they had caused me and those I loved.

I couldn’t.

I had found another limitation on my power—the limitation of conscience—shown me by Zeus and Fate. I blessed my lucky stars for it at the same time that I felt a horrible creeping dread begin to grow in my heart. This time conscience had limited me, but what about next time? And the time after? What about the times when necessity contradicted conscience as the case of Nemesis had for Necessity herself?

What would I become then?

In another place, at exactly the same time, I was already facing just such a temptation.

Hades the place is not Hell, and Hades the god is not the Devil, but in my own personal lexicon they both come damned close. A shadow of myself stood over the fallen Lord of the Dead, its . . .

no,
my
hand stinging from the tremendous backhanded blow that I had just delivered to his bony cheek.

“Don’t you dare try to ask me for anything, Hades! I am
this
close to drowning you in the Lethe and installing Cerberus in your office. You will shut up and stay still while I sort a few things out here.”

Starting with Megaera. I found the Fury standing on the end of the pier beneath the window of Hades’ office, staring into the cold gray waters of the Lethe.

“Megaera,” I said as I manifested myself beside her, “it doesn’t have to be this way. You served Necessity faithfully for thousands of years, and you are owed a reward for that.” She turned and looked at me with eyes as dead as the landscape around us. “I have chosen my reward already, and it is forgetfulness.”

“I’m really new at this job, and I could use some help. You wouldn’t have to do it as a Fury.” The timing of her death—in the window when there was no Necessity—provided me with that option. “You wouldn’t even have to help me. If you want, I can free you of the ties that bind you to Necessity before I restore you to life and send you into a much-deserved retirement in someplace along the lines of Raven House.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “No thank you. I am and have always been Megaera the Fury, handmaiden of the incarnation of Necessity who was Themis. To serve another master or even not to serve is to become something else, to cease to be Megaera, and if I must do that, I would rather it were this way.”

She took a step backwards, off the end of the pier, and vanished beneath the waters with a surprisingly soft splash. She did not resurface. And, with the eyes of Necessity, I saw that she never would. It hurt far more than I could have possibly imagined.

Pain is a funny thing, especially when it takes the form of guilt. I wanted to unmake Megaera’s decision then, but understood that to do so would be to unmake Megaera as completely as she had unmade herself. Searching for some light in the darkness, I thought of other deaths, deaths for which I was responsible, wrongs that I might right. I reached outward seeking such. I wanted to find absolution for some of my many guilts.

I found one such wrong in my cousin Moric, whose spirit stood close at hand. Moric, whom Atropos had sent to kill me and on whom I had unleashed the fires of chaos, murdering him to prevent his murdering me.

In that moment, I restored him to life and sent him home to my great-aunt Atropos. Whether she would see it as a peace offering or a slap in the face of Fate for reversing the course that had already clipped his thread, I didn’t know.

And, honestly, I didn’t care. It felt good to be able to undo one of my heaviest decisions, to remove one of the many weights that rested on my conscience. I reached further then, hoping to do more such. I wanted most to find Laric, the cousin whose friendship and trust in me had cost him his life.

Instead, I found another limit on the power of Necessity. In looking for Laric, I found only the knowledge of what had become of him. It was all there within the files of Necessity. Laric had gone straight from the Gates of Hades down to the river Lethe and plunged in—a wise soul ready to begin anew. And there my knowledge of him ended.

The power of Necessity ended on the shores of the Lethe. Who and what Laric had become was closed to me. Even if it were not, to restore him to what he once was would be to destroy what he had since become.

I returned then to the office of Hades the god and lifted him back into his chair. I spoke no words to him and glared my hate into his eyes, but I also replaced the computers that ran Hades the place and restored his very limited connection to the mweb. I might despise who he was and what he did, but somebody had to do it, and I hadn’t the strength of will.

I withdrew much of my attention from the shadow that stood with Hades and refocused the core of it on the place where I had left my body, the Tomb of Necessity, and on those gathered within.

On my way past the Gates of Hades I picked up Cerberus and Kira and brought them with me to my tomb. I also opened a way for Shara to project her presence.

Seeing my friends gathered around the empty vessel of my soul, I was nigh irresistibly tempted to cause my body to sit up, thrust forward its arms, and groan, “Braaiins!” Instead, I once again projected a shadow of myself. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here today.”

I’d always wanted to say that and mean it, but nobody laughed. Nobody responded at all. While I waited, I set the part of my brain that loves a loophole to picking at the subsystem that governed Cerberus’s relation to Hades. That
was
why I’d brought him, after all.

“Ravirn?” The sound of Cerberus speaking my name through his Mort head refocused my attention.

“Yes,” I said through the lips of my shadow-self.

“I’ve got a question,” said Mort.

“Me, too,” agreed Bob.

“How are we here?” asked Dave.

“And who’s guarding the Gates of Hades?” added Mort.

“Because if it’s not us, something is very whacked with the multiverse,” said Bob.

“I’ve sort of suspended time for a bit,” I replied. “Not absolutely, just in terms of Hades. I can’t do it for long.” I was already feeling the strain. “But I really wanted to have you here for at least a few minutes, and I thought you’d like the break.”

Dave blinked several times. “Then you
really
are Necessity now; how did that happen?”

“Long story, and I promise someone will tell it to you soon. In the meantime, I think . . .” I checked my hopes against my exploration of loopholes and came up with a jackpot. “Yes. I have a proposition to make. Fenris?”

“Yes?” The giant wolf swiveled his ears to point at me but didn’t move otherwise.

“You don’t have a real place in the structure of this MythOS. I’d like to make one for you, to harmonize you with it and its brand of chaos. If you’re both interested, I would make you blood brothers with Cerberus and use that bond to give him the occasional day off.” Mort blinked several times. “Can you do that?”

“Even if he can, why would Fenris be crazy enough to take him up on it?” asked Bob.

“Not that we’d turn you down,” Dave said to Fenris. “I’d love to have the chance to visit with Persephone once in a while, but it’s a lousy job.”

“Pack?” said Fenris, and his tail began to thump gently against the floor. “You’re offering me real, blood pack?”

“If you all want it,” I said, “and remembering it’s not without cost.” For the first time in all the years I’d known him, Cerberus’s tail began to wag.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Fenris?”

“Pack!”

“Then consider it done.”

With a tiny flick of my will, I sent the lot of them back to the shores of Hades, where another fragment of me went to work on the details. It was only as I released my grip on the flow of time that I found out just how much strain it had caused me. My body on its slab wasn’t so much sweating as leaking.

Memo to me: Don’t dick around with time unless you absolutely have to.

“Boss?” Melchior had climbed up onto the slab and was now sitting cross-legged on my body’s chest and looking down into its eyes. “Are you in there somewhere? Or are we just getting echoes?”

“Yes,” I said through the lips of my body.

He rolled his eyes. “That was meant more as an either/ or question.”

“But both are true.” This time I spoke through my projection. “I’m definitely in here, but
here
is a really big place by comparison to the old me. It would be very easy to get lost.”

“And are you planning on staying?” asked Cerice. “Because, if so, I’d like to resign my commission. It’s not that I don’t like you. Hell, in a lot of ways I still love you. That’s actually the problem. I don’t think that two people with our past should be in the position this puts us in.”

“I don’t know that either one of us has a lot of options on that one,” I said, mentally running a check on the Fury subsystems and finding about what I’d expected to find after my experience with Shara. “I can’t make you not a Fury. It’s beyond the power of Necessity. As to my being Necessity . . .”

Was
I
planning on staying?
What a question that was. It’s not like I had a . . .
Wait—did I have a
choice?
Beyond dying my way free in the mode of Themis, that is?

I looked again at the Fury systems, at the kludge Shara had grafted onto Necessity’s earlier work in order to grant me some of the powers and privileges of that office, but not all of them.

“You know, there just might be a way . . .”

If I were to convince the system that I was technically enough of a Fury to render me ineligible for the job, what would happen? Would it simply boot me out? Or would it destroy me utterly? It was an open question, but hey, you don’t play the game if you don’t want to take any chances.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Alecto. “The multiverse needs Necessity.”

“It does,” I replied. “But you have to agree I might not be the best candidate for the job.” Alecto nodded. “Point. I can think of few worse.”