Codespell, page 2
part #3 of Ravirn Series
“Zeus likes parties. End of story.”
Well, there was that. Zeus is a party animal, a sort of divine hybrid of king of the gods and the ultimate frat boy, which makes a certain amount of sense I suppose. Fraternities refer to themselves as Greek and attach Alphas and Omegas to their front doors, and my family has provided plenty of inspiration on the drinking-and-debauchery front. For his casual sex contributions alone, Zeus deserves a special place in party history.
It’s actually kind of strange. Here we have the Lord of the Sky, God-King, and King-God who defeated and imprisoned his Titan forebears in the war known as the Titanomachy. Yet, when he’s not painted breaking heads, the myths are mostly about him seducing mortals. I guess that’s what happens when you try to run a multidimensional divine operation with a one-dimensional personality.
I looked at the invitation again.
Zeus wants you!
And, House Raven will be expected to make a formal appearance.
That didn’t leave me much wiggle room. House Raven—the institution—as opposed to Raven House—the building I called home—pretty much consisted of me, and maybe Melchior. The latter depended on whether you counted him as a person or not.
Cerice’s matriarch—Clotho, the Fate who spins the threads of life—had thus far refused to accept Cerice’s resignation, which meant that technically Cerice still belonged to the Houses of Fate. Shara, Cerice’s familiar, would always have a home at Raven House, but her relationship to House Raven was even more tenuous than her mistress’s, since she was trapped within the computer-mind of the goddess Necessity for at least the next month if not forever. It was hard to guess what would happen to her with Necessity in such dire shape.
As for Haemun . . . Well, as the spirit of the place, he worked more for Raven House than he did for me. I really hadn’t had time to accumulate an entourage, and I preferred it that way. As a hacker and cracker, and a demigod of same, I tended to think of myself more as a lone coder than any kind of head of a Divine House. In fact, I really didn’t much like the whole idea of becoming a power, however minor. Of course, no one had asked me. They’d just gone ahead and made me one.
Just then, Haemun arrived with a mojito for me and a very small snifter of something amber for Melchior.
“Your drinks,” he said, leaning down with the tray.
“Thanks, Haemun.”
“You’re welcome, sirs. Can I get you anything else?”
“No, thank you.”
Haemun wandered off and I took a long sip of my drink— rum and mint, lime and sugar, a bit of soda and absolutely fabulous. OK, so there were a few perks to this whole House Raven thing. They didn’t begin to make up for everything I’d had to go through to get here. Or, I suspected, the grief the whole deal was going to buy me in the future. I tossed the card onto the table beside me.
Melchior picked it up. “This party smells like trouble.”
“Everything smells like trouble to you, Mel. I think I misprogrammed your paranoia levels.”
He nodded. “That’s possible, but it’s more likely the company I keep. You are a trouble magnet, and this party setup”—he tapped the card—“is begging to be exploited. It nails you down in one place at a specific time and announces the details to all of your enemies.”
“No one’s going to try to pull anything right under Zeus’s nose.”
Mel rolled his eyes again. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s any precedent for that. Like say, a golden apple with ‘For the Fairest’ tossed into another Olympian party by Eris, Goddess of Discord.” He snapped his finger. “Oh, wait, isn’t that how the Trojan War started?”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“Is there another way to put it?”
I winced and tapped the part of the card that talked about House Raven being expected. “Unfortunately, being a chaos power doesn’t mean that I get to let what I want to do get in the way of what I have to do. If you can think of a good way to weasel out of this, now’s the time to suggest it.”
He shook his head. “I hate it when you resort to reason like that. It’s out of character.”
I could feel the muscles in my back and shoulders beginning to tighten and took another drink. If it were daylight, I’d have gone surfing to distract myself, but misjudging waves in the dark is a great way to become one with the reef. Besides, my glowing eyes tended to attract sharks. We got an awful lot of them in the bay, maybe because in this DecLocus, no humans had come along to prey on them. The eyes draw bugs, too.
I wondered if Discord had the same problem. Her eyes are like mine, only more so, two glowing balls of chaos. I liked Eris, even if she was crazy, but her eyes had always creeped me out. Now I saw their close cousins looking back at me every time I faced a mirror.
Melchior was probably right about the party, but I really didn’t have any outs. The great powers of the pantheon are Chaos, Order, Death, and Creation—Discord, Fate, Hades, and Zeus. With Order and Death already out to get me, I really didn’t want to piss Zeus off, too, no matter how stupid he was.
I sipped away at my mojito and tried to pretend everything would go fine. Yeah, right. About the only good thing I could see was a chance to plead my insomnia case to the Dreamers in person if they showed for the bash.
“Ravirn, be serious.” Cerice glared at the leather pants I’d just pulled out of the closet. “You can’t wear those.”
“Of course I can.” I slipped them on, ignoring her glower. “They’re comfortable and practical.”
The pants were racing leathers made by a little company called Tech Sec and lined with about seventeen layers of Kevlar. Great if you happened to crash your bike, better if someone started shooting at you.
“The invite said House Formal.”
She was wearing a red-and-gold-brocade dress that would have been perfectly appropriate in the court of Elizabeth I. It looked fantastic on her. Cerice is tall and slender, with china-pale skin and white blond hair. Her slit eyes are blue, her cheekbones high, her ears pointed, and her face shaped like a narrow heart. The children of Fate are at the root of the legends of elf-kind, and my own appearance is a black-haired masculine mirror of hers.
I stepped in close and planted a gentle kiss on her cheek. “I know that, Cerice. But I no longer belong to the Houses of Fate. I am my own House, and I don’t like classical. Not the way it is worn at House Clotho”—I tugged at her sleeve— “and not the three-thousand-year-old Athenian version favored on Olympus.”
She sighed and smiled. “I understand that, but if you’re going to go modern, couldn’t you at least wear a tux instead of riding leathers and a T-shirt?”
“The leathers stay. I like bulletproof.”
“Bullet resistant,” interjected Melchior. “There’s a difference. ”
I gave him a sour look. “I will concede the T-shirt.” I’d planned on doing that anyway, and this way I’d get relationship points for it as well. “What would you suggest?”
She headed deeper into the closet, returning a moment later with an emerald silk shirt with Edwardian ruffles. I took it dubiously and slipped it on, then added my jacket.
“Oh my.” Cerice grinned.
“Good?” I asked.
“Surprisingly so.”
A quick look in the mirror confirmed her judgment. Tech Sec leathers are custom-fitted, and a very silky black. With the jacket open and the ruffled shirt, the whole looked something like Edwardian Modern. Even the boots added to the effect, since I’d opted for Tech Sec’s English riding style. Nice.
That just left one thing. Stripping the jacket off again, I put on a low-profile shoulder holster and slid my .45 into it.
“Uh, Boss?”
“Yes, Melchior. What do you want? And would you please stop calling me Boss? We’re partners.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.”
“Melchior?”
“Yes?” He gave me an innocent look.
“You were saying . . .”
“Are you sure you want to bring a gun along? You do remember that Zeus has banned them, right? ‘Nobody thunders but me’ and all that jazz.”
“I was going to conceal it with a spell,” I said. “Besides, my rapier and dagger don’t go with the outfit.”
“So you’re leaving them behind?”
“Well, no. I was going to ask you to tuck them away somewhere.” I flapped my fingers mystically. Melchior often parked my blades in a sort of pocket of folded space when I didn’t want them visible.
“Why not have me take the gun, too? It’d be safer.”
I wanted to argue, especially after he’d reminded me what a lovely target this party made of me, but he was right. I handed over the .45 very reluctantly. He took it and whistled a quick string of binary code. The spell opened a hole in space, into which Melchior tucked the pistol. My blades followed a moment later, but he kept it open and gave Cerice a rather pointed look.
“What?” she demanded.
I grinned. “If I’ve gotta, so do you.”
“Oh, all right.” She reached under her skirts and produced a small Beretta semiautomatic. It went wherever it was Mel had parked the rest of the stuff, and he closed things up. Cerice’s slight but smug smile as he did so suggested to me that she was holding out. I didn’t call her on it.
“Are we ready?” I asked.
“As we’re likely to get,” muttered Melchior. “I just wish we could travel like sane people and LTP it.”
That would have been nice. Despite my newfound facility with faerie rings, I also preferred locus transfer protocol gates. But the damage to the mweb had removed the world that held Raven House from the net and cut off all mweb-based magic in the process. That left us no other choice.
“You want to walk or ride?” I asked him.
“Ride, I think. I’m less likely to draw divine attention if I play inanimate object for most of the evening, and that’s the way I like it.”
“Fair enough. Melchior, Laptop. Please.”
He grinned and began to melt into a blue puddle—the first step in the shift from webgoblin to laptop. He could have done it on his own, of course, but he seemed to prefer the old ritual of command and performance when running most of his spell programming. Kind of odd, actually, since the “please” we’d substituted for “execute” made the whole thing as voluntary as if he’d initiated the spell himself.
But then, he was a bizarre little mix of hardware, wet-ware, software, spellware, and whatever spiritware Tyche and Eris had snuck into the webgoblin specs to give them free will. As far as I can tell, AI is at least as weird as the regular sort of I. When he was done, I lifted his laptop form—a translucent blue clamshell—into a Tech Sec shoulder bag and bowed Cerice out the door in front of me.
The faerie ring was embedded in the marble of the grand balcony, a circle of black veining within the green stone. Taking Cerice’s hand, I stepped into the circle and went . . . elsewhere.
Faerie rings are a form of chaos magic that acts as a loophole in the idea of place. Outside, you’re somewhere specific. Inside, you’re not. Every single ring is at one and the same time both itself and every other ring. When you cross back over the border on the way out, your odds of stepping out of any other circle are perfectly even. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, most people experience the rings sequentially, seeing potential exit points in a series of flickers, like high-speed channel surfing.
That’s how it worked for plain old Ravirn—very dangerous and very scary. But the Raven is a power of chaos, which gives me unusual power over the rings. Now when I enter one, I somehow experience the whole damn system simultaneously and can simply step out into the world of my choice. Convenient but, in its own way, even scarier.
This time the Olympus ring was a chain of braided flowers, bright in the afternoon sun. They lay on the floor of a small marble temple, the pantheonic equivalent of a gazebo. On my last visit to the mountain, it had been a circle of dancing satyrs. Athena is the head of Olympian security, and she does not allow permanent rings.
As we stepped over the flowers, a small, fat satyr pranced up to greet us. He had more flowers in his hair and looked to be a sweet-natured thirteen. In reality, he was probably in his late hundreds and as steeped in vice as the rest of his half-goat relatives. That impression was reinforced by a glance over his shoulder to the place where a half dozen of his fellows were hunched over some kind of game that involved dice and lots of drinking from unmarked brown bottles.
“Raven and consort, so good of you to come. If you’ll just follow me, I’ll lead you to the party.”
“I prefer Ravirn,” I said.
“And consort?” demanded Cerice. “Don’t I even get a name?”
“Look,” said the satyr, “I don’t write the cards, I just read ’em.” He waved a slender calling card at us.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Out of the arrivals box. Security’s pretty tight for this gig, and Athena’s people are monitoring all the incoming traffic, both LTPs and on the ring network. Whenever any of the invitees comes in, a card pops up with titles and whatnot on it.”
“What if someone isn’t invited?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s not really my department. I assume all hell breaks loose. It hasn’t happened yet, and I hope to miss it if it does. Now, are you coming?”
He led us to a large field with dozens of pavilions. A line of slender posts linked by golden rope surrounded the area, and we walked along these to a place where the rope spiraled around a taller pair of poles to form an arch. A pair of ten-foot cyclopes in security guard uniforms and mirrored shades stood to either side of the opening.
The satyr handed the calling card over to the nearer of the two. He read it carefully and painfully, silently sounding out the syllables. When he finished, he turned his head so that the single lens of his mirrored shade was aimed right at me and frowned.
“I remember you,” he said.
He didn’t sound happy. Neither was I. The last time I’d come into contact with the rent-a-clops types that supplied muscle for Athena’s security operations, we hadn’t exactly seen eyes to eye. In fact, there’d been some shooting involved. Mostly them, at me, with high-caliber Gyrojet pistols, but it hadn’t all been one way. It was going to be very embarrassing if I got into a fight with one of the security guards and got thrown out of a party in my own honor.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You missed. I missed. Can we just call it even?”
“I don’t t’ink so,” said the cyclops, cracking his enormous knuckles. “I really don’t. One of these days, you and me are gonna have a long talk in a dark alley somewheres.” He shook his head with some disappointment. “But it ain’t today. Today is professional, not personal. Zeus invited you, so I gots to let you in, but Athena said to make sure I frisked you first. You wanna assume the position? Or do I gets to go personal on you ahead o’ schedule?”
What I really wanted was to go back to Raven House, but all the reasons I had to come to this event still applied. Besides, I didn’t think I’d be allowed to simply walk away at this point. With a sigh, I put my hands on top of my head.
The ’clops looked briefly triumphant when he found my shoulder holster, but that faded as soon as he saw it was empty. At the end of the pat down, he turned his gaze on Cerice.
