Codespell (WebMage Book 3), page 21
“Me?” The idea made me squirm. “I’ll pass. Look what it got Prometheus.”
“I didn’t claim you were the original,” said Haemun. “More like he who would steal fire from the gods for the benefit of man . . . knowing that not only were the gods going to kick the crap out of him, but that mankind’s response was going to be a mix of yawns and complaints that now they have to keep feeding the damn thing.”
“That’s sweet, Haemun. I’m touched you see me that way, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Maybe,” said Haemun, “but it seems to me that if that were the case, you’d be quietly fixing bugs for Lachesis in a place with no free will and long, bitter winters.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I wasn’t a hero, not really. Just someone who kept getting stuck between a bad decision on the one hand and a worse on the other. Right? But the trees, for all that they were covered by words, held no fresh answers, and I’d already rejected Haemun’s.
“Tell me about Nemesis, about the differences,” I said into a silence that had grown uncomfortably long.
“As you wish. The main thing after simple identity was the emotions. Nemesis has no sense of humor. All she has is hate. Every second of every day, she radiates hate the way the sun radiates heat. It’s awful. I’m a house spirit. I serve Raven House and its master. That defines both who I am and how I act. Part of that is an ability to sense the moods and anticipate the needs of my house’s master.”
“Like the way you always wake up in the middle of the night to get me a drink when I can’t sleep,” I said.
“Exactly. In order to do that, I have to be in touch with the emotions and physical needs of the master of the house. When that was Nemesis, I was constantly awash in her hate and her anger—her need for revenge. At the moment those emotions are mostly directed at you.”
At the moment? Mostly? I stopped and leaned against an oak that declared, “Eris wuz here” in a warped-text rainbow. Since there was no golden apple to go with the words, I decided the tree didn’t know what it was talking about.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“I . . . This is hazier.” Haemun paced back and forth in front of me. “Both because of my own haziness and because of the nature of the beast. Nemesis is two creatures in one skin right now—the goddess and the body.”
“Dairn.”
“Yes and no. Most of Dairn is gone. I couldn’t sense his thoughts or personality at all—only his hates are left, only the emotions that feed Nemesis. And more than anything else, he hates you. I don’t know if Nemesis hates you because of that or if there’s some deeper reason. I just know the hatred because I felt it, too.” Haemun hugged himself. “I hated you so much it burned me, burned my soul. I will carry the scars as long as I live.”
I reached out and touched his shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about this any more if you’d rather not.”
“No, I’ll keep going. It’s important. If anything I know could help stop her, stop that hate . . . I, well I just have to do what I can, that’s all.” He took several deep breaths. “Better. There is another hate underneath the hate for you, older, colder, more patient, like something waiting in the darkness. Waiting for a chance at Necessity.”
“Waiting for what?” I asked. “My death? Does she have a checklist, and she needs to write me off the list before she goes after Necessity?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Haemun. “The two hates are intertwined somehow, tied together. Again, it’s hard to explain. It’s all emotion, all hungers and drives, no thinking. All I know for certain is that Nemesis sees you as the key to getting her revenge on Necessity.”
“I suppose that could make a twisted sort of sense if she sees me as a link to Shara and the damage the Shara virus has already worked on Necessity, but I really wish the giants of the pantheon would go back to swinging at each other and leave me out of it. I’m fighting way above my weight class in these battles.” I shook my head. “Let’s get back to Dairn. Do you think the goddess’s hate for me comes more from him or more from this perceived link to Necessity?”
“I don’t know. She lives to hate and destroy. I’m not sure it matters who or what, with the possible exception of Necessity. It might be that her hate for you came from Dairn, that all she needed was the pointer, but it could just as easily be whatever link she sees between you and Necessity.” He sighed. “I wish I could be more help, but that’s really all I’ve got.” He grinned morosely. “Unless you think a longer recitation of her menu would help.”
“I doubt it. Thank you, Haemun. I don’t know what I’ll do with all that yet, but everything I can learn about Nemesis in her current incarnation helps. Why don’t you head back to the hill house, and I’ll follow along behind. I need to think.”
“All right, but don’t take too long. You’re hungry, and you need a good breakfast. Here, this will take the edge off.” He handed me a pear and walked away.
“Thanks,” I called after him, and he waved over his shoulder.
So what did I have after all that? Not much really. Nemesis hated and mirrored me to some extent. I’d known that already, hadn’t I? I took a bite of the pear. It was soft and sweet, lovely really. I started walking back toward Chez Ahllan, eating as I went.
There was just too much that I didn’t know. Why had Nemesis merged with Dairn? Was it his idea? Hers? Some combination? Was that merging the way Necessity and I had gotten tied together in her mind? Did that even matter? Where had Nemesis been all this time? Not dead, obviously, at least not in the conventional sense. But how did you imprison a bodiless goddess? And how did that work? What was Nemesis? A goddess certainly, one with enormous power, who lived for revenge. But beyond that?
All I could say for sure was that she hated me, which emotion might or might not have come from Dairn. That and she was one hell of a coder. I stopped chewing. Nemesis had vanished over three thousand years ago, long before anyone had proposed even the idea of the computer. Where had she learned to code? That was a very interesting question, and I didn’t have an answer.
“Maybe she didn’t,” said Tisiphone, “learn to code that is. Maybe she’s just mirroring your divine spark.” She looked quite bemused.
“Maybe,” I said. “Certainly all I’ve seen her do so far are really spiffy hacks, which is my department, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to it since she’s performing magic that’s well beyond what I could manage even with serious goblin help.”
“Do you always start conversations like this?” asked Tisiphone. “The last thing you said to me before dashing back in here and asking about Nemesis and coding was that I’d have to ask very nicely if I wanted to be forgiven.”
“It’s well within his normal range,” said Melchior. “I occasionally suspect that Scattered ought to be his middle name.” The goblin was standing on the workbench, having put aside a soldering pencil and a fragment of circuit board.
I ignored him and decided not to answer Tisiphone’s question. I still wasn’t happy about what she’d done to Cerice, but it was worse than what I’d done only in degree. Besides, apologies were probably not a part of Fury nature, and I didn’t want to push that conflict right now.
Instead, I said, “Look at that self-harmonizing thing Nemesis does. I’ve only ever seen Fates and webtrolls manage that. I sure as hell couldn’t do it. The way she crashed Melchior—same thing.”
“That was nasty,” said Melchior, “and there’s no reason to believe she can’t do it again next time we see her. She’s seriously out of our league.”
“Leave that to me,” said Tisiphone. “She’ll have a tough time whistling through a broken jaw.”
“That’d be nice,” I said. “It might be a good idea to have a backup plan, though. It’s too bad we can’t turn Mel into a webtroll.”
“I don’t much like the look.” He mimed big shoulders and dragging knuckles. “Hulking just doesn’t suit my dashing personality.” Then he sighed. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind a little more crash resistance.”
“Maybe we can think of something,” I said. “You’re about due for an upgrade anyway.”
Tisiphone caught hold of my shoulder, hard. “I hate to interrupt, but Shara’s sending again.”
“On it,” said Melchior, as a slightly green Tisiphone began pointing directions. “I wonder what she wants; she isn’t scheduled to check in for another hour.”
“What’s going on out there?” sent Shara. “I want to talk to Cerice.”
“What do I tell her?” asked Melchior as he set up the wards.
“Oh hell.” I sighed. I’d known this was coming at some point, but I’d rather hoped it would be later. “Better tell her the truth, that Cerice is with Clotho and that she and I are no longer an us.”
“Will do,” said Melchior. “I’ll break it to her as gently as possible.”
Because of the nature of the system, with Melchior flicking the wards on and off to send information to Shara, we could transmit much faster than we could receive. Now he launched into a long explanation, one that left Tisiphone looking queasier by the minute.
“I hate this,” she whispered, but she didn’t throw up. She was getting better at dealing with it, and I said so.
She nodded. “I think at this point, I could actually cope pretty well with not knowing where I was all the time. It’s this flickering back and forth between the two states that makes it so hard. Wait, incoming.”
“I knew it!” sent Shara. “Stupid, both of you.” There was a brief pause. “Nothing to be done about it while I’m locked in, and you’re locked out. Have to fix that. Soon!”
“Why soon?” sent Melchior, at my request. “Has anything changed?”
“Calendar, of course.”
“Huh?” I said. “Ask her what she means.”
“Spring,” she sent.
Shit. I’d forgotten about that. While we’d been sitting here talking at our glacial pace, the days had gone drifting by, bringing spring ever closer until . . . what? We didn’t know what would happen when Persephone’s annual release date arrived and with it the temporary expiration of Shara’s forced tie to Necessity.
“How much time do we have left?” I asked.
Melchior shrugged. “We’re off the mweb here. I haven’t been able to query the Fateclock.”
I turned to Tisiphone. “Does Necessity run on Olympus Standard Time? How did she decide when to release Persephone? ”
“She has her own internal clock that she keeps synched with the Fateclock. Actually, it’s the other way around. She dictates mweb time, and the Fateclock cues off her.”
“Melchior?”
“On it.”
“Five days,” sent Shara.
“We’ve got to find some way to get in before time’s up. What if Necessity spits Shara out and can’t draw her back when the time comes? This could be the only shot we’ve got.”
“But how do we find out where she is?” demanded Melchior. “We can’t do thing one until we can get to Shara and Necessity, and all this point of maximum uncertainty jazz isn’t very helpful.”
“Not without some way to predict or tune in on the thing,” I said. “How would we do that? Tisiphone?”
“No idea. All I can tell you is that’s how the system works, all chaos flows and quantum uncertainty and the math of randomness.”
Melchior got a thoughtful look. “Actually, that sounds right up your alley, Boss. Isn’t being the Raven all about hacking chaos? You did a pretty good job with Clotho’s quantum computer chip maze.”
“That’s different,” I said.
But was it?
I thought about it for a minute. A while back, Clotho had locked Cerice, Shara, Melchior, and me into a magical hedge maze on the grounds of Clotho House. The maze could assume the shape of any computer chip, and to keep us trapped there, she’d had it take on the form of a quantum processor so that every gate in the maze was simultaneously open and closed. It would have taken most people, most gods even, a lifetime to find their way out. Not the Raven. My power over chaos had allowed me to shape the maze to my whim, and we had been able to escape only a few minutes later. If I could do something like that here . . . but no. What we needed now wasn’t some way to make an already-existing quantum computer do what we wanted, because we didn’t have the computer. Then a thought occurred to me.
“Uh, Boss,” said Melchior. “I don’t like the expression you’ve got on your face. I’ve seen it before, and every time it’s meant trouble for me. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that several problems might just solve each other.”
“Like what?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“Like we need a quantum computer that can connect to the mweb and touch chaos at the same time. Like Nemesis is an evil bastard of a hacker, and you need crash protection and an upgrade. Like I’m a chaos power, and you’re fundamentally a creature of order, a conflict that’s already causing problems.”
“You’re not suggesting . . . ?”
“That we upgrade you into a brand-new type of webgoblin, the very first quantum laptop. Oh yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
Melchior sat down on the bench with a little thump. “I knew I wasn’t going to like what came of that look.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to do it?” I asked. “You’re my partner now, not my servant. If you don’t want to try this, I won’t force you.”
“No, the reason I don’t like it is that you’re right. It would solve a lot of problems all in one go, and we really don’t have time to look for a better answer.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m saying that. Or this: we’d better start working on the plans.”
That was going to be an interesting problem. I’d coded Melchior myself years ago, crafted him by magic from blueprints drafted by Lachesis, then modified to suit my needs. This was a bigger problem.
“We’ll be able to use some of your original specs, since we won’t want to make any changes in the goblin side of you,” I said. “Or will we? If you’ve ever wanted to be a little taller or a little prettier, now’s the time to speak up.”
Melchior made an eeping noise and shook his head. “Thanks, but I’d rather not change anything we don’t absolutely have to.” He forced a smile and tossed his head. “Besides, I’m beautiful just the way I am.”
“Done, though the head-tossing thing would work better if you had hair. We could include that in the new plans—thick, luxurious hair . . .”
“No thanks.” He rubbed the top of his head. “This is much-lower maintenance.”
“Uh, guys.” Tisiphone put a hand on my arm.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That.” She pointed toward the back wall. A ball of blue light was slowly growing there—the spinnerette. I felt a whisper on my skin as of invisible plumage ruffling.
“I wish I knew what that thing wanted,” I said.
“And whose side it’s on,” said Melchior. “Every time it’s shown up, Nemesis has been right behind it.”
“Has she?” Tisiphone smiled. It wasn’t the kind of smile I’d have wanted directed my way. “Good.”
The spider-centaur faded into view, and Tisiphone started toward it, claws extended. I caught the tip of her wing as she went by me. It was hot, but it didn’t burn me. Tisiphone had taught it not to.
“Wait a moment,” I said. “Let’s see what it wants.” Cerice’s comment about spinnerette activity had started my curiosity bump itching.
Tisiphone looked back at me. “Can’t we just take it apart and figure out our answer from the pieces? It’d be simpler.”
“Call that plan B,” said Melchior.
“Oh, all right, but if it tries anything, I’m going to tie its legs in knots.”
“Fair enough,” he agreed.
I stepped around Tisiphone. This was the first chance I’d gotten to really look at the thing. Female, at least the human part of it, and about eight feet tall, though I suspected it could easily go higher if it fully extended its long spider legs. The spider body was massive, a shiny black ovoid as big as a golf cart. The woman’s torso above that, likewise black, was similarly large—sized for a seven-foot female linebacker. The head was an attractive woman’s with the exception of the arachnid mandibles growing out of her cheeks.
“******?” she chittered at me.
It was obviously a question, but beyond that . . . I had no idea what she’d said, though again, the voice sounded almost familiar.
“******?” Louder this time, less querulous.
“I don’t understand you,” I answered.
“******!”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “Afraid not.”
“****** . . .”
She shrugged. Then, without any warning, she was leaning down toward me. I assume she’d crossed the intervening distance, but if so, it was too fast for me to follow. Big, shiny black hands caught my shoulders, lifting me off the ground. A bubble of blue light formed around us, and the world began to fade.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fire engulfed me, and I fell. When the flames subsided, I found Tisiphone standing over me, her wings spread like a shield between me and the world. The spinnerette clung to the ceiling on the far side of the room, though whether she had leaped there or been thrown I didn’t know.
“*********?” she chittered—a new question.
Tisiphone growled and moved toward her.
“Wait,” I said. “We still don’t know what she wants.”
“I don’t care what she wants,” said Tisiphone, though she checked her advance.
“*********?” The question she chittered this time sounded almost exasperated. She dropped back to the floor and reached a hand out toward Tisiphone.
“That’s it,” she said, and her internal fires flared higher. “You have ten seconds to get out of here. After that, I start taking you apart.”
“*********!”
