I followed him, and Tisiphone followed me. The space beyond was shaped like the inside of a drum and deathly quiet, insulated from the rest of the world by powerful built-in wards, both traditional and more high-tech. A permanent hexagram twelve feet across took up most of the floor. I knelt to examine it. The borders were two-inch-wide channels filled with . . .

  “Melchior, is this actually a continuous circuit?” I asked, tapping the layer of glass that had been laid down over lines of circuit—green silicon boards laced with gold conductors.

  “Yes. Ahllan built it herself. It’s a chaos-powered multiprocessor computer dedicated entirely to warding. It’s all connected up on the underside, with core chips soldered beneath each of the outer angles. When it’s active, nothing passes in or out without the consent of the master controller. It’s as near perfect a magical insulator as I’ve ever seen.”

  I whistled. “Nice, but what about mweb access?”

  “Since this world is off the net now, it’s moot, but there are network jacks at the inner angles, and the whole hexagram can be tuned to act as a high-density buffered data antenna.”

  “Activation?” I asked.

  He pointed at a narrow oak cabinet built into a niche on the far wall beside another door. “That’s got a full set of candles and stands if you’re feeling traditional. Otherwise . . .” He whistled a short burst of binary, and red lasers flickered to life at the outside corners, beaming bright spots onto the ceiling and connecting the hexagram on the floor to a second one set into the stone ceiling above.

  “What a setup.” I shook my head. “I wish Ahllan were here to explain it all to me. We never got a real chance to talk shop after I found out she had once been a Fate server. I think I could have learned a lot from her.”

  “I wish she were here, too,” said Melchior. “I miss her.”

  “I would have liked to have met her,” said Tisiphone. “When my sisters and I raided this place, she hid in here with Cerice and Shara until we left. Megaera wanted to question them, but Alecto and I convinced her it wasn’t worth the effort of breaking such powerful wards, not when your magical scent led straight into a hex gate set for Castle Discord. ”

  Melchior looked up at Tisiphone, his expression troubled. It was easy to see he didn’t much like to be reminded of Tisiphone’s coming here as an invader. I didn’t either, but I did like Tisiphone, quite a lot. It was a strange feeling.

  “How could you tell where the gate went?” asked Melchior. “It’s a one-way, with all sorts of variables that Ahllan had to juggle on the fly.”

  Tisiphone shrugged. “It smelled of Discord.”

  “Fair enough,” said Melchior, though the answer obviously didn’t satisfy him. “I suppose that’s all ancient history at this point. At the moment, we need to invent a way to use your link with Mother Necessity as a communication channel to Shara, so she can tell us how to get from here to there. You have any ideas about where to start on that, Boss?”

  “No, but I’m willing to play hardware hacker and fake it.” I turned back toward the door. “Let me dig through the equipment bins and see what I can come up with.”

  “All right,” said Melchior, as we passed out into the main part of the basement again. “I’ll get to work on cleaning this place up while you do that. If we’re going to be here for any length of time, we’ll want the whole shop up to Ahllan’s old standards. Especially the clean room and the workbenches.”

  “What about you?” I asked Tisiphone.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the hacker. Necessity does most of her own deep IT work even if she uses us as her hands when she needs them. I don’t think I’ll be much help on the hacking front, and I don’t clean. Perhaps I’ll go have a look around after.”

  “After what?” I asked.

  “Pouncing you.” Then she leaped, catching me around the shoulders and pulling me over.

  I think I shrieked. I know I jumped. But it was actually as gentle as a tackle could possibly be. She turned in the air so that I landed on her instead of hitting the stone floor, and she cushioned both of us with her wings. I ended up lying atop her and staring into a pair of mischievous blue eyes while my heart hammered out a toccata and fugue in panic minor. I was still trying to figure out what had happened when she caught my face in her hands and pulled me down for a very thorough kissing.

  “That was lovely,” I said, when she finally let me up for air, “but a little more warning might have been nice. You startled me.”

  “That was the point. And sorry, no can do on the warnings front.” She grinned. “Your hour was up, and I told you back then that amorous hostilities could reignite without any prior warning. You’ll just have to get used to the occasional pounce.”

  “Will I?” I put my hands on her ribs. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we? That, and whether Furies are ticklish.”

  “Hey, no fair—” began Tisiphone.

  I didn’t let her finish, and as it turns out, Furies are ticklish. Giggling ensued. It didn’t last long, because Tisiphone flipped me over and pinned my arms.

  “Now what are you going to do?” she asked, sitting on my chest.

  “Surrender?” I asked.

  “Nope, sorry. Not an option.”

  Since it hadn’t worked last time, I wasn’t terribly surprised. I was still trying to think of a good answer when Melchior cleared his throat.

  “Should I go and find some earplugs while you two bang about for a bit?” he asked grumpily. “Or is this more of a brief-interlude-with-groping kind of thing?”

  I sighed and looked up at Tisiphone. “Truce?”

  “We’d probably better.” She released me and popped herself to her feet with a beat of her wings before offering me a hand. “With Nemesis running around loose, it’s important we work fast. Is there anything special I should be on the lookout for while I’m out and about?”

  “Faerie rings,” I said, “if you’re feeling the need to be useful. The fewer possible routes of approach available to Nemesis, the better.”

  “Good enough.” She crouched, then launched herself up into one of the air shafts, quickly climbing from view.

  I looked at Melchior. He looked from me to the heavens—or possibly the air shaft—and shook his head. Without saying another word, he started in on the cleaning and organizing. I went to dig around in Ahllan’s supplies.

  Several grimy and sweaty hours of sifting, sorting, and soldering later, and I had kludged together a new piece of magical test equipment built on a PDA frame and designed to check out mweblike wireless communications across every band I could think of. Whether it would work or not, I had no idea, since I didn’t really understand what Tisiphone was doing, but I was fresh out of enthusiasm and ideas.

  “Would this be a good time for refreshments?” said a voice from the top of the stairs at that exact moment.

  It was Haemun, wearing a truly gods-awful Hawaiian shirt and carrying a tray with lemonade and some fresh fruit. He started down.

  “Sorry I can’t offer you the sort of variety I might were we at Raven House, but I had to go with what I could pick off the nearby trees and what little was left in the way of durable goods in Ahllan’s pantry.”

  “No need to apologize,” I said, taking a glass. “This is pretty miraculous considering conditions. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Haemun,” said Tisiphone, dropping suddenly from an air shaft.

  “You’re . . . welcome, Madam.”

  Haemun swallowed visibly as Tisiphone landed and lifted a drink from the tray but kept his smile and generally did better at looking unruffled than I had the first time I’d been surprised by a Fury. Apparently he was bouncing back from the magical brainwashing he’d undergone when Nemesis took over Raven House. That was good both for him and for me. I needed to ask him about the whole thing sometime soon, but I hadn’t wanted to push.

  “How’d it go?” Tisiphone took a sip of her lemonade and smiled at Haemun. “This is lovely.” He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like “Thanks,” and headed back upstairs as she turned her attention my way. “Did you figure anything out?”

  “Maybe.” With one fingertip I tapped the device I’d put together. “It depends on how you get your positional information. If it acts like it would if I’d set it up, this thing should be able to detect something.”

  “There’s a description that inspires confidence,” said Tisiphone.

  “What do you expect?” I shrugged. “I’m a hacker, not a communications specialist. We’ll find out just how big a distinction that is in a few minutes. How’d you do?”

  “I found a half dozen proto rings at nearby ley nodes, including one that was almost ripe at the place where Stonehenge sits in most of the primary lines of reality. The only full one I spotted was where Reykjavik would be. I destroyed them all, of course, but I didn’t make it as far as North America. There may be more there.”

  “Then we should probably get this moving along, shouldn’t we?” I finished my lemonade and set the glass aside. “Do you know where you are right now?”

  Tisiphone raised an eyebrow at me and moved her glass in a little circle to indicate she was right there with me.

  “Yes, very funny,” I said. “But you know what I meant. Do you know where you are relative to everywhere else?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean.” She emptied her glass. “It really only activates when I’m trying to move between DecLoci.”

  “I was afraid of that.” I handed her the detector I’d put together. “Here. The power button’s on the side there. If you would be so kind as to take that and go somewhere via chaos, we’ll see whether it tells us anything.”

  “How far do you want me to go?” asked Tisiphone.

  “Just far enough to activate your sense of location.”

  “All right.” She reached out and clawed a hole in the air, vanishing into the place between worlds.

  A moment later, a tearing sound from the top of the stairs announced her reentry into the DecLocus. She walked down and handed the device to me.

  “Well?”

  I glanced at the readings. “Wow, look at all the garbage.” Where I had expected to see either no magical band readings or, if I got lucky first time out, a slender spike on one frequency, I had noise everywhere. “Mel, what do you make of this?”

  He climbed up onto the workbench so he could look over my shoulder. “Gotta be interference from the Primal Chaos. It is the source of all magic, so maybe it registers a signal across the whole spectrum. Too bad it’s not a consistent signal. That we could adjust for. But this is all over the place both in frequency and amplitude. We’ll need a longer-duration sample to have any hope of sorting it out.”

  “That assumes whatever we’re looking for will even register somewhere in this range.” I sighed. “Tisiphone, you willing to take a longer trip? Something that lasts fifteen or twenty minutes?”

  “Sure.” She took the detector and went.

  While she was gone, Mel and I speculated on what we were looking for but didn’t reach any real conclusions. The mweb was a high-speed, high-fidelity, long-range medium, comparable to a very powerful two-way FM-radio-type signal. The Furies’ back channel to Necessity could have looked like anything from some kind of fast pulse signal up at the top of the spectrum down to the sort of extremely low-frequency long-pulse communication that was used to send messages to submarines running deep. We just didn’t know enough about the amount and rate of information transmission to do more than make wild-ass guesses. As it turned out, whatever it was, it didn’t register on my detector, nor on any of the others we tried over the next three days.

  “So now what?” Tisiphone asked, after I tossed aside the latest version.

  “Old-style divination, I guess.” I hate traditional magic— it’s messy, it’s unreliable, and it’s dangerous. “Unless anyone’s got a better suggestion.”

  Silence.

  “All right then.” I fetched a small silver basin from the sorcery side of the workshop. “Haemun!”

  “Yes, sir?” He stuck his head through the hatchway at the top of the stairs.

  “Could you fetch us a pitcher of water?”

  “Right away.” He vanished.

  A few minutes later the three of us—we’d invited Haemun, but he opted out—were standing in the center of Ahllan’s sanctuary with the water-filled basin on a narrow pedestal between us.

  “What do you think?” asked Mel. “Candles and calling the quarters, or binary and lasers?”

  “Let’s start with the easy way,” I answered.

  “Good enough.”

  He whistled a string of binary, and the red lasers flicked on. Another whistle brought up matched blue lasers. Finally, he turned on the greens to make a full-spectrum beam. The hexagrams above and below came to life.

  I reached for the basin but stopped abruptly when Tisiphone lurched and caught hold of the pedestal with both hands. Her knuckles were pale and her fully extended claws— daggers of organic diamond five inches long—sank deep into the polished oak of the pedestal top. The skin of her face paled and took on a greenish tinge, and she looked as though she might throw up at any moment.

  “Make it stop,” she whispered.

  “Mel!” I said.

  “On it.” He quickly whistled the lights out and the wards down. “Better?”

  I looked at Tisiphone and nodded. Already the green had faded, and her normal color had started coming back.

  “What happened?” I wanted to take her in my arms, but her claws were still out and I didn’t dare. “Are you going to be all right?”

  She nodded, then smiled weakly. “I was wrong.”

  “You were?” I asked. “About what?”

  “About not knowing where I am except when I try to travel through chaos.” She rolled her shoulders and retracted her claws, though she didn’t release her grip on the stand.

  “I don’t think I get it.” I reached out and put a hand on top of one of hers.

  “Apparently I always know where I am. Well, except when a really powerful ward cuts me off from whatever it is that lets me know what I know.”

  “Ahllan’s wards block it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It feels awful, like the worst inner-ear turbulence you could imagine.”

  From there it didn’t take us too long to figure out what was being blocked and move on to the question of how to use it to send messages in via the back door. The locator system worked a bit like a cross between dolphin-style echo-location and the submarine ELF system. Tisiphone and— presumably—her sisters sent out a continuous series of pulses that located them for the system and illuminated the DecLoci around them. In turn the system sent them five-dimensional polar coordinates via ELF letting them know where they were relative to three-dimensional space plus time and distance up or down the world spectrum from Olympus.

  What we eventually came up with as a transmission system was a bit of a duct-tape-and-baling-wire job, but hey, that’s my specialty. Tisiphone’s job was to stand still and not get too sick while Melchior flicked a set of wards on and off to create a binary signal that the locator controller couldn’t possibly not notice.

  Of course, we didn’t know whether the locator system was still hooked up to any other part of Necessity, or whether either Necessity or Shara was also hooked up to the ELF transmission system, or whether either one of them was in any state to answer if they were hooked up. The best we could do was try it and see what happened. So we did.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34