Codespell, page 8
part #3 of Ravirn Series
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“A few weeks ago, you broke down the wall between the Primal Chaos and Hades, let the stuff out there”—she pointed through the glass once again—“into the realm of order, into the land of the dead. Chaos devours everything it touches. It devoured you, rendered your body back into the stuff of potentiality. And yet here you stand.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Don’t be a fool. When you entered the faerie ring on your way here, you wore the body of a giant raven.” She spread her arms and they became great black wings. Flapped them closed, and they returned to arms. “Now you do not. You are a shapechanger, a power of chaos. You are no longer your skin and its contents. You are chaos.”
She stepped forward and pinched my cheek between her fingers. “This is an illusion, a lie you tell the universe. Just as everything here”—she gestured at the bridge and the doorways at either end—“is another kind of illusion. Castle Discord is also chaos, shaped by will and magic into my ever-changing home. When you forced a faerie ring to appear in a part of the castle that didn’t then exist and stepped through, you stepped into chaos. That is part of my defenses. ”
“If that’s true, why wasn’t I destroyed? Or if I was, why did I come back so quickly? It took weeks for me to get back after what happened in Hades.”
“Because you are what you are, the same as the stuff beyond my walls. And who says it didn’t take weeks. How would you know?”
My stomach felt even worse, though I was certain I hadn’t been without a body for weeks—I didn’t feel the way I had after coming back the last time. But if Eris was right, I’d unwittingly and unthinkingly taken Melchior into the Primal Chaos.
“What happened with Melchior?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Your will protected him from the stuff of your being, but the psychic pressure of being trapped out there was very hard on him. He is a manufactured thing, a creature almost wholly of order.”
“He’s a person, not a thing!”
“In soul, yes,” said Eris. “And that part of himself he has aligned with you, a creature of chaos. His physical nature, on the other hand . . . he is a computer, one of the most ordered of constructions.” She sighed. “I see that still you doubt. Perhaps a more thorough demonstration.”
Eris closed her eyes for a second. Then opened them. Wide. Wider. Her lids separated an inch, two, five. The chaos in her eyes swallowed her entire head. Then her body. Her shape stayed the same, but she became a clear vessel filled with chaos. She spread her arms as she had earlier. The lines of her body relaxed and stretched until a huge bird shape, defined only by the chaos within it, hung in the air in front of me.
Then she reversed the process, coloring herself in, starting with her tail feathers. A great raven with chaos-colored eyes faced me for one instant. I blinked, and in the beat between the closing and opening of my eyes she became Eris the goddess once again, dressed now in black-and-gold motorcycle leathers much tighter and better tailored than my own. It was only then that I realized my aloha shirt and board shorts had gone wherever it was I’d left the wings and feathers.
I couldn’t help it, I slapped myself. Broken-glass laughter filled the air as I rubbed my now stinging cheek.
“You are such an odd child,” said Eris. “The lie you tell the universe is the same one you tell yourself. To wear the flesh is to be the flesh in most respects. How else do you think the Titans produced ordered offspring?”
“So I take it this means I don’t get a free pass into the genuine immortals club? If someone kills me, I still die?”
“No you don’t, and yes you will. Someday perhaps, when your power has grown and your image of what you are has changed, the lie you tell the universe will come to include that sort of clause, but only if you live long enough. I have real doubts about that.”
“Me, too,” said a disgruntled voice from my bag.
I unzipped the top, and Melchior poked his head out.
“I take it we’ve arrived?” he asked.
“We have indeed.”
“Does that mean that you’re arguing metaphysics with Discord instead of getting down to business?”
“As usual,” said Eris. “He’s so easy to bait. Why did you come all this way for a visit?” She gave me the perplexed look of a particularly harmless old grandmother.
“Dairn,” said Melchior.
“Of Atropos’s brood?” asked Eris. “Colors, mottled browns? An archer? Shot you through the arm, I believe? Not very bright?”
“That’s the old description,” I said. “Things have changed.”
I quickly filled her in on our more recent encounters.
“You’re sure he was the shark?” she asked at the end.
“Not sure—” I began. But that wasn’t right. “Yes, I am, though I can’t say why.”
“I can,” said Eris. “It was because you saw yourself in the mirrors of his eyes.”
“Well, they are mirrors,” I said, trying to sound perplexed.
“And earlier you saw yourself in my eyes,” said Eris, “but we both know that neither of those things is what I meant. No, what I meant is that you have seen your Nemesis.”
I didn’t like the weight she’d given to that last word, not at all. “Don’t you mean nemesis?”
“No. I don’t. No more than I mean necessity when I say Necessity.”
“So then, we’re talking about Nemesis the goddess, right? I just want to be clear on that, because I’ve always been taught that she was dead.”
Eris nodded. “Yes, and she is.”
“Fabulous, I’m being pursued by a dead goddess. What fun.”
“That’s a new one,” said Melchior. Then he shrugged. “Of course, if anyone can find a way to make something like that happen, it’s you, Boss.”
“Thanks, Melchior, that really helps.” I turned my attention back to Discord. “I don’t suppose you’re pulling my leg, joshing with old Ravirn to make his life a little more discordant? ”
She laughed and a tableful of wineglasses fell to ruin in the sound. “No, I’m not. Oh, I would, but in this case I don’t have to. Unpleasant truths are infinitely more useful in my business than unpleasant lies. Surely, you’ve learned that much about me by now?”
“I have, I just keep hoping it’ll turn out I was wrong. So, tell me about the dead goddess who wants my head.”
“All right. To start with, ‘dead’ is somewhat imprecise in this case.”
“I would never have guessed that, what with her wandering around and trying to kill me instead of resting in peace in Hades.”
“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to irritate Discord? ” she asked. “Because I’d be perfectly happy to play the irritation game if that’s what you want.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Stress makes me sarcastic.”
“There’s news,” said Melchior, “along with ‘Zeus likes nymphs’ and ‘Morpheus is dreamy.’ ”
“And ‘like master like familiar,’ ” said Eris.
“Hey,” snapped Melchior, “that’s . . .”
“Yes, little man?” asked Eris.
“Nothing. I keep forgetting that I don’t want you to notice me. I’ll just be shutting up now and crawling back down into the bag, shall I?”
“Whatever makes you most uncomfortable,” said Eris. Melchior slipped out of sight. “Now, where was I? Oh yes, Nemesis. Shall we walk?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just started moving. “She’s not dead so much as bodiless.”
“Like Necessity?” I asked as I followed in her wake.
“No, not all. Necessity still has a body, several really, though they’re made of plastic and silicon rather than flesh and blood. She is as much a creature of hardware as she is of software, though where that hardware is physically housed is a secret known only to the Furies.”
And maybe Shara, I thought, but didn’t say.
“Nemesis is something else again. Like Necessity, she had a body once, but she did not give it up willingly. It was destroyed in a battle with the Furies.”
“Is that what happened?” I asked. “Why?”
It was something I’d wondered about whenever my grandmother had mentioned the demise of Nemesis. That and how a goddess, a true immortal, could die.
“She challenged Necessity, or rather, her existence was a challenge to Necessity’s authority, which is pretty much the same thing.”
I started to ask a question but got derailed because we’d reached the end of the glass tunnel and stepped through the gate into . . . the glass tunnel. Ahead, I could see us just stepping out the other end.
“The hell?” I mumbled.
“What? Oh, sorry. I forgot to turn that off. I like to walk here and think sometimes, and having to turn around can disrupt me, so I make it unnecessary. Hang on a second . . . is that better?”
It was. With no transition we were elsewhere. Or rather, elsewhere was here, since Eris didn’t move us at all. She mentally rearranged the castle around us. Now we stood in the heart of a huge shopping mall. All around us people bustled from shop to shop, people with golden apples where their heads should have been. It was distracting, but I didn’t mention it. That would only have given Eris more ammunition for later. Instead, I just waited quietly for her to continue.
“Nemesis is a goddess of vengeance,” she said. “At one time she was even The Goddess of Vengeance, visiting the wrath of the gods on the heads of men, and the wrath of Necessity on the heads of the gods. The only problem with the system was that she was a freelancer who didn’t so much take orders from the powers that be as listen to suggestions. Sometimes the heads she busted hadn’t earned the wrath of anybody but Nemesis, and sometimes the heads she was supposed to bust didn’t interest her.”
“I can see how that might not go over so well,” I said rather dryly. “Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other thing.”
My own experiences with the gods had shown me just how much they didn’t like to be thwarted, especially the hard-core control freaks like my grandmother Lachesis and the other Fates. And Necessity was the Fate of the Gods.
“Exactly,” said Eris. “Necessity liked the idea of Nemesis, but not the execution, so she came up with a less independent version in the Furies. Of course, Nemesis didn’t much like the idea of being cast aside for not just one, but three, younger women. I can’t say that I blame her. There were several battles early on, and mostly the Furies came out on the losing end. Even as a group they weren’t as strong as Nemesis in her heyday.”
I swallowed hard at that. I’d gone up against the Furies a couple of times and survived through a combination of luck and being a particularly entertaining squeaky toy—you know, the kind a cat doesn’t want to break all at once. Individually, any of them outclassed me on the divine scale. Collectively, I’d seen them take down Eris, and she and I had about as much in common in the chaos power department as Castle Discord and the kind of castle you make from sand.
“There’s no need to look quite so worried,” said Eris. “That was in the youth of the world, when she still had a body and wore the mantle of a great power. She is much reduced from those days, though it took the combined efforts of the Furies and the direct intervention of Necessity to reduce her so.”
“By direct intervention do you mean . . .”
“In the flesh, yes. This was in the days before she transformed herself into the computer at the heart of the multiverse. ”
“Nemesis is still around despite all that?” Eris nodded. “Then I think I’ve got every right to look this worried. Shouldn’t she have died at that point?”
“Probably, but I don’t think Necessity wanted that. If she’d died and descended into Hades, she might have drunk of the waters of Lethe. Then, her memories washed away, her soul could have returned. But her soul is the soul of vengeance, and she would have returned as a goddess in full to start the whole round all over again. Necessity didn’t want that, and she made sure it didn’t happen. I’m not sure exactly how she managed it, though I think Hades must have been in on the plot from the beginning. Disembodied, Nemesis does not represent a threat on the same scale.”
“She sounds plenty threatening to me,” said Melchior.
“I thought you decided to check out of this conversation,” Eris said with a grin.
“Yeah, Mel.” I winked at him. “I was actually kind of enjoying hearing about my impending doom without a string of ‘I told you sos’ and ‘Here we go agains.’ ”
He made a rude noise at me but kept his head out of the bag.
“So,” I asked, “if she’s been wandering around bodiless this whole time, how come I’ve never heard of it until now?”
“Because for more than three thousand years, no word has been heard of her. Where she has been all that time, I don’t know. Perhaps Tartarus. Believe me, I looked everywhere I could.”
“Why?” Apparently I wasn’t the only who was interested, as a number of the apple heads had gathered around us to listen.
“Because Nemesis in opposition to Necessity would create great discord.”
“Oh. Foolish question, I guess. I wonder where she’s been and why she’s come back.”
Eris smiled. It was not a smile of the kind that invites you to smile along. It was the kind a shark smiles at its soon-to-be lunch.
“The first is easy,” said Eris. “She has been wherever Necessity trapped her after the ambush.”
“And the second? The why?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much if I were you. You have a much more important question to concern yourself with.”
“Oh. What’s that?” I asked.
“How are you going to prevent her from killing you?”
“That’s an important one, yeah. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”
“No. Nemesis is vengeance personified. She will never give up, she will never back down, she cannot be killed. I don’t think you’ll get out of this one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Do you really believe I’m going to die?” I asked.
“I’m quite certain of it,” said Eris. “But I was also certain that you would die when you faced Hades in the heart of his power, and when you went up against the Fates.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Does that mean you’re certain I’ll die, but you expect me to get out of it somehow? ”
“No. Nothing so hopeful as that. I expect you to die. If you do, I have the satisfaction of being right. If you don’t, I have the entertainment of watching you slip the noose. Either way, it’s a win for me.”
“Happy to be of service,” I said, sourly.
“Don’t be that way about it,” said Eris. “There’s no reason to get mad at me for making the best of a bad situation. ”
“A bad situation for me, you mean. For you it’s like a damned sports highlights reel.”
I turned away from Eris and stomped off through the crowd of apple-headed not-people. I needed time to think without her picking at me, and that meant being where she was not. Though I like Eris far more than I should, Discord is both her title and her nature.
“Well, this is different,” Melchior said after a while.
