MythOS (WebMage Book 4), page 9
“You can send me home?” I couldn’t keep a bit of hope out of my voice.
My feelings on the matter were complex. There was a lot to be said for not getting anywhere near Hades ever again. At the same time, any thoughts I’d had about this being a radically better place had been soured by the appearance of my aunt’s doppelgänger and my knowledge that the head honcho would really prefer to see me dead, with only Hamlet’s reasons for not killing me yet—I’d rather not bet my life on someone else’s continued indecision.
“Let us rather say I can arrange your passage if you make it worth my while,” said Odin. “Come.”
He led the way along the tree in the opposite direction from the one Skuld had taken. Soon we came to a place where a root humped up from the ground to make a low arch. Set within was a stone door shaped like some ancient altar stolen from its plinth. It had no handles, hinges, or keyholes, but I had no doubt as to its purpose. Odin rapped once on the center of the stone with the butt of his spear, and it lowered itself into the tree’s base like a reverse drawbridge.
“After you,” said Odin.
The stone boomed hollowly as I stepped onto it, the noise echoing away into the deep but narrow gap it bridged.
“What’s down there?” I asked, as Odin followed me across.
“Listen.”
Very faint and far away in the depths I heard the sound of chewing, like a dog worrying an old bone.
“Wolf?” I asked, since there seemed to be rather a surplus of them in the local pantheoverse.
“Dragon. Turn left.”
I ducked through a low wooden archway into what appeared to be a theme park for computer bureaucrats, that or the world’s ugliest server farm. Rack after rack of beige boxes extended in a series of identical rows across the living wood of the floor, eventually vanishing into the harsh fluorescent-lit distance.
“And this is . . . ?” I let my words trail off because I simply couldn’t think of anything more to say. How this place could exist in the same universe as Loki’s sexy little portable was beyond me.
“The heart of MimirNet,” said Odin, and I could hear pride in his voice. “Ten thousand state-of-the-art boxes running OS Panorama, the system that controls the universe.”
“How very . . . scenic.”
Odin gave me another hard look as he led me between the rows. “You’ve seen better?”
Had I seen better? I thought of Necessity and the stark black servers she used to keep track of the fates of the gods—slices of faux ebony, with only the deep purple and red of their telltales betraying them as something made rather than grown. Or Eris’s system-wide Library of Alexandria case mods with each multicore computer disguised as a Greek scroll. For that matter—on a more personal level—Melchior’s subnotebook shape with the etched goblin head on the top that allowed his OLED monitor to be read through his casing was pretty spiffy. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that would be a good direction to take here, especially not when I wanted to hear more about MimirNet, which looked to be the local equivalent of the mweb. I very politely shook my head.
“Not really, no. Ten thousand machines? That’s got to be a royal pain to administer.”
“You’d be surprised. MimirSoft is really good at external management. There’s not a single computer here, or anywhere else on the net for that matter, that I can’t remotely operate in every detail.”
“Anywhere?”
“Sure, say Tyr’s system goes down.”
The hand in my breast pocket twitched at the name, and I coughed and thumped my chest in response.
“Go on,” I said a moment later.
“Well, all I have to do is open it up from here and I can do anything that needs doing. Replace a corrupt file. Revert him to an earlier backup. Even scrub his machine and reinstall from scratch. I have total control of every single box running the MimirSoft OS. It’s an IT department’s dream.”
And a user’s nightmare, I thought but didn’t say. “It sounds like it.” On the other hand, it meant that once I hacked into the control system, I’d own the whole shebang. “But what about security?”
“Bulletproof. You can’t even reach MimirNet without installing one of our networking cards, and the encryption is built right into the chipset. It can’t be cracked.”
“Really? Not even if someone could—” I coughed again, thumping Laginn through my leathers. “Sorry. Frog in my throat. Not even if someone got their hand on one of the cards? Say from a machine here?”
Inside my jacket Laginn got the message. It climbed out of my pocket and began sliding around behind me. I found it surprisingly hard not to shudder as I felt the disembodied hand slowly slipping out of my jacket and sliding three fingers into one of my back pockets.
“Wouldn’t help,” said Odin. “Not really. Sure, you’d be able to see the network, but the system is uncrackable.”
I bit my tongue, both to keep from making a smart remark to Odin and to keep from squeaking as the hand pivoted and then slid down to the back of my knee.
“Ah,” said Odin, “here we are.”
As he turned into a narrow aisle between racks, the hand crawled down the back of my boot before soundlessly dropping to the floor. At the end of the aisle sat another ancient stone door—again without any visible means for opening it. Carved in the wood above it was a series of runes. I’d never seen that door, and I couldn’t read the signs, but somehow I felt I’d been there before.
Odin rapped the butt of his spear against the door, and it slowly swung inward. I felt my nonexistent feathers fluff and flutter as though some powerful eldritch wind had come gusting out through the opening. With the feeling came a sound I had heard only once but would never forget—the sharp metallic clicking as copper beads slid along bronze wires and made unknown calculations for mysterious reasons—huge abacuses working themselves.
Beyond the door I found a room identical in content to the last place I’d seen in my own pantheoverse, a room filled with bronze abacuses. As my feathers continued to fluff and blow in a wind that left my hair untouched, I more than half expected a repeat of the sudden stillness and silence that had preceded my forced departure from the halls of Necessity. But the abacuses just kept calmly clicking away as though neither I nor my one-eyed tour guide existed.
“What is this place?” I asked after a while.
“Don’t try to tell me you haven’t seen its like.”
“Only once, and only briefly, right before I ended up here. Tisiphone said she thought it was Necessity’s soul. I had my doubts then and even more now.”
“Tisiphone, the Fury?” asked Odin. “Is she the other power I felt entering my sphere?”
I nodded since there didn’t seem much point in denying it.
“Just what this pantheoverse needs—another berserker.” He sighed. “Actually, she wasn’t too far wrong if you think of your Necessity in her role as arbiter of worlds.” He swept an arm across his body in a gesture that took in the abacuses. “This is Mimir’s soul, or a part of it. It’s why he lives on despite his decapitation. When the primal universe first started to split into its many successors, one god from each of the lines that survived took over the task of maintaining the continuity of their mythos and preventing the destruction that would result in a remerging or collapse of one mythos into another. In your world it was Necessity. Here it was Mimir. Elsewhere it might be Vishnu or Thoth.”
“Why are you showing me all this?” I asked.
“Ragnarok.”
“Okay, you just lost me.”
“The doom of the gods. I surrendered my eye to Mimir for knowledge.” He tapped his empty lid. “Within the Void I can see that which was, that which is, and that which will be, which must be, really. I know my doom and the doom of my realm and of each and every one of my subjects, the final battle that will kill us all. You have seen Fenris?”
“The poodle with the big iron thorn for a lip ring?” I raised an eyebrow.
“The wolf. Loki may hide his son’s shape, but never his true nature. Fenris is Hunger, an empty soul that can never be filled. The wolf will devour me in the end, and the Void in my eye will become one with the void in his gut. My son Thor will kill and be killed by Loki’s other son, the great serpent, Jormungand. Loki will die at the hand of another of my sons, Heimdall, who will himself perish in the slaying. The world of Midgard will end in that final hour, too, taking every living human being with it. All that I have built and fought for will come tumbling to ruin at the hands of Loki and his children. In every minute of every hour of every day I can see the coming destruction. I need only focus my attention to bring it into full view.”
“Ugly.” Exceptionally so. Enough to rob me of my usual glibness—there are some things not even I can make into jokes. I was beginning to understand Odin’s grim demeanor.
“I’m still not sure what it has to do with me,” I said after a moment.
“It’s a matter of eyes,” said Odin. “Mine. Loki’s. And now yours.”
Ahh. That did explain a few things, though it also raised a number of questions. “You’re referring to the glow-in-the-dark nature of my pupils and their—let me note for the record, purely superficial—resemblance to Loki’s?”
“Yes, young Raven, that is part of what I’m talking about. The chaos in your eyes reflects that chaos in his, not to mention the stuff that burns in the belly of the wolf and that drips from the fangs of Jormungand. But that is not the only thing of which I speak. If it were, I would simply count you among my enemies and slay you.”
“All right, I’ll bite. What else are you talking about?”
“I can only see you through my good eye.” Odin’s voice sounded plaintive, almost confused.
“I don’t think I understand.”
“I see the past, the present, and the future within the void of my missing eye. But you are not there to be seen. You are an unknown, possibly even an unknowable. In all the long years since I sacrificed my eye, that has never once happened. You present me with a mystery and a dilemma. What I should do with you is a worry that looms large. My first impulse is to kill you, my second to send you home; but I don’t know what the result of either action will be, and so I dare not act. Who knows? You might even represent an opportunity.” He shook his head.
“Okay, that brings me back to my original question: Why show me all this?”
“To demonstrate that sending you home is within my power, just as killing you is.” Without seeming to move, he brought the spear on which he had been leaning up so its point rested ever so gently in the hollow of my throat. “No one else can do both, though Loki may pretend things are otherwise. Loki is a liar and a deicide-to-be. Give him the chance and he will use you in his war against me. Someday soon I may be forced to act on your status. It would be better for both of us if you left me the choice for that action to echo this.” He pulled the spear away.
I felt a trickle of blood follow it and suppressed the urge to wipe it away. “You make a persuasive case and, honestly, I have no desire to get involved in the conflict between you. I try to stay out of that sort of thing at home, and it seems a bad idea to change that pattern abroad.”
“Good,” said Odin, turning and leading the way back to the door. “We understand each other. I am the only one who can send you home. Both your life and any hope for return are in my hands. Please convey the sense of my words here to your Fury friend as well, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I said as I stepped into the server room. “I doubt she’s any more interested in making trouble here than I am. I’ll . . .” I trailed off as I found my path blocked by a pair of enormous ravens, one of which had a gray and stiff-looking hand clutched in its left claw.
“Why am I having a hard time believing that?” asked Munin.
“Perhaps you’re in need of a hand?” asked Hugin, lifting the feebly struggling Laginn and offering it to his companion.
“Perhaps,” said Munin. “Though not that one, I think. It belongs elsewhere.”
“Right you are, Mr. Munin. Right you are.” He turned his gaze my way. “I believe this is yours.”
“We found it attempting to open one of the control servers,” said Munin.
“Now, what was that you were just saying to our master about troublemaking?” asked Hugin. “I can’t seem to remember.”
“That’s my job,” said Munin. “Memory, that is. I believe he was in the middle of telling a mistruth.”
“Loki’s eyes,” said Hugin.
“And Loki’s lies,” added Munin.
CHAPTER SIX
Laginn looked terrible after his night in the cell with me. He lay palm up on the narrow wooden bench, gray and cold and barely moving, not at all the lively thing I’d become rather attached to over the last forty-eight hours. I prodded him gently, and he feebly waved a pinkie at me. Whatever was wrong, it seemed to be getting worse.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” I said.
The hand twitched, and I got up to pace the confines of my cell. It was comfortably appointed, with a small table and a pallet in addition to the bench, and neither too hot nor too cold, but it was definitely a cell. The thick wooden door with its barred window and heavy lock announced my prisoner’s status.
“I am sorry about this,” Odin had said when he closed the door behind me, “but I think it’s for the best for now. It’s the least bad thing I can do to you under the circumstances.”
I suppose I could see his point. Not that I was going to let that prevent me from escaping. I paused in my pacing and glared at the rough brown circle I’d drawn on the floor with my own blood. Still not a faerie ring. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me. I wasn’t entirely a power here, or so Odin had told me, suggesting that was for the best where my health was concerned.
“If you were a power in the same way you are at home,” he’d said, “this cell couldn’t bind your magic, and I would be forced to kill you.”
I looked at Laginn again and growled. He was in very bad shape. For about the twentieth time, I kicked the door—a martial-arts-style side kick with the sole of my foot. Nothing happened. I regretted the sword I’d left at Shakespeare’s place and the pistol the ravens had taken from me. How was I going to get us out of here? The gaps in the window bars were big enough that I could probably have forced Laginn through them, but then what? Given his current state, that would accomplish little more than putting him outside my protection.
I still had my athame, and I might have tried using it as a lockpick if I could have reached the lock, but it, like the handle, was entirely on the outside of the cell. Swearing, I dropped back onto my bench. I’d never wanted to be a power in my old life, never wanted to be the Raven. The role had been thrust upon me, and I’d fought hard against it, though I’d eventually accepted it. Now, when I really needed it, the only ravens around were playing for the other team. Damn Hugin and Munin! Damn them and my own internal Raven, too, since it had . . . Wait a second.
What exactly had Odin said? I replayed the first part of it my mind. If you were a power in the same way you are at home . . . That wasn’t the same thing as saying I wasn’t a power at all. When I was sitting on the branch between Hugin and Munin, Odin had called them Thought and Memory and included me with them as Impulse, and later, Intuition. What if the pair weren’t ravens, but rather Ravens? If so, could I perhaps tap that power somehow? I felt my invisible feathers rise ever so slightly, and a shadow seemed to fall over me, a shadow with wings.
“Intuition it is.” I grinned.
Now, how did I use it? Once again I was feeling my lack of grounding in the Norse mythos. What sorts of powers did Hugin and Munin have? Somehow I thought that knocking the door off my cell wasn’t among them. Thought and Memory . . . hadn’t they served as Odin’s intelligence-gathering service? Spies for the God of Information? Yes, that sounded right. But a couple of giant ravens would have a hard time playing the spy, wouldn’t they? I got up and started to pace again. How about a couple of not-so-giant ravens? I eyed the bars of the window and felt the ruffle of invisible feathers.
Time to put Impulse into action. I picked Laginn up and carried him to the window, pushing him between the bars wrist first. I’d hoped the hand would hold on, but that was apparently beyond him, and he fell to the floor outside with a dull “thump.”
Better hurry. I reached for the chaos within me, trying to touch the place where blood and magic became one. Nothing. It felt like the Titan blood had been drained from my veins. Now what? I kicked the door again. I needed to get out of here, even more so with Laginn helpless on the other side. Again I reached within. Again, nothing.
I’d been so sure my intuition was right. Hadn’t my Raven’s shadow confirmed my plan? What was I missing? I thought back to Hugin and Munin transforming me. It had been every bit as painful and wrenching as when I did it. The only difference I could think of in the process was that it had been imposed from without instead of coming from within. Could I use that?
I saw the shadow of wings, and the invisible feathers stirred on my back and shoulders. I tried to hold on to the sensation, to strengthen it and deepen the Raven’s shadow. I felt a definite increase in intensity but nowhere near enough. I pictured myself perched on the limb between Hugin and Munin, tried to remember exactly how it had felt when Odin shifted me back—like I was being skinned.
No. Was it really that simple? It couldn’t be, but the darkness of my Raven’s shadow grew blacker yet. Stretching out my arms I matched my position to the shadow of the soaring Raven. It felt . . . right. I clenched my fists as though catching hold of the tips of my shadow wings and pulled, trying to draw the Raven shape over me like a cloak.
Searing pain filled me, as my very soul was forced into a mold that wasn’t quite the right shape, a mold made of the caustic stuff of Primal Chaos. I was devoured by it as I had been devoured before, though there were differences this time. First and foremost, I never lost my sense of self. I was completely there and completely in the moment. I felt each and every molecule of my body shifting under the Raven’s skin. I also felt intense pinpricks of heat and cold, as though someone had added sparks and snowflakes to the usual mix.
