WebMage (16 page)

The word
Furies
had concentrated my attention marvelously. The Furies, embodiments of the twin concepts of revenge and justice, are one hundred percent bad news. If they were coming to kill me, I was probably going to die, and it probably wouldn't be a clean death either. Family lore said that when they'd gone after my cousin Menander, they'd played him like a cat plays a mouse: lots of frenetic running, squeaking, and batting that ended with a nasty little crunch. I tried to clear the image from my mind. I needed to find out what was happening if I wanted even the slimmest chance of avoiding that death.

"I haven't a clue what you're talking about," I said to Cerice. "I don't know anything about erased threads."

Not unless she was talking about whatever it was Eris's dragon had been doing when it ate life threads. They could have been erased, but they could also have been rewritten into Discord-worshipping zombies. I didn't know enough about the inner workings of the Core even to hazard a guess. Besides, I didn't
feel
erased. But I didn't have time for wild speculations or for twenty questions with Cerice. I'd have to sort it out later.

"There was a virus in the Fate Core," I said, "but it wasn't mine. It belonged to Eris. Laric and I killed it." She opened her mouth, but I held up a hand. "Let me finish. If the Furies really are on the way, I may not have the time to say any of this ever again. Laric died fighting the virus. He
was
my friend, and I'd have spared him if I could. Nobody regrets his death more than I." I paused and took a deep breath. Talking about Laric took more out of me than I'd expected, and I needed to recompose myself.

"Lastly, and most importantly," I said, "if you really are falling for me, that would be the best thing to happen to me in what looks like it's going to be a rather short life."

I realized then that I wanted to tell her that for me falling had given way to fallen some time ago. I hadn't truly appreciated it until that moment, with death approaching on wings of vengeance, but what I felt for Cerice was more than deep affection colored by lust. Maybe I'd been half in love with her for years without knowing it. Whatever the case, somewhere along the line half in love had become more like three-quarters. I wanted to let her know, but I couldn't. It would have been unfair in the extreme, to promise a heart that might stop beating at any moment.

"I have to go," I finally said. "And if this is the last time we speak, remember that I cared for you, more than I've ever cared for anyone else." It was inadequate, but it was the best I could do. "Good-bye, Cerice."

"Good-bye, Ravirn." She looked up again for one brief moment and met my eyes. "I… I cared for you, too." The lights in Melchior's face went out, and she was gone. I lifted him out of the bag and set him on his feet. Then I pulled the sleeve back from my injured forearm.

"It's time to use magic, Mel. It can't make things any worse."

"Not with the Furies coming to kill you. You could swallow a pint of nitroglycerin and try to escape by pogo stick, and it wouldn't make things worse."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence. Melchior, Patch & Go. Execute."

"Executing," he said.

He spat a netspider into his hand. By squeezing it, he was able to get a big gob of cobweb, which he applied to the paired entry and exit wounds on my arm. When that was in place, he whistled a short burst of binary, and I felt warmth spreading outward from the points of contact.

I'd coded the spell while recuperating from my encounter with Moric and company. It wasn't exactly a full healing spell. Those take a lot of time and personal power investment, and I'd wanted something that required neither. But it wasn't really an illusion either. That wouldn't have done much good. Instead, it was somewhere in between. The webbing would bond with the flesh and make the wound look and feel healed.

I'd be able to use it normally for a while, but eventually I'd have to peel it off and really fix the problem. In the meantime it wouldn't do any real healing and might actually get worse. Also, I'd probably lose some flesh when I ripped the stuff loose, but I was willing to trade function now for cost later. I'd have liked to do the ribs as well, but the Furies could arrive at any time and I had something else I needed to do first.

"Melchior," I said, "Scorched Earth. Execute."

"Loading," said the webgoblin.

Scorched Earth was a big spell, and it would take a little while to prep. I just hoped it was time I had. It had crashed the mweb the last time I tried it. Right at the moment I couldn't think of a better result. I had no illusions that it would actually prevent the Furies from getting to my present DecLocus, but it would certainly slow them down while I tried to put some distance between us. As I waited for the spell to finish loading, I felt the sickly fingers of panic begin to caress my soul. Maybe I shouldn't have taken time to fix my arm. Maybe I should have just hung up on Cerice the moment she'd said
Furies
.

"Executing," said Melchior after a few seconds. He began to spew high-speed binary. Another couple of seconds passed before he stopped whistling. "Scorched Earth successfully… Success… Succ… Scorched Earth Null Set. Mweb security alert. Illegal Command. Fatal Error. Fatal Error." He sneezed once, very loudly. Then his whole body went rigid, and he keeled over.

I suddenly had trouble breathing. It felt like my lungs were filling with sand. My familiar had crashed, and I was going to die. My leg hurt. My side hurt. If I added in the fact that my girlfriend seemed to think I'd done something horrific, I had the beginnings of a country western song. I felt like shit, and I must admit I entertained the idea of quietly lying down in the snow next to Melchior and letting events roll over me. It would have been so easy. Atropos was going to win, and I was going to lose. Why prolong things?

I'm not sure why I didn't give up then. I think it was Cerice and all the unanswered questions. If I'd died then, I'd never have been able to find out what we could mean to each other or learn what she'd been talking about when she said my life strand had been erased. It might not seem like much of a motive, but it kept me moving.

I bent and flipped Melchior onto his back. Just below and behind his right ear was a small wartlike projection. It was his programmer's switch, which would force a reboot. Taking it between thumb and forefinger, I twisted and pushed. There was a gentle chime followed by the sound of a processor cycling. Hopefully, that would take care of the crash, but I doubted it. Webgoblins are very stable little machines, and it takes a lot to bring one down. I was pretty sure the problem hadn't been with Scorched Earth, which meant it was probably a countervirus of some kind. The sneeze, a common alert signal for webgoblins with viral problems, tended to reinforce that speculation.

My guess was that the Fates had upgraded mweb security after the last crash and that the new systems had done something vicious to Melchior. That scared me. The Fates can be
very
nasty when they want to, and Melchior was, much as I might hate to admit it to anyone but myself, my best friend.

Grabbing my webgoblin by the scruff of his neck, I stuffed him into the bag and started limping across the snowy pavement. I didn't bother to pick up my skis. I wasn't going to outrun the Furies on foot, not when they could fly at close to sixty miles an hour. I needed a car, but the ones here in the back of the lot were all parked in. I was almost at the front of the line when I heard a sound like someone ripping a hole in reality somewhere behind me. Sure enough, peering over my shoulder, I spotted a jagged rent hanging in the air above the place where I'd abandoned my skis.

Take a movie screen. On it, project a snowstorm. Now place an enraged tiger in the room behind the screen. At some point the tiger is going to realize that all it has to do to get out and shred the audience is to use those nice, sharp claws and make an itty-bitty hole in the screen. The end result was pretty much what I was seeing. The only difference was that next to the Furies, an enraged tiger is a fat and lazy house cat. The first one through the hole was Alecto; I could tell by her wings.

That's the easiest way to identify a Fury. None of the three ever wears clothing. They don't need protection, and modesty is a concept utterly foreign to them. As she emerged, I pictured her and the others as I had last seen them at a hubris trial.

Alecto was a tall, beautiful woman with a voluptuous figure and skin the gray of granite. Her eyes and nipples and the hair that grows on her head and at the base of her belly were sable shot with silver, like lightning on a dark night. Her wings were a midnight storm.

Megaera was shorter and less generously proportioned, with an olive complexion. Where Alecto was ebony and silver, Megaera was a rich dark green. Her wings hung in the air above her like a seaweed mat big enough to swallow ships.

Tisiphone was slender, almost boyish, her skin so pale you could see her veins tracing fractal patterns in blue ink. Her hair and eyes were flame, and her wings ignited forest fires.

I didn't wait around to see them in person though. I wanted to make my exit while there was still only one of them on my side of that rip. Turning to the nearest car, I whistled a quick spell of opening. It wasn't a very good spell—it's hard to whistle when your lips are freezing—but it was only a car door. I tossed my bag and ski poles onto the passenger seat and slid into what turned out to be an old Toyota Land Cruiser. Reaching under the steering column, I applied a little superhuman strength and wrenched the ignition switch free. The engine caught on the first try, which frankly surprised me, considering the way the rest of my life was going.

In the rearview I could see the second Fury, Tisiphone as it turned out, pass into this DecLocus and unfurl her burning wings. The next step in my little auto theft was to snap the steering lock. As I did this, Alecto lowered her head to my fallen skis like a wolf sniffing out the trail of an injured deer.

I floored it. Tisiphone, who'd maintained an alert stance, watching while her sister took the scent, howled and pointed. Megaera, who had just emerged from the place between worlds, and Alecto nodded agreement. Wings snapped wide and the trio flung themselves into the air. In an instant they'd vanished into the storm.

When they'd taken Menander they'd attacked like falcons, climbing high into the sky and dropping on him in pile-driver dives, smashing him to the ground again and again as he tried to escape. He was nothing but a pulpy sack of shattered bone by the end. As I accelerated, my mind kept rerunning the scene endlessly, like the preview of an overhyped coming attraction at the local theater.

Cutting around the dealership building, I headed for the front gate. In another season I'd have taken the direct route to the highway and plowed through the fence, but I didn't dare get stuck in a snowdrift. The gate was closed. It didn't even slow me down. A Land Cruiser moving at forty miles an hour packs a lot of punch.

As I hit the open road, I switched to pushing the pedals with my left foot to take some of the strain off my injured knee. It was never going to be as good as new, but I heal fast, and giving my leg some downtime might make all the difference later. After a bit I glanced at Melchior. He should have finished his reboot by then, and it would have been a perfect time to have him back online. No such luck. The rigidity had left his body, but that was the best that could be said for him. I ran a hand gently along his spine.

"Just sleep it off and don't worry about anything, my little blue friend. I've got everything under control." I couldn't help adding, "And if you believe that, I've got a pomegranate farm I'd like to sell you. Riverfront property with a beautiful view. Sure, the river's the Lethe and it's deep in the heart of Hades, but once you taste those pomegranates you'll never want to leave. Even a couple of seeds will do. Just ask Persephone."

Minutes passed without anything happening. I couldn't delude myself into believing the Furies had forgotten about me, but I began to hope the storm was too nasty for them to hunt properly. I got the Toyota up to seventy-five, which was way too fast for conditions, but nowhere near as fast as I wanted to go. I could see maybe thirty feet, and that not well. The wind whipped the snow around like a horizontal tornado with me at the eye, hurling individual flakes at the windshield like icy bullets. If it hadn't been for the compass on the dashboard, I'd have lost all sense of direction. I was only able to stay on the road by riding the yellow line, and even that kept fading in and out of view.

Every so often I'd a hit a patch of ice, and through the steering wheel I'd feel the tires lose their grip on the road. At those moments all that kept me going in the right direction was momentum and luck. It was terrifying in a way the Furies could never be. Alecto and her sisters would kill me if they could, but that was personal. They would do it with the ultimate knowledge of who I was and why I was dying. The storm wouldn't even notice my passing. The irony that I had summoned this particular storm into being to save my life, and that now it might kill me, didn't help my mood.

A sign loomed out of the white blur on my right, pointing me toward the Highway 10 entrance ramp. Pumping the brakes like a madman, I slowed for the turn. As I began to spin the wheel, there came a sharp bang, like a sledgehammer smashing into steel plate, and the Toyota rocked wildly, tilting down and toward the right. At first I thought I'd blown a tire, but then something in the right-hand corner of my vision caught my attention. Turning my head, I saw five narrow spikes driven through the roof of the car. The finger claws of a Fury. They'd missed my head by no more than six inches. A second set was driven through the steel another foot and a half to the right, and I was sure that if I looked back I'd see matching toe claws over the cargo area.

I pushed the gas pedal back to the floor and roared up the entrance ramp, hugging the right side of the lane. As I clutched at the wheel, I felt a twinge in my right arm where the webbing hadn't bonded perfectly. Halfway up the ramp, I found what I was looking for, a big traffic-merging sign. When I hit it, the thin metal supports snapped like the pins on a poorly installed sound card, and the heavy steel sign folded over, slamming into the Fury on my roof at fifty miles an hour. With a horrible screeching sound, her claws tore free of the Toyota, and she hit the road behind me. I didn't look back. There were two more around, and I knew better than to believe I'd done more than inconvenience the third. She'd be back, and she'd be angry.