WebMage (28 page)

I found myself swallowing audibly. "If we're going to have a working relationship, my lady Discord, you're going to have to stop doing things like that. I need to stay focused if you want me to debug your program."

"Sorry," she said, but her tone belied the apology. She gave me a broad wink, "Force of habit, really. I know I shouldn't practice on my own side, but I have to keep my hand in."

"Delightful." I didn't like her thinking of me as being on her side. Not one little bit. I might be unwilling to see Atropos murder free will, but I wasn't interested in signing up to play for the Chaos Marauders either. I didn't think it would be wise to declare it openly, but maybe I could put a little discreet distance between us. "Remind me to do something nice for you when I get a chance, like starting a major fire in your basement."

"I like fires," she said with a wistful smile. "Leading admirers astray makes for a nice hobby, but it's got nothing on a really world-class fire. Selling that cow to Mrs. O'Leary has to rank as one the best bargains I've ever gotten."

I winced inwardly. "You're responsible for the great Chicago fire?"

"Among others." She waved a hand airily. "Anything to keep in trouble. Why…"

I didn't get to find out what she would have said next because just then the end result of her summoning whistle arrived. Like a falling star, one of the glowing apples dropped straight for Eris's head. She stabbed it out of the air in the manner of a pitcher fielding a line drive, and the slap as flesh met processor made me wince.

Putting the apple to her mouth, she took an enormous bite. Immediately, a thick green caterpillar nosed out and started questing around with its mandibles. Eris placed the spell crystal from her pocket in front of the small creature's face. Taking the crystal firmly in its jaws, the caterpillar slowly withdrew into the center of the fruit. When it was completely gone, Eris placed her lips over the hole as though she were kissing the apple and replaced the piece she'd bitten out. Then she tossed it lightly into the air, where it proceeded to violate about nine laws of physics by continuing to accelerate after she let go.

"Now we wait," she said, leaning against a crenellation.

I sat down in one of the gaps across from her. "What exactly does this program do?"

"Nothing," said Eris. "That's where you come in."

"What's it
supposed
to do?" I asked, sourly.

"Grab the source code for Atropos's doomsday spell."

I let out an involuntary whistle. That
would
be nice. I needed Puppeteer. With it, I could clear my name with my grandmother. And if Eris had a copy as well, I could leave her to worry about countering it. I had no doubt she'd be able to handle that task better than I.

I realized then that Melchior had been awfully quiet for some time, and looked around to see what he was doing. He was sitting, goblin fashion, in a sheltered spot as far away from Eris as he could get.

I didn't blame him. The Goddess of Discord was not the most settling company I'd ever had. If I could have avoided dealing with her, I would have. Also, he'd had an awful lot of shocks lately. It started with Atropos trying to kill us, included the virus he'd contracted, my new involvement with the familiar underground, the change in our relationship, and now, the discovery that his self-determination was germinated from a seed sown by Eris. If we survived all this, I owed him one hell of a vacation.

But there seemed to be something more to it than that. His face had a thoughtful, worried look that struck me as out of character. And, every so often, he would run his tongue along the edge of his broken fang. I knelt beside him. "Are you thinking thoughts I should be aware of?"

"Maybe," he replied. "There's a detail missing. I don't know what yet, but I've got a premonition it's going to be ugly."

I put my hand on his arm. "Look at it this way; if there is something dark and unexpected creeping up on us, our luck is holding. I'm not sure what I'd do if we got a surprise of the happy variety."

"Wouldn't it be nice to find out," said the goblin, a longing note in his voice.

I squeezed his shoulder, then rose and turned my attention to Eris again. "Do you have any idea why your spell didn't work?" I asked.

"Not really. Every time I ran it through my spell-checker, my system crashed and I had to go back and rejigger the code."

"What happens when you actually try to cast it?"

"I haven't," she said. "If it kills the checker, there's no way it's going to function properly."

"Sure, but you can learn a lot from seeing just how it hangs under field conditions."

"Go teach your grandmother how to code in Basic, boy," said the goddess. "Don't you think I'd have tried that if I could have?"

"I don't see the problem," I said.

"What
do
children learn in school these days?" she asked. "Didn't I tell you how I learned about Atropos's program in the first place?"

"Yes," I replied. "You said something about a disturbance in the balance. And?"

"You really don't understand, do you?" She shook her head sadly. "Think of reality as a wire stretched between the two poles of chaos and order. This wire is tuned to the balance between the pair, like the string of a musical instrument. Any change in that balance acts like someone plucking the string, sending a note vibrating through the length of reality. Anyone with the right sort of hearing can hear the note. Are you with me so far?"

"I think so," I replied. "My grandmother never taught me anything like what you're talking about, but it makes sense. I'm surprised she didn't mention it."

"Having known Lachesis far longer than you've been alive, I am somewhat less than shocked." Her tone was dry. "But that's a bit off subject. When Atropos first tried to cast her Puppeteer spell, it gave the string of reality a gentle, but powerful strum." She made air guitar motions. "The effects of a successful implementation of her scheme would change things in a deep and fundamental way, and the implications are still reverberating through the ether. It set up a sort of low-amplitude standing wave that won't die out until the spell is either countered or carried through to a successful conclusion. Anything I do to affect the outcome will change the tone of the note, so the second I try to cast my spell, whether it works or not, Atropos and the other Fates will instantly be aware of the change."

"Oh shit," said Melchior, jumping to his feet. "That's it."

"What's…" I trailed off before I really got started. I could see it too. "My grandmother already knows about Puppeteer," I whispered. "She's known about it all along."

Eris gave me an odd, almost pitying, look. "Of course she does. She couldn't help but know. The Fates, Tyche, me, we're all tuning forks for the forces involved. When the note is struck, we resonate in sympathy."

"I am so fucked," I said.

"As much as I'd like it if the singular pronoun were the correct one, Boss, I'm afraid it just isn't so," interjected Melchior. "The proper phrasing is 'We are so fucked.'"

I stared blankly around the open deck of Eris's tower. I was in shock. No, I'll be honest. I was beyond shock, in a special little realm reserved for those who have quietly deceived themselves about the basic nature of their existence and are suddenly faced with the truth. Denial is a great place to live, as long as nobody ever opens the windows on reality.

I had no doubt Eris would lie to me in an instant if it served her interests. For that matter, she'd probably lie to me just for fun if she thought it'd make my life a little more discordant. But this was no lie. It was certainly possible Eris could have learned about Puppeteer through some other means, but her explanation made too much sense.

What Atropos wanted to do
would
have profound consequences. The spell was bound to make some sort of existential noise. I'd avoided using magic after my assault on the Fate Core because I was concerned about the Fates detecting me. Why should a spell of Puppeteer's magnitude be any less obtrusive? When I looked things square in the face, I couldn't bring myself to believe my grandmother was completely unaware of Atropos's plans.

Far more disturbing was the sudden conviction that it didn't really matter one way or the other. My grandmother was a manipulator and a controller, the absolute dictator of my family. No, that wasn't nearly broad enough. My grandmother, Lachesis, was the measurer of Destiny. Every thread spun by Clotho passed though her hands to be given its allotted span before going to Atropos for the final trimming. Atropos might be the gleeful administrator of mortality, but it was Lachesis who decided who would live and who would die and on what schedule. She would no more disapprove of a spell that gave her greater authority than a penguin would disapprove of ice.

When Atropos had shown me Puppeteer and commanded me to help her, she hadn't been concerned about the other Fates finding out. She'd been concerned about them finding out too soon. She didn't want to ruin the wonderful surprise she was making.

For months, I'd been figuring that all I needed to do to get out of my personal war with Atropos was to show Puppeteer to my grandmother and prove I hadn't started things. When I hacked the Fate Core, I'd dug the hole even deeper, but I'd still believed all I really needed to do to make things better was show my grandmother the truth. It had never once occurred to me what it would mean if she already knew.

I found myself sitting on the rough timbers of the tower roof without even the vaguest memory of how I got there.

"You're telling me the truth, aren't you?" I whispered up to the goddess.

"Of course," said Eris, with a grin. "I almost never lie. Why bother when the truth is usually so much more devastating? The truly honest individual has very few friends. Like most young people, you have a certain passion for the truth. With age, however, you'll find that the occasional comforting lie or self-deception makes for a
much
more pleasant existence. The bleakness of truth can be very hard to face."

She shook her head, and her skin shifted from gold to black and back again as the light played over her trichromatic features. "Diogenes was a masochist. If he'd ever found his honest man, he'd have been deeply disillusioned. I imagine the first thing that honest man would have said is: 'You've spent your whole life looking for me? What an enormous waste of time. Why didn't you try making things better where you were instead of searching for a semi-mythical place where they're already perfect.' Diogenes might have had a hard time answering that question."

"Maybe," I said, "but at least he had an ideal to strive for." I was wishing right then and there for one of my own. Having one of the pillars knocked out from under your universe really makes you wish for an alternate support structure. As a dedicated cynic, I've always prided myself on building my world on the shifting sands of the actual, the real. At the moment, I was envying the bedrock foundation of belief that provided the fanatic with his unshakable sense of his own virtue.

Eris's breaking-glass laugh crackled forth again. "Priceless," she said. "Idealists are some of my favorite people. They're so committed to achieving perfection of one sort or another they'll turn down opportunities for incremental changes that go in their direction. Take democracy; I can't begin to count the number of times people have refused to vote for the lesser of two evils and ended up with the greater one in their living rooms. It's really quite delightful. I do love idealists. They make my life so much easier."

I decided I wasn't the person to try to defend ideological purity, not with my cynical side screaming that Eris was absolutely right. It isn't easy to put together a rational plan when the one you came in with has been dynamited. My original plan had called for collecting my evidence and running. Instead, I was sitting on top of the tallest tower in the Citadel of Discord without the slightest idea what was going to happen next. And, at least until Eris's spell was finished recompiling, there was nothing else for me to do but ruminate.

On the one hand, it felt wonderful actually to have a moment where I could stop and think. On the other, I had the sense that someone had just hidden the goal posts, and I was running out of time to find them before the Furies ended the game.

"Who else knows about Puppeteer?" I asked at last. "Do the Furies?" That was my biggest worry now, that they might know and be allied with Fate.

"I doubt it," replied Eris. "The effect is still a subtle one, even if it is pervasive, and the sisters of vengeance are not noted for their appreciation of fine distinctions. I once heard Tisiphone say she liked to think of subtlety as a type of large-caliber automatic weapon. Actually, Tisiphone and her sisters aren't alone on that score." She turned away from where I was sitting to look out over the battlements. "I don't know if you've read that dreadful little book by Bulfinch, but his listing of the peccadilloes of the various children of the Titans, while lacking in style, does have a rather painful degree of accuracy. As a group, the denizens of Olympus and Hades are not known for careful thinking."

"What she's saying," said Melchior, as he paced back and forth, "is that most of the deities of ancient Greece couldn't navigate their way out of an unwalled amphitheater with a map, a guidebook, and GPS."

"I think I begin to see why self-determination wasn't in your original specs, little man," said Eris, giving Melchior a penetrating look. "But you've stated the case succinctly enough. If any of my fellow gods had the wit to listen for Atropos's meddling, they might well be able to discover it. However, I doubt any of them would exert themselves on the topic. Even if they did, I wouldn't want to bet any stake I was afraid of losing that they would understand what they'd found."

"So," I said after a moment, "why don't you fit that pattern?"

Eris laughed again. "Oh, I've never been of the same mind-set as the rest of my divine cousins, which is one of the prime reasons I chose to set myself up as a nemesis to the whole idiotic lot. Also, having Atropos and her sisters to play against all these years has kept me sharp. I dislike the three of them with an intensity beyond anything you can probably imagine, but I won't lump them with the others for wit. Your grandmother in particular is a very, very sharp operator. I've never seen her do anything for fewer than three reasons. Even her most-straightforward-seeming statements and actions are carefully crafted to serve more ends than the obvious ones. All in all, a much nastier opponent than Atropos."