WebMage (29 page)

"What?" I asked, sitting up. I needed something to take my mind off the ticking clock. How long was that damned recompile going to take? "You've got to be kidding. Are we talking about the same two Fates here? Lachesis may yank on the threads of destiny, but it's Atropos who cuts them short."

"That's actually part of it," said Eris. "Atropos is a very straight thinker. If she doesn't like you or what you're doing, her first impulse is to kill you outright. Only if she's blocked does she resort to anything else, and even then she'll just do her best to make you miserable."

"Isn't that enough?" I asked. "She's doing a damn fine job in my case. I don't see how anyone else could make my life any worse."

"You lack imagination, boy. I could make your life infinitely more painful if I wanted to." She smiled, almost wistfully. "But that wasn't my point. Where Atropos goes for the direct route, Lachesis is more subtle. If she were out to get you, you'd never even know it. She doesn't make people's lives into living hells, she arranges things so that they do it to themselves. Someone trying to kill you is a problem that's amenable to direct solutions. Someone who puts you in the position of wanting to kill yourself has created a situation that's far harder to deal with. I'll take the straight thinker as an enemy over the twisty one every time."

I wanted to argue on my grandmother's behalf, but found I couldn't. When I was driving cross-country with a crashed Melchior in the seat beside me, I'd begun a process of introspection. In the past few minutes I had taken another long walk down the path I'd started then. I wasn't entirely sure where the journey would lead, but it was changing the way I looked at things in a deep and fundamental way. I was coming to believe that my grandmother didn't
deserve
my allegiance. It was a very painful realization, and one I would rather have done without, but change is a necessary corollary of life. Either you're going somewhere or you're dead.

Perhaps the most terrifying thing I'd discovered in the hour or so since awakening in chains was that I liked Eris. Growing up as a scion of the middle house of Fate, I'd been taught that Eris, and Tyche with her, were the epitome of chaos and evil. More than once, my mother had warned me that if I didn't quit behaving in such a disobedient and willful manner, the Goddess of Discord would carry me away to be a slave in her castle.

Now, here I was, face-to-face with the great bugaboo of my childhood, and she was nothing like I'd expected.

Certainly she was frightening, but in many ways she was less scary than the matriarchs of my own family or the Furies. She possessed something the other divine figures lacked: a genuine sense of humor. It was a dark and brutal humor, but then the multiverse is a dark and brutal place. If you couldn't joke about the macabre and the bleak, you were likely to be mighty short on laughs.

Just then there came a descending whistle like incoming mortar fire. I hunched up, but there was no explosion. Instead, it ended with a sound like a soggy Ping-Pong paddle smacking a leather couch. Before I could move, I felt a sharp jab in the ribs. Eris had poked me with an amber crystal about five inches long. It was shaped like a four-sided anorexic pyramid, with a base perhaps an inch across and a tip like a blowdart. Binary code ran through it in sharp angular lines of gold.

"I'm calling it Orion," she said, handing me the spell.

"The Hunter," I replied dryly. "How original."

I held it up against the star-speckled blackness that encapsulated Castle Discord like a snow globe. For one brief moment I found myself feeling that neither side was worth fighting for, and I contemplated throwing the spell into that darkling sea and giving up on the whole thing. But that wasn't an option. Regardless of all the other issues, I was committed to opposing Atropos and Puppeteer, even to the death. More than that, though, I was committed to my friends, Melchior and Cerice, Shara and Ahllan, and that meant I had to keep moving forward.

"So, 'Once more unto the breach' dear friends,'" I whispered to myself. Then I stood up. "My lady Discord, it seems we are to be allies of a sort. That being the case, what should I call you? Eris seems too informal. And referring to you as Goddess of Discord every time I speak goes too far in the other direction."

She laughed her dissonant laugh. It was beginning to grow on me, sending a pleasant chill running down my spine. There was something appealing about it, something that went straight to the libido. It made you want to tell her jokes and… Realizing where my mind was wandering, I shook my head to clear it. She was doing it again.

"What a funny child you are," she said when she stopped laughing. "Formality is oil for the machine of social order. It smooths the way and puts people in their place. That's why your charming grandmother and her splendid sisters insist on all that bowing and courtly language. I've no use for any of it. You may call me whatever you wish. I've been known to answer to many things, most of them unprintable, and taken delight at every hurled epithet. To this day Athena still calls me 'that bitch.'" She smiled in fond remembrance. "But, if the thought of addressing me as 'hey you,' or 'demonspawn,' distresses you, call me Eris, or even simply Discord."

"I think I'll go with Discord," I replied, after a moment's thought.

She licked her lips. "Is Eris a touch too
intimate
?" she breathed.

It was like she'd read my mind. I reddened, and my desire meter pegged deep into the danger zone. I took a deep breath and let it out. Another. "Look, Discord, if you really want me to help with Orion, you're going to have to quit doing that."

"You'd better listen," interjected Mel, from somewhere near my knees. "The boy has focus issues. Ask anybody. He has enough trouble with walking and chewing gum, much less debugging and fantasizing. It's too much to ask."

"Oh, all right," she said. "I'll turn it down." She smiled and a twinkle appeared in her eye. "But I won't promise to keep it that way."

She let out a reverse wolf whistle. The waves of sex appeal that had been rolling off of her and slowly eroding my ability to think vanished like they'd never been. She was still stone gorgeous, but now she possessed the same statuelike quality of distance as the Fates or Furies.

"Thank you," I said, with as much sincerity as I'd ever mustered. "Now, if you can give me someplace quiet to work, I'll see what I can do."

She nodded. "Done."

That was her only move, and I started to ask where we should go. Then I realized that the air was no longer cold and flavored by the outdoors. Instead, it was warm and slightly stale. There'd been no sensation of movement and, even more amazing, no feeling of disorientation, but now we stood in the game room I'd visited earlier. It was like the trick she'd pulled when I first woke up from my little nap, not appearing so much as suddenly having been there all along.

"How do you do that?" asked Melchior. His tone clearly expressed the incredulity I felt.

"Do what?" The goddess grinned.

"Move us around like that? It's not an Up link or any other kind of transport I've ever used."

"Do you want to know the secret?" she asked.

"That's why I asked," said Melchior.

"I didn't move us at all."

"Then what did you do?" I asked.

"Nothing at all," she said.

"That's ridiculous," said Melchior. "We were standing on a windy tower top. Now we're in an interior room. One with really ugly art." He pointed at an oil-on-velvet painting of dogs playing poker.

At just that moment one of the dogs grinned and winked at me, and I realized that it was a coyote rather than the collie I had taken it for at first. I gave a start. In response, the coyote showed me its hand. Five aces. Hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds, and what looked like paw prints. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again the painting had returned to normal.

Melchior continued, "Something had to change for us to get here."

"No," said Eris. "It didn't."

"Then," I interjected, "why do we see things differently?"

"I was wondering how long it would take you to ask the right question," said Eris. "It's all a matter of perspective. Castle Discord doesn't really exist in the classical sense of the word. When I decided I needed a home other than Olympus, I wanted something that would suit my mood. And since my mood is notorious for being an ever-changing target, I needed something as malleable as thought itself."

"If we're going to get all existential," said Mel, "we'd better get comfortable first." He hopped up onto the card table and sat down.

I took a chair and did the same.

"Castle Discord is a state of mind," said Eris, "an island of probability floating in the ocean of chaos that separates the worlds. It's more like a suit of clothing for my mind than a building. It assumes whatever form I think it should. When I decided we were in the game room, the castle rearranged its internal reality to reflect that desire."

"But when we were wandering around earlier it seemed relatively rational in structure," I said. "Rooms seemed to be more or less the same size on the inside as the outside. Stairs led neatly from one floor to another. We were able to follow cables from point A to point B without passing through point £."

"You must possess an orderly mind," she said. "When I'm not exerting my direct will on any part of the castle, it assumes the shape of whoever is occupying that portion of it. Didn't you encounter any oddness at all?"

"It
was
day on the inside and night on the outside," I replied.

"Does he miss a lot of appointments?" Eris asked Melchior.

"Do satyrs chase nymphs?" replied Melchior. "Does your hard drive always crash the day before you do a major backup? Is Atropos a control freak?"

"Yes, Mel," I said. "I think we get the point. I've been known to lose track of the time on occasion. So I get distracted and go off task every once in a while. Is that a hanging offense?"

"It is for your grandmother," he replied, "and for Atropos."

"Speaking of tasks," interposed Eris.

"Right," I said. "Mel, if you'd be so kind as to switch to laptop form, I should take a look at this."

"As you wish," he replied.

He winked at me and melted. Like a plastic action figure on a griddle, the process started with his feet. Soon there was nothing left but a flat blue lump, which then reshaped itself into a streamlined clamshell. Flipping the lid, I opened his memory bay. A small but surprisingly deep drawer, it was lined with shiny black plastic. I set Orion in place and watched as the bay flowed around the crystal, conforming to its shape.

When I closed the bay, a golden pyramid icon appeared on the screen. Clicking on it made the structure unfold like a puzzle box disassembling itself. The monitor filled with an ever-changing, three-dimensional structure of angular lines.

Melchior. Code Warrior. Please
, I typed.

A small animated goblin appeared on my screen.

Ready to RAM
, he replied.

Pulling out my athame, I plugged in and joined Mel, diving into the code. It was bliss. There is nothing in all the infinity of possible worlds that I enjoy more than hacking and cracking. Coding from scratch is okay, but nowhere near as much fun as pulling apart somebody else's program and finding the holes.

Back before I ended up at the U of M, I'd flunked out of Carnegie Mellon. CMU is a weird sort of place, split almost evenly between highly talented engineering types and highly talented performing artists without much of anything in the middle. My roommate there was a pretty cool guy, a concert pianist. He practiced five or six hours every day, often going over the same piece a hundred times. Once, I'd asked him if he didn't get bored.

"This is what I was born for," he'd replied. "When I'm playing in the zone, I become the piece. Nothing else matters. So, I guess the answer is yes and no. Yes, because it takes a lot of work to get to the place where I am the music, and it can be tedious. And no, because when I do get there, I know every second of effort on the way was worth it."

That's how I feel coding. Sometimes the programming's a slog, which is how I got booted out of CMU, but when I hit that perfect hacking pace, I am the code, and it's all the reason for living I could ever need. I hadn't been there for months because I hadn't dared submerge myself so fully since before Atropos tried to recruit me. I'd always had to keep one eye open for someone sneaking up on me in the real world. But in the center of Castle Discord, with the goddess herself watching over me, I was as safe from attack as I was ever likely to be again. And, unlike the past couple of times I'd jacked in, I wasn't going to be dealing with an actively hostile environment. No enemy security. No viruses trying to eat me. And no major risks of death.

Eris is the queen of hacking, and Orion was magnificent. I'd been terrified and impressed by the virus she let loose in the Fate Core. I was actively awed by Orion. It was a big evil bastard of a spell with all sorts of baroque subroutines and logic traps, and it was beautiful. I wanted it. With every twisty hacker fiber of my being I wanted to crack that spell and own it. I kept digging in deeper and deeper, trying to find some flaw. It became an obsession. There had to be a hole I could crawl into, some error that would let me make the spell mine. I slid my consciousness along every line of binary and pried into all the dark corners. I pulled at anything that looked loose, pushed every lever, and flipped all the switches. Finally, I found it. Down in the depths of the job batch that would allow the spell to search multiple worlds, I found a fissure in the logic. I was just inserting the electronic equivalent of a crowbar when I felt a sudden sharp pain.

My body was demanding my attention. I tried to ignore it, but the pain came again. This time I heard an accompanying sound, a sort of harsh thwack. Grudgingly, I let my awareness slide back into my body. I arrived just in time to fully experience the back of Eris's hand. It hurt. I shook my head and tried to focus. There was blood in my mouth and my cheeks felt as though someone had been slapping the daylights out me.