WebMage (32 page)

"Well, when you put it that way…" said Mel. "I suppose it does sound pretty stupid."

"What other way is there ter put it?" she asked, rolling her eyes. "The real question is, how does I know yer'll keep yer word once I tell yer what I know?"

"Let her go, Mel."

"What?" His voice was incredulous. "She's as vicious a little thing as I've ever seen. She even threatened to tear my eyes out, and you want me to let her go?"

"She's also one more independent-thinking being who happens to have been enslaved by a branch of my family, a predicament I'm sure you're familiar with. We haven't any more .right to hold her prisoner than I had to order you around."

"I don't see you turning
him
loose," said Mel, pointing at Dairn.

"No. But I might if it can be done safely."

"Oh, all right," said Mel. "You've got that stubborn look." He paused for a moment. "And, much as I hate to admit it, you're probably right."

He opened his fingers. Immediately the pixie took wing and streaked away. She'd gotten about fifty feet before stopping. For a long time she hovered there. Then, flying much slower, she came back to a point about ten feet away.

"A deal's a deal," she said. "There was a pretty nasty fight. Maybe a dozen of Atropos's git against the girl, the goblin, and the troll. The troll was somethin' else. She picked up one of those boys, a big furry guy in a loincloth, name of Hwyl, and used him like a club. That was a sight. The girl took down two or three before they swarmed her under. When that happened, the goblin went nuts. Never seen one of them so het up. She got all four sets of claws into the leader's head, she did. I think she near killed him. That's when my former master there put an arrow into her."

"No!" exclaimed Melchior.

" 'Fraid so," responded the pixie. "It hit her in the face and she dropped off."

Melchior closed his eyes in obvious pain, and a tear ran down his cheek. When he opened them again there was burning rage there, and he started for Dairn. I'd anticipated that though, and I was able to catch him by his scruff.

"Not yet, Mel. We haven't heard the whole story, and he's a bound man. Later, we'll let him have a head start and take him in a fair fight."

"I've never been much for fair fights," said Mel, but some of the murderous tension went out of him. "Tell us the rest," he said.

"There's not much more. With the girl and the goblin down, there weren't no way that troll was going to win. She must have seen that too, because she chucked the big galoot at the others, grabbed up the goblin and dived into the wall."

"Dived into the wall?" I asked.

"Yeah. There was this big red hexagram deal there. The troll jumped into that, and the whole thing vanished."

"That's something," I said. "Ahllan wouldn't have taken Shara if it was completely hopeless."

"Thanks for trying," said Melchior. "But even if Shara was repairable, that gate went to Castle Discord. You can't just change the coordinates on one of those like you do an Up link. They went into the gate all right, but they never came out the other end. We'd have seen them."

I winced. Travel between the worlds was never a sure thing. I'd had more than one relative go missing. Lost in transit didn't make for a poetic epitaph, but neither did operator error, and they'd both applied to people I knew. The pixie suddenly darted in closer.

"That's all I saw," she said. "I got to go now." She turned and started to fly away, then paused and looked back. "I'm sorry."

Melchior and I made a pretty grim pair as we sat beside the ruins of Ahllan's home. The former owner, along with a severely wounded Shara, had gone missing between worlds. Cerice was taken by the Fates. Our only other ally, the Goddess of Discord, was last seen in a losing fight with the Furies. And every last bit of it looked to be my fault. All in all, I was beginning to wish Melchior had just let Dairn split my skull. At least that way, I wouldn't have had to live with the havoc I'd generated in every life that mattered to me.

"Any thoughts on what we should do next?" I asked.

"How about taking an ltp link to nowhere? I find the thought of having the stuff of chaos render me down to component bits to be a soothing one."

"Too quick," I replied. "I feel a need to suffer for my crimes. Besides, that's the way Ahllan and Shara must have gone, and I'd hate to sully—" I stopped then, because the faintest glimmerings of an idea had just occurred to me. "Melchior, what did I just say?"

"Don't you remember?" he asked.

"Humor me," I said.

"All right. You said that Ahllan and Shara were eaten by the chaos between worlds. Does hearing me say it make it any less of a nightmare?"

"That's what I thought I said." I sat up straight. "Powers and Incarnations, I'm an idiot. You know what, Mel? You are a beautiful person."

"Look, if you're going to drift off into insanity, could you at least do it quietly?" He turned and stared out into the darkness.

"Don't you see it?" I asked.

"Why do I suddenly feel like I've wandered into
Waiting for Godot
?" he asked. "Here we sit, two fools on a gray stage waiting for nothing. We've even got the tree."

He didn't see where I was going. It was kind of nice to be one step ahead of somebody for a change. Still, I couldn't leave him hanging.

"I'll make it easy for you," I said. "Ahllan and Shara are missing and presumed dead because they went into a gate that almost certainly dumped them into the Primal Chaos, right?"

"Yep."

"Mel, how did Ahllan survive after Atropos threw her on the junk heap?"

"She needed energy, so she transported herself into the Primal Cha…" His face lit up like Apollo rising in the east.

"If they're still out there, can you—" He cut me off.

"Already on it." He hopped to his feet. "Executing Red Flag." His expression went far off and dreamy for a few seconds. "Red Flag away," he said. "Now we wait."

I don't know if it's possible to express the way I felt then. Waiting to find out whether someone you care about is alive or dead is perhaps the most emotionally wrenching experience a person can have. In its own hellish way, it's worse than the news that someone you love has died. At least with the latter, the worst has happened and you can begin to deal with it. The uncertainty of not knowing leaves you without any landmarks. You slide endlessly up and down the ladder that leads from hope to despair. I was in the middle of a downswing when Melchior let out a whoop.

"I've got a response from Ahllan," said Melchior, his voice crackling with excitement. "It's a message-received confirmation and a time-critical Up address."

The news sent a momentary thrill through me. Ahllan was alive! The happiness was brief, however, and it was followed by a nasty crash. As long as the matter of Ahllan's whereabouts and status were unknown, I'd been able to focus on that. Now, with the issue at least partly resolved, my mind turned to Cerice and Shara. The image of Hwyl carrying Cerice off fixed itself firmly in my inner vision, periodically alternating with a picture of Shara with an arrow sticking out of her face.

I barely noticed as Melchior set up an ltp link. It wasn't until he actually tugged my sleeve that I realized it was ready. That presented me with a couple of problems. First, I couldn't stand up. My bad knee wouldn't take my weight. That was relatively minor. I could always crawl into the ltp field. The second problem was more serious: what to do about Dairn.

I didn't want to leave him there. Atropos might send one of her brood back to check on him at any time, and he knew enough about our movements to make me nervous. Likewise, I didn't want to take him to Ahllan's new hiding place. If he got loose, he'd bring the forces of Fate down upon us. Even if he stayed firmly tied up, Atropos might have some way to track him. That wouldn't have stopped me if I'd thought he could be used as a bargaining chip to get Cerice back. But he was a failure, and Atropos wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice him. Just slitting his throat and leaving him for the crows seemed the most sensible solution, but I couldn't do that either. As much as I hate to admit it, I have a bad case of ethics. Then I hit on the perfect idea. I had Melchior levitate him to the faerie ring and push him in. It wasn't the same as killing him, because he would probably manage to roll out again before he lost his mind, but he was certainly in for a very bad time. With that taken care of, we headed out.

* * * *

Chaos. The raw, wild wine of creation. The mad tumble of it met my eyes from a distance measured in fractions of an inch. For a brief instant, I thought Mel had blown our transfer. That impression was quickly dispelled as I completely failed to dissolve. Then I realized I was viewing the stuff through a crystalline barrier. It induced a strange sort of déjà vu, and when I rolled onto my back, I discovered why. We had arrived in a huge sphere of transparent crystal, perhaps fifty feet across. It was identical in type, if not in scale, to the one in which I'd had my disastrous initial discussion about Puppeteer with Atropos. It was even filled with the same strange, clear fluid.

Suspended seemingly at random in this liquid matrix were various oddments of furniture and electronics. If you were to take the contents of Ahllan's former home, mix them into a bowl of Jell-O, and let it set up, you would have achieved a similar effect. Nearest us, perhaps eight feet away horizontally and four vertically, was an electronics bench, its surface canted about thirty degrees toward us. Ahllan hung in space a few feet above it. A bright purple laptop lay on the bench in front of her. An arrow was driven through the upper half of the clamshell casing and the screen was a splintered wreck. Melchior shot across the intervening space and ran a small hand across Shara's keyboard.

"Is she dead?" he whispered.

"No." said Ahllan. "The arrow missed her motherboard and her DASD memory. But she's in a very bad way. She was in goblin shape when it hit, and she lost a lot of blood. The only way I could save her was by forcing a shift to laptop mode. Unfortunately, I couldn't pull the arrow beforehand without killing her, and it has a metal shaft. Besides the obvious damage to her screen, there was some shorting in the connected components. I've done everything I can to stabilize her, but I'd rather not try to make repairs without her designer on hand."

"And Cerice isn't exactly available," I said, sitting up. The thick warm fluid took much of my weight.

"No," agreed Ahllan, "she's not."

"That'll have to be job one," I said.

"The Fates aren't going to want to let her go," said Melchior.

"I think it can be done," I said. "I have something they want more than they want her—something they'll be willing to trade for."

"I don't think I'm going to like this," said Melchior. "What did you have in mind?"

"My life."

"I was afraid you were going to say that," replied the goblin. "You can't do it."

"Why not?" I asked. "I got her into this mess. In fact, I got you all into this mess. If the only way to make things right is by giving myself up to the Fates, that's what I have to do."

"As your partner," said Melchior, "I'm going to veto this one."

"I'm sorry, Mel. You're the best friend I could have asked for. I love you like a brother, but I think I'm going to have to dissolve the firm."

"That's not going to fix everything," he snapped. "You know that. Even if you get Cerice free and she's able to repair Shara, Atropos still wins. With you gone, and probably Eris as well, Atropos will be able to implement Puppeteer unopposed."

"Atropos hasn't solved her coding problems yet," I replied. "Maybe she never will. Even if she does, she won't go unanswered. Tyche's still out there. You can take Orion to her. Don't discount yourself or Cerice when you discuss opposition, or these two, for that matter." I gestured at Ahllan and Shara.

"Nor will Eris be removed from the scene forever," said Ahllan. "She's a true immortal. The worst they can do is torture and imprisonment, and no chain can hold the Unbinder indefinitely."

"You're not agreeing with him." Mel's voice was incredulous as he turned to Ahllan.

"If you have an alternate solution," she said, "now's the time to propose it."

"That's not fair," he said. "Come on, Ravirn. You've at least got to take another look at Orion before you do anything else."

"What's Orion?" asked Ahllan.

We brought Ahllan up to date. Then she told us her story, confirming what the webpixie had said.

"Which brings us to your arrival here," concluded Ahllan.

"That's something I've been meaning to ask," I said. "Where is here? More to the point, what is it? I was in a similar bubble once, but that's as far as my knowledge extends on the subject."

"It's a sort of looped gate," replied Ahllan. "If you think back to your transportation to Castle Discord, you'll remember that a single-use gate keeps track of its two endpoints though a series of sliding mathematical formulae. Imagine a point outside the mweb, a random location somewhere between the worlds. Now picture a gate that starts and ends at that point. The mathematical value for your start point is identical to the value for your end point, so you end up with a gate that opens into itself."

"OK," I said. "I'm with you so far. But don't you run into a paradox? I mean, when you step out through the gate, don't you bump into yourself coming back in?"

"You would if you tried to do it within the ordered confines of normal space-time. But out here"—she gestured to the phantasmagoric dance outside of the sphere—"what you get is a sort of self-enclosed bubble of reality."

"And the fluid?" I asked.

"Condensed probability," she replied. "The essence of order."

I shook my head. "I'm having a hard time believing this."

"Oh, don't do that," said Ahllan, her tone deathly serious. "You might make the whole thing vanish."

"Now, just a second," I said. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard." I was about to go on when I saw the evil sparkle of humor hiding behind her seriousness. "Are you pulling my leg?"