Mythos (28 page)

Fire filled my chest, pumped in through the gaping wound in my back. Jormungand’s venom found and burned its way into my heart, going from there into my arteries and thence to every corner of my body. I burned from within.

For a few instants that seemed to last a lifetime, I knew that I had died, and I waited to see whether the Valkyries would come to claim me or if I would be sent home to Hades and eternal torment. The fire filled me utterly.

Then I felt . . . better!

Much, much better. Fantastic, even godlike. For just a moment longer I believed in my own death, that I had found the door to Elysium. Then I realized that these were familiar feelings, if far more intense than I was used to. I felt as I did when submerged in the Primal Chaos, only much more so.

In that instant two very important things occurred to me.

One, that the poison of the Midgard Serpent was akin to the stuff in his brother’s gut. Chaos. In this case, chaos distilled to its purest expression. Jormungand had just injected me with about 7,000ccs of refined magic. It might be the local brew instead of my home brand, but I still felt
great
!

Two, I had just dropped my best friend for no good reason. Which meant I needed to do something
besides
feel great, and damn quick, too. But caring was hard. There’s something about being overcome by ecstasy that really takes away from your sense of urgency.

Still, I had all this free-floating power, and maybe I could just use a bit of it to . . . I reached inward, dipping into the torrent of concentrated chaos flowing through my heart and feeding it to the Raven within. Using the tiniest fraction of that power, I pulled myself off the fang embedded in my back and slid free of the serpent’s mouth. Wings furled, I started the long plummet toward the sea below.

I had barely begun to fall when I felt the gaping wound in my back heal itself, felt all of my wounds seal themselves one by one. Though Jormungand’s venom no longer pumped into me, its effects continued to build as it saturated every fiber of my being. I could feel myself changing at the most basic level as Norse fire and frost married itself to the Greek
Χαος
I had inherited from the Titans, the two streams of chaos meeting and becoming one within me.

As I fell, I reached outward with senses enhanced by the floodtide of power rising in my soul. A part of me noted and felt relieved by the spectacle of the Wild Hunt circling back toward Bifrost and the road to Asgard, but most of my attention I reserved for the waters beneath me. I saw many things, both above and below the surface.

The largest was the shadow of the Raven, my shadow—bigger than I had ever seen it, with a wingspan that stretched a hundred feet in either direction—a shadow as dark as a slice of the primordial night that lurks in the deeps of the Earth. With a nudge of my will, I aimed my fall straight toward the shadow’s heart.

Infinitely more important and precious, however, was my view of Melchior. The tiny goblin tumbled amidst the surging waters that accompanied the writhing of the great serpent. He had already descended far beneath the waves and continued to sink.

The form of the Raven went from help to hindrance as I passed through the interface between the world above and the one below. Drawing upon the power of the venom running in my veins, I discarded wings and feathers as easily as I might have slid off my jacket at another time, transforming myself into a huge otter. The usual shock of agony went through me as I shifted shape, but this time the pain brought a twisted joy, filtered as it was through the chaos-fueled euphoria that still continued to build within me.

I dived deep, instinctively tucking my front paws tight against my chest and driving myself downward with the broad flippers of my hind feet while I steered with my tail. In seconds, I had overtaken Melchior. Catching his right hand in my paw, I drew him upward. He didn’t fight. In fact, he barely moved, seeming half-drowned despite the fact that breathing was a purely optional activity for him. I was so focused on Melchior that I’d almost reached the surface before I remembered the Midgard Serpent and thought to worry about what might happen next.

It was a purely intellectual exercise, this worrying—all forebrain, no emotional investment. My emotions remained in fuzzy-bunny-utopia because of all the magical happy juice in my bloodstream. That was probably good. It kept me from freaking out when I found myself surfacing in a huge circle of water as calm and flat as a bathtub waiting for a bather.

The towering walls that surrounded it blocked all the turbulence of the greater sea, living walls the brilliant yellow of a candle’s flame—the scaled belly of the Midgard Serpent. I was encircled, wrapped around and around and around again by the coils of Jormungand. Centered over this shielded pool like a low thundercloud hung his huge head, those burning red eyes fixed firmly on me and Melchior. His mouth was ajar, exposing a long, forked tongue, one strand of which he’d wrapped around Tisiphone like a living rope.

Either because of my chaos overcharge or because of some special otter sense as yet unknown to science, I could feel that the serpentine walls completely enclosed the column of water in which I swam. From the bottom of the seabed to the clean, clear air thirty feet up, Jormungand surrounded me. There would be no easy escape.

“Panic!” my forebrain screamed at my hindbrain.

“Chill,” replied the hindbrain. “It’s all good. You know, this chaos is
great
stuff. We should have some more. Maybe we could get the snake to bite us again.”

Actually, the hindbrain wasn’t anything like that coherent. It just sat there churning out the biochemical markers for bliss. Chaos and Discord, but I hate feeling drunk.

While my brain argued itself into vapor lock, my otter’s body went its own merry way. Without exercising the slightest bit of volition, I found myself rolling onto my back and balancing Melchior on my chest like a mother sea otter with her cub. Holding him there with one paw, I patted his back with the other. After a few seconds he blinked and coughed up a little water. Then he looked me in the eyes.

“Ravirn?” he asked, uncertainty writ large in both tone and expression.

“Yep, yep, yep,” I said in something halfway between speech and chittering—with my brain devoting so much energy to arguing with itself, my body continued on its own happy otter way.

Melchior shook his head bemusedly.

Before either of us could say more, a deep, urbane voice sounded from above, “What exactly
are
you, little otter who was a raven?”

“That’s
Ravirn
, snake-dude!” I slapped myself with one furry paw. Hard.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m a little on the altered side of the chemical balance at the moment. When you bit me, you sorta overflowed my chaos buffers.”

“I was kind of wondering about that,” said Jormungand, tilting his huge head from side to side as though he were trying to get a better look at me. “Normally when I bite something, it dies. Even the gods are supposed to die when my poison fills their veins. You not only didn’t die; you came out better off than you started.”

“Totally,” I said, with an otter grin. “But I’m a special case, maybe
the
special case, though I wouldn’t bet against the venom’s having the same effect on Loki.”

“Why is that?” asked Jormungand, leaning even closer.

I couldn’t help but notice Tisiphone glaring at me from amidst the loops of his tongue. Her mouth was held firmly shut, or she probably would have been swearing. I winked at her.

“Well,” I said, “strictly speaking, I don’t have veins for your poison to fill.”

“I don’t understand.”

I pinched the back of my left paw between the claws of my right. “This flesh is a sort of mask I wear over the real me; at least that’s what Eris says. When I fought Hades, I died, or my body did anyway, eaten by the chaos that forms my soul. My body is a lie I tell the universe, a physical manifestation of my will. Of course, I
can
die because it’s a lie I tell me, too, but that’s another story.”

“Hades? Eris?” Jormungand shook his head. “The more you speak, the less you say.”

“Sorry. The chaos from your bite seems to have given me a bad case of the babbles. Look, I have a proposal to make. You may have noticed that we arrived pursued by a giant osprey—”

“Heimdall,” said Jormungand, his voice flat and angry.

“Yeah, him. Not terribly far behind was the Wild Hunt and Odin. They seem to have given up for now, but they might change their minds, and I’d really rather not be here if that happens. Would you be willing to carry on this conversation somewhere else? Or at least on the way to somewhere else?”

“Perhaps, where did you have in mind?”

“I thought we might head for Iceland. I need to talk to your father about a deal he wanted to make.”

He moved his head a little farther back. “I can see I have been too long out of the loop. Yes, I will take you to Iceland, and we may talk on the way.”

“Boss!” spluttered Melchior. “What about Ahllan?”

I blinked.
How could I have forgotten her? Oh, right. Drunk on chaos. Damn.

“Where are we now?” I asked. “My little blue buddy here has just reminded me that we need to make a stop on the way. On the north shore of Prince Edward Island. I’ve a sick friend I need to visit. Oh, and I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.”

“I suppose,” said Jormungand, sounding quite bemused, “though it’s not anything like on the way, and I’m not sure you’re really in any position to insist. We’re just off the coast of Denmark. I’d argue, but I suspect it would only delay the delivery of the answers I want. Is there anything else?”

“Not that I can—” A rather loud growl from Tisiphone’s direction interrupted me. “Oops, yes, could you be so kind as to let go of my girlfriend?”

“Sure, why not?” Jormungand sighed. “I can always eat you all later if I change my mind. And letting go of her will make it ever so much easier to carry on a conversation without drooling.”

He spat Tisiphone out, and she dropped toward the waves, pulling up only a few feet above me.

“Later, you and I are going to need to have a long talk about priorities,” she said, and the snarl in her voice and the blaze in her eyes were enough to give me a little shiver even through the pink cloud that still cushioned me from the world.

“Uh, yeah. I guess we will.”

“Bet on it,” growled Tisiphone. Then she winked, her anger seeming to evaporate in an instant.

I don’t think that I will ever understand her.

“If you two are ready?” asked Jormungand, and I just about jumped out of my borrowed otter skin.

Without making any noise and with remarkable speed, Jormungand had uncoiled from around us and dropped his head down so that his mouth was mere inches behind me.

“Sure, sure, sure,” I chittered, half in otterish.

Before I could do anything more, Jormungand vanished under the gently rolling waves without so much as a splash. A moment after that, he slid his head underneath us and resurfaced. Our initial ascent was like riding a very fast elevator with no walls. Within seconds I, still lying on my back with Melchior on my belly, found myself several stories in the air.

“Everybody comfortable?” asked the serpent.

Tisiphone landed next to me and sat down cross-legged. “We are now,” she called out.

“Then away we go.”

Jormungand shot forward, accelerating from zero to something way past sixty in a matter of seconds. Despite our speed, there was no wind, and the sheer size of the platform provided by the top of his skull made any worries about falling off seem ludicrous. Or perhaps I was just still too chaos-drunk to care.

Melchior hopped off my chest and sat down on the opposite side from Tisiphone. I rolled over onto my belly and would have settled my head on my paws if I hadn’t felt a sudden intense tickling sensation under my rib cage.

“Laginn,” I said. “I almost forgot about him. I’d better let him out.”

I knew the shape-shift would come much harder this time. I still had extra power coming out of my ears, and I was still in my happy place, but I actually had time to think about it in advance, and that makes a huge difference.

Fundamentally what I do when I change my shape is create a magical map of where every atom in my body is now and a second map of where it needs to be in the shape I want to assume. Then I plot a route from one to the other and drop it into a set of magical instructions, a spell if you prefer. It’s all done on the fly since I’m a hacker and that’s the way I work. And it has to happen very fast so that the universe doesn’t catch on somewhere in the middle and interrupt the process.

Such an interruption would leave me as a rapidly expanding cloud of magically charged atoms. Bad for me, and quite probably bad for the world around me. If the atoms hit anything sufficiently magically reactive, that is. It’s not quite the recipe for an atomic bomb, just the magical equivalent. Once I’ve got a spell hack ready to go—in this case an extra-kludgy one since I had to work within the skin-changer framework of the local MythOS and I just didn’t know it very well yet—it’s just a matter of triggering things and hoping I don’t go “boom.”

I mentally flipped the switch. Then I screamed. Gods and monsters, but the process is painful. You wouldn’t expect it to be, since it’s too fast on both ends for the nerves to send signals to the brain, and during the middle part I have neither nerves nor a brain for them to complain to. But somehow my soul remembers being torn apart and put back together again, and it doesn’t like it.

Before I’d even finished screaming, Laginn shot out of the neck of my jacket as though he were rocket-propelled. He landed on all fives and took off at a dead scurry. He was moving so fast he almost shot off into space when he ran out of serpent, skidding around only at the last second in a half turn that left him hanging from the ridge over Jormungand’s right eye.