Spellcrash (29 page)

I opened my sword hand and willed the blade to reverse itself. It pivoted around the crystal circle in the center of my palm, so that I now held it in an underhand grip with the blade pointed toward me. Placing the edge against my belly, I focused my will and made a sweeping cut. I was surprised by how little it hurt.

With any other sword, that would have been the moment where my innards became outards, spilling themselves into my lap and generally making a mess. But Occam was special. It had the power to access my inner chaos in a controlled manner that hadn’t been open to me in the days before Necessity had given it to me. By using Occam like a combination athame-scalpel, I could achieve some very subtle results. In that regard, using it to open my belly probably counted as backsliding.

The thought made me laugh. Bad idea. Exceptionally, mind-bogglingly, divinely bad idea. The slice in the skin of my stomach opened wide and chaos poured out. All of it. All of me. The Raven is a creature of chaos hiding inside a lie of flesh. I’d just told the universe the truth.

The chaos burned as it left me, and I burned with it. Away to nothing.

It was the splinter effect that ultimately saved me. You know when you’ve got a splinter somewhere deep under the skin of your foot, and no matter how hard you try to ignore it, you can’t? Yeah. That. Really. Well, that and some serious effort on Melchior’s part. But I didn’t find out about that until later.

I had dissolved myself into chaos once before, when I fought Hades and lost. Cerice’s love for me had been my anchor that time, a point of connection with the real world that allowed me to gather my scattered self from the winds of chaos and use the Raven’s power to create myself a new body from scratch as my Titan ancestors had done before me.

For obvious reasons, that anchor wasn’t an option this go-round. My bond with Tisiphone might have worked if she’d been in the right pantheoverse, but she wasn’t. No, what drew me back to myself was the splinter effect, and what drew me back into the world was Melchior.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, a side effect of the whole dissolving-into-chaos thing, I think. It dislocates your sense of time and space. The last time I’d done this, I hadn’t had Occam grafted onto my soul. I’d just been a big diffuse cloud of possibility, with no internal reference points.

This time I had a chunk of congealed chaos attached to me in the shape of my indestructible Fury blade.

I can’t really describe how that feels, since I didn’t have nerve endings or feelings in the traditional sense of the word. What I can do is give the analogy of the splinter. There was something external to my core vision of self attached firmly to the cloud that made up my rather diffuse awareness. A hard, sharp, unavoidable something, like a splinter sunk deep under the skin of your foot, too deep for you to see. You can’t be fully certain anything is there until you dig it out, but every time you step on it, you get a little jab of pain.

That was what Occam did for me. Every time the floating wisp of awareness that was all that was left of me started to disperse, it rubbed across my Fury blade and drew what currently constituted my attention inward. So, far more slowly than I might have wished, I contracted inward toward the point where my soul bound me to the reality of the sword. Eventually, I became something very much resembling an individual consciousness once again. At that point I was me in the most important sense though I still didn’t possess enough will to do anything about it. Which is where Melchior and the reassertion of sequence and order comes into the picture.

It started as a sort of mumbling just below the threshold of hearing, a string of too-faint nonsense syllables that made me want to find the source and tell them to
speak the hell up, damn it!
In the Primal Chaos there is no true direction—too many dimensions beyond our regular three—but things can be closer or farther away from you. My pseudoconsciousness found the noise almost as irritating as the splinter. After a time I began to search out the source, drifting this way and that, always edging closer to the noise—seeking to render it into something recognizable.

Closer. And closer still. Until, WHAM! It grabbed me by the soul and yanked.

This is what it said: “Ravirn, I conjure and abjure thee with blood of your blood, with hair from thy head, and with this feather plucked from the tail of thy power’s shape. I summon thee with the name of thy soul and the name of thy power. Raven, appear before me now. I command thee to appear with the principal of sympathy and the magic of thy true name. Ravirn, I conjure and abjure . . .” Etc.

I’d never been summoned and bound before—hadn’t even realized it was possible—but I suppose that I
am
a supernatural creature now, with all that implies. But damn if it didn’t hurt! It felt a bit like I was being skinned in reverse, as my soul was forcibly twisted and compressed back into the lie of a body. To be more specific, the part of me that’s me felt like it was being stuffed back into a me-the-body-shaped sack of skin, then heat-bonded to it.

“Suddabit!” I gasped, as soon as I had control of my brand-new set of lips and tongue.

My brain ran that back through the old word-processing system while my eyes tried to make sense of the mostly green blur that surrounded me. It didn’t sound right, so I tried again.

“Son of a bitch!”

Melchior chuckled. “Considering that the Fates are ultimately responsible for my design specs, and thus Lachesis could be said to be my mother, I have to concur. Oh, and it’s good to see you, too.”

About then, my brain got the hang of processing visual input, and that feeling became mutual as Melchior entered my personal picture of the world around me—it was very good to see him again. To
see
again, period. He stood on the lanai of Raven House, with the big faerie ring behind him and beyond that the jungle and the bay.

In one hand he held a feather and my hairbrush, in the other a tiny crystalline vial filled with a rich red fluid. I stepped forward to catch him in a hug—well, staggered, really, since I wasn’t used to having a body again yet—then screamed when I bounced face-first off an invisible wall made of pure pain. Somehow, I managed to stay upright.

“Suddabit!” I yelped, rubbing at my numbed nose and lips.

“Sorry about that,” said Melchior.

Looking down, I spotted the lines of a hexagram carved deep into the marble of the floor, one that completely enclosed me. I raised an eyebrow, or made a valiant attempt to do so anyway.

“Haemun’s gonna kill you.”

“Actually,” said Melchior, “he did most of the chisel work.”

“Really? How’d you convince him to help you make such a mess of the floor?”

“That’s a long story,” said Melchior.

“I’d love to hear it,” I said, “
and
the one about why you’re doing things this way instead of using a nice sensible piece of code. But both of those would sound better sitting down with a drink in my hand. This is the point where I’d normally suggest we adjourn to the bar, but I can’t help noticing that there’s one tiny little problem with my plan.” I indicated the hexagram that bound me.

Melchior nodded but didn’t move.

“I’m noticing a distinct lack of your letting me out of here,” I said, after a moment.

“Yeah, and I’m really sorry about that. But the first couple of yous I summoned turned out to not actually be you, which has a lot to do with why we carved the binding in stone along about try number three. Likewise, the next couple of yous that showed up after that were also not you. As much as I want to open that hexagram, I need to make sure that this you is the real you first.”

“Don’t I
look
like me?” I glanced down the length of my body and did a quick comparison with how I normally looked, a comparison made easier by my nakedness. Everything seemed to be there and in the right places, which was a relief.

“Yes, and no,” said Melchior rather evasively. “But so did things one-through-nine.”

“Those statements both sound pretty bad, but let’s start with that ‘yes and no.’ I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on that . . .”

“Just as soon as I’m sure you’re you.”

“Something about your tone tells me that this is going to require more than a game of twenty questions that no one but the real Ravirn could answer.”

Mel nodded. “Yeah, and I’m sorry about that, too, but the whole twenty-questions routine is how you number three convinced us to let it out.”

“I really don’t like the sound of that, Mel. Why would the not-me know things only the real me ought to?”

“Again, something we can talk about once your identity is verified. Oh, and by the way, you owe Fenris the contents of a complete butcher shop among other favors for help with yous numbers one through three, five, and nine. If he hadn’t been here then, I wouldn’t be now.”

“The more I hear about this, the less happy I become, Mel. Can we get on with things so I can hear the whole story?”

“All right, and let me say in advance that if you do turn out to be you, I’m really sorry about this next bit.”

Before I could ask, Melchior produced a miniature wax figure of me along with some pins and set them on the low table where he was sitting. The details that followed are tedious though only moderately painful, and made more so by the fact that the Ravirn figurine was followed by one of a little wax Raven, so I’ll skip over the ouchy bits. Sometime later, when I was done yelping, and Mel was done apologizing, he produced a chisel inscribed with long strings of arcane binary.

“It’s about damn time,” I said.

He paused then and looked thoughtful. “You know, before I let you out, I was wondering if now might not be a good time to renegotiate my salary.”

“What!”

Then he winked at me and grinned, and I broke down into semihysterical giggles. It was just that little bit too much.

“Okay, and he passes the sense-of-humor test with flying colors.” A relieved grin spread across Melchior’s features. “I think this is the genuine article.”

“That’s it, then?” Fenris slid out from the shadows under the overhang. “He laughs, and it’s really him?”

“The right kind of laugh, yes,” replied Melchior.

Something really unpleasant jangled at the back of my mind at that—a vague memory of past problems. “Why does my sense of humor need a test?”

Mel looked up from the chisel he’d placed against the outer line of the hexagram and sighed unhappily. “The chaos
gazing
out of the eye
balls
of the other nine versions of you turned out to be nothing more than reflections, if you know what I mean.”

“Gazing? Reflections? Are you saying the gazing ball was somehow inhabiting fake versions of me? I don’t see how—” And then I did. Eyes like smoky mirrors.

“Nemesis.”

“That was my thought,” said Mel.

“And it’s why I offered to do the chisel work.” Haemun followed Fenris out into the sun. He had a robe draped over one arm, and now he bobbed the tray of drinks he also held, making the ice clink together. “I thought you might need one of these.”

“Or six,” I replied.

Nemesis.
The Goddess of Vengeance. Apparently, I hadn’t destroyed her. Little spots of ice prickled here and there on my skin. That thing they say about if you would shoot at the king, be certain you kill him . . . Well, it goes double for goddesses.

“I’m going for nine,” said Melchior. “One for each fake-you we had to dispose of.” Fenris lapped up another snoutful of single malt, then sat back and looked out over the bay.

“Okay, shoot that one by me again. How can Nemesis possibly be running around loose after you used the powers of Necessity to destroy the body she was inhabiting and banish her to Tartarus forever? Wasn’t the whole point of the exercise to make sure she could never threaten Necessity ever again? Her survival and return makes no sense.”

“Actually, I’m afraid that it does.” Now that I’d had some time to get over the initial shock of the idea, I was starting to think again—bad thoughts. “After Necessity cast her out the first time, Nemesis became a bodiless soul but retained much of her former power.”

“Which ranks her up there near the combined strength of all three Furies,” Melchior said, glumly.

“Speaking of which,” I said, “later you’ll have to tell me more about Eris knocking Cerice on her ass.”

I’d been gone from the corporeal world for something on the order of thirty-five hours, and a lot had happened. Things like Discord’s putting Cerice down for the count, then apparently vanishing from the face of the pantheoverse. We needed to move against Nemesis as soon as possible, but if we wanted to survive the experience, we needed to move smart. That meant gathering information and formulating plans.

“Can we get back to Nemesis?” Haemun sounded fixated, and who could blame him after his experiences with the goddess? “Why isn’t she in Tartarus where she belongs?” Nemesis had really messed with his head last time around.

“Actually, she is.” I held up a hand to forestall argument. “Not physically, perhaps, but magically, which is all that counts. When Shara chose to take Persephone’s place in Hades, she didn’t do it literally. She did it through the wonders of modern spellware by occupying the file space that bound Persephone to Hades. Each year for three months, Shara’s soul is trapped within the part of Necessity’s system that governs the placement of the goddess Persephone.”

“Now Nemesis is doing much the same thing, occupying the file space of her own imprisonment in Tartarus.” I took another sip of my drink—a lethal-grade margarita. “Which just happens to lie right in the heart of Necessity’s operating system. It’s as if the goddess Necessity has caught the ultimate computer virus in the shape of her own daughter, Nemesis.” Melchior’s eyes went suddenly wide. “Oh shit. Do you think that Nemesis lifted the file-space trick from us and Shara? That we’re responsible for this development?”

“One way or another.” I tilted my hand back and forth. “Nemesis is at heart a sort of distorted magnifying mirror. She reflects the talents and thinking of whomever she wants to destroy, then adds her own power to the mix, creating a sort of amplified echo of the individual. When she assumed Dairn’s body, she also took on his hatred of me, then she used more powerful versions of my own hacking-and-cracking skills to try to kill me.”