WebMage (10 page)

"
If
she comes to me, Mel, not when. And that's a big if. You read the e-mail. Cerice is mad already, and no doubt getting madder with every passing hour that I don't respond. Responsibility is not a word that has been associated with my name on a very regular basis."

"You can say that again," Melchior affirmed.

"See. If everyone agrees I'm irresponsible, even my familiar—"

"Especially your familiar." I shot him a nasty look, but it slid off like water off hot Teflon. "OK," said Melchior. "I see your point. But I still think this is cracked. We're talking pure raw magic here, not code. It's very chancy stuff."

"Objection noted, Mel. But by the time I've got full mweb access again it might be too late to explain myself. For that matter, I might not live that long." I started pacing back and forth across the confined space.

"Excuse me for asking, but isn't the Cassandra curse going to cause you some problems in the explanation department?"

I sighed. It was a good point. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet figured out what to do about it. "I expect it will make this almost impossible," I said. "But I've still got to try. Look, this is about more than my relationship with Cerice."

Melchior raised a skeptical eyebrow at me.

"It is," I said, though I wondered if he wasn't right. "She's important to me. Very important, even. But more than that, somebody besides thee and me needs to know what's going on with Atropos."

"Wetware," said Melchior with a sniff. "Can't live with 'em. Can't debug 'em. If that's what you want to believe about your motives, nothing I say is going to change it."

If I'd had a good response I'd have made it. Instead, I said, "Oh, shut up and pass me the athame."

The webgoblin sighed and shook his head, but handed over the slim dagger. With a blade only five inches long and less than a quarter of an inch across, it looked like a letter opener. But no letter opener was ever as sharp as that little knife. Made of magically hardened iron to maximize its affinity for blood, the athame made my father's straight razor look dull.

It was so sharp that I felt only the slightest dragging sensation as I ran it lightly across the palm of my left hand. However, bright blood immediately welled up and soon filled my cupped palm. Before it could overflow, I took a length of hemp rope and slowly and methodically worked my hand along its entire length, staining it rusty red. When I was done, I whistled the short spell that closed athame-inflicted wounds.

I spliced the two ends of the rope together with a marlinespike, making a continuous loop, and placed it in a rough circle on the brown grass. The next step was very scary. It involved playing with the primal chaos again, and I didn't like the idea.

My earliest ancestors, the Titans, formed themselves from the stuff using nothing but their own demiurge, but the Titan blood runs thin in my veins. It's been diluted over the generations. Still, it was the link formed by that descent that I called on to open a tiny hole between the ordered frame of my current Decision Locus and the churning stuff between the worlds.

Like the ocean pouring through a break in the tide wall of reality, pure chaos rushed into the gap. But I had judged things carefully, and the way was only open for a microsecond. An enormous, but tightly focused and finite, burst of raw energy poured into the endless loop of my bloodstained rope. It struck about six inches from the splice and raced around the circle, crumpling the hemp into a line of charred ash behind it. I held my breath as the chaos charge came around to the splice, but it jumped across without hesitating.

In a tiny fraction of a second, it had looped back to its entry point, the beginning of the ash trail. Around it went again, this time consuming the ash and leaving a circle of bright green grass in its wake. On the third and final time around the circle, it caused the grass to perform a full summer's growth. With that, the chaos dissipated, leaving behind a thigh-high circle of emerald grass. I had built me a faerie ring.

"Party time," I said to Melchior. He'd hidden on the other side of the stone pier while I worked, but he stuck his head around the corner and peered at the results.

"Joy," he said after a moment. "Nothing would make me happier than to jump into that wonderful little hole you've created in the order of the universe." Despite his tone, he came to stand beside me.

"I'm glad to hear it, Mel. Because that's just what we're going to do."

"My, but this is a bad idea," he said. "Have I mentioned that?"

"Many times, Mel. More than I would care to count."

"Then I'll only do it the once more, and anything that happens after that is your fault."

"I grow tired of insolence, Melchior." It wasn't that so much as the fact that he was probably right that I found annoying. But I couldn't very well admit it.

"Sorry, my lord and master. But as your familiar, it is my humble duty to advise you about things magical. So… First, this may be an imperfect circle. In which case we could end up anywhere. Second, there may not be an appropriate receiving circle close enough to Cerice. In which case we could end up anywhere. Third, even in ideal conditions, these things can misfire."

"In which case we could end up anywhere. I know, Mel. I know." I shrugged. "But I'm fresh out of time and ideas." I opened the mouth of the bag for him.

"As you wish," he said, bowing his head in surrender.

In all honesty, I wasn't much more enthused by the idea than Melchior. I'm a thoroughly modern sorcerer, a code-warrior, a programmer. I'm not a classical magician. I hate the old ways. They're painful, inefficient, and hideously dangerous. There's a reason so many sorcerers in old stories meet untimely ends. In the great mystical feeding chain, classical sorcerers fall roughly in the category of hors d'oeu-vre. Even using the methods developed by the Fates isn't a guarantee of safety. More than one member of my extended family has been eaten by a glitch when they didn't check their code closely enough. Doing it the old way is just begging to end up on the cosmic lunch tray. Unfortunately, it was the only thing I could think of that might work in the time I had. So I lifted Mel's bag onto my shoulder and stepped into the circle.

Intense, stabbing cold filled my universe. It made the fifteen-degree chill of the snowstorm I'd left feel like an hour in the sauna. Involuntarily, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was elsewhere. I had the briefest impression of orange sun-baked cliffs and a low ring of cacti, like a donut that had been dropped in ajar full of stickpins. I smelled piñon and sage. Then the cold took me again. This time I was in a brown-and-green swamp redolent with the stink of rotting vegetation. The faerie ring was formed by a snake, its own tail between its teeth, swimming a slow circle around a tiny island. The cold came again. Things began to get really weird.

It was like one of those college parties that's died of inertia around 3:00 a.m. The sensible people have gone home. Everyone who's going to get lucky has, and they've left too. The drinkers are passed out in the corners. The remaining partygoers are collapsed in front of the TV while someone who's into hallucinogens and channel-surfing uses the remote to set a new world speed record. A thousand settings flickered across in front of my eyes too quickly for me to take them in. Each transition was punctuated by a brief blast of arctic cold. And it all seemed to be getting faster.

I felt my brain growing numb as I was repeatedly clubbed by sensory input. It became difficult to hold my destination in my mind's eye. That was the danger. It would be terribly easy to give up my sense of self and let the rings carry me where they would. Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that if I let go of myself, I'd never see me again. Powerful magic was involved, and I had no reason to expect that my physical and mental selves would have to arrive at the same place.

I started thinking about taking a break, stepping out into the next world that looked even remotely inviting. But that wasn't a good idea either. Looking inviting and being habitable are not necessarily related. That's when I saw the tiny door in the base of the tree. It was only a flash, then it was gone, but I recognized it. Mentally, I wrenched the process around and went back. It was very like channel-surfing. I kept going up and down the line, slowly narrowing in on the right program.

I stood in a perfect circle of dead grass. On my right was the fountain that lay just in front of the Harvard student union. Behind me was the yard. Directly in front was a grand old oak tree with a tiny door between two roots. The door was dark green and no more than three inches high. I remembered it from a visit I'd made while I was just a few miles away at MIT, back when I'd been on my grandmother's good side and still living in one the primary threads of reality. It was probably around 1:00 a.m., but the area was still heavily populated.

I staggered out of the circle before it carried me away again. Then I dropped to my knees and threw up. Around me, people did what they always do when someone appears magically in their midst. They assumed they had been looking away at the critical moment and ignored me, pretending nothing had happened. Throwing up helped the process along enormously. Pretending you don't see someone becoming violently ill around bar rush is an ingrained survival skill on most college campuses.

When I was done being sick, I slid my athame from an inner pocket and surreptitiously pricked the ball of my thumb. Then I flicked a bit of the blood into the center of the circle, sealing it. Before I came through, it was probably just a proto-ring, not a gate at all. But now it was as much an invitation to disaster as an open manhole cover with a bit of newspaper covering it. My blood would hold it shut for a night and a day, then it would be open for business. I'd have to arrange to destroy it before then.

I put the athame away and dragged myself into a standing position. If I was remembering things properly from my previous visit to campus, there were internet-ready computers and hookups in the union. The architecture was typical seventies Ivy League. Lots of open space and preformed concrete. A twisted loop of stainless steel entitled
Infinity
sat just inside the doors. It must have been art, because I couldn't think of anything else that would look like that, except possibly a locus transfer gone terribly wrong. I paused long enough to get a soda out of a nearby machine and slam it, washing away the taste of vomit, then dropped onto a chair. When I reached into my bag, Mel bit me.

"Ow!"

"Serves you right," said a sullen voice.

"What did I do?" I asked.

"Do you want the whole list, or just the most recent and relevant bits?"

I couldn't stop myself. I chuckled. He sounded so aggrieved, and I couldn't help but think of the image I must be projecting for anyone who cared to watch. Since my arrival, I had thrown up, stabbed myself in the thumb, staggered into the union, and here I was talking to my shoulder bag.

"Why don't you just hit the highlights, Mel."

"Well, most immediately, you just stuck a finger in my eye, and another in my mouth. That'd justify biting you all by itself. But you also carried me through that Powers-damned faerie ring in goblin shape, instead of as a laptop. Which means I had a stomach for the whole trip. I won't be forgiving you for that anytime soon."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know what it was going to be like."

"What do you mean?" asked Mel, his voice deceptively calm.

"I've never actually used a faerie ring before. I know the theory, of course, but it never seemed like a good idea to test it."

"Are you bleeding much?" asked Mel.

I checked. "Yeah. You got me pretty good."

"Well, that's something at least."

"Thanks, Mel. I'd love to continue this conversation, but I need to hook up. Melchior, Laptop. Execute."

The shoulder bag writhed around in my lap. When it stopped moving, I pulled out my laptop and hooked into the local WiFi net. A quick search verified that Cerice was listed as a graduate research assistant in Comp-Sci. Cracking the Payroll Department to find her address took a bit longer, but not much.

Predictably, the doors to the graduate dorms were locked. If I'd dared, I'd have run Open Sesame, but we'd have had to tap into the mweb to do it, and I didn't want my signature showing up in any DecLocus other than my own. I'd have to get in the hard way. Fortunately, I'd been able to pry a building schematic out of the campus computers.

The dorm was three stories tall and shaped like a brick. I went around to where a rusty fire escape climbed the end wall like an iron version of the ivy that was everywhere. When I was sure no one was looking, I took a deep breath and leaped up to catch the ledge of the lowest landing. I could've tried for the ladder, but I figured pulling it down would make enough noise to wake my grandmother, several dimensions and half a world away. Besides, the lower landing was only about fifteen feet off the ground, comfortably within my reach.

As quietly as I could, I headed for the third floor. If I'd read the plans right, Cerice's room was at the corner, and the nearer of her windows was only about eight feet from the top of the fire escape. Climbing cautiously onto the broad ledge that encircled the building at window height, I discovered that my motorcycle boots tended to slip around a bit, making scratching noises that reminded me of just how much I didn't want to fall backwards off a three-story building.

As I slid into place outside Cerice's window, I noticed a ghostlike red dot on the glass. The hand that had been about to knock froze. I slowly and carefully lifted my arms away from my body with my palms open and facing the window. A quick glance downward confirmed my suspicion that there was another red dot, this one considerably brighter, on my chest just above the heart. A laser sight.

"Cerice, it's Ravirn," I whispered, frantically trying to remember what sort of gun she used. The Kevlar in my jacket would stop most bullets, but it wouldn't take much to knock me off that ledge, and Cerice might be using armor-piercing rounds. "Don't shoot."