WebMage (11 page)

When Cerice didn't pop me immediately, I decided it was probably all right to breathe. A couple seconds went by and the window swung inward. At no time did the red dot move from its place over my heart.

"Come," she said. I slowly stepped through the opening and onto a desk, keeping my hands firmly in the air. "What in Hades's name do you think you're doing?"

"Would you believe me if I told you I wanted to restage the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet
!"

"It's you all right." The red dot winked out, but she didn't put the pistol down. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I also noticed what she was wearing. A frown and nothing more.

"I'm here because I need to talk to you." Certain portions of my anatomy were making other suggestions. I ignored them as best I could.

"Oh," she replied. "Really? I'm not sure we have anything to talk about." Her voice had icicles in it. You could almost hear the little syllables freezing as they left her lips, then dropping to shatter on the floor.

"Please, Cerice. There are things I need to tell you." I paused and swallowed. "But first, I have a favor to ask."

"A favor?" The ice was gone, replaced by a blowtorch. "You send me a note after Garbage Faerie. A note in which you tell me you want to spend more time with me and that you want this to be more than a fling. Then nothing, for weeks. Now you show up here and try to break into my room, and you want a favor?"

"Cerice, I owe you several apologies, a couple of explanations, and my life among other things. If I could do this without the favor, I would, but I just don't think I can."

"So what is it?" she snarled.

"Would you please, please, put some clothes on. You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known, and I could stare at you for hours. But right at the moment I have things I want to tell you, and every time I look at you my brain freezes up, and I start drooling."

"I…" She paused. "I should probably just shoot you and get it over with." She set the gun down. "But I won't. All right. Turn around."

Part of me wanted to protest that since she was already naked, there wasn't much point in my looking away while she got dressed, but the admittedly small part of my brain devoted to self-preservation overrode my mouth. So I spent what felt like hours staring at the iron plate welded over what had once been a fireplace.

"All right," said Cerice after a while. "Against my better judgment I'm going to give you a chance to state your case before I throw you out." When I turned back, she was wearing a heavy skirt of red wool and a yellow-gold T-shirt. She looked fabulous.

"First," I said. "I'm very, very sorry I haven't gotten in touch. It's inexcusable."

"We agree on that at least."

"But I had no choice."

"No choice? No choice?" Her voice was rising again. "You had no choice? What kind of crap is this?"

"I've been cut off from the mweb. Lachesis revoked my access. I can't send anything between DecLoci. There was literally no way for me to get a message to you."

"Can you honestly stand here and expect me to believe that? Do you think I'm an idiot, Ravirn? If you can't use the mweb, how the hell did you get here?"

"I built a faerie ring."

"You—" She stopped, her mouth open. "That's insane. Faerie rings are chaos magic. Do you know how dangerous that is?" She shook her head abruptly. "No. I don't believe you. Even you aren't
that
crazy."

"I can take you to the terminus on this end," I said quickly. "It let me out by the student union. I sealed it to keep it from swallowing up innocent bystanders. Would that be proof enough?" She nodded. "Show me."

* * * *

"All right," she said after examining the ring. A wry smile touched her lips. "I believe you're a maniac, and about the mweb access. Next question. Why did she cut you off?"

So I told her about the nocturnal visit I'd received from my grandmother and about Saint Turing's. As we talked we walked, heading slowly across the campus. It seemed to be earlier in the season here, more late fall than early winter. The dead leaves crackled underfoot. We'd just reached the steps of the main library when I finished my account.

"But that's less than half the story," I said, turning onto the stairs. "And I owe you the whole thing."

I stopped. From here on out, everything I said was going to be filtered through Atropos's curse. I wanted to scream. Instead, I turned to the concrete wall that ran beside the stairs and smacked my forehead against it. Cerice looked at me curiously, but didn't say a word. Instead, she continued upward and took a seat on the top step. I sat down a few feet away. It was a good place to talk, well above the general level of the campus, where no one could sneak up on us. The silence stretched out, and the expression on Cerice's face began to darken.

"Well?" she said after several minutes.

"I'm sorry. I'm not sure how to go about this." I pressed the palm of my left hand against my forehead and squeezed.

"Begin at the beginning," said Cerice, as though she were speaking to a child. "Pass through the middle, and wrap up with the end."

"That's not the problem," I replied.

"What is the problem?"

"You aren't going to believe a word I say."

"You sound awfully certain," she said, some of the anger returning to her tone. "Is that because you don't trust me to judge what you say honestly? Or because you aren't planning on being honest?"

"Actually, it's neither." There was no good way to go about this. I was going to tell her everything, she wasn't going to believe me, and our budding relationship would come apart like a hard drive when the head touches the disk. "Look," I said finally. "For reasons I can't explain beforehand, I know you're going to find this unbelievable. The only thing I can do is ask you to listen to the whole thing before you make any judgments. Will you do that for me?"

"I suppose," she said, leaning back on her hands. "Though I can't think of a good reason why."

"Thank you. I wasn't hacking Atropos.web just for the challenge on the night I crashed the mweb." My lips tingled, but only slightly, and Cerice nodded as though she'd been expecting that. "I was looking for a memory crystal. Atropos is trying to shift the balance between Fate and free will." The numbness increased dramatically, and I heard my voice go uncertain and shifty.
Damn, damn, and double damn
, I thought.

"That's more or less her job description," said Cerice. I was losing her.

"I told you that you wouldn't believe me. Please, just listen for a while."

"All right." She agreed, but her expression hardened.

"This is a little more drastic than usual. She wants to eliminate chance and choice completely. What's more, I think she can do it if her spell works." I hopped to my feet and began to pace. The tension was simply too great for me to hold still.

I told her everything that had happened since Atropos had approached me about Puppeteer. Every word came out sounding like the desperate slitherings of a pathological liar, and my mouth went so numb I lost all track of my tongue. By the end I'd bitten it pretty badly at least twice. I couldn't feel it, but I could taste the blood in the back of my throat. I studied Cerice's face, trying to gauge her reaction. Her brow was wrinkled in an intense frown of concentration. It wasn't the expression I wanted, but it was better than I'd expected.

"You don't believe me," I said. A statement rather than a question.

"No," she replied, and it felt as though someone had hit me in the stomach. "But I know you're telling the truth. It's an amazing feeling. The emotional half of my brain is sure you're the biggest liar since Hades told Persephone the pomegranates were delicious and completely harmless. But at the same time, the thinking half knows you're telling the truth."

"What?" She was supposed to be calling me nasty names and walking out of my life. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to happen, but I'd been bracing for it so hard that her actual response left me severely off-balance. I stopped pacing to face her. "How do you know?"

"It's not my secret to share," she said.

She reached up and caught my right hand. "Poor payback for your courage in telling me an unbelievable truth, but the best I can offer at the moment. Thanks for trusting me."

"You're welcome."

I looked down at the place where our hands were joined and tried to find the right words. What can you say when "I like you," isn't half-strong enough, but you haven't yet gotten to "I love you"? Was it even fair to be talking about such things when I didn't know whether I'd be alive to follow through on them? No words came.

"What are you thinking?" she asked after a time.

"That I don't know how to tell you what you mean to me," I answered. "That you have grown very dear to me. That I would like more than anything to have the leisure to follow where that leads me."

"Really?" she said, and cocked her head to one side quizzically. There was a long silence before she whispered, "How very odd."

My mouth went dry, and my heart felt as though it had been transformed into a particularly anxious and fidgety hedgehog. I couldn't face those blue, blue eyes any longer and turned my gaze downward. For several minutes we remained like that, unmoving. Then Cerice reached up and placed a finger under my chin. With surprising strength, she lifted my head until I had to face her again.

"How very odd," she said again. "Because, despite my better judgment, I've grown quite fond of you, too." She pulled me down to her level and kissed me.

We went back to Cerice's room then, and for a very long time we just held each other. When we did eventually make love, it was with a slow, lazy passion and gentle twining of limbs that was more about tenderness and discovery than sex. Later, Cerice opened an ltp link and sent me through to the U of M. There was a risk my passage through the mweb might be noticed, but Cerice refused to even consider letting me use the faerie ring, which she promised to close up after I left.

* * * *

I tried to keep up with Cerice over the following weeks, but my lack of mweb access meant I couldn't call her, she had to call me. That didn't happen very often. She did have Shara bring me a new silver-inlaid rapier and matching dagger as a Solstice present. I'd found a string of tiny oval-cut rubies set in red gold that I wanted to give her the week before, so Shara didn't go back empty-handed. But exchanging gifts by goblin seemed a poor substitute for the in-person time I wished for. Between the tangles in my love life, Atropos's curse, and a heavy course load you'd have thought I had enough problems. Fate, or more precisely, one of them, didn't seem to agree. During the next six weeks, I encountered four more magical surprises, dodged one drive-by shooting, and found poison in my Purina dorm chow on three separate occasions. It was all more fun than discovering an electric eel in your beer stein. I turned into a raving insomniac, and my concentration went to hell. Somehow I managed to hold my grades up, though it was a bit like treading water with a bowling ball in each hand. It didn't help knowing that Atropos might finish Puppeteer and end the world as I knew it at any time, or that I was the only one who could stop her.

Somehow, I survived until January break and the end of the semester. That gave me a full month off before classes started again and, since Lachesis had reinstated my mweb privileges when my grades came in, the freedom to do something with the time. I would have liked nothing more than to spend it with Cerice, whose place in my heart seemed to grow in proportion to her absence in my life. But likes must make way for needs, and I really
needed
to see if I could do something about Atropos and Puppeteer. If I could also find a way to pull my own personal bacon out of the fire without burning my nine remaining fingertips and exact some small revenge on the darkest of the Fates into the bargain, I'd be halfway to a seat on Olympus as the patron god of hackers.

One side benefit to being nailed to the floor for half the semester was that I'd had plenty of time to think. I knew that my many-times-great-aunt would have increased security significantly since my last visit to Chez Atropos, and that none of the hacks that had worked in the past were likely to do me a lick of good. But after much thought I'd finally come up with an approach that might get me in. Better still, I had some clue as to what to do once I got there, at least as a first step: a bit of computerized life insurance. All of which put me where I was at present.

The dirt road was poorly plowed, and my borrowed Econoline van almost went into the ditch a couple of times before I got to the state park's lot. I left the van running while I crawled into the back and put on a pair of heavy black tights, a turtleneck, a sweater, and a windbreaker. Thick wool socks and a pair of ski boots came next. I slid my arms into the straps of the mountain pack holding the rest of my gear, then turned off the van and reluctantly got out. It was four below and the wind felt like a razor scraping painfully across my face. My bad knee complained, but there was no other way to get where I needed to go, so I ignored it.

When I stepped into the bindings of my cross-country skis they squeaked from the cold. I wanted to do the same, despite the fleece mask, goggles, and gloves I had added to my outfit. Instead I picked up my custom poles and got moving.

There was no wind in the woods, and the snow was a perfect coat of light powder on top of an icy crust. I made good time, and soon warmed up enough to enjoy the scenery. Late-morning sun struck rainbow sparks off the jumbled surfaces of the loosely drifting snowflakes, filling the air with dancing color. A thin layer of this frozen faerie dust decorated every branch, and the pines looked like miniature ice pagodas where tiny Japanese webpixies might live. It was almost enough to make me forget that the weather would kill me given half a chance. The faint corduroy noise of my skis and the crunch as my poles broke through the crust were the only sounds, both quickly swallowed by the silence of a pine forest in winter.