WebMage (24 page)

She shrugged. "I'd say it's in the hands of the Fates, but I'd rather not believe that."

"You and me both," I replied.

Then, since I didn't have the words, I kissed her. It was a promise of sorts, and she returned it in kind.

Turning away, I said, "Showtime."

Ahllan nodded. "Stand by the hexagram and be ready to move. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to hold it open once I make the connection."

"Is this really safe?" asked Melchior.

"No," said Ahllan. "Not at all."

"That's what I was afraid of."

Ahllan's features slumped as she turned inward, and the blank places filled with scrolling numbers. A moment later the whole hexagram began to glow a pale red and curdle the space around it.

It looked like a two-dimensional figure suddenly deciding to become three-dimensional but not quite getting it right. Take a wafer of warm iron and set it on a slab of butter. As it slowly sinks in, it leaves a hole. The diagram did that, only not. At the same time it moved away from us it also stayed in exactly the same place. It was deeply disturbing, and I was about to spend time with it up close and personal.

I stretched my arms to loosen up, then groaned. Black agony coursed up the left one from wrist to shoulder, and I cradled it against my chest. I'd cracked loose a bit of the already flaky Patch & Go spell I'd used on the king-size piercing Dairn had given me.

"Let me see that," demanded Cerice.

A little bit of blood was oozing out around the torn edge of the spell, but the pain had passed.

She examined it carefully. "That looks terrible."

"It wasn't supposed to have to last this long."

"Even so, it's an ugly little piece of work. What were you thinking when you coded it?"

"That under any circumstances where I'd be willing to use it, I'd be in the position of desperately needing to."

"Well, it's going to have to come off," said Cerice.

"I hate to interrupt," said Melchior. "But the gate's open."

A stone hall could be dimly seen at the far end of the red tunnel.

"That's my cue," I said, and tried to pull away from Cerice.

She didn't let go. "The spell's unraveling and tearing the hell out of your arm in the process. If we don't take it off in a controlled manner now, it'll fail catastrophically soon enough. Maybe we can abort the gate and try again later. Ahllan—"

Shara shrieked. "Emergency burst from Kalkin." Her eyes and mouth slammed open, vomiting light into the air.

"Atropos has detected your gate," snarled Kalkin's image. "The Furies have taken the scent. Fly." With a flare like an exploding bulb, Kalkin vanished.

"That's done it," I said. "If I leave, the Furies will follow. I've got to go now."

"You'll lose the arm," said Cerice.

"Children," said Ahllan, through clenched teeth. "The Furies are coming, and this is not as easy as it looks."

"Give me five minutes," said Cerice. "This
has
to come off."

"You have two," said Ahllan.

"Done," she replied, and yanked on the spell.

It ripped free with a horrible rupturing sound, and the pain drove me to my knees. Blood poured hot and wet from the reopened wound.

"Shara," said Cerice, "That Which Does Not Kill Me. Please."

The purple webgoblin spat out a long string of binary, and it felt like someone passed a branding iron through my wrist. The world went entirely white, and I'm pretty sure I screamed. When the colors returned, I couldn't feel anything from the elbow down, and the entry and exit points were covered with a sort of silvery fur. It looked a bit like the stuff you find growing in abandoned Tupperware in the back of the common room fridge at the dorm. It also appeared to be swaying in a gentle breeze that didn't exist.

"What in Hades' name is that stuff?" I asked.

"No time to explain," said Cerice. "Besides, you
really
don't want to know. Suffice to say it'll speed healing and dry up and fall off when it's done."

"Cerice," I said. "I can't feel my arm."

"Good. It's working." She stripped her belt off.

"Cerice, I may need that arm."

"You wouldn't have had the use of it much longer anyway, not with that awful spell of yours. The only difference is this isn't permanent."

"Children!" husked Ahllan, strain clear in her voice.

"Right," said Cerice. She looped the belt around my neck and arm, making a crude sling, then gave me a gentle push. "Go."

I leaned in close to get one last lungful of her perfume. Then I grabbed Melchior and stepped into the gate. From the inside, the portal looked like a long cylinder of red crystal filled with hairline fractures. Each of the fractures was actually a magical energy flow and gave a sort of sticky resistance as I pushed through it. It felt as if the entire space were packed with sheet after sheet of cobwebs. I wanted to run, but the resistance and disorientation caused by the energy threads made it difficult just to stay upright and keep walking.

Before I truly realized it, the horrible slithery resistance ended, and I stumbled out the far end of the tunnel. I turned around. On this side there was no sign the gate had ever existed, just a grim passage of gold-flecked granite stretching away into the distance. There would be no return.

I felt like a rat. It was me the Furies wanted, and once they found out I was gone they'd move on, but they could inflict an awful lot of collateral damage in the meantime. Perhaps worse than that was that Atropos had given the Furies our whereabouts, alerted apparently by the activation of the gate. The darkest of the Fates now knew there was a rogue Fate Server. Atropos wouldn't rest until she'd found and eliminated what she would see as a usurper of the powers of Fate. Cerice and the others were going to become prime targets after this.

"I sure hope they get out before the Furies arrive," I said quietly.

"I wouldn't worry," said Mel. "Ahllan's very resourceful, and Cerice is no slouch. They'll be fine."

"I'm sure you're right," I said, forcing a smile. The smile he gave me in return looked as waxen as mine felt. "You don't believe it either, do you?" I asked. He shook his head.

"No, but at least the problems they're having should be of a lesser magnitude than the ones we're about to stir up. I can't think of many worse places to be than here. Of course, it's possible Ahllan blew it and we're nowhere near Castle Discord." He suddenly grinned. "Maybe we've just ended up in a rather starkly decorated health spa."

"That's a cheering thought," I said. I had no idea what the odds of such a miss might be. "We'd better confirm we're in the right place. It's clearly a fortress of some kind, whether it's Eris's castle or not. All the old stonework and arrow slits are dead giveaways."

"Yeah. The architecture's definitely of the 'hostile neighbors' school of design." His expression became nervous. "You know, I'd be a big fan of getting out of this hallway. It looks like a main thoroughfare."

He was right. The long stone passage was broad and high-ceilinged, with a well-worn rug patterned in yellow and black running down the middle. There were doors along one side and slit windows on the other. At each end it met another corridor in an L, with a stairway that led both up and down tucked inside of the angle.

"I'm going to take a quick look out the window, Mel. Why don't you find an unoccupied room."

When I looked outside I knew we'd come to the right place. The sky was the unnatural uniform black of a computer astronomy program. Scattered across this depthless darkness were a billion stars. That was my first impression. Then I realized the stars were moving in a slow firefly dance and that each and every one of them was actually a perfect fourteen-karat golden apple. The view was almost hypnotic. It was also wrong somehow, too big. I stuck my head out the window and looked down. Where a moat should have been I could see only blackness filled with shining golden apples. We were on an island afloat in a sea of night. I felt a tug on my tunic.

"Hey, Boss," said Melchior. "Why don't we make ourselves scarce?"

"All right. But stop calling me boss. We're partners now, remember?"

"Whatever you say, Boss." I turned a sour eye on him, and he grinned back innocently. "What?"

"Never mind," I sighed, following him to the door he'd picked out.

It was a small storeroom lined with shelves on which lay steel-sheathed shutters for the windows. Since the castle wasn't currently under threat of invasion, I didn't think anyone would be visiting us anytime soon.

"So what now?" asked Melchior.

"I really don't know. This was Cerice's idea. I've never been here before, and I haven't the foggiest notion where to find Eris's computer room. For that matter, I don't even know whether Eris goes in for the same kind of hardware the Fates use. I was kind of figuring we'd blunder around and hope."

"I don't like that plan," said Melchior. "In fact, as your partner, I'm vetoing it."

He said it firmly, but the look on his face was the sort of expression you'd expect from someone trying to defuse a bomb. Not a big surprise really. Our new relationship was only a few hours old. The habits of master and servant were going to be hard to break. For both of us.

I was pretty sure that if I used the name-spell-execute command form, it would still compel Melchior to do my will. He might be a person in his own right, but the command imperatives were built into his firmware. He was extremely vulnerable to arm-twisting on my part. After years of treating him as a piece of stubborn hardware, I was going to have to work very hard to avoid steamrolling him whenever he disagreed with me. This was sort of a first test.

"All right," I said. "What would you suggest?"

He relaxed. "I hadn't gotten that far yet. I was too busy getting ready for the argument we were going to have when you decided to override me. How about we look for network and power cables?"

I nodded. "Good idea. If this place is like most retrofitted castles, the conduits and things will be surface-run."

We traced the Romex line that led from the overhead light to the back of the closet, where it fed into a junction box. The box was mounted to a large conduit that came in through the ceiling and went out through a rough hole drilled in the mortar between two stone blocks. A pale blue cable about the size of an ethernet line was tie-wrapped to the conduit every couple of feet.

"Do you want to try to follow this out? Or do you think we could just run a vampire connection off it from here?" I asked Melchior.

He climbed up the shelves and put his ear against the cable. He held it there for quite a while before shaking his head.

"There's almost no traffic. It might make the initial insertion easier, but I wouldn't want a sudden spike in packet transfer to show up on a system monitor somewhere. Also, a vampire does funny things to data flow. If we have to go that way, I'd rather do it where the system is making enough noise to wash out any echoes."

Melchior was smaller and stealthier, so he led the way as we moved out. A few minutes later we were standing outside the room that should back on the closet we'd been in if things were arranged in a geometrically rational fashion. Since Castle Discord was as far from the prime level of reality and the Fates as it was possible to get, I wasn't going to bet the ranch on the rules of spatial relations applying there. I'd been in a few worlds like that, and they irritated the heck out of me. A person could walk around what appeared to be a perfectly normal corner and wind up in an Escher print.

I let out a little sigh of relief when the door opened into a large game room with the conduit we were looking for clearly visible on the side wall. The center of the room was dominated by a heavy felt-surfaced card table. Other distractions were set at various points around the room, including a pool table and an air hockey set.

A faint smell of old smoke and stale beer flavored the air. The floor was entirely covered with a thick gold-and-black oriental rug depicting the monkey king cheating at dice with the emperor of heaven. The latter was shown in his warrior mode, with a mighty sword propped at his side. It would have taken a lot of moxie to cheat him. But then, the king was supposed to be one tough monkey.

A dozen or so arcade-style video games alternated with windows on one wall. As I headed for the conduit, something about the windows struck me as odd, and I detoured to check it out. Looking out, I could see a brightly lit inner courtyard split between a formal garden complete with hedge maze and a broad green lawn. Swearing, I looked up.

A golden apple sun centered the sky. While it was possible the day-night cycle was just very fast and I'd missed the change I doubted it. A quick glance into the hall confirmed it was still night outside the castle. My hopes for the insides of things matching the outsides evaporated. This could turn out to be an impossible task, and I said as much to Melchior.

"It's not that bad, Boss. The cable's in the right place at least. It goes down through the floor here. Let's just keep following it."

I nodded. We didn't have a whole lot of choice. Three flights down and twenty minutes later the cable had joined a bunch of its cousins and seemed to be heading for some sort of master junction. The hallway we'd been following turned a corner and dead-ended at a door. Judging by all the cables and conduits going inside, we'd arrived at Castle Discord's main communications hub. We were getting close, and I was getting worried. The ease of our run so far made each and every one of my vertebrae itch with nasty anticipation.

Melchior checked the door. "It's unlocked," he said. But he didn't open it.

I tried flexing my left hand to see if I'd be able to hold a dagger anytime soon. Nothing. While my fingers did move a little bit, the only way I could tell was by watching them. As far as my nervous system was concerned, my arm ended at the elbow. I loosened my rapier in its sheath.

"Ready?" asked Melchior.

"Ready."

He turned the handle.

"Jackpot!" whispered Melchior.