WebMage (4 page)

At least it wasn't going to last long. One way or another the situation would be resolved in the next few minutes. Not-I reached down and grabbed the fake Melchior. I quickly shoved the contents of the bag into my pockets and handed it to not-me. Not-I took it, put not-Melchior into it, and went out the door of the gallery. I closed my eyes and concentrated on managing not-me. Melchior reversed those priorities, working on opening a preweb DecLocus gateway, while letting not-him sit vacantly in not-my bag.

Not-I staggered a couple of times on the stairs but made it to the main floor without falling. Moric had just arrived.

As not-I watched, there were a couple more shots and sparks danced across the back of his armor. He didn't seem to notice. The armor was modeled on a suit my aunt Electra had designed, and nothing short of an antitank missile was going to breach it. He turned and saw not-me. Smiling, he advanced.

"Ah, dear little Ravirn. How nice of you to come out to meet me. Did you run out of places to hide? Or did you finally remember the nobility of your blood and decide to look your death in the face?"

"Neither," not-I replied. "I decided that if I was going to go, I should at least take one of you with me."

Not-I raised not-my hands and pointed them at Moric. Internally, I braced myself. Then I opened a line into the interworld chaos and let it roar down the channel that led from my body to my doppelganger's. It was like opening my veins and pouring liquid fire into them. Both of my bodies crashed to their knees, and I felt my own right kneecap fracture. Compared to the pain of the linkage it was barely worth noting.

I was intentionally violating every rule I'd ever been taught about the proper management of magical power. Normally we only tap the raw chaos in a very carefully channeled way and take all sorts of precautions to contain it. That's why it can be so dangerous to tamper with even something as simple as a netspider. Muck up the tap and instant charcoal.

I felt the skin of my doppelganger crisping as though it were my own while its underdeveloped nervous and magical channels struggled to handle the overload. There was no chance. My uncle Mordechi had died this way when a particularly involved enchantment melted down on him, and he'd been a better pure sorcerer than I would ever be. It was that death, which I'd had the misfortune to witness from close at hand, that had given me the original idea for Burnt Offerings.

Not-I watched as the power I'd summoned shot from not-my hands and wreathed Moric in flames. His armor protected him from some of the fury, but it couldn't stop all of it, and after only a few seconds it knocked him down. I didn't see what happened after that because not-my eyeballs melted about then.

Agony filled my soul, and I fought like mad to free myself, both from the pain and from the linkage that connected my two bodies. If I couldn't sever the pathway before the chaos tap finished consuming the false me, it would backlash into the real thing and I would go the same way.

I struck at the link with everything I had, but it was very strong. It had to be, forged as it was from the sympathetic resonance between me and the fingertip I had used as a seed for the doppelganger. Symbolically we were part of the same whole, and breaking your own internal self-image apart isn't a task I'd recommend. In fact, it's just about impossible, a circumstance I was discovering to my great dismay. I was going to die.

"Boss!" Melchior's scream came from a distance of millimeters. "Boss! The gate's open. Let's get the hell out of here!" There was pain in his voice. No surprise; not-Melchior must have been getting pretty badly charred in that shoulder bag.

Fighting through the pain, I forced my eyes open. My vision was blurry with tears of pain, but I could still see the depth and life that had come to suffuse the picture. Too bad I wasn't going to live to see the world on the other side. It looked awfully pleasant.

"Thanks, Mel. You've done me proud. Why don't you step through and find someplace nice to settle down? I don't think my great-aunt will leave you in one piece if she finds you, even if I'm gone. Take care of yourself." I closed my eyes. It was too hard to keep looking at the escape I'd almost made.

"Boss, come on. You've got to move. If you don't, they'll find you."

"Don't worry, Mel. By the time they arrive I'll be ashes. The doppelganger's just about burned out, and the backlash should be along to get me in a few seconds. But, thanks for caring."

"Don't be an idiot, Ravirn. The net's backbone is down. Once we're through, with the gate closed behind us, the doppelganger link will be severed."

"What?" I thought about that. He might be right, but only if I hurried. I had at best five more seconds before not-I finished flaming out. After that…

I reached up and grabbed the edge of the picture frame with one hand. When I started to stand I rediscovered my broken knee. My leg folded, and I almost lost my grip. I had three seconds left. Clenching my teeth, I pulled myself up and into the picture. The pain as my bad knee hit the frame joined the feedback from the doppelganger and sent me tumbling into unconsciousness.

I don't remember what happened next, but I must have gotten lucky and fallen in the right direction, because I woke up an hour later still among the living. My face was pressed into the ground, and the smell of crushed grass with just the faintest compost undertone of decay filled my nostrils. I lifted my head and found myself in another world. I lay on a rounded green hill next to a faerie circle made from crushed beer cans. Melchior sat beside me. I looked at his maimed finger, and guilt washed over me.

"Sorry about the hand, Mel."

"It's okay, Boss. I understand. If that scrawny carcass of yours turned up without mine alongside it, your cousins would never believe they had the real thing. Even with your actual flesh providing the signature, they'd know something was up. It's common knowledge that you couldn't find your ass with both hands and a map without my help."

"You know what, Mel? Because of your recent service above and beyond the call of duty I'm going to ignore that rather than erasing your hard drive and starting from scratch like I ought to." The banter helped keep my mind off how close I'd just come to dying.

"Gosh, Boss, you're all heart."

"I'm glad you think so, because I'm about to put you back to work."

"I can hardly wait," he replied.

"Your enthusiasm overwhelms me. First, let me see that finger." He gave me his hand, and I taped up the finger. "Good. Melchior, Root Access, authorization code—Antigone."

"Root Access granted."

"Lefthand/pinkiefinger/1stknuckle.source," I said, "Terminate Signal. Initiate Recovery Cycle. Run Command, Run Command. Root Exit."

"Exiting Root. Returning to normal operation." He let out a long sigh, and the tension visibly drained out of him. "Oh yeah! Thanks, Boss."

"You're welcome. It doesn't give you your fingertip back, but it'll kill the pain and stop the bleeding. When we have a little leisure and mainframe access, I'll write you a new one. I wish we could fix mine as easily."

The pain, which seemed to have held itself in abeyance until that moment, returned then, as though speaking of the injury had conjured it up. My finger wasn't alone. I had an arrow crease, a couple of cracked ribs, and a myriad of lesser strains and bruises. But it was the horrible throbbing of my right knee that led the rapidly rising symphony of agony. The scary thing was I was still pretty shocky. I didn't want to think about how bad I'd be hurting once I came out of it.

"Let's move this along. Melchior, Better Living Through Chemistry. Execute."

"Executing."

The webgoblin's right index claw lengthened and sharpened, shaping itself into a hypodermic needle. While he was doing that I unzipped the left wrist seal of my jacket and pulled it up, baring the flesh beneath. When I was ready, Melchior formed his hand into a gun and jabbed the claw into the exposed vein. Then he brought his thumb down, sending morphine shooting into my bloodstream. The dose was insanely high, enough to kill a human, and within seconds I could feel it taking hold.

"Much better, Mel. I might even live through the next step." The drug pulsed through my system, moving to the rhythm of my heart. It felt like liquid nitrogen, freezing out sensation. With each beat the cool relief slid a little farther through my veins. "You'll have to open my pants from ankle to hip. Then I'll need a splint."

Some jarring was inevitable while he dealt with the seams. I closed my eyes and let the morphine carry me away to a place where everything was quiet bliss. It was also pink. Not my favorite color, but I didn't feel like arguing. I'm not sure what pulled my awareness back to the place I'd left my body, but when I opened my eyes I found that my leg had been straightened out. I was glad to have missed that bit.

Mel sat on the grass beside my head, watching curiously as a short, gnarled woman with extremely broad shoulders arranged long strips of dried sinew and some old bicycle spokes around my leg. I was about to ask who she was when she pulled the bindings tight. Even through the morphine it felt like someone had placed my knee in an electric pencil sharpener. I decided everything had been better when it was pink and went away again.

I surfaced later in darkness. I lay on a low futon that had seen better days. A faint smell of old dust and mildew flavored the still air. I'd barely stirred before Mel appeared, a small wooden bowl clutched in his hands.

"Here, Boss. Drink this. The troll says it'll help with the pain."

"The troll?" I sat bolt upright, adrenaline overriding pain.

"Calm down," Melchior said. "Ahllan's not that kind of troll. She's a vegetarian."

"Where did you find a vegetarian troll healer?" I said, beginning to relax.

"We're under the hill in the picture. She made the beer-can faerie ring. We're an awfully long way from the primary course of reality. It's a weird version of faerie, oriented around the detritus of urban sprawl and pollution instead of sylvan idyllicism. I don't know what goes on in the head of the artist who painted this gate, but I'd rather not meet his subconscious in a dark alley."

"It sounds bizarre," I said, taking the bowl.

It was full of a dark green liquid with suds on top. It looked terrible and smelled worse, but the pain in my knee was coming back, and Melchior assured me the stuff wasn't toxic. I took a tentative sip. It actually tasted pretty good, something like bananas and cream. I knocked the rest of it back. My catalog of injuries quieted down almost immediately, and shortly I fell into a deep sleep. While I slept, I dreamed.

* * * *

I was in my dorm, playing around with a new spell. The basic idea had been suggested by something my cousin Laric said at a bar one night. That hurt even in sleep. We'd been good friends since childhood, but he was Mode's first cousin, and probably an enemy now. I called the spell Jurassic Gas. It was a hack, but most of my spells are.

I'm an off-the-cuff sorcerer. I write good code, but I've always preferred quick and dirty to elegant. My real specialty is cracking, unraveling other people's work. Nobody's code is perfect, and I have a talent for finding even the tiniest flaw and exploiting it. What that means is that I've never met a security system I couldn't get around. It also means I'm a whiz-bang debugger, but that's a lot less fun and doesn't really interest me.

My grandmother, on the other hand, finds it to be my primary redeeming feature. That how I ended up at a mid-level school in a backwater reality. Lachesis wanted my talents as a systems analyst honed. She also said I needed to learn discipline. She'd started me out at MIT in one of the primary-reality nodes, but there'd been so much happening there that I hadn't really paid attention to classes and flunked out. The same thing happened at Carnegie Mellon in a secondary node.

When Lachesis signed me up at the U of M, she'd told me in no uncertain terms that the next step was a monastery school at the back end of beyond.

These were the thoughts going through my head as I fine-tuned Jurassic Gas. I had the spell just about where I wanted it when Melchior chimed.

"New mail," he said. "A request for visual."

"From who?"

Melchior shivered a bit. "Atropos."

I quickly reviewed my recent cracking. There had been one or two forays into Atropos's demesne, but only nibbles around the edges. I didn't think she had anything on me.

"Put her through," I replied.

"If you insist." His expression went far away. "Contact. Waiting for a response from Atropos.web. Lock. Vtp linking initiated."

Melchior opened his eyes and mouth wide. Beams of light lanced out, green, blue, and red. But rather than coming together to make a picture as they normally did, the beams struck me full in the face. My vision fogged, the world seemed to go gold, and my stomach told me I was falling. Then I was elsewhere.

* * * *

The space was a perfect sphere perhaps thirty feet in diameter and enclosed by walls of crystal. Outside, the primal stuff of chaos tumbled and foamed. It looked like a million different colors of dye all being spun in a blender, except that they never mixed, each maintaining its own color as it twisted through and around the others.

I reached toward the nearest arc of crystal, wanting to reassure myself it would keep the chaos on the other side. My arm seemed to move in slow motion, and I realized I was suspended in a thick, clear fluid. Since I didn't seem to be having any trouble breathing, this was something of a shock.

"I'm so glad you could come." The voice from behind me was cool and pure, inhumanly so.

I turned my head and found myself looking into the eyes of Fate. Floating a few feet away was Atropos. I've always had trouble describing my grandmother and her sisters. Oh, the details are there. They're uniformly beautiful, nearly identical in basic appearance. Each is tall and slender with ice-white skin, thick black hair, and fine bones, but somehow those things pale into insignificance beside their eyes.