Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (11 page)
“If Nemesis,” I said, “wherever she was—interacted with anyone whose life thread is held in the Fate Core, Atropos could have learned of it. For that matter, Atropos and Hades are on excellent terms. There’s no reason she couldn’t have asked him.”
“Or they could be in it together. Each knows how much the other hates you.”
“That’s a really ugly thought, Mel.” It made a nasty sort of sense. “On the other hand, it doesn’t answer your question about Atropos’s willingness to defy Necessity. Atropos seemed awfully afraid of her at Eris’s hubris trial. All the Fates did.”
“True,” said Mel, “but things have changed. The Persephone virus really hurt Necessity. Maybe she’s weak enough that the Fates see this as an opportunity to move up a level. I’m sure Atropos hates taking orders from Necessity on anything, and there’s the added spur provided by the changes in the Fate Core.”
“The more we talk about this, the less I like it. We’ve got zero evidence, but there’s a logic to it that makes me queasy. It’d make releasing Nemesis a twofer.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mel.
“Necessity made the Furies to replace Nemesis, and she made them wholly her own. They even call her ‘Mother.’ If someone really wanted to move in on Necessity’s operation, they’d pretty much have to get the Furies out of the way first. How better than introducing an alternative power of vengeance, one with a proven track record of beating the Furies. ”
“That
is
an interesting thought,” said a voice from the nearest of the apple heads.
is
an interesting thought,” said a voice from the nearest of the apple heads.
“I figured you’d listen,” I said.
The apple head developed a smile rather like the Cheshire cat’s. A moment later the rest of it began to fade into transparency, until it looked like a hollow figure made from glass. The glass filled with chaos, then stretched and flowed until Eris stood in its place, wearing the Cheshire cat grin.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Eavesdropping’s ever so much more fun when the targets think they’re alone.”
“Gosh, I’m really sorry to disappoint you, but only a complete idiot would think he could hang around Castle Discord without you knowing everything he did.”
Eris laughed long and loud.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“Uh, Boss, you do remember how we met Discord, don’t you? The whole breaking in here and looking for electronic evidence to clear your name bit?”
“That’s different,” I said. “That was a cracking run. We were supposed to get in and out without her ever knowing we’d been here. This time, we practically knocked on the front door.”
“You tried to sneak in through a nonexistent faerie ring,” said Eris.
“I wasn’t sneaking. I’d planned on finding you as soon as we arrived. Besides, it’s unfair bringing up that first time. I didn’t know anything about you that hadn’t been filtered through Fate family horror stories. I was young and foolish then.”
“As opposed to now, when you’re old and foolish?” asked Melchior.
“Can we just get back to Nemesis?”
“Only if it makes you more uncomfortable,” said Eris. “I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
I sighed and wished I could ask her to drop it for five minutes. I didn’t because I’d come to care about Eris. Her role as Discord required that she make a pain of herself. Even if she really wanted to let things go, she couldn’t. It was a fact that I was pretty sure caused her genuine hurt on a frequent basis. Being a power had costs, and any request from me along those lines would only serve to emphasize her pain.
Instead, I said, “Then we’re good. The more I think about Nemesis, the scarier she seems and the more uncomfortable I get. Especially when I think of her working with Atropos and Hades.”
“Say Fate and Hades, and I think you’ll hit closer to the mark.” Eris’s smile was poisonously bitter. “Unless, of course, you entertain illusions about the inherent righteousness of Atropos’s sisters.”
My laugh was as bitter as her smile. “Not after my own grandmother agreed to cut my thread for defying her. That’s not a lesson I’ll ever forget. If Atropos is part of this, Clotho and Lachesis are as well.”
The idea of Fate and Death controlling Necessity filled my bones with ice. A multiverse ruled by them would pretty much look like a forced-labor camp, with its inmates constrained to do exactly what the guards wanted in the brief period between birth and early death. I might not always like the way Necessity ran things now, but at least she enforced a balance that kept the gods arguing among themselves most of the time instead of . . . well, playing god.
“Do you really think they’re moving in on Necessity?” I asked.
“It makes sense,” said Eris. “Fate has never liked to have constraints placed on its power. None of us do. But just because something makes sense, that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“So,” said Melchior, “is that ‘yes,’ with a side of ‘no’ or just a flat ‘maybe’?”
“Call it a suggestion that you find out,” said Eris. “It’ll give you something to do when you aren’t dodging bullets.”
I nodded. “Can we borrow your connection? I might as well get started as soon as possible.”
“Absolutely, if you promise to tell me what you’ve learned when you’re done. If Fate and Death are making a move to replace Necessity, I’d like to get ahead of them. Hang on a moment while I hook us up to the mweb.”
I would have to find out how she managed that sometime. Castle Discord was only in contact with the mweb when Eris wanted it that way, making her much less vulnerable to hacking and cracking. It was a feature I wanted to add to Raven House.
I was just going to ask her about it when our surroundings changed again. The mall was gone, replaced by an ancient library of the sort with deep pigeonholes for all the scrolls. My flimsy food-service table had become a heavy wooden desk with a small inkpot and quill stand.
“It’s a little retro, isn’t it?” I asked Eris.
“Think of it as a case mod for my entire server farm.”
She reached a hand into one of the pigeonholes and grabbed a wrapped scroll. As she pulled it out, I saw that the golden cap on the nearer end was an apple inscribed with “for the fairest.” The other end was actually a multipin connector of a sort I’d never seen.
“Each of these is a thirty-two-core server with maxed-out RAM and overclocked processors, all configured as part of a distributed supercomputer running my own custom OS.”
I nodded. She’d been running one form or another of the system for some time, a Grendel group in answer to the more traditional Beowulf cluster.
“Slick,” I said. “Where do I jack in?”
“Take a close look at the writing quill.”
I reached for the quill and found it surprisingly heavy and firm. The feathery portion of the feather was actually some sort of high-density plastic acting as a hilt for the long narrow blade concealed by the stand—a very fancy athame.
“And the cable?”
“Check the inkpot.”
The little black knob on the top of the cap was actually a flip-up cover for a networking plug, and the pot concealed a good yard of cable. It was a gorgeous little setup.
“You’ll understand if I prefer my own gateway, right?” I put the quill back into its holder.
“Where’s your sense of trust?” she asked, but with a smile.
“I left it beside my youthful idealism on top of a tower in this very castle a bit over a year ago when I figured out my grandmother had betrayed me to Atropos.” I shifted my attention away from Eris. “Melchior. Laptop. Please.”
“I live to obey.” He grinned and sat down cross-legged on the desk in front of me as his body began to flow and twist.
When he’d finished the transition, I plugged the inkpot connector into one of his networking ports. For several long seconds the little goblin-face logo below the screen on the left blinked repeatedly as he checked the connection. Finally, it bobbed a nod. I produced another length of networking cable from my bag, and a dagger barely wider than a letter opener from a hidden sheath in the sleeve of my jacket—my athame.
The cable connected the small socket in the pommel of the dagger to a matching port on Melchior. Next came the hard part. I braced my left wrist against the corner of the desk so that my hand hung in the air. A network of thin scars centered my upturned palm, and I rubbed my thumb lightly over the spot. No matter how many times I did this, it still took me a while to work up the nerve.
Lifting my athame, I carefully placed the tip in the thickest cluster of scarring. Taking a deep breath, I pushed, forcing the needle-sharp blade into and then through the flesh of my hand so that the bloody point stood out a good inch from its back. I could feel sweat breaking out all over my body, and little flashes of lightning edged my vision. I let my breath out in a ragged gasp, then slammed my right hand down on the pommel. The athame slid deeper, stopping only when the simple cross guard contacted my palm.
I felt only a fading echo of that touch as I catapulted out of my body, my awareness slipping through the passage opened by blood and magic into the world of the mweb. Pain was a vital part of the process, helping the sorcerer disassociate himself from his body—a necessary price for access to the electronic universe.
I had arrived in a small space with blue, pebbled-leather walls, a brass spiral staircase leading up, and a single irregular window. It was a place I had been many times before, a virtual room located inside the protected cyberspace of Melchior’s internal architecture. I crossed to the window to see how Eris had arranged the world outside this time.
I was surprised to find a rather vanilla sort of view, little more than an empty gold-carpeted black-walled room with one closed door and one open archway. It made a stark contrast to the last time I’d used Eris’s portal on the mweb. Then, her server farm had registered as an animated fun-house version of an apple orchard. But last time, Eris had offered me her full backing, including the processing power of her Grendel group. The blank room with its closed door was a clear message. This time, I was on my own.
With a sigh, I stepped into the room, the last stop before I entered the mweb. Melchior joined me, creating a tiny mouse with his head on its body to signify his electronic presence—a pointer really, since most of him would stay with his body to provide electronic support. I scooped the mouse up and tucked it into the breast pocket of my leathers. I took a moment then to contemplate the best target for my initial run. There were things to be learned from all three networks— Hades’, Atropos’s, and Necessity’s—and each had its own problems and plusses.
I put Hades aside for the moment since his system is almost entirely cut off from the net. In my rescue of Shara I had learned things that might allow me to get some sense of what was going on behind his firewalls, but any true access was both terribly unlikely and extremely dangerous. That left Atropos and Necessity, and since the mweb was administered out of the Temple of Fate, I could maybe kill two birds with one stone there.
I stepped through the arch. On the other side I found a narrow hallway with a moving sidewalk running down the middle—a metaphysical representation of the pipeline Eris had used to connect us to the mweb. I hopped on the sidewalk and let it carry me to the end of the hall.
Beyond lay a narrow tunnel with a few insectlike packets of information zipping along in one direction or another. Castle Discord was way out at the edge of existence, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic passing through the line she’d connected to. It looked rather like a maintenance area in a mall, all gray walls and rough concrete unsmoothed by the passage of data. I turned trafficward and began to move on my own. I also turned right and up and diagonally, but true direction is essentially meaningless in the virtual world of the mweb. It’s all about information flow, and what I was really doing was heading to the closest nexus. When I got there, I followed the traffic once again.
After a few more twists and turns, I reached the heavily used areas of the mweb. Here, the smooth shiny walls of the tunnel were farther apart, but the packets came and went like clouds of swarming bees. I had the urge to keep my mouth shut so I wouldn’t inhale any of them. Since I wasn’t actually breathing or wearing a physical body, this was perhaps a bit silly, but the habits of a lifetime in the flesh are hard to discard. Especially since I was so much bigger than most of the chunks of information that moved around me.
The soul is irreducible. Unlike most of the data that flows through the mweb, it cannot be broken into a bunch of smaller segments and sent from point
A
to point
B
via multiple paths. This posed an immediate problem when I arrived at my destination, the last nexus before the mweb server farm—how to bypass the packet-size security filters.
A
to point
B
via multiple paths. This posed an immediate problem when I arrived at my destination, the last nexus before the mweb server farm—how to bypass the packet-size security filters.
It was not an unexpected problem, nor one I hadn’t overcome in the past. Every protected node on the mweb has some variation on this particular security feature. But it had been a while. I wanted to take my time and look at things from up close before I made any final decisions about approach.
I was immediately glad that I’d decided not to rush in, as things had changed significantly since my last visit. The servers themselves were physically located within and administered from the Temple of Fate and always had been, but previously they’d had their own security systems separate from Fate’s. That was no longer the case. Where once there had been multiple portals, there now stood a seamless firewall, its first layer like a wall of backlit blue silk. It was stamped with the usual dire warnings about the ultimate destruction of trespassers.
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