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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

Codespell (13 page)

BOOK: Codespell
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“Pleased to meet you, Asalka,” said Melchior.
Her smile become a grin as she looked at her hand. “That’s so cool.”
“Now could you explain the hero bit?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. We are a people enslaved,” said Asalka, her tone going bitter. “The Fates intended us to be things, not individuals. Even now that they know our true nature, they treat us the same way.”
She stopped for a moment but continued when Melchior didn’t look any more enlightened.
“So modest,” she said, shaking her head. “You stood up to Fate. You didn’t have to, and yet when it mattered most, you spat in the teeth of our masters. You made Fate acknowledge us as people even if only for a moment, and you did it in the only way they understand—thwarting their power.”
“I gave away our secret,” said Melchior. “I probably killed dozens of us.”
“The secret would eventually have been lost anyway. This way it was given, not taken. Because of you, the Fates can no longer pretend we are merely devices. They can keep us enslaved, but they cannot make
things
of us ever again. You did what was right and carved our dignity in the tablets of history for all to see it.”
“I, uh, huh.” Melchior looked at his feet, and his cheeks darkened in an indigo blush. “I guess I never thought of it that way. I just did what I had to.”
“That’s what heroes do,” said Asalka, and she bent to give Melchior a peck on the cheek.
“This is going to take some processing,” said Melchior.
“I hate to interrupt,” I said to the troll, “but I have to ask. Does this mean I’m not getting eaten?”
“Of course not,” said Asalka. “Not as long as you’re here with him.”
“That’s great,” I said, “but doesn’t it seriously violate your programming?”
The troll grinned again. “Not at all. I’m supposed to watch for and stop intruders. I did that. My programming doesn’t say anything about not letting you go after that. I’m supposed to report incursions to the Fate security admin. I’ll do that, either in a posthumous message, or in coded e-mail sent after I’ve escaped to freedom. I’m supposed to destroy those who don’t belong within the Fates’ network. If Melchior—the webgoblin who established our independence—doesn’t belong here, I don’t know who does.”
I blinked, then smiled. It was the genie problem to a tee—any loophole that can be exploited will be—and it was happening to the Fates. How nice. I finally relaxed enough to look past the troll. We stood in a very narrow data channel, the choke point just outside the entrance to the Fateclock. It was one of the oldest parts of the system, and it was so simple that it was rarely upgraded. The interface was kind of clunky—basically a translucent green tunnel with a big red door on the Fateclock end and more tunnel in the other direction.
“Thank you,” I said.
“There’s no need,” said Asalka. “I owe it to him. Now, you’d better be going on to do whatever you came for. I am not Fate’s only security, and the longer you stay in one place, the more likely you are to be noticed.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Melchior.
“Then don’t say anything at all,” answered Asalka. She squeezed his shoulder.
Melchior shook his head and walked past her, heading away from the Fateclock. I followed, scooping him up onto my shoulder as I came even with him.
“All hail the conquering hero.” I grinned, though I meant it sincerely enough—he’d done it to save my life.
“Can we not talk about that for a bit?” he asked. “I don’t think I’m ready to discuss it.”
“All right,” I said. “What would you prefer to talk about?”
“Business, I guess.” He sighed. “Where do you want to go next? Should we try for
Atropos.net
and any communications she’s been having with Hades?”
“No. I think we want to go straight to the mweb servers and a Necessity gateway at this point. I’m not sure whether Asalka was there because Fate knew about the back door, or because she did, or just by coincidence. Things have changed a lot around here, and I’d rather not get caught by anyone less forgiving, like, say, Atropos.”
What I didn’t tell him was that I had the weirdest
poofy
feeling, like I was in my raven shape and all my feathers wanted to stand on end. I couldn’t think of a way to talk about it without sounding mystically cracked or seriously paranoid.
“Fair enough,” said Melchior. He looked around. “Let me just get my orientation . . . all right. Hang on.”
The green walls of the tunnel blurred around us as Melchior took over steering. It opened out into a wide plain studded with the edifices of various Fate systems, rather like a town-dotted countryside. Melchior aimed us at one of the largest of the nearby clusters, a good-size data city—an mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory.
As I had the last time I visited this place, I arranged my view of the system by color, painting native software a pale translucent green, remote client apps a deeper opaque olive, and the pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server I marked in orange, lesser links in yellow.
Melchior took us to a large, strangely placed open space, like a gigantic parking lot where a building should have been. In the very center of the flat, black expanse was a tiny patch of purple sunk a few inches below the surface.
When I’d freed Shara from her imprisonment in Hades, I had done so by e-mailing her soul out to Cerice. What I hadn’t known at the time was that Persephone had recompiled her and attached a virus that guaranteed she’d end up being rerouted into Necessity, where she was supposed to take over the works. The reroute had happened at this very point in the system—then a black-box override processor attached to the mweb server by Necessity. It had appeared in cyberspace as a six-story black cube. When the Shara virus had taken over Necessity’s security and memory systems, it had pulled that processor back behind a soul-keyed portal, leaving behind this blank spot of a locked door with its purple keyhole.
Despite what I’d heard from Tisiphone about the Furies being locked out of the system, I’d kind of been hoping things had changed since my last visit. When I knelt beside the keyhole, I found out that they had, just not very much and not in a useful way. Then, three purple divots the size and shape of pomegranate seeds had centered the indentation, indicating that it could only be opened by Persephone and the Shara virus. Now, the divots were gone, replaced by a pair of purple handprints, rather like those found outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. So it was still locked, and I still didn’t hold the right key—Shara, the whole Shara, not the truncated thing with her face that the virus had created to take over Necessity.
“What do you think, Mel? Is there any point in trying to get past this right now?”
He knelt and placed his own small hands in the handprints and pushed gently. Nothing.
“I doubt it,” he said. “This is a soul lock, just like last time. Since Shara’s still on the inside as far as we can tell, I don’t think anyone’s getting in before the first day of spring. Not even then, if Shara’s tie to Necessity doesn’t work along the same timeline as Persephone’s to Hades. I don’t suppose you’ve got any fresh ideas on that front?”
“I don’t know, Mel. Things went so fast there at the end when we confronted Hades. Persephone’s bondage has always been enforced by the will of Necessity. Now that Necessity’s thoughts and memories have taken on the shape of electronic files, the whole thing’s muddier. Especially after Persephone’s virus flaked out and scrambled things.”
It was supposed to erase the file that tied Persephone to Hades at whatever cost. When it turned out Necessity had hardware-level structures for all of the powers, structures the program couldn’t touch, the conflict between its orders and its capabilities had pretty much driven the program insane. Later, we’d discovered that the only way to free Persephone was for someone else to take her place within the mind of Necessity, and that’s what Shara set out to do while I was battling Hades. Since Persephone had been released, we had to assume she’d succeeded.
“I wish we knew exactly what happened to Shara,” I said, “where she went.”
“Well, she sure didn’t show up in the land of the dead,” said a new voice—a feminine one. I jumped about three feet in the air, whipping around to look behind me as I landed.
I heard a giggle then but still couldn’t see anyone. At least not initially. Then a piece of the background shimmered and took on the shape of a winged woman. Tisiphone slowly flickered into view as she turned off the chameleon effect she used for stalking. She was as beautiful as ever, tall and slender, with an athlete’s muscles and a goddess’s laughing eyes.
“Sorry about sneaking up on you like that,” she said. “I just couldn’t resist.”
I suspected that last was literally true. The Furies are born predators, but the way they hunt varies widely. Tisiphone most resembles a well-fed cat—she plays with her prey. Since her very nature as a power includes that huntress side of her, the need to scare the daylights out of people is probably written into her very soul. Just as the need to disconcert is written into Eris’s, or to be honest, the way the need to act recklessly is part of my nature as the Raven.
I had learned a lot about the downside of being a power over the last few months, including the insomnia and this sense I had that my currently nonexistent feathers were standing on end. It was like having an itch I couldn’t scratch, and I was going to have to figure out what it meant one of these days. If it had faded out when Tisiphone faded in, I might have taken it for a warning that we were being watched.
“It’s all right,” I finally said with a shrug. “It’s probably good for my heart.”
“Being scared?” she asked, her tone somewhere between mocking and hopeful. “Or being scared by me?”
“Oh, the latter, of course, my lady.” I gave her my best Houses of Fate court bow. “Being scared by Hades wouldn’t do a thing for me.”
“I hate to interrupt this divine flirtation,” said Melchior, “but since the conversation’s come back around to Hades and we’re in kind of a hurry . . .” He indicated the soul lock with his eyes and a tilt of his head.
“Right,” I said. “Tisiphone, you said Shara hasn’t shown up in Hades. Are you positive?”
“Absolutely.”
I nodded. We’d been pretty sure of that, but we didn’t exactly have access to Hades. It was nice to have it confirmed by an outside source.
Tisiphone continued, “My sisters and I believe that rather than physically taking Persephone’s place in the land of the dead, Shara somehow managed to game the system, taking her place electronically and symbolically within the hardware of Necessity.”
“You don’t know for sure?” I asked.
Tisiphone shook her head and looked frustrated. “No. We
can’t
know until we get back into the system, and that”—she pointed at the soul lock—“is a big part of what’s keeping us from reaching her. We can’t get to our mother, and it’s absolutely maddening.”
As she said this last, the fires in her wings and hair leaped high, and her eyes grew bright with anger. Melchior shrank his projected self back to mouse size before diving into my pocket. If I’d had any sense at all I’d have been figuring out how to do something similar. Tisiphone might have a thing for me, but she was still a Fury, and I’d had an awful lot to do with the closing of the path to Necessity. Instead, I found myself drawn toward her—a moth to the flame. Or perhaps a Raven to risk?
I forced myself to hold both my ground and my tongue while I waited to see what she’d do next. It seemed a bad time to experiment with her ideas of personal space, and somehow I didn’t think that telling her she was beautiful when she was angry would be a good idea just then. Though she was.
She flexed her fingers and toes, revealing diamond-hard and diamond-bright claws, then started to idly dig furrows in the virtual ground with the latter. The look she turned my way was fierce and hungry, and her wings, furled till then, half opened. She stared predatorily at me for several seconds that felt very long indeed, then closed her eyes and visibly forced herself to relax. When the fires of her wings had dimmed again, she opened her eyes and grinned.
“On the plus side, I don’t hold a grudge. It’s a good thing your meddling with the Necessity gateway caught my attention rather than Megaera’s. She doesn’t much like you.”
“
Really?
I’d never have guessed that from the way she threatens my life or tries to kill me every time I see her. All this time I’d just thought it was her way of making nice with the neighbors.”
Now Tisiphone laughed. “Well, she does do that with everyone, but with
you
she means it.”
“Great,” murmured Melchior. “Love that.”
“You can’t really blame her,” said Tisiphone. “The number of targets who have escaped us over the years can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”
“I didn’t escape,” I said. “Necessity decided I had been framed and let me go.”
“That makes it worse in some ways,” said Tisiphone. “You’re all alone in that category, and Megaera feels it sets a bad precedent. But now, since I’ve brought it up and I am Necessity’s representative on the spot, what are you doing messing around with that?” She indicated the keyhole with her chin, and her voice took on a much more serious tone.
BOOK: Codespell
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