Mythos (11 page)

“You have something of the hero about you, which means you might even end up carried off to Valhalla, immortalized by my own Valkyries. And
that
would make you my problem until the end of days. I’d rather avoid the prospect as well as several other thorny possibilities if I can.” He sighed and looked more than a little resigned.

“Wait, if I die here, I might not go to Hades?” I pushed myself to my feet, feeling the memories of my recent transformation echoing on as phantom pain. “Maybe I should start looking for a condo.”

I didn’t want to die. Not at all, but if I could arrange things so that any death that might take me would put me beyond the reach of Hades—who of all my enemies hated me most—well, that would make dying a much less scary prospect.

“I wouldn’t hunt up a Realtor just yet,” said Odin, with the first faint echo of humor I’d heard from him. “It’s a complex question with no good way to guess the answer ahead of time. I’d make your odds of being drawn back to your own deadlands and their dark ruler between thirty and fifty percent.”

“That’s still better than the bet I’d get if I buy it on the home front. You mentioned some sort of Valhalla option, too—if I’m recalling rightly, that involves an eternity of drinking and feasting and wenching. I could be persuaded to that alternative.”

“Your memory serves you well, though you seem to have forgotten the fighting and dying, not to mention the pain of death and of rebirth.”

“So it’s not all fun and games; Hades intends to slow cook me until the end of time. I’m not seeing what you’d call a big downside to the whole Valhalla thing. Well, aside from the initial death part. I’d rather skip that entirely, all things considered.”

“That
would
be nice.” Odin smiled a sad smile, and I knew in that instant that, whatever rules the game followed back home, here the gods were mortal.

“There is very little you don’t know. . . .” I raised an eyebrow.

“Including the hour and manner of my death, yes. You are a clever little Raven. Perhaps I should have named you Intuition rather than Impulse.”

“Two sides of the same coin,” I said, “the action and its cause.”

“You may be right, though I little expected wisdom from you.” I grinned at this, and Odin shook his head. “Don’t make too much of it. I’m not looking to hire another Raven at this time. Nor a cock robin.”

“Ooh, he does have a sense of humor after all,” I said. Odin frowned and I mentally cursed my overactive tongue before continuing. “It’s probably better you didn’t call me up. So far, pretty much everyone I’ve ever worked for has ended up mad at me.”

“Why don’t I find that surprising? Come, walk with me.”

Who was I to argue? The part at the beginning about wishing he could just kill me now suggested this might be a good time to be as cooperative as possible. Together, we left the clearing and walked into the woods in silence. Somewhere in there Odin did something elaborate with the fabric of reality that included us taking several steps on a stripe of rainbow that rang hollowly beneath the heels of my motorcycle boots.

The woods grew darker, the trees greater, shifting from oak through pine to something that reminded me of California redwood but looked more like some sort of giant ash. It was hard to say because the branches were lost in the gloom above. We came around a particularly mighty trunk to face an open space the size of a cathedral and . . . How could I describe it? The king of all trees? Their god? The one true tree of which all others were only shadows?

It towered over us, impossibly tall, unbelievably wide, more like a topless tower of bark than anything living. Yet I had no doubt that it was alive and . . . somehow aware. At its base stood a wide stone basin fed by some hidden spring so that water poured eternally over the nearer edge, where it bathed one great root before flowing away into the darkness of the forest behind me.

“Yggdrasil,” said Odin. “The World Tree.”

I didn’t say anything. Somehow, “It’s nice,” sounded insufficient, and anything else seemed beyond me. We walked across the forest floor, our footsteps muffled to silence by the deep mold, until we stood on the edge of the basin. It was perhaps twenty feet across, and the water within was as clear as air. Only the faintest ripples on the surface betrayed its presence at all. Nine feet deep? Or ninety? Or even nine hundred? I couldn’t say, though I could see the bottom as well as if it were only nine inches and there, in a fold of the raw rock, lay . . .

“Is that
your
eye?” I asked.

“It is. I sacrificed it for a deeper sight.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” Or that I wanted to.

“Look at me.” It wasn’t a request, and I didn’t argue.

Odin opened his other eyelid and exposed the Void within. Until that very instant I had not understood that
nothing
could exert such power. Odin had created a divine vacuum, and all the knowledge in the universe had rushed to fill it. But it could never be full for it was zero made manifest, the Void.

“One of my many titles is Allfather,” said Odin. “But I might as easily be called the Nofather. I am both the one and the zero, Lord of Information, the Binary God.”

“Now ask him about the last ‘Binary God,’ ” said a voice from off to the left, a voice I knew too well.

“Atropos!” I whipped my gaze away from the water and found myself facing . . .

Here stood my many-times-great-aunt Atropos, the Fate who cuts the threads, who had once attempted to cut mine. Except, it wasn’t. The voice was identical. So were the eyes, the terrible
knowing
eyes of Fate. The flawless skin, the dark fall of hair. In every way she was the aunt who despised me and would have killed me if she could.

“I am and am not she whom you named,” she said, “oh, child of my sister’s house. Now ask the question I required of you.”

I met Fate’s eyes then. There’s no hint of human emotion in those depths. They hold the record of every single thing you’ve ever done or thought of doing. Every secret fear that lurks in the shadows of your heart, every petty jealousy, every noble ambition. It’s all visible there, just so much raw data to be weighed when Fate calculates your destiny. I held her gaze with my own, and I shook my head.

“Fate is neither my friend nor my master.” My words tasted hard and cold and bittersweet, fueled as they were by a deep and abiding anger at the wrongs done me by my family. “I have defied my own grandmother at the cost of my name and my house. I will not bend the knee to Fate ever again, not in any of her forms and though it cost me my life.”

“Interesting,” she said, “very.” Then she turned her gaze on Odin. “Answer the question.”

“Very well, Skuld. You saw that my eye was not all that lay in the water?” he asked me.

“You mean the head? It was kind of hard to miss, as it’s about three times normal size. So was the fact that it’s also short an eye. I was going to ask, but then Dame Fate arrived and precluded the question.”

“Say rather that I demanded it, and you’ll be closer to the truth,” said Skuld.

“To-may-to, to-mah-to . . .” I winked at Fate.

“The head belongs to Mimir,” said Odin, “the previous Lord of Memory and Information.”

“The first Binary God,” said Skuld. “The first leg of the triangle, just as Odin is the second, and the third is yet to come. Isn’t that right, Mimir?”

“The time is not yet,” said a sonorous voice from the depths of the well. “Nor should you be too proud of your foretelling, Skuld. Not all that is Fated is certain, and not all that is certain is Fated.”

Skuld didn’t so much as look at the well, keeping her eyes fixed on Odin. “The puppet may speak the words, but it is the puppeteer who shapes them. Is that not right, Father of All?”

“Sometimes, Skuld, if the puppet is no more than that. But you know as well as I that Mimir is infinitely more than a puppet, if less now than the god he once was.”

“If you think MimirSoft and MimirNet are anything more than a projection of your will, Odin, you are mistaken.”

“If I thought it, I might be. I don’t. I know it.” He opened his empty socket once again, and for several long moments the two of them locked gazes.

Finally, Skuld looked away. “Believe what you will, old man. Your time will come no matter how you fight it.”

“As will yours, my dear. As will yours.”

Skuld turned from Odin to me. “You are quite the bold little Raven. It must have galled my Greek sisters to have your thread moved from their hands to those of Necessity.” She shook her head then and laughed, sending ice crackling along my nerves. “I wonder if they can see even the shadows of your future anymore, or if the shame of it blinds them.”

“Frankly, I couldn’t care less.”

“You may tell yourself that all you like. You may even believe it. But it will be a lie. I know because I
can
see those shadows. You have within you the potential to become the Final Titan, Prometheus Unbound, Atlas Unburdened. Necessity holds your fate, yes, but you also hold hers, or you yet may. What will you do when the chance comes, I wonder? Make yourself Lord of Everything? Or laugh and turn away? Even I cannot say. Yes,
gall
is the word, and you are its very soul.”

Then, without another word, she turned and walked away, following the gentle curve of the World Tree until she passed from sight. Odin focused a hard eye on me.

“I really
should
kill you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“And the same reasons prevent me as earlier. I cannot read your future, and that means I cannot know what is the right thing to do with you. I only wish that sending you home were a less difficult task and that I could be sure of what that would mean for things to come.”

“You can send me home?” I couldn’t keep a bit of hope out of my voice.

My feelings on the matter were complex. There was a lot to be said for not getting anywhere near Hades ever again. At the same time, any thoughts I’d had about this being a radically better place had been soured by the appearance of my aunt’s doppelgänger and my knowledge that the head honcho would really prefer to see me dead, with only Hamlet’s reasons for not killing me yet—I’d rather not bet my life on someone else’s continued indecision.

“Let us rather say I can arrange your passage if you make it worth my while,” said Odin. “Come.”

He led the way along the tree in the opposite direction from the one Skuld had taken. Soon we came to a place where a root humped up from the ground to make a low arch. Set within was a stone door shaped like some ancient altar stolen from its plinth. It had no handles, hinges, or keyholes, but I had no doubt as to its purpose. Odin rapped once on the center of the stone with the butt of his spear, and it lowered itself into the tree’s base like a reverse drawbridge.

“After you,” said Odin.

The stone boomed hollowly as I stepped onto it, the noise echoing away into the deep but narrow gap it bridged.

“What’s down there?” I asked, as Odin followed me across.

“Listen.”

Very faint and far away in the depths I heard the sound of chewing, like a dog worrying an old bone.

“Wolf?” I asked, since there seemed to be rather a surplus of them in the local pantheoverse.

“Dragon. Turn left.”

I ducked through a low wooden archway into what appeared to be a theme park for computer bureaucrats, that or the world’s ugliest server farm. Rack after rack of beige boxes extended in a series of identical rows across the living wood of the floor, eventually vanishing into the harsh fluorescent-lit distance.

“And this is . . . ?” I let my words trail off because I simply couldn’t think of anything more to say. How this place could exist in the same universe as Loki’s sexy little portable was beyond me.

“The heart of MimirNet,” said Odin, and I could hear pride in his voice. “Ten thousand state-of-the-art boxes running OS Panorama, the system that controls the universe.”

“How very . . . scenic.”

Odin gave me another hard look as he led me between the rows. “You’ve seen better?”

Had I seen better? I thought of Necessity and the stark black servers she used to keep track of the fates of the gods—slices of faux ebony, with only the deep purple and red of their telltales betraying them as something made rather than grown. Or Eris’s system-wide Library of Alexandria case mods with each multicore computer disguised as a Greek scroll. For that matter—on a more personal level—Melchior’s subnotebook shape with the etched goblin head on the top that allowed his OLED monitor to be read
through
his casing was pretty spiffy. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that would be a good direction to take here, especially not when I wanted to hear more about MimirNet, which looked to be the local equivalent of the mweb. I very politely shook my head.

“Not really, no. Ten thousand machines? That’s got to be a royal pain to administer.”

“You’d be surprised. MimirSoft is really good at external management. There’s not a single computer here, or anywhere else on the net for that matter, that I can’t remotely operate in every detail.”

“Anywhere?”

“Sure, say Tyr’s system goes down.”

The hand in my breast pocket twitched at the name, and I coughed and thumped my chest in response.

“Go on,” I said a moment later.

“Well, all I have to do is open it up from here and I can do anything that needs doing. Replace a corrupt file. Revert him to an earlier backup. Even scrub his machine and reinstall from scratch. I have total control of every single box running the MimirSoft OS. It’s an IT department’s dream.”

And a user’s nightmare,
I thought but didn’t say. “It sounds like it.” On the other hand, it meant that once I hacked into the control system, I’d own the whole shebang. “But what about security?”

“Bulletproof. You can’t even reach MimirNet without installing one of our networking cards, and the encryption is built right into the chipset. It can’t be cracked.”