Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page A

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