WebMage Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    Clotho is the easiest to face. She's the