Free Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page A

Eris’s mood and whim.

    Well, perhaps there was a loophole. That was the nature of what little divinity I possessed, finding the loophole in the stuff of reality—the elegant hack. Feeling my way into the Raven’s power over the faerie-ring network, my power, I reached for the circle I’d used before, the one absent from the current Castle Discord. Potentialities flashed through my awareness—rings that had existed, rings that would exist, rings that could exist—there! I touched the echo of a place that was no longer and pushed. Possible became probable became actual. Another ring joined the network, a part of me within it. I focused my attention and . . . stood within a ring of forget-me-nots in a greenhouse beneath a golden-apple sun. Castle Discord.

    I stepped out of the ring and went away.

    Discontinuity.

    “Hello, Raven.” Discord’s voice brought me back.

    The greenhouse flickered into being and was gone in the same instant. We stood now upon a bridge of glass over a river made up of the eternally changing stuff of Primal Chaos. That was my first impression. My second was of a glass tunnel suspended within that same river. One moment it seemed to be all around us, the next in one direction only. The only solid points of reference were a pair of large arched doors, one a hundred feet ahead, the other a hundred behind. Those, and the goddess herself. Well, sort of.

    Eris is a creature of change. Her hair and skin are gold or black . . . and both at the same time. Like taffeta, how she looks depends on how you look at her. Some things change less than others. She is always tall. She is always beautiful, though sometimes it is the unattainable perfection of a marble goddess and sometimes the pure lusty sexiness of a Kama Sutra angel. She is always, always dangerous.

    Today it appeared that she had decided to spare me the come-hither that hurts—she is a virgin goddess and only turns on the carnality to create trouble. She was just under seven feet if you didn’t count the six-inch stiletto heels on the flimsy-looking sandals whose straps twined like golden black snakes around her feet and ankles, twisting and climbing up her bare calves to just below her knees. A short split skirt of something like silk clutched at the curves of her hips and thighs, shifting its colors at the slightest movement. Above she wore an equally clingy blouse. It was nearly transparent, and I could see . . .

    I swallowed and shook my head. Damn it! She was doing it to me again, more subtly this time, jacking up the sex appeal slowly as my eyes climbed upward.

    “Would you please stop that?” I asked, and only as I missed the harsh cawing undertone of my words did I realize I was no longer a literal raven. I had been transformed once again. “You’re quite terrifying. You know that, don’t you?”

    Eris laughed, and the sound was beautiful and terrible, like windows breaking in the city of the gods. The sex appeal blew away in the puff of wind that ruffled and opaqued her blouse at the same time it disarranged her hair. The marble goddess had arrived.

    “Oh, Raven, I do miss you when you aren’t around. But it’s your own fault. It wouldn’t be such fun if you didn’t fall for it every time.”

    “Don’t call me Raven.”

    “Whatever you say, Boss.” She mimicked Melchior perfectly, and I realized for the first time that I didn’t see him.

    “Where’s—”

    “In your bag,” she answered, “sleeping it off.”

    “Sleeping what off?” I demanded.

    “The chaos time.”

    “I don’t think I understand,” I said.

    “Don’t you?” The question was not a question, it was a challenge. Her tone said that the only reason I didn’t know the answer was that I was fooling myself somehow.

    “Tell me that again but look me in the eyes this time,” she said. “You haven’t yet. I think we both know why, and it’s not just because you so like looking at the rest of me.” She ran her hands down her