Free Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page B

sides suggestively, and for an instant the sex appeal was back. “Come on, you know you don’t want to.”

    This challenge I understood, and I had to answer it or lose face, to say nothing of self-respect, so I forced myself to look into Discord’s eyes. Of course, I saw myself looking back. The chaos that had devoured my pupils owns all of Discord’s eyes. It had scared me when mine were still black slits. Now, it was utterly terrifying. They say the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and in meeting hers I was forced to acknowledge my own recent soul-deep transformation.

    “Better,” she said, and smiled. “Much better.”

    “It hurts,” I answered. It did. “In so very many ways.” Not the least of which was the sudden deeper understanding of all that had come between me and Cerice.

    For an instant a look of something very like sympathy flickered across her face. But it came and went too fast for me really to tell, and the look that replaced it was more than a little smug.

    “Pain is how you can tell you’re alive. If you wake up some morning and nothing hurts, it means you’re dead. And then you go to Hades.”

    “It’s funny,” I said. “I don’t understand why you don’t get more dinner invitations.”

    “It’s because my eyes glow in the dark,” she replied.

    I sighed and lifted my hands in surrender. Fencing with Eris, whether physically or verbally, is a losing proposition. She always plays for blood and nearly always gets it.

    “Chaos time?” I asked, trying to change the subject back to what had happened with Melchior.

    “When you transported yourself here.”

    “You lost me.”

    “Castle Discord is not a place,” said Eris.

    “I know that. It’s a Greatspell of some sort, a permanent piece of magic surrounded by the stuff of chaos.” I gestured at the churn flowing around the glass tunnel.

    Castle Discord is off the net, way off, floating completely alone in the place between the worlds. It is not attached to any DecLocus and has no world resource locator fork.

    She nodded. “That, too, but I meant something else in this case. When you enter a faerie ring, you enter all faerie rings. You know that, right?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Do you know why?”

    “I—” It had never occurred to me to think about it. “No.”

    She pointed through the wall. “That out there is the very stuff of randomness. Potentially it can become anything at all, even a god.”

    “The Titans,” I supplied.

    “Exactly. They self-organized from chaos, created structure from its antithesis. They are hybrid beings, chaos arranged by will into the illusion of order.”

    “It’s an awfully solid sort of illusion. You, me, all of us in the pantheon are their children. Wars have been fought between the generations. Are you saying we’re all illusions, too?”

    “Yes and no. The Titanomachy was real enough. Most of the children of the Titans are creatures of order, whatever their actual allegiance. Zeus is no illusion, not physically. Nor is Tartarus, where he imprisoned the Titans after the war. Neither are the Fates, for that matter. There is much that is real in the pantheosphere. You, however, are not. No more than I am.”

    My stomach did a backflip with a triple twist and failed to stick the landing. I felt sweat break out on my forehead. I couldn’t possibly be an illusion. For one thing, no illusion would feel so queasy.

    “That’s crazy,” I said.

    “A few weeks ago, you broke down the wall between the Primal Chaos and Hades, let the stuff out there”—she pointed through the glass once again—“into the realm of order, into the land of the dead. Chaos devours everything it touches. It devoured you, rendered your body back into the stuff of potentiality. And yet here you stand.”

    “That doesn’t mean—”

    “Don’t be a fool. When you entered the faerie ring on your way here, you wore the body of a giant raven.” She spread her arms and they became great black