“Yeah,” said Melchior. “Listen to the lady. She knows whereof she speaks.” He looked physically shaken.

I shrugged. “Too late to do anything about it now. Besides, what else would you expect?”

The two of them had been despairing of my common sense for years, and at least in this case, they were probably right. The Titans, my ancestors, had created themselves from the pure stuff of Primal Chaos—the driving force of all magic—by the sheer power of their own demiurge. Though thinned by the many generations that lay between, my own blood still carried that chaos within it. An oath sworn on it carried all the force of divine law.

If I broke my word now, the Furies would come down on me like the world on Atlas’s shoulders. Not that it really mattered. If I blew this one, I’d be stuck on the wrong side of the Styx, and there’s really not all that much that even the sisters of vengeance can do to a dead man. Which is not to say the oath was an empty one.

I had a plan, or half of one at least, but I knew I’d keep finding excuses not to try it if I didn’t do something to stiffen my spine. Basically, I was scared three-quarters of the way to death at the prospect of breaking into Hades, and the oath was the only thing I could think of that would force me to act despite the terror.

At least that’s what I tried to tell myself. But Melchior was right; there was something more than a little bit crazy about that oath. I’ve always been a daredevil, but lately I’d found myself pushing the edges harder and harder, as if something were driving me to ever-greater heights of risk taking. My fight with Fate had changed me in ways I didn’t completely understand.

“He’s at it again,” said Melchior, rolling his eyes until they came to rest on me with a glare. “I suppose you expect me to come along on this little jaunt and bail you out.”

“Volunteers only,” I replied.

“You know I hate it when you make me make decisions,” said Melchior.

“Ain’t free will a bitch?” I replied.

He sighed. “Shara’s my friend, too, and more than that. I guess I’m stuck.” A grim smile exposed his fangs. “I suppose that, on the upside, I’ll have the rest of eternity to say ‘I told you so’ after we get killed.”

Cerice watched the interplay with a sad smile. “Same old, same old,” she said. Then she gave me a quick hug and kiss. “You’re an idiot. You know that, don’t you?” I nodded. “But you’re my idiot, I suppose. My dark bird.”

I frowned at that. “You know how I feel about the whole Raven thing.”

“I also know that Clotho does nothing without reason. Whether you choose to wear the name or not, you own it.” She canted her head to one side. “More importantly, it owns you. Names have power, Ravirn. You need to at least understand what Clotho’s given you before you can safely put it aside.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, though not because I agreed with her. I just didn’t want to start a fight with the woman I loved on what might be my last day among the living. Especially since I hadn’t yet gotten her to admit she loved me back.

“Don’t agree with me just to make me happy,” said Cerice. “It doesn’t work that way.” Before I could answer, she put a finger on my lips. “Ravirn, no one living is closer to my heart than you are. You matter to me, and I respect your opinion, even on occasions like this one, when you’re wrong.” She smiled to take the sting out of her words. “But we’ll save that discussion for another time. For now, let me just thank you for rescuing Shara.”

“You sound awfully sure of my success in spite of the odds. If you’re not careful, my head’ll swell.”

“I doubt it,” she said, stepping in very close and touching my cheek. “If it gets any bigger, it’ll burst.”

“Amen,” said Melchior from somewhere down around my knees.

“Unkind,” said Cerice. Then she winked at him.

I had to smile. She and Melchior were all that was left of my old life, and I loved them and loved that they weren’t letting the possibility of my death and dismemberment make them go all maudlin. I hate maudlin. When it’s a choice of laugh or cry, I’ll take laughter every time and no matter the cost. I rubbed Melchior’s bald blue head for luck, then gave Cerice a very thorough kiss.

“I’d better get going,” I said when I came up for air. “I need to make some serious preparations. I have less faith in the certainty of my success than you do.” There were things I’d need back at the apartment, Shara’s mortal shell high on the list.

As I started for the door, Cerice caught me and gave me another kiss.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Just in case.”

“I thought you were certain I’d succeed.”

“I am. You’ll fulfill your oath.”

“So what the problem?”

“You didn’t promise that you’d come back,” said Cerice, and there were tears in her tired eyes. “I do sometimes wish you’d learn to count the cost. Try not to get yourself killed, all right?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, holding my hands up like two scales on a balance. “Get myself killed or come home triumphant to the grateful arms of the most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy. Tough call, that.”

No. I didn’t believe me either. I hoped I’d come back, but . . . let’s just say I’d phrased my oath the way I had for a reason.

My high-intensity dive flashlight penetrated about the length of one arm. Unfortunately, it was Melchior’s arm. If I pointed the beam down the length of my body, I couldn’t even see my weight belt. Combine that with the fact that my wrist compass kept spinning in circles because the underworld wasn’t exactly governed by the same rules as everywhere else, and I had major problems. I kicked slowly, trying to hold myself still relative to the water flow.

How come this kind of shit never happened in the movies? Bond always seemed to have crystal-clear water and fifty-foot visibility. Of course, a real dive in zero vis would be about as much fun on film as shoving the camera into a mudbank and letting it roll. I sighed through my regulator, letting off a trail of bubbles. In the current of the thick black not-quite-water, they slid slowly up and to my left. I turned my head in that direction and blew a bunch more bubbles. This time they moved directly away from me as they rose. I realized I could use them to tell the direction of the current and up from down. It might not make for pinpoint navigation, but it should get me across the river.

When the barge returned, it was carrying four crisp-looking Russian Spetsnaz carrying AK-47s and about two dozen Japanese tourists who didn’t seem to have a real solid grasp of their situation—they were taking pictures and talking excitedly among themselves. I pulled myself up on the dock and, inasmuch as it was possible, blended in with the group headed for the gate.

A series of velvet ropes stood to one side to allow the area in front of the gates to be divided into a zigzag queue for high traffic. At the moment, it was a straight shot from the ferry to the place where a couple of obviously bored dead souls in Hades Security Administration uniforms were standing by something very like a metal detector. I was a little worried about that until the heavily armed Spetsnaz got through without the HSA boys so much as blinking their huge and vacant eyes.

When my turn came, I made sure Cerberus wasn’t about to make an appearance, then boldly stepped through. The alarm went off like a harpy with its tail caught in a blender. The security detail stopped looking bored and started looking like the damned souls they were.

I yelped and started to run.

I say started because I didn’t really understand what running meant until I heard the dreadful hungry baying of the oldest and most dangerous hound ever born. Cerberus was coming. I had thirty feet to cover from checkpoint to open gate. He had a half mile or more. The hot breath on my neck as I crossed the last yard was my only warning. I dived forward. If he’d really wanted to, he could have had me then. But those mighty jaws closed on air instead of me, and the pile-driver force of his striking head tossed me through the gate.

I landed hard, even by demigod standards, and emptied my lungs in a great whoosh. Why do I always end up taking on entities higher up the ladder of divinity than myself? Just once I’d like to go toe-to-toe with somebody from a lower weight class. It took me a good minute to get up the will to stand and another after that actually to manage the job. I was just glad to find that my bad knee hadn’t taken too much of the impact. It was much better than it used to be—witness my sprint—but it still occasionally went out if I misused it.

When I looked back, all I could see was bristling hellhound. He filled the gate from top to bottom and edge to edge, or a bit more than that on the sides. He’d really have to squeeze if he wanted to get through. By looking between his big, bowed legs, I could see that the security checkpoint had been reduced to kindling in his charge.

“We told you not to try it,” said the three heads in that one terrible voice. “We told you; you aren’t Orpheus. But you wouldn’t listen. Go on. Find the one you came for, but remember that we’ll be here when you come back.”

He settled down to wait, his eyes a poignant mix of angry and woeful, and I realized I’d just kicked a dog. I felt like a world-class heel.

“Good-bye for now.” Mort shook his great head. “See you in a bit.”

“We’ll have to kill you.” Bob sounded almost tearful. “But after that you can still play bridge with us, at least until you drink Lethe’s waters of forgetfulness.”

“You won’t make it past us again,” said Dave. But then he smiled a sad/friendly smile. “No one but Orpheus has. Still, I wouldn’t eat any pomegranates if I were you. Now, move before the boss shows up. We’ll only kill you on the way out. Hades will kill you anywhere. Get out of here, Raven.”

It was a slap in the face, and it stung, but I figured I’d earned it. I got going without another word. The underworld is a bit like a subway station with the trains all permanently delayed. Lots of bored and grumpy people sitting around doing nothing, forever. But there is a way out. All you have to do is let the Lethe wash your memories away. Then they send your blank soul back for another go-round in a fresh body. Hades may be the personification of death, but he’s also big on recycling.

Once I felt sure Hades wasn’t going to take a personal interest in me, I found a quiet corner and pulled my laptop out of the freezer bags I’d used to keep him dry. Run Melchior. Please.

“Kind of reminds me of the 149th Street station in the Bronx,” he said once he assumed his webgoblin shape. “But the view is better, and it doesn’t feel quite so hopeless.”

“I thought 51st and Lexington in Midtown,” I said.

“It’s not that bad,” he replied with a wink. “Mind you, I wouldn’t want to winter here every year the way Persephone does.”

“Yeah. Remind me not to join Hades’ fruit-of-the-month club.”

I might make light of the situation, but it really was that bad. In fact, it was much, much worse. Hades is the land of the dead. I’d always known that, but you can’t really understand what it means until you’re there. Life is something we all take for granted at a very deep level. Oh, not in the sense of never questioning our mortality or anything like that, but rather that it surrounds us all the time.

Biologists will tell you that no matter where you go, you’re surrounded by living things. Even in the deepest, darkest caves and basements, you’ll find spores, molds, tiny plants, bugs. You can find bacteria at the bottom of the ocean, or inside of stones, or in near-boiling water. There is no place completely devoid of life. No place, that is, except Hades. Here there are souls, but not a single living creature other than Hades himself and, for a few months a year, Persephone. You can feel it in your bones and your blood. In every breath that you draw there. The absence of life is a palpable thing.

I had never realized until that moment that we all carry a sort of sense of life within us, a deep psychic connection to the biosphere around us. We may not see the web of life, or be aware of it in any conscious way, but when it’s gone, it’s as obvious as if the sun had blinked out. A darkness of anima as scary as any loss of light.

I found myself shivering, and not from cold. “We need to find Shara and get out of here.”

Did we ever! The so-very-alive Shara would be beyond suffering here. It was a good thing Cerice couldn’t know how Hades really felt. She was almost around the bend from grief and stress as it was.

“I’ll work on the Shara problem if you’ll cover our exit,” said Melchior.

“Actually, I have an idea or two on the subject,” I said.

Cerberus himself had given me the hint, though he was right about my not being another Orpheus. I couldn’t carry a tune in an amphora, but there was more than one way to fleece the golden sheep. Melchior gave me a questioning look, but I didn’t elaborate. I wasn’t sure any of it would work, and besides, why ruin my reputation for poor planning? With a sigh, he started making electronic blood-hound noises.

I held my breath. Hades’ internal system is totally disconnected from the mweb—no way in, no way out—and I hadn’t been able to find out anything about it. That had been one of the factors that prevented me from getting here sooner. What if he was as much of a technophobe as Apollo? The chariot of the sun was still run on B.C. technology—Before Computers, that is. But a few moments after he started searching, Melchior tapped into hades.net.

The system was like WiFi on speed, totally wireless and blazing fast but very short-range. There were dampers set up all around the perimeter of the underworld so no wardriving hacker on the outside could cop free access. Hades also believed in firewalls—the kind that came with brimstone—and security by sneaker-net.

The sole connection from the mweb to the underworld was a hardwired link to the desktop machine in Hades’ office, and it had zero cross-connects to the intranet that ran the show down here. It also had weird access parameters that completely blocked outgoing locus transfers. That meant hacking and gating from the outside would only buy you a one-way ticket to invade Hades’ personal space, a bad idea of Iliadic proportions. Even if you managed to slide a little hack into his machine and gated in undetected, the only way to move a program on from there to where the preowned souls were processed was to have it loaded onto a disk and physically carried to one of the hades.net servers. Then, just as in my current situation, you had to get it back out. Very serious ugliness.

Working from the inside, however, his intranet security was cake. It took Melchior about fifteen seconds to pop a hole into the command line, and from there we owned the soul-tracking software. I opened a terminal shell and ordered up a real-time lock on the current location of entry #99691046-Sh, better known as Shara. Once we had that, an in-system gate took care of getting us all together in the same meatspace. We found her sitting on a cliff edge overlooking the Lethe.

“You don’t look so hot,” whispered Melchior, as we came up behind her.

He was right. Shara, normally a bright lipstick purple in either of her shapes, had faded to a sort of lilac-tinted white. She barely even blinked at our arrival. I could have cried.

“It’s kind of hard to maintain a tan down here, big boy,” she answered, pointing at the sunless, starless cavern roof above. “Land of twilight and all that.” Her webgoblin form and mannerisms had been modeled on the late, great Mae West, but they, too, seemed to have faded. The land of death was slowly converting her into a lost soul. “You’ll go the same way soon enough.”

“Actually,” I said, “we weren’t planning on staying.”

“Nobody ever does.” She looked sadly at Melchior. “He finally got you killed, huh? I always knew it would happen. At least he didn’t manage to do the same for Cerice.” A look of terrible pain crossed her face, all too similar to the ones I’d seen on Cerice when she thought I wasn’t looking. “I miss her so. Every time I think of her, I start wondering if I shouldn’t take a walk off the Lethe pier. I don’t want to forget her, but it hurts to remember.”

“She sure hasn’t forgotten you,” I said. “That’s why we’re here, to get you out.”

“Right.”

“No, really,” said Melchior. “We’re not dead . . . at least not yet.”

Shara looked dubious.

“He’s telling the truth,” I said. “Look.” I unzipped my bag and pulled out a freezer-bagged bundle. Inside was the purple clamshell that normally housed Shara’s soul. I opened it wide and set it on the ground. The blank screen looked like a bottomless hole. “Hop in.”

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Yes, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead serious.”

Shara reached out to touch the surface of her former self, then pulled back abruptly. She looked simultaneously fascinated and disturbed.

“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” she said, leaning over as if trying to see her reflection in the depths of the dead monitor.

“I am,” said Melchior.

He placed both hands on her butt and shoved. She tipped forward and smacked headfirst into the black rectangle with an audible thunk.

“Huh,” he said. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

“I should hope not.” Shara rubbed her forehead. “What did you expect?”

“It should have been like falling into a hole,” said Melchior. “Hang on a second.” He licked a fingertip and reached for Shara’s ear, then stopped. “Is this all right?”

Shara nodded. “I’d make a joke about there being better ports for you to try, but I’m just not up to it.”

I winced. If Shara really wasn’t feeling up to innuendo, she was a seriously hurting unit. Melchior stuck his finger in Shara’s ear and whistled a short spell protocol. After a few moments, he pulled back, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Well?” I asked.

“Problem. Big problem. She’s been recompiled into a noncompliant format. We’ve got about thirty-six hours to get her back to Cerice, and she’s not currently compatible with her own hardware.”

I blinked. That was unexpected and very bad. “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

“Why in Hades’ name . . . ?” Somehow that seemed an inappropriate oath at the moment.

“Who knows?” said Melchior. “Mysteries of death and all that. Maybe Hades’ server does an automatic recompile as it processes incoming souls.”

“You guys really are here to get me out, aren’t you?” Shara blinked and rubbed her eyes like someone waking from a long sleep. “Alive and in the flesh?”

“Of course,” agreed Melchior. “You don’t think we’d let a little thing like death get in our way, do you?”

She shook her head. “Sweet. Icarus-grade stupid, but sweet nonetheless. Thanks!” She smiled for the first time since we’d arrived and gave Melchior a hug, then held her arms out to me. I scooped her up and gave her two, one from me, one from Cerice.

“Sorry we’re late,” I said.

“No problem,” she answered. “It’s not like I’ve had a lot to do. What’s the plan for getting out?”

“It’s not a plan so much as an outline,” I said, “with plenty of room for improvisation. Unfortunately, we’ve got a deadline.” I quickly sketched out the conditions of my oath.

“I should be appalled,” said Shara, “but somehow, I’m not even surprised. Why do you suppose that is?”

Melchior held up a hand in the classic pick-me pose. “Is it because Ravirn and planning go together like satyrs and celibacy pledges?”

“That’d be it,” said Shara with a sigh. “All right then, so what’s the outline?”

“Well, version 1.0 sort of went out the window when you didn’t go back into your mortal shell,” I said. “So, we’re going to 1.1.”

“Which is?”

“I’m working on it.”

She sighed again. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, right?” I nodded. “Goody. Do you just want to invite the Goddess of Discord to the party now? Or do we have to pretend this has some hope of ending well?”

“Hey,” I said. “It won’t get that bad. I promise.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course not.”

“Oh, I’m not saying things aren’t going to get sticky, but I’m just not in Eris’s league. If the ability to mess things up were a boat, I’d be a canoe to Eris’s Titanic.”

“Why don’t I find that reassuring?” asked Shara.

“Maybe because you’ve seen what happens when someone stands up in a canoe?” said Melchior.

I decided it was time to cut the pick-on-Ravirn session short. It was nothing personal, of course. I could easily hold my own in a battle of wits with a couple of webgoblins. It’s just that I’d had a fresh idea for what to do next. Really.

“Hush,” I said as I scrolled down the screen. “I know what I’m doing.”

Truth be told, I didn’t like being “here” either. After I’d told Mel where I wanted to go, he’d gated us directly into an office where any sybaritically inclined CEO would have felt at home. Lush carpet. Imposing desk. Pricey art. Expensive chair. Honking-big plasma-screen monitor. Of course it all had that same grayed-out quality as the landscape, but cutting a few artistic corners seemed an inevitable consequence of running the underworld.

So it wasn’t that I had anything against the office itself—and Hades’ big leather chair was one of the most comfortable I’d ever sat in—I just didn’t want be there when he got back. Unfortunately, if you want to read the God of Death’s e-mail, you have to go to the source. That meant the desktop computer in Hades’ office, the one that had the only link of any kind to the outside in the entire underworld.

Typing fast, I pulled up Hades’ e-mail client. It gave me a password prompt. Now, if only he was as unimaginative and technolazy as his brother Zeus . . .

I’d done a little troubleshooting for the big guy once. While he had godly power practically oozing out of his pores, you had to suspect that his wits had followed his wisdom when Athena popped out of his forehead fully formed.

I entered, Hades123.

Access granted. I let out a sigh, then almost swallowed my tongue when I heard a faint noise from beyond the office door, as of someone pausing there, then walking past. I really wanted to get away, but we had to get Shara back to Cerice ASAP if I wanted to keep my oath. That meant finding out what had been done to her. Forcing myself to concentrate on the screen, I checked out the client software. Then I started swearing.

I’d been spoiled growing up in the Houses of Fate. My umpteen-times-great-grandmother Lachesis is the Fate who measures the threads for Atropos to cut. Control freak doesn’t begin to describe her personality. Neither does anal-retentive. She doesn’t just want everything in its place. She insists that it like it there.

I’m about as sloppy a child of Fate as ever lived, but every e-mail I’ve ever received is neatly filed away in an appropriate folder for archival purposes. Some of them are even duplicated in multiple folders since they fit into more than one category. Cerice is the same way. It’s our upbringing, and the source is more organized yet. Lachesis even archives her spam.

Hades was a whole different story. He didn’t so much as have folders, just an in-box with about 300 messages, half unopened. Apparently anything that didn’t have immediate importance went into the trash, where I found 23,897 messages, again about half unopened. After a few minutes I realized his search functions were shit, too, and that I’d have to code my own e-mail sorting script. It’s amazing how fast a man with nine fingertips can type when he’s got the right motivation.

More precious minutes ticked past, and I kept thinking that if Hades were a better record keeper, we’d have been in and out by now. As it was, I still had to look at 163 messages that might possibly contain the info I needed. I was able to discard some quickly, things with headers like “Smite 500 Percent More” and “Totally Nude Nymphs.”

That got me down to fifty or so I actually had to open and skim. Forty. Thirty. Twenty-five. Twenty. I was sweating. What if the info I needed wasn’t here? Ten. Still no luck. The next one claimed to be from Persephone@gaia.net. It was six months old, from before Shara’s arrival, the date stamp was 10 July OST (Olympus Standard Time). I wanted to skip it, but my script had selected it as containing at least a couple of my search terms. I double-clicked.

It opened, Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . .

I reached for the closing keys, then froze as heat seemed to shimmer above the surface of the screen, opening an instant-messaging box in the thin air between me and the monitor. Hello, little hacker, read the IM, or would you prefer that I called you Raven?