The near bank of the Styx is rocky and dark, a black stone beach under eternal twilight. I’ve never been entirely certain whether it is actually in a cave under Olympus, or just in a pocket reality anchored to the mountain of the gods. There’s little in the way of living vegetation on the near shore, and what there is has thorns and spines. If it doesn’t stick you, cut you, or try to poison you, it isn’t native. The black waters flow by in unnatural silence, so the huge splash that ended the baying was all the clearer.

Soon I could see the great vee made by Cerberus’s mighty chest cutting the water as he swam to meet me. His eyes glowed a baleful red as he glared in my direction. That was new, and the hairs on the back of my neck danced in response. Still, I held my ground. Part of that was bravado, part stubbornness, and part pure calculation.

The river marked the ultimate border of Hades’ domain. He held sway over the ground from its far side to the physical borders of the underworld and was absolute ruler within the latter’s walls. But here, I stood on Zeus’s territory. I didn’t believe Hades was fool enough to lightly order one of the children of the Titans murdered in his brother’s fiefdom.

Whether Cerberus might kill me without his master’s sanction made for an iffier question. After our last meeting at the gate, I was inclined to believe he wouldn’t just tear me to shreds. Shaking muddy river water all over me, however, turned out to be fair game, a fact I found out after he bounded up the hill to meet me.

As soon as I’d scraped enough of the foul stuff out of my eyes to see again, I gave Cerberus a slight bow. “Nicely splashed. I take it then that you’re not just going to bite my head off?”

“How do you figure that?” asked Bob, an edge of anger clear in his voice.

“I suppose I could be wrong,” I said, “but you never struck me as a big fan of muck-blackened cuisine.”

“Point,” said Mort, sounding much calmer than Bob.

“Not bad,” agreed Dave, clearly amused, “but what if we just didn’t think of it? What if our poor little doggy brains don’t plan things out that well?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Poor little doggy brains? Nice try, Dave, but I’m not buying it. You’ve got about as much in common with a normal dog as I do with a sparrow.”

“That might be more than you think, Raven,” said Mort. “There are certain habits of thought and behaviors that we share with our mortal kin.”

“Like an irrational attachment to our two-legged friends,” Bob said, giving Dave a sour look.

“Look,” began Dave, his voice hot, “just because I like Raven and take my duties to our mistress more seriously than you do—”

“That bitch hates Hades,” snarled Bob. “I’ve never liked her. From the day he brought her home, she’s caused nothing but trouble. We owe her nothing! Nothing. I wish she’d go away and never come back, that her mother would just keep her.”

“Jealous much?” Dave sneered.

“Of Persephone?” howled Bob. “That’s a joke, right?”

“If the collar fits . . .” said Dave.

Bob growled low in his throat and Dave snapped at him contemptuously. Seconds later both heads were barking and snarling at each other.

Meanwhile, Mort had moved as far away from the other two heads as he could. “At least I’m not between them,” he said to me in a quiet aside. “Sometimes I wish I could take a couple of weeks off from pack life and play only dog.” The barking cut off abruptly as Dave and Bob locked jaws, straining against each other.

Mort shook his head. “Bob never learns.”

“Learns what?” I asked.

“That he’s not as strong as Dave, that he always loses arguments, that he’s never going to be alpha. Take your pick.” Bob began to whine then. “Whatever you might think about our relative dogginess, our shape makes a difference. And so does our name.”

“Subtle you aren’t,” I said, and it was my turn to sound sour. “If you think so much of this whole Raven thing, why don’t you just tell me about it?”

“Is that a sign of curiosity at last?” asked Mort. “Are you actually starting to wonder about who you are?”

“I know who I am,” I said. “I’m Ravirn, no matter what the Fates say. On the other hand, I have to admit that I’m beginning to wonder what I am. Or what others see in me. So, are you going to tell me anything? Or are you just going to stand there looking smug because I finally asked?”

“Asked what?” said Dave, who’d finally let loose of Bob.

“Who he is,” said Mort.

“What I am,” I corrected.

“A filthy little prison breaker,” said Bob, who went silent a moment later when Dave turned a dark eye on him.

“It’s about time you asked that question,” said Dave. “I just wish I knew the answer.”

“What?” I demanded. “All this time, the three of you have been giving me shit about this Raven business, and you don’t know what it means either?”

Dave looked sheepish. “What it means, no. That it’s important, yes. You don’t smell like a child of Fate anymore.”

“What?” I was surprised by that.

“We’ve met more than a few of Fate’s children,” said Mort. “You don’t die easy, but you can be killed.”

“I know that,” I said quietly. “I’ve sent two of my cousins across the Styx myself, though I’m not proud of it.”

“Moric,” said Dave, “and his uncle’s son, Laric.”

“Exactly,” said Mort. “Though you may not be able to smell it, there is a scent associated with those who come from the three houses of Fate. You don’t smell like that.”

I was frankly fascinated. “What do I smell like?”

“A raven,” said Dave.

“And Discord,” said Bob, still sounding angry.

“Say elemental Primal Chaos, and you’d be closer to the truth,” corrected Mort.

“Chaos?” I asked. “Don’t we all smell of chaos? It runs in the blood we inherited from the Titans, yours as well as mine.”

“This is different,” said Mort. “The Primal Chaos in our veins is fixed. The Primal Chaos that wraps you like an invisible cloak is the raw wild stuff that churns between the worlds.”

“What did Clotho do to me?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Dave. “I really don’t. But the spinner spun Eris’s thread as surely as she did those of Atropos and Lachesis. She is the author of order and disorder both, and her motives are not always the same as those of her sisters. If you really want that question answered, you’ll have to ask it of Clotho.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got to go now.”

My brain felt like someone had stuck a stick blender in my ear and hit the on button. I simply couldn’t process the Raven stuff. To say nothing of the implications of Dave and Bob’s tiff and what they’d had to say about Hades and Persephone. Even more disturbing was how they’d said it. I started to walk away, then stopped and turned back.

“I almost forgot why I came today. I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble with my visit last week. I took advantage of our friendship, and that’s not nice. You don’t have to forgive me—I don’t regret the deed—but I owed you an apology.”

“Forgiven,” said Dave, with a smile.

“Forgotten,” said Mort.

“Fat chance,” snarled Bob.

It wasn’t until I’d moved a little way off and gotten Melchior out of my bag for the return trip that I thought to wonder where Kira was. Since she appeared a few seconds later, it was a brief concern.

“Yer likes ter live dangerously, don’t yer,” she said as she flew up.

“Think of the devil,” I said.

“And I’m yer reward,” said Kira. “When do yer think yer could do that jack job for me?”

“Like I said, drop on by. I’ll make time. Oh, and hang on.” I dug around in my bag for a moment and pulled out a plastic sack. “I got these for you as a temporary jury-rig.” Inside were three sets of earbuds and two stereo minijack Y-splitters.

“Thanks!” she said, flying in close to take them, then backing off and hovering.

There was something about her body language that suggested she had more to say, so I waited quietly. After a minute or so, she looked at her feet.

“Yer heard that bit about Persephone,” she mumbled.

“I did.”

“And Hades?”

I nodded. “It sounds like there’s some conflict in the kennel on the subject.”

“Aye,” she said. “There is that. It don’t seem right ter talk about my boss, but I owe yer a couple, so I’ll say this. Dave’s heart belongs to Persephone. Mort’s his own master. But Bob is Hades’ dog to the core. More to the point, so’s Cerberus. That hound’s more complex than he looks. He’s bound to obey the letter of his master’s orders, but his heads is pretty good at interpreting things to suit their fancies given half a chance. Yer won’t get that chance if you cross the river again. Dave’s yer friend. Mort, too. But Cerberus has orders to see you dead, and he’s with Bob on this one. Be careful.”

“I will; and Kira, thanks for the warning.”

“Yer welcome. I’d best be going now before they miss me.” She flitted away.

With a sigh, I pulled Melchior out of my bag and set him on a rock. As I reached to flip his lid up, he changed back into his goblin form.

“I thought you didn’t like it here,” I said.

“I don’t. I really don’t, but I wanted to make sure you were really listening to Kira, and it’s easier to read your expression with eyeballs than CCDs.”

“Is it also more satisfying to say ‘I told you so’ in the flesh?”

“What do you mean by that?” His face was the picture of innocence.

“Oh, just get it over with. You and Cerice and everybody else were right about me needing to make sense of Clotho’s gift. I was wrong. Even I can see that now.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with reeking of Primal Chaos, would it?”

“No one used the word reek, but yeah, that pretty much nailed it for me. Oh, and while I’m on the subject of eating crow and other dark birds, I was an asshole earlier about asking for a gate. I’m sorry.”

“Really? Are you going to tell me it won’t happen again?”

“No. It’ll happen again. I’ll just have to apologize again when it does.”

“At least you’re honest about it. Apology accepted, though I reserve the right to tell you to stick it in your ear next time.”

“Deal,” I said. “Now, how about you open up a gate so I can go home and make my third major mea culpa of the day?”

“You think you’re going to even things out with Cerice with a single apology? Aren’t you just the demigod of optimism.” He got busy with some chalk and string, creating a temporary hexagram.

“Connecting to prime.minus0208,” he said once he was done. A very long pause followed, then, “LTP error, client has encountered bad data from the server.”

That was a new one on me. I’d never gotten an error message on a locus transfer protocol link before. But Melchior was continuing, and I didn’t have the chance to ask him about it.

“Automatically rerouting connection request to alternate server. Waiting for response.” There was another pause, briefer this time. “Connected. Initiating Gate procedure.” The hexagram slowly filled with light.

As I waited for it to finish, I knelt beside Melchior. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know.” Melchior looked more than a little distressed. “The mweb is . . . I don’t know, I’ve never felt anything quite like it. I didn’t even know I had an LTP error menu until I accessed it. It must be something the Fates built into the webgoblin firmware specs.” He gave a little shudder. “I wonder whether there are any other surprises lurking down in the depths of my code.”

By then the gate was complete, so we stepped into the light. And dropped. I felt like I’d landed in a particularly wild waterslide. I shouldn’t have felt anything at all, not as a stream of ones and zeros passing along an mweb channel. I shouldn’t have felt anything, and I shouldn’t have been able to scream because there shouldn’t have been time. Nor should I have been able to hear Melchior’s panicked cries. None of those shoulds mattered. I screamed and screamed again, and Melchior screamed back. None of it helped, and I started to wonder if this was what had happened to all the relatives I’d lost in transit. Then it was over.

Melchior and I had arrived . . . somewhere. The tiny room with its twin lofts sure as Fate wasn’t our apartment in Cambridge, though it did look vaguely familiar. Then it hit me—my old dorm at the University of Minnesota, though the new occupants had completely different furniture and a much better cleaning routine than either I or my roommate had managed. The most important thing about them, though, was that they weren’t home.

That was good, since I hadn’t bothered to send a netspider ahead to check for surprises. I’d gotten out of the habit lately since I’d been gating to places where I knew I was safe or knew I wasn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. Of course, it might not have mattered anyway, since I hadn’t intended to come here in the first place. I turned to tease Melchior about that but stopped when I saw his face. He didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked scared out of his wits. His skin had paled to an ashy color more gray than blue.

“You OK?” I asked.

“I . . . I’m not sure,” he whispered. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Hey, just because we landed halfway across the country and twenty-eight hundred Decision Loci off target doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. You did get us to a college after . . .” I trailed off because Melchior was shaking his head vigorously.

“We’re in the right DecLocus,” said Melchior. “At least, that’s what the mweb world resource locator forks are telling me. As for Harvard vs. the U, my system software tells me that’s right, too. I just . . . This is bad, Boss. Really bad.” He sat down on the floor with a thump. “There’s something very wrong here. It’s like all my firmware reference points are screwy.”

I glanced out the window. By the sun it must have been around three in the afternoon. If this really was Cerice’s DecLocus, it should have been running pretty close to OST. That meant we’d lost an hour or two in transit on top of whatever else had happened.

“Virus?” I asked. He’d caught a killer whipped up by Atropos a year ago, and I’d almost lost him. I didn’t like to think about it.

“I don’t think so. I feel fine otherwise.” He looked away from me, and when he spoke again his voice was very quiet. “Do you think it could be aftereffects from the one that crashed me so bad?”

“Maybe. It almost did you in, and I had to do a major repair job. But I’d think anything like that would have kicked in sooner.”

“Not if they programmed in some kind of sleeper,” said Melchior.

I didn’t like that idea at all. It suited Atropos’s nasty nature to a tee. “We should get you home so I can have a look at your internals.”

“Good idea, but how? I don’t think I should drive.”

I had to chuckle. “Me either, little buddy. Maybe we can get Cerice and Shara to come pick us up, or Kira. First, let’s find out for sure where we are. You say the mweb tells you this is prime.minus0208?”

He nodded. “But I can’t be sure. Not the way I feel. I don’t know if I should even try a Vtp link. What if I hit a logic loop, and it takes me down?”

“Not to worry, I have a radical idea.”

“What?”

I sat down at one of the desks and picked up the phone. “This.”

I might not have Melchior’s ability to process and send high-speed binary, but I could do a pretty damn good impression of an old-style modem or a phone-switching computer. Phone phreaking was something I’d picked up purely for the hack value. I’d never had to make an actual person-to-person call before, preferring Vtp for relatives and VOMP when I had to interact with the human world or couldn’t take a visual. Soon, a little whistling on my part had convinced the local voice provider that I was allowed to make unlimited long-distance calls from the number I was at. A few seconds later I waited while the phone in Cerice’s lab began to ring. On the third ring someone answered.

“Theoretical computing, Dr. Doravian’s lab, this is Cerice.” Relief flooded through me.

“Thank Zeus. I’m sorry.”

“What? Who is this? Ravirn?”

“You got it. I wanted to apologize right off.”

“Apologize? Over the phone? What’s up?” She sounded very confused. “Why are you using a phone? Is this some retro romantic-fantasy thing?”

“No, more like bad technoreality, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I owed you the apology, and I wanted to give it to you up front. And hey, I’ll be honest. I figured it’d lower the odds of your hanging up on me, too.”

“You’re not making much sense.”

“Sorry, it’s been a very strange couple of hours, not least because I seem to have awakened under an offending star. My mouth and my foot have been trying to get on better terms all day, and now I’m stranded with a fritzed webgoblin.”

“Ravirn!” she said sharply.

“Yes.”

“You’re babbling.” She did not sound amused.

“Am I? No, don’t answer that. I am. Look, I think Melchior might be really messed up, and I need a hand.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, her voice softening at once. She had a big soft spot for webgoblins in general and Melchior in particular.

So I gave her the story. When I finished, I could hear her putting her hand over the phone. A muffled conversation followed.

“You still there?” she said after a while.

“Yeah. I just told you, I’m stranded, as in ‘can’t go anywhere. ’ Remember?”

“Sorry. Stupid question. Wait there; we’ll be along shortly.” The phone went dead.

“Thanks, Cerice,” I said to the dial tone. “That’s really sweet of you. We’ll see you soon.” Then I hung up.

After about fifteen minutes, the phone rang. I looked at it dubiously. It was almost certainly for the people who lived here and quite likely to be someone who’d find the idea of a strange man answering a bit on the alarming side. On the other hand, Cerice should have been here by now.

“You going to answer that?” asked Melchior.

“Yeah, I’d better.” I picked it up. “Hello.”

“Ravirn?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ve got another problem.”

“Why did I just know you were going to say that?”

“Maybe it’s because you attract them the way Cerberus attracts fleas,” offered Melchior. I just nodded. When someone’s right, they’re right.

“Tell me about it,” I said to Cerice.

“Shara can’t gate.”

“What?” I asked. “Why not?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time in ages I could hear something akin to panic in her voice. “Maybe it’s because she was dead. Maybe it’s something else, something worse. Right now she’s throwing up in the trash can, but she keeps telling me it’s not a virus.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Shara tried to connect, and she just sat and cycled for the longest time. That had me worried. Then she came up with an error message I’d never heard of.”

“LTP error, client has encountered bad data from the server?” I asked.

“That’s the one. How’d you know?”

“It’s the same one I got with Melchior. I told you about it a few minutes ago.”

“Right,” said Cerice. “I knew that. Shit. I knew that. Damn!”

“What happened next?” I asked, trying to bring her back to the topic. Cerice was a consummate problem solver. This behavior was completely unlike her. Shara’s problems were consuming her.

“Sorry,” said Cerice, sounding calmer. “Anyway, she tried again and got the same error. She was just going for a third round when she let out a little ‘eep’ noise and ran for the wastebasket. Now I can’t get any sense out of her. She says she’s not sick, but she keeps throwing up.”

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

“How?” asked Cerice.

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Just hang on.” With that I hung up.

“Boss?” said Melchior.

“Yeah. I don’t suppose this is good news, is it?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Once I heard Shara was having problems, I tried to call Kira.”

“And ...”

“No go. The mweb is really turbulent right now. It felt like someone shoved a hyperactive spider into my inner ear. Maybe that’s why Shara’s throwing up.”

“Motion sickness?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh, could be.” It could be indeed, but I really didn’t like the idea. If it was true, something big was happening with the mweb, something like nothing I’d ever heard of. “Or maybe you and Shara just have a bug in common. You do share a lot more software than most goblins.”

“I hope that’s the case,” he said. “I’d much rather I was screwed up than the mweb.”

Me too. I could do something about a webgoblin virus. The mweb on the other hand . . . I shuddered. That was too big a problem for me, and the more I thought about it, the likelier it seemed. Hadn’t we been having all kinds of communication problems, starting with Shara’s long delay and Tisiphone’s static-touched Vtp message?

“Time to go,” I said, scooping Melchior up and setting him in my bag. Suddenly I was in a hurry.

“Yeah,” he said as he sank down until only the upper half of his face was visible. “But where?”

“The airport,” I said. “If human people can get around on planes, so can we.”

Speak for yourself, I typed back with one hand. I needed the other to maintain my death grip on the seat arm. My stomach’s still on the ground in Minneapolis.

It turned out I was a nervous flyer. If I’d had any idea of how bad it was going to be, I’d have stolen a motorcycle and gone cross-country. Compelled by a sort of sick fascination, I looked out my window again. All I could see was clouds. I shuddered.

No wonder airports are such miserable places, I typed. The people in them know they’re going to have to get on planes.

I’d driven people to and from airports, even hung around in them a few times watching the planes take off and land. I had cousins who’d gotten pilot’s licenses just for the joy of flying, but somehow I’d never had any desire to try it myself. I’d always figured that was because I knew a simple spell could take me from any point in all the multiple levels of reality to any other in a matter of seconds, so why bother? Apparently, it was actually my subconscious anticipating how much I’d hate the whole experience and working to reduce my suffering. Sensible subconscious.

This is a stupid way to travel, I typed, trying to distract myself. It’s worse than faerie rings.

He had a point, but . . . At least I understand how they work, I typed. This is unnatural. A giant steel cigar with wings not much bigger than a Fury’s, and somehow they expect it to stay up. Humans are all mad.

I’d booked first class. Why not? It wasn’t like I was paying for the flight or anything, not with e-tickets and online check-in. But bigger seats and classier service couldn’t change the fundamental fact that flying and I did not belong in the same sentence. Sick of arguing with Melchior, I closed his lid and stuck him under the seat in front of me. That allowed me to cling to the seat arms with both hands. It was a marginal improvement, but I absolutely could not wait to get off that plane. I also couldn’t wait to throw away the printout of the return trip ticket I’d bought to avoid hassles with the Homeland Security Department’s data-mining software.

It was so bad that I stopped in one of the little airport bars at Logan and had a couple of shots of Scotch while I waited for my heart to go back to a normal rhythm. Then I caught the T’s Blue Line at the airport station. Two transfers and an hour or so of travel time saw me off at Harvard station in Cambridge just before the system closed down at twelve-thirty. Not long after that I was opening the door to Cerice’s lab.

I got a huge relieved hug and a kiss from Cerice. And a smaller, shakier version of that greeting from Shara, who claimed to be feeling much better.

“I don’t buy it,” I told her. “You don’t look as bad as you did when I found you in Hades, but you sure don’t look good.”

“Way to flatter a girl,” said Shara. She turned her gaze on Cerice. “Sometimes I wonder what you see in this boy. Then he walks away in those tight jeans, and it all becomes clear.” She winked, but it didn’t look like her heart was in it.

“Nice try,” I said, “it’s not going to work. You look terrible.”

“Believe it or don’t,” said Cerice, “she looked a whole lot worse a couple of hours ago.”

My shoulder bag moved of its own accord then, lumping up, then falling off the desk where I’d set it. Muffled swearing came from inside, then it unzipped itself, spitting out Melchior.

“Were you just going to leave me in there,” he asked, “or did I miss something?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was a little preoccupied with Shara.”

“I see why,” he said, looking her over. Stepping closer, he touched her cheek. “Last time I saw that expression on your face, you were under the desk hiding from Persephone.”

Shara shivered and hugged herself. “Don’t talk about that, about her. I can’t think about her. I just can’t. She’s . . . brrr.”

“I agree with you there,” I said, remembering the horrible pain of meeting those winter eyes, then thinking about what Kira and Cerberus had to say about her. “I can’t tell you how much I wish she hadn’t made me promise her a favor.”

“What?” asked Cerice, an edge in her voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Didn’t I mention that part?” I asked.

Her eyes sparked dangerously. “No. I don’t believe that you did.”

“It must have slipped my mind. No. Really. When I got back, and Shara wasn’t here, I kind of got distracted. I did mention that she helped me get Shara out, right?” Cerice nodded. “I guess I skipped the bit where she told me she’d have a task for me later.”

Cerice put a hand over her eyes. “Only my Ravirn could forget a little detail like goddess blackmail. I so wish I didn’t believe you.”

“Does that mean you do?” I asked.

“Yes.” She sighed. “It does. Now, I think we—”

She was interrupted by a loud bing from Shara. “Incoming visual transfer protocol message from Ahllan@ahllan.trl. Accept Vlink?”

“Accept,” said Cerice.

Ahllan was a webtroll and an old friend. She’d once been Atropos’s personal web server, but now she ran the familiar underground, an organization dedicated to freeing AIs from slavery in the houses of Fate.

“Vtp linking initiated,” said Shara after a long pause.

The light that burst from her eyes and mouth was the first clue that something had gone horribly wrong. It was white instead of colored in the primaries. The globe it formed was filled with silvery gray mist like something from an old-time black-and-white movie rather than the usual gold cloud. It was also brimful of static. When it partially cleared, the troll within was likewise black and white and so shot through with lines of interference that she looked like some kind of electronic zebra. She was also low res.

You could barely make out the heavy lower jaw and three-inch tusks. Even her huge potatolike nose only registered as a lumpy blur. Ahllan was an early-model webtroll, one of the servers Atropos had used in her own personal network back toward the dawn of the computer era. At a hair over three feet tall, Ahllan barely came up to my waist in person. But her shoulders were broader than mine, and she probably outweighed me. Her skin was mottled and brown and wrinkled like a winter apple. The only bright things about her were the wise eyes. They shone like black sapphires. All that was lost to static.

“Ksshst an emergssshht. Need to kssshht warn you. Urgent. Ksssjsjt soon!”

“What?” I asked. With the garbling, I figured I’d better keep questions short and to the point. She might cut out at any second.

“Shshsjjt Garbage Faerie is crzshht.”

“I missed that, what?”

“Hang ozzzst, I . . .” The image suddenly sharpened and lost some of its striping, bringing her background—a beer can faerie ring on a blasted hillside—into focus. She was in the backwater of reality where I’d first met Ahllan and the troll’s onetime headquarters.

“There,” said Ahllan, her voice tinny and strained, but clear. “Much better, but it’s taking most of my processing power to modulate this so it rides with the churn on the mweb. I’ll be quick because it’s only going to get worse.”

“Why are you calling from Garbage Faerie?” asked Melchior. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” answered Ahllan. “Something awful has happened to the mweb. Worlds have fallen silent, and there are gaps in the net. The turbulence is incredible. I couldn’t even reach you from my new home. There’s change in the wind, big change. The web that Necessity built, the web I was designed to help maintain, is fraying. The great powers are restless. Fate. Discord. Zeus. Hades.”

“Do you think one of them is responsible?” I asked.

Ahllan shrugged. “I don’t know, but Necessity’s strength is too great to be tried by lesser names. And whoever did this, each will try to turn it to their own advantage. People will die. Even gods may fall. It is a time of endings. I wanted to warn you, to tell you that I love you, and say good-bye if I don’t see you again.”

“Don’t talk like that, Ahllan,” said Shara. “You’re tough as old tree roots. You’ll weather this storm.”

“I might,” she said. “But old trees fall, too, and I’m old even by human standards, ancient for a computer. Even if all goes well, I won’t be around much longer. If things go poorly . . .” She shrugged. “Much of the power of Fate is bound up in the mweb. They can operate without it, but it will not be easy. The Fates are unkind to those who interfere with them.” She looked at me. “You should know that more than anyone. What will they do if their most powerful tool is permanently damaged?”

“Do you think it’s really going to get that bad?” I asked. The very idea made me feel cold.

“Worse. Maybe much worse. Fate is not the only power who has come to depend on the mweb. How will Hades take it if something disrupts the flow of the souls who people his empire? For that matter, what will your cousins do if they can no longer make easy use of the magic that is central to their lives? If they are forced to travel by faerie ring or not at all? They will want to make the responsible parties pay. And if they can’t find the right target, they will choose a scapegoat. It could easily be me and the underground movement I began. Or”—and her eyes caught and held mine—“it could be you.”

She turned her head then as though she’d heard something off to one side. Her eyes went wide. “Shara? What? I don’t kzshht.” Static filled the picture, though the audio hung on. Ahllan’s voice rose, sounding almost frightened “How is that—”

The globe of white blinked out.

“Connection lost,” said Shara. “Transmission error. Encryption error. Unverified certificate. Attempting to reestablish Vlink. Attempting . . . Mweb not responding to queries.” She blinked several times, then in her normal tones said, “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Cerice and I asked simultaneously.

“The mweb,” said Shara. “It’s gone.”

“You mean it crashed?” I’d crashed it once, taken down the whole system. That was how I’d originally ended up with a price on my head.

“No.” Shara sounded more frightened than I’d ever heard an AI sound. “I mean it’s gone. Poof. Vanished. It felt like this world was simply removed from the system.”

“That’s not possible,” said Cerice.

“All the same. It’s true.”