“What the hell happened?” I asked. I hadn’t blacked out, but it had been mighty close. I wanted to see if her experience matched mine.

“Your faerie ring arrived with a bang. It was quite spectacular. I expect that the local emergency services people will be along shortly. I take it rings aren’t supposed to do that?” she asked dryly.

“No. Not in my very limited experience.” I sat up, though the effort made the world crinkle around the edges. “Did it work?”

“Oh yeah.” Melchior came up next to Cerice. “Speaking of which, unless you want the effort to have been wasted, we need to get moving. It’s starting to float away.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

With Cerice’s help I managed to get to my feet. The ring, now a free-floating circle of ice, had indeed drifted away from the bank. More alarming, though, was that it was still on fire. Or rather, the water around it was on fire. Neon-green flames ringed the ice like a particularly gaudy Christmas wreath.

Something flashed in the corner of my eye, and I glanced up at the underside of the bridge, where a perfect circle of polished white stood out starkly amidst the dirt and grime. It lay directly above the place where I’d marked out my ring. The heat or the magic or something had burned a mirror-smooth finish into the concrete.

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Just then a siren started in the distance. “Come on, we’d better get going.” Lifting Melchior back into my bag, I took Cerice’s hand. “Ready?” She nodded, though I could tell she had some doubts. “Right, I’ll count to three, then we’ll jump. When we hit, we’ll be on our way. Just keep holding on and let me drive.”

“What about the fire on the water? Won’t that attract attention?”

I shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it unless you want to stay here and answer official questions. Besides, it appears to be dying down.”

It did, though not as quickly as I would have liked. Cerice frowned, then whistled a quick spell. A stand of dry and leafless brush some way upstream burst into sudden flame, sending a great plume of smoke skyward.

“There,” she said. “That’ll give them something else to look at while this drifts away. One.”

“Two,” I answered.

We said three together and leaped. The ice had drifted a good eight feet from shore by then, an easy jump for any child of Fate. Almost too easy in my case. I went farther than I’d intended, landing on the far edge of the ice so that the toe of my left boot actually touched the flame. I’d have cleared the ring entirely if Cerice hadn’t had a firm grip on my hand. In fact, for one instant as my feet left the ground, I felt as though I could simply have flown away were it not for her weight.

I didn’t have time to think about it because the moment we touched down, we were elsewhere. A faerie ring is nothing like a computer-assisted locus transfer. When I asked Melchior to open a gate for me, I was creating a point-to-point link with a definite beginning and a definite end. The ring, on the other hand, was a matter of probability and will. Anytime you enter a faerie ring, you have an absolutely equal chance of emerging in any other ring among all the infinite levels of reality. Will determines where you actually end up.

In theory, if your will is strong, and you know what you’re doing, you could get in at one ring and step out of the one you want to reach as your very next stop. In practice, finding your destination is more a matter of throwing yourself in the right direction and sort of channel surfing until you hit the ring you’re looking for. I’d learned all of that with my previous faerie ring experience. This time I learned something else; not all rings are equal, and that matters. A lot.

This ring was much stronger and wilder than the ones I’d been through in the past. Before, the rhythm had been something like world, beat, beat, world, beat, beat, world. Now it was wor-, wor-, wor-, with rings strobing by too fast even to register as places. I felt like some sort of weird quantum particle, simultaneously in multiple places at one time. Hundreds of them in fact.

How am I going to find the right one if I can’t even see them? a small panicked voice in the back of my head asked. Horrible things can happen to a person who gets lost among the rings. You can lose your soul. I nearly had on my last trip.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, our progress stopped. We had arrived, at least for an instant, in one definite place. Pulling Cerice along with me, I jumped from the ring. I did it without even looking to see where we were. We could always step back into the local ring in a few moments when we’d had a chance to recover. Hopefully it would be gentler than the one I’d made in Cambridge.

“Huh,” said Cerice. “That wasn’t so bad. Step in at home, step out at Ahllan’s place in Garbage Faerie two seconds later. Why do you and Melchior make such a big fuss about the rings?”

“What?” I demanded, but a quick look around confirmed she was right. We stood beside the beer can ring next to the torn-open mound that had once covered Ahllan’s home. It was a sunny afternoon, and the season was much warmer than the one we’d left behind. “I . . . shit. How did that happen? Melchior?”

“I don’t know, Boss. That’s just plain spooky. I’d have expected you to at least pass through a couple of other rings on the way here. Let me think about it for a second.”

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t either of you register all those other rings?”

“What other rings?” they demanded in near-perfect unison. I sat down then. Fell down was more like it, but the effect was the same. I was no longer standing, and my butt was firmly on the ground. “Tell me what you saw,” I said.

“Same as Cerice,” Melchior said. “Step in there, step out here.” Cerice nodded. “I figured that just this once we actually had a piece of good luck. I take it that’s not what you saw?”

I related my experience of the ring. Melchior whistled.

“Sounds like my worries about a chaos storm and the rings being messed up too had something to it. Things certainly feel strange enough for that. I’ve got some mweb access in this DecLocus, but it’s bad and rapidly getting worse.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I had a sneaking suspicion that what had just happened with the faerie ring wasn’t related to the mweb problems and that I wasn’t going to like the truth when I finally figured it out. But there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, so I put the idea aside and got to my feet.

Garbage Faerie, as we called it, was in a serious backwater of reality. Magic ran much closer to the surface here than it did in the vicinity of Olympus, where things were more regulated. Neither Zeus nor the Fates are big fans of anyone else’s having magical power. That includes the other gods and all their myriad offspring; but the blood of the Titans cannot be denied or contained, so reluctantly, they live with us. Given the choice, I don’t think they’d allow magic to go beyond the family. But the gods—except perhaps Necessity—are finite, and the multiverse is not.

I suspect that’s the real reason the Fates went modern with their ever-expanding set of computers for tracking life threads and running coded spells. It’s also probably a big part of why Zeus has kept such a low profile for the last couple of millennia—he’s lost control, and he knows it. So now he sulks. Of course, he never really had control, but he’s dim enough that I imagine it took a while to sink in. But hey, that’s the head of the pantheon to a tee, astronomical energy harnessed to teensy-weensy processing capacity. Kind of like the early-model PCs they used to run the space shuttles at the turn of the century.

Whatever the reason, magic flows very freely out at the edges of things. The worlds there can become quite strange, bent as they are by the fundamental force of the irrational. In this one, despite an apparent lack of people, the detritus of a modern civilization lay everywhere, rusting hulks of cars, trashed refrigerators, old computers. The smell of decay hung heavy in the air. Yet there was a weird beauty to it all, because nature was in the process of reclaiming the works. Bindweed and other flowering creepers had taken hold of most of the larger pieces of trash, transforming junked pickups into floral topiary. A blown-out television had a Japanese rose growing out of the hole where the tube had once been.

Weird and wild and strangely wonderful, Garbage Faerie reeked of magic. Spells that might take a thousand lines of whistled code and draw heavily on the mweb in the vicinity of Olympus would need little more than a thought and pursed lips here. That plus its distance from the corridors of Fate was why Ahllan had set up shop here. I turned then to look at her blasted and empty home.

The low hill that had once sheltered a dozen homey rooms had been cloven in two, its mosaic-covered walls lying shattered and exposed to the elements. I heard a gasp from beside me and looked down to see Shara. She was trembling, and who could blame her? She had died here, falling in the ruin of this place.

“I didn’t know it was this bad,” she whispered. “I went down too early to see it.” She put her face in her hands. “I feel so awful.”

I knelt to put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” I was speaking of her death as much as the destruction of the house.

“Don’t be an idiot, Ravirn,” she said. From her tone I knew she’d caught my meaning. “I know that’s hard for you sometimes”—she was interrupted by a whispered “amen” from Cerice, but didn’t acknowledge it—“but this isn’t your fault. Sure, you were the proximate cause, but it was Atropos and the other Fates who did this in their desire for absolute control.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But we aren’t here to argue about comparative guilt. We’re here to find Ahllan.”

“She’s gone.” Melchior was kneeling a few yards away, sniffing at the dirt. “She was here, but not for long.” He pointed at a pair of deep footprints in the mud. “There was a gate there.” He pointed again, but I didn’t see anything beyond a few more tracks. “Incoming only.”

That would explain it, no physical traces. Webgoblins’ magical senses were much stronger than mine, able to see the faintest of spell traces if they hadn’t been deliberately masked.

“So what happened? It looks like something very strange.”

Melchior nodded. “Ahllan appeared through the LTP gate, walked a couple of steps, called us, then poof.”

“But she didn’t gate out?” I asked.

“Not that I can tell. And unless she did a really spectacular backflip, she didn’t leave via the faerie ring. I can’t Vtp her either. I’ve been trying since we got here. Although whether that’s because she’s blocking messages, gone somewhere off the net, or just because the turbulence is so bad, I can’t say.” He shivered. “It feels . . . wrong, like something crawling around the inside of my skull. Shara?”

“I’m not hooked up, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just take Mel’s word for it. I’ve got enough problems without things crawling around inside my skull.”

Cerice gave Shara a penetrating look. Normally webgoblins hate to be out of touch with the mweb and will only break contact by order or request. The stream of information and magical power that comes to them through the mweb is as much a part of them as the blood flowing in their veins.

For perhaps the millionth time, I wished that I could experience the mweb in the same way Melchior did. Sure, I could enter its virtual space by using an athame, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. It was the difference between being a scuba diver and being a fish. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to grow gills. We needed to find out what was going on, and fast. With Ahllan missing, I could only think of one other possible source for that information: Eris.

“I want to visit Castle Discord.”

“What?” exclaimed Shara. “Why? We should go home and keep our heads down. This isn’t our problem. This is a matter for the gods to sort out with Necessity. If we try to fix it, if we even go within a thousand yards of the mweb servers, Fate will have collective apoplexy and murder us on the spot. Let it go.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“I’m definitely right. This is not our business.”

“So I’ll take the three of you back to the apartment before I go on.”

“Not a chance,” said Melchior. “Not with Ahllan missing. I’m going, too.”

Cerice knelt in front of Shara. “We have to do this, honey. We just have to.”

Shara sighed. “All right. But if we have to go, we should do it quick before the mweb cuts out and we’re forced to use the faerie ring again. Maybe it worked this time, but they still give me the creeps.”

“Amen to that.” Melchior pulled out a string and stylus and began sketching out a hexagram in the dirt. “At least when I make the gate, I know I can trust the driver.”

I thought back to our most recent trip from Hades and how that had gone, but didn’t say anything. Melchior clearly felt strongly on the subject, and, judging by the profound look of relief on Shara’s face, so did she. A few minutes later we stepped into the light. It wasn’t nearly as rough as our last trip. This just felt like being trapped in an elevator with its cables cut, a wild straight drop through darkness with a sudden stop at the end. We landed hard, though not hard enough to break bones.

When the light cleared, we stood on a small rectangle of stone completely surrounded by the wild billowing colors of the Primal Chaos. Some sort of irregularly shaped invisible shield prevented it from reaching the surface of the rock and devouring us, though occasional tendrils of the stuff came frighteningly close.

Eris prefers to live off the grid, way off. Castle Discord is a floating island in the sea of chaos. Whether it lies in the turbulence between worlds or somewhere beyond the farthest edges of reality is something that’s more a question of philosophy than science. To make things even more difficult, the castle moves constantly. Combine that with the fact that it’s not actually connected to the mweb, and you have a situation where only a fully functional webtroll like Ahllan, exerting maximum concentration, can keep its coordinates fixed long enough to open up a gate to the castle proper. For the benefit of visitors Eris has placed a chunk of stone in a fixed and permanent relationship to the rest of the multiverse. She called it the welcome mat, and it even had the Greek welcome, Kalos Orisate, carved into it in letters six feet tall. That’s where we arrived.

I’d been there before and knew the routine, so I slowly turned in place until I saw it. Far off and high up, a speck appeared. Castle Discord. Our arrival had triggered the doorbell, and now the castle was coming to us. As I watched, it grew steadily closer, becoming a ragged chunk of golden granite. The top was hidden by the angle at first, but as it descended, I could see a great splash of green covering the surface. It looked nothing like it had the last time I’d seen it. No surprise.

Castle Discord doesn’t actually exist in the way most people mean the word. It’s entirely a state of mind. I can’t even begin to explain the spells involved in its creation. It’s very deep, wild magic of the kind that scares the living daylights out of me. All I can speak to is the result. Castle Discord is a sort of mathematical description of a place with all the descriptors as variables that can be adjusted by the whim of its occupant. One minute it’s a medieval cathedral, the next it’s a Vegas-style casino. It depends entirely on what Eris’s notoriously changeable mood desires.

Even more bizarre, when she isn’t actively exerting her will on the place, it will rearrange itself to suit the whim of whoever happens to be wandering its halls, a fact I had discovered on my first—unauthorized—visit. At the moment, it most looked like some sort of huge botanical garden occupying a series of interlinked greenhouses. But that was on the outside. We wouldn’t know about the inside until we got there.

When it reached a point about a hundred feet above us and perhaps twice that distance away, Castle Discord stopped moving. An archway opened just below the rim. Like some sort of huge stone frog mouth, it spat a long flight of stairs at us. They had no railing and looked to be made of black glass. As with the welcome mat itself, some sort of invisible barrier kept the stuff of chaos from pressing too close to the stairs.

“Have I mentioned that this is a bad idea?” mumbled Shara, when the stairs touched down in front of us.

“I’d certainly gotten that impression, yes.” I stepped up onto the first stair. “But unless you want to play ‘ring the doorbell and run away’ with the Goddess of Chaos, we’d best get moving.”

“I think it’s fascinating,” said Cerice, following close behind. “Ever since you first described this place to me, I’ve wanted to see it.”

I’d been here any number of times since my initial visit but always by invitation, an invitation that had included only me and Melchior. I probably could have brought Cerice, but I’d always felt it safer to keep her away from Discord. Eris might find me amusing. She might even have a soft spot for me. But she was one of the most dangerous and certainly the most capricious of goddesses. I preferred not to give her any more handles on me than I had to, and Cerice would make a mighty fine one.

I looked past her now to Shara, who was reluctantly bringing up the rear. I wished there was something more I could do for the little purple webgoblin. I missed the wild, willful, sexy creature she had been before her time in Hades, and it tore at my heart to see her so subdued. I’m not sure which was worse, that or the fact that I’d started having suspicions about her. I hated my own paranoia, but that didn’t prevent me from keeping one eye on her as we climbed the stairs. On one of my periodic glances her way, I noticed a bright flash on the welcome mat that I might otherwise have missed. It was similar to a locus transfer yet not quite the same.

“I wonder what that is,” I said quietly. I couldn’t think of any answer that would make me happy.

“What?” asked Cerice.

Instead of responding I stepped past Shara, and said, “Melchior, Eagle Eye. Please.”

He quickly whistled the spell that gave me the vision of a raptor, then duplicated it for Cerice, Shara, and himself.

A bright rip had opened in the air at the base of the stairs, like someone had sliced a hole through from someplace else. That was because someone had. I’d seen the effect once before. It was the Furies’ version of an LTP gate. I didn’t know how it worked, except that it involved the adamantine claws that tipped their fingers and some special application of the powers granted them as Necessity’s personal handmaidens and IT staff.

First through the gap was Megaera with her seaweed-colored wings and hair, not to mention a personal vendetta against yours truly. I didn’t honestly care who came next. None of them was good news, and I couldn’t help but think their arrival here and now was no coincidence.

“Run!” I said, turning back toward the castle. Cerice was ahead of me. She’d already scooped up Shara, and was taking the remaining stairs two at a time. I grabbed Melchior and followed.

We were already close to the top, and I felt confident we’d reach the gate ahead of the Furies. But there my confidence ended. Whether the doors would open for us, and what would happen after, I didn’t know.