That gave me precious seconds to think. Unfortunately, I was about out of options. The faerie ring was too far away to do me any good. The river was bad. A gate would take too long, especially with the mweb whacked. A fact which also limited my spell menu. It was more good luck than planning that Hydrophobia had worked, since it was mweb-based magic. Most of my spells were. I’d grown up in the mweb era, and except for a few brief hours when I’d crashed the whole shebang, it had remained a constant throughout my sorcerous career. Megaera had gotten perhaps fifteen feet away when Melchior stepped between me and her.

“Run, Boss!” he yelled, before whistling the beginnings of a spell.

It didn’t sound like one of mine, and the roughness of it suggested he was coding on the spot. Since I’d never known Melchior to spontaneously compose, I was frankly fascinated to see the results. Stupid, I know, but there it is. Before he’d gotten more than a few dozen lines in, Megaera stepped forward and bent down, backhanding the goblin.

It was clearly a casual blow, contemptuous even, but it sent him flying. For all his attitude, Melchior’s not much bigger than a cat and lighter than he looks. He hit the cave wall with a thud that made my stomach turn a cartwheel. Cerice hurried to his side. The Furies let her pass. I stood alone, my back tight against the hound of hell.

I should have been terrified. I was. But even more than fear, I felt anger. Anger at the way Megaera had treated my familiar. Anger that the Furies’ presence prevented me from going to him. Anger at the whole damned situation. Anger that was exactly what I needed to break my thinking loose.

I couldn’t escape from the Furies, not really. Not in the long run. Even if I gave them the slip here, they would keep coming after me. That was what they did. That was who they were. No, as long as they operated under the authority of Atropos and her sisters, I was going to be a target. If I wanted any hope of ever getting my life back, I had to find a way to stop Persephone’s virus, fix Shara, and make things right with Necessity. That meant going to Hades. My only true escape route lay across the Styx.

There was a quick way to make that journey, a very quick way, and Megaera would be only too happy to buy my ticket. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up on getting back out. That meant that I had to shake the Furies loose at least for a few moments. And as the living wall pressed against my back reminded me, I had to get Cerberus out of the way, too. Perhaps I could introduce problem A to problem B to create opening C.

“Tisiphone,” I said. “Do you still feel the same way about me that you did when last we talked?”

“I do,” she answered.

“Then, if someone has to kill me, I’d prefer it were you.”

“I . . . Don’t ask me to do this,” she said.

“That’s cruel,” said Megaera stepping forward. “Ask me. I’d love to help.”

“Or me.” Alecto stepped up beside Megaera. “It’s my duty and if you face it with honor, I’ll end it quickly.”

“Dave,” I said quietly.

“What? I’d rather not get involved at this point.”

“Are we still friends?”

“Yes—” he said, simultaneously with Bob’s “No.” “—good ones.”

“Then, I’m sorry to get you into all this. You and Tisiphone both.”

“I don’t—” he began, but I was already moving.

I chose Megaera, both because she was closer to the river than Alecto and because she was much more likely to let her anger govern her actions. I took a long step toward the Fury and away from Cerberus. Using my left hand, I unzipped my jacket and exposed my chest. Megaera grinned and lunged at me, just as I expected. Ten razor-tipped fingers came straight at my chest, and the flow of events seemed to slow down. I felt like I had all the time in the world to implement my plan.

But I was moving as slowly as everything else. So despite the fact that it seemed like I had hours in which to decide exactly how and where to grab Megaera’s wrists, I was only just able to catch them, pulling her forward and up at the same time as I threw myself backwards and down so that she passed over my falling body.

It shouldn’t have worked, and it probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had help. Even though I knew I couldn’t hold Megaera for long, I had a firm enough grip for the action of the moment. But I’d forgotten about the talons on her feet, talons that would have slit me from throat to groin if Tisiphone hadn’t leaped forward at that exact second. She collided with Megaera in what looked like a clumsy effort to help her. Instead, it gave Megaera a little added boost, and those toe claws dug ten shallow trenches in my chest rather than filleting me. It felt like she’d ripped my nipples off, but it didn’t kill me, and Megaera kept right on going, sailing over me to collide claws first with Mort’s nose.

Pandemonium. A dog’s nose is about the most sensitive bit of his anatomy, and Mort’s was no exception. He howled like a bee-stung basset and almost instinctively snapped at Megaera, catching her shoulder in his oversized mastiff’s jaws. With a reflexive toss of his head, he threw her aside, sending her sailing through the air. Then he turned his attention on me, glaring down and snarling with his great fangs bared. Since I was flat on my back and practically between his feet at that point I should have been paralyzed with fear. I didn’t have time.

Tisiphone had taken Alecto’s place as the closest Fury, standing over me with both of her feet a few inches to the right of my pelvis. As her toe claws sank deep into the stone there, I felt my penis shrivel and try to climb up into my body to get away from them. She swung her right hand high above her head as though she were about to rip me open.

At the very same time Alecto was coming in from her left. But before Alecto could do anything, Mort’s descending head struck her square in the ribs. He kept his jaws closed, but the force of the blow was tremendous, and she tumbled, smashing into Tisiphone. Together the Furies fell toward me. Again, I probably should have died when that tangle of sharp death landed on me, but somehow Tisiphone’s wing, like the pinion of my very own personal guardian angel, swept me out of the way at the last instant.

It wasn’t gentle, and I picked some up fresh scrapes and bruises as I rolled across the loose rocks and rough stone that made up the near bank of the Styx. Megaera came back about then, descending on me from above.

“You attacked Mort!” Dave bellowed in a voice that sounded like a bad actor auditioning for the part of a vengeful gang member in West Side Story.

Then he snapped Megaera out of the air. Tisiphone got to her feet about then and screamed something incoherent before lunging at Bob. I don’t know what Alecto and Mort were thinking at this point, but full-scale battle had been engaged between their respective counterparts, and they crashed together in an apparent desire not to be left out. Cerberus lost his footing and fell almost on top of me, forcing me to scramble like mad to get clear.

I ended up at the base of the long finger of stone that Shara had climbed earlier and quickly leaped up beside her. We were trapped there by the snarling tumbling ball of madness that was the Furies and Cerberus. Well, I had my distraction. I just needed to figure out how to get past the barrier of the river. I was glad the melee had separated me from Melchior and Cerice. That would make my plan for taking the next step alone much easier to execute. Now I just had to lose Shara and get across the damned river.

“What do we do now?” she asked, looking worriedly from the wild brawl to the black water that surrounded us on three sides.

The entire surface rippled and roiled with the nastiness Hades had released into the waters. Directly beneath us, the water was so churned up that sooty foam had formed in small clumps.

“I don’t know. Swimming doesn’t seem like a great option.” And I want to leave you on this side of the Styx anyway. She was half-rescued, and I didn’t want to have to rerescue that half later.

“Really?” said Shara, rolling her eyes. “You don’t say? No swimming. And here I was thinking you and I were finally going to get a chance to go skinny-dipping without Cerice around to spoil the fun.”

Before I could respond, the battle between the two tripartite heavyweights caught my attention. It was one of those brief moments of stillness that happen even in the worst fights, and I got a snapshot view of the state of things. Tisiphone had Bob in some kind of modified head-lock and was viciously smashing the balled fist of her free hand again and again into the center of his forehead. Either Alecto had caught Mort’s upper jaw with her hands and his lower with her feet and was desperately trying to force them apart, or Mort had grabbed Alecto and she was trying not to get munched. It was hard to tell which. Dave had Megaera’s waist clamped between his teeth and was shaking her brutally.

Then, with a sudden flip of his shoulders, Dave tossed Megaera aside. He yelped when he did it, so I’m not sure who the point belonged to, but I had more immediate concerns, as the tumbling Fury smashed hard into the base of our rock-spur refuge. It shook and tilted, sending Shara sliding toward the edge. Throwing myself flat, I flung out a hand and caught the scruff of her neck before she could go in.

“Nice save, little man,” said Megaera, whose presence I had momentarily forgotten. “Too bad it’s not going to do you any good in the long run.”

Oh shit. I felt a jolt along my spine like someone had plugged my tailbone into a light socket. This was it. But Dave snarled then, and Megaera turned away from me. I had a moment to feel relief that she hadn’t had the time to make good on her threat. Then she kicked backwards with her left foot, slamming the sole into the base of the rock like a sledgehammer. She used the impact to propel herself into the air and a swooping dive aimed at Cerberus.

I’m not sure what happened with her after that, and frankly, I didn’t care. The kick had been the last straw for our little refuge. The rock was tipping and sliding toward the dark waters and the hungriness that lurked beneath.

“Save yourself,” screamed Shara.

I might have been able to jump clear, if I’d let her go. But I wasn’t going to do that. Together, we slid toward the river and final oblivion.

My brain kicked into overtime, trying to find some way out, a loophole that I could slip through and save the day. There had to be a way. Darkness passed before my eyes. I thought it was all over for a moment, but then I recognized it as the shadow of the Raven, the spectre that had haunted me with increasing frequency as I made ever more use of the gifts of chaos.

I remembered Cerberus’s last words on the subject before the arrival of the Furies cut our conversation short—that I must “assume the role” of Raven or I would eventually face self-destruction.

Well, eventually had come more quickly than I’d expected, and the decision point was here. I could die as myself, or I could accept the new role I had forged in my battles with Fate and hope that the Raven could offer a solution where plain old Ravirn had none.

I turned inward, reaching for the place where blood and bone met chaos. As I did so, the shadow of the Raven slid over my own. For a brief moment the two shadows remained distinct, then they merged into one darker winged shadow. I had found it, the inner nexus between my own heart and the heart of change.

Now, I silently whispered, we become one.

A burst of pure energy hit me like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was wild and raw and completely insane. I felt a bit like a mosquito might if it had bitten into a fire hose rather than the fireman holding it. Time stopped. Not really, but effectively. Just as my newfound powers had allowed me to simultaneously occupy a thousand different faerie rings and choose the one I wanted to step out of all in the blink of an eye, I now saw another series of possibilities and a way to choose among them, to make chance work for me.

The current arrangement of particles in my body was only one of a number of such patterns available to me. The vast majority of routes to rearrange them would result only in my tearing myself to pieces, a sudden explosive death. But there were other options, and I reached for one of those now.

It hurt! Chaos and Discord, but it hurt! I was trying to rip every single atom of my being away from every other atom and put them all back together again. And I was trying to do it in the femtosecond before the universe caught on to the trick and pointed out that it should have been fatal.

Shara slipped from my grasp as I ceased to have fingers, but before she could fall into the water I caught her again with one clawed foot. I didn’t want to take her with me, but it was that or let her fall. Bunching my shoulders, I threw myself skyward and spread my great black wings. I was truly the Raven now, in form and function, and I gloried in the moment. The feeling of wind sliding through feathers. The deeply rewarding effort of fighting up and away from the bonds of earth and soil. The sheer sensuality of experiencing everything with a new skin.

In that instant, I understood that Raven the power was not some alien creature completely outside the domain of the old hacker Ravirn, but merely an extension of what I had always been. Quantum mechanics tells us that many things that really shouldn’t be possible are, though so unlikely that entire universes could live and die without their ever happening. The atoms of my body rearranging themselves was one such occurrence. Incredibly, almost mind-bogglingly improbable, but not utterly impossible—a tiny loophole in the programming of reality, and finding and exploiting loopholes is what I do. Becoming the Raven merely gave me a shortcut around a lot of the coding Ravirn would have had to do to achieve the same effect.

Simple, elegant, and incredibly dangerous. I had no doubt of that last. One of the nice things about precoding a bit of magic, then running it through a spell-checker is that it gives you the chance to see whether you’ve made a mistake beforehand. If anything had gone wrong with the Raven transformation, I would still have been floating above the Styx, but I’d have been doing it in Charon’s ferry instead of on wings of magic. Whether I’d experienced beginner’s luck on this one or whether I’d touched on something deeper and more basic—the Raven form going with the name—I didn’t know. I did know that I would have to be more careful about shape changing in the future.

“He’s escaping!” The voice seemed to come from a great distance, traveling through a slurry of time and space to reach my consciousness. “Get him.”

I shook my head, trying to break loose of such petty concerns.

“Uh, Raven?” This time it was Shara.

I pulled myself back into the moment. “Yes.” My voice came out harsh and gravelly, half word, half caw. “What?”

“The Furies can fly, too.”

I looked down. The fight on the banks of the Styx had ceased, the three heads of Cerberus bent in close conference with the three bodies that made up the entity known collectively as the Furies. How I could tell it was the two governing intelligences consulting and not a conference of the constituent personalities I didn’t know, but I had no doubts. When six heads bobbed in mutual agreement I knew things were about to get ugly again.

Cerberus turned away from the Furies and leaped into the water, swimming powerfully to get beneath me. A moment later, and with a single coordinated motion, the sisters of vengeance launched themselves skyward. I was above them, and I thought I might be able to keep my height advantage if I worked at it, but that was only going to work for a very little while. The Styx and both its banks lay in a cavern under Olympus. Up was a finite resource, and I didn’t want to get out anyway. I needed a plan. Well, actually I had one. It was just a bad plan. I’d come to the underworld to speak with Persephone, and I knew that if I wanted to do that, I had to enter Hades once again.

Before the arrival of the Furies, I hadn’t fully decided whether I was willing to take that risk, especially after Cerberus had pretty much confirmed that I hadn’t “escaped” last time. I’d been let go. I still wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but it did have the added advantage of putting me in one of the few places the Furies, and Cerberus, for that matter, wouldn’t follow. I turned in the air, lining up on the gate.

“Shara, I have to get to Persephone. I’ll drop you outside the gate before I go through.”

“No. You’re going to need a webgoblin inside.”

“I can’t take you back in there.”

“You have to. I need to see this thing through, and I don’t think you can solve the problem without a goblin. Without me. Besides, I’ve got to get my soul back in one piece before I crack. I’m coming.”

“You’re staying.”

“I’m coming.”

“I’m not taking you, and that’s final.”

Shara didn’t answer, and I took that as agreement. It might have been defiance, but I just didn’t have time to argue. I was almost to the roof, and the Furies were coming up fast.

“If I don’t make it out, tell Cerice I love her.”

“Tell her yourself,” said Shara. “’Cause I’m not breaking that news for you.”

I felt the feathers of one wing brush against a stalactite. I had just run out of leeway. Folding my wings, I dropped like a stone. The Furies rolled toward me one after another, arrowing along an interception course, with Megaera flying point. It was going to be a close-run thing. We got closer and closer together as I headed for the floor, until finally we met in the air. Or almost met. I felt a stabbing pain in my tail and caught a puff of black feathers out of the corner of my eye as Megaera swiped at me and just missed.

I breathed a mental sigh of relief that turned into a curse as I realized how close I’d come to the ground. Cerberus himself served up the reminder, leaping for me like a lesser dog going for a Frisbee.

“Yarghh!” screamed Shara as she yanked her feet up to avoid Mort’s reaching jaws.

Then I was at the gate. “Good-bye, Shara.” I opened my claws.

“And hello,” she answered me back, catching a grip round my ankle and hanging on as I flew through the opening.

We had both returned to Hades.

Considering the commotion kicked up by our arrival, I decided not to hang around the gate, flying on toward the heart of Hades. But I knew that no matter how hard I flapped, I wasn’t going to get us where we needed to go fast enough, not if Hades started looking for us. So after I’d put some distance between us and the entrance, I spoke with Shara. I hadn’t wanted to bring her with me, but I’d have been a fool not to make use of her now that she was here.

“When we came to break you out, Melchior was able to get root access to Hades’ intranet so we pretty much owned the place.” My voice came out harsh and croaking, and I found myself wanting to “caw” at every full stop. “I’m sure he’s beefed up his security since, but if we can’t LTP this trip, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“I told you, you needed me,” said Shara. “Hang on a second. Melchior gave me the details on the system while you and Cerice were playing slot-in-the-RAM. I’ll see what I can do.”

She went silent, and I felt her body relax as her mind went elsewhere. She was gone much longer than Melchior had been. I began to worry that we were shit out of luck. But then I felt a slight tremor, and she returned to me.

“I can’t do root. Hades shut that down solid, but I managed to crack the IM daemon and go from there to Hades’ personal user setup, which gives me most admin privileges. Gating us around will be easy, likewise anything else the system is already set up for; but I won’t be able to cover my tracks very well, and I can’t guarantee I won’t set off any alarms.”

“After the mess at the gate, I doubt alarms are going to matter much in the long run. In fact, I doubt that we’ve got a long run. Can you find Persephone and take us to her?”

“On it.” A couple of more precious seconds ticked past. “Got her. You’ll have to land so I can set up the gate.”

I bobbed my head and started a downward glide. We landed on a bluff overlooking a dell where the ghosts of trees played at being a forest. But they had no vitality, and I could feel the weight of death pressing down upon me like a great stone on my chest.

“You planning on staying a giant Raven forever?” asked Shara as she began the LTP process.

I cocked my head to one side and croaked, “Nevermore.” I couldn’t resist. If I got killed in the next few hours, I might not get the chance again.

Shara rolled her eyes and turned back to the business at hand. “I’ll take that as a no.”

I took a few hopping steps away and thought about turning myself back. I’d never done this before, so I didn’t really know how to go about it. I tried reaching inward to the place I’d touched earlier, my own personal interface with the Primal Chaos. It was like sticking my tongue in a light socket, or maybe inserting a cattle prod directly into my frontal lobes. Energy poured into me.

I no longer had a link to chaos. I was a link. It was wild. It was seductive. It was terrifying. Once upon a time I’d used a direct chaos tap to turn my cousin Moric into charcoal, and I’d almost gotten fried in the process myself. This was like that, only more so. I had infinitely more power available to me than I could possibly manage to control. If I wasn’t exquisitely careful, I’d end up a briquette. If I’d still been in my old shape, I’d have been pouring sweat. As it was, I could feel every barb of every feather on my entire body standing on end.

The temptation to skip the whole thing and live out whatever time I had left as a raven was strong. I thought about it. I really did. But in the end I decided I had to master this thing. Besides, I’d miss my opposable thumbs. To say nothing of my lips. So I dipped a mental toe into that incredible flow of power and tried to picture the outcome I wanted. Again I was presented with a million, a billion possibilities.

A myriad of paths led from raven shape to a spreading smear of plasma, even more to a loose cloud of carbon compounds, and one or two to an application of E=mc² that would completely eclipse the Hiroshima bomb. I steered my way between these options to the tiny subset that ended with me alive and in one piece, finally selecting the one that matched my internal image of myself—Ravirn, late of House Lachesis, child of Chaos and the Fates. Once I had that firmly fixed in my mind, I constructed a set of commands that would take me through the intervening steps, a reprogramming of my own internal reality.

It was harder than the transformation into a raven, much harder. Then, I hadn’t had time to really internalize all the ways the process could go wrong. I’d needed to act, and I had. But now, making the same decisions in cold blood and doing it with the unlife of Hades surrounding me—the ultimate reminder of the true and fatal meaning of a mistake—I shuddered. If I wanted to make Ravirn the master of the Raven, I had to master this. I knew that. But I didn’t know if I could.

“Ravirn,” said Shara, tapping her little purple foot. “The gate’s open.”

“All right.” Now! Just do it.

I did. With a little mental twist, I set the transformation to running. Soul-searing pain filled every iota of my awareness. For an instant I existed only as agony, while my body ripped itself apart and reassembled in a new shape. Or rather, an old one. I was Ravirn once again.

“What’s with the court rig?” asked Shara.

“Huh?” I asked. Then I looked down at myself and swore.

I was no longer wearing the racing leathers I’d had on earlier. Instead, I’d reverted to the formal wear of my youth. Apparently, no matter how much I might claim to have completely given up any allegiance to my grandmother, some deep part of me still longed for the days when I’d been part of her House. Either that, or the Raven had a wicked sense of humor.

My motorcycle boots had stretched themselves thigh high and grown cavalier’s cuffs. Leather pants had vanished in favor of emerald tights. T-shirt had become tunic, likewise green. Instead of a jacket I had a black leather doublet. My pistol was gone, replaced by my much-loved but frankly obsolete rapier and dagger.

I swore again. I was really going to miss the built-in armor of my leathers and my pistol, but I didn’t have the time, and I wasn’t willing to take the risks necessary to get them back.

“Well?” Shara raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask. Let’s just go.”

“Step into the light,” said the goblin, bowing me before her. I did so, and she followed. “Gating.”

The column changed from green to blue, and the world from outside to in. We stood on a narrow landing at the top of a long, curving flight of stone stairs. A thick door with a narrow window blocked our way forward. The bars were verdigrised bronze, as was the heavy lock. I leaned forward and looked through the window. Beyond lay an opulently furnished chamber with a huge bed and an elaborate table spread with a banquet in the traditional Greek style. For all that, it was still a prison. I needed only a glance at its sole occupant to know that.

Persephone.