Worldweavers: Spellspam (20 page)

“Or smelling
everything
,” Terry said. “Ow. Complete overload.”

“But you said it gave you an idea, Larry,” Zoë said, settling herself into the armchair by the window. The light fell over her face and hair like a blessing, making her faintly luminous, as though she were a visiting Woodling basking in her forest’s sunshine. Thea saw the awareness of this wash over Larry’s face before he spoke.

“Yes. An idea. About Thea.”

T
HEA’S SMILE WAS WIPED
off her face. “What?” she said, looking warily up at Larry.

“Well…when you go looking for Diego…”

“Wait a minute,” Terry said, “is she really supposed to—”

“Uh,” said Thea.

“Perhaps we’d better…,” Zoë began, getting up from her armchair.

The door of the study opened just as they all spoke at once.

“One at a time,” said the professor, “usually works better if you are actually trying to communicate. Is everything all right with Sam Emmett?”

“Absolutely,” Larry said. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Yes, thank you,” the professor said, walking around the desk to claim his high-backed chair.

“There are going to be a lot of doctors with
their hands full this morning, people don’t know any better,” Larry said, pouring out a mug of strong black coffee and taking it back to the desk. “And some people won’t go at all because some of the stuff on that list isn’t symptomatic of anything specific…and just how do you cure someone of xenophobia, anyway…?”

“Someone had better call my uncle,” Terry murmured carefully.

“I already let the FBM know. I’ll update them later,” Larry said.

“Now,” said the professor, accepting a mug of steaming coffee from Larry’s hands, “what was this about an idea?”

“Wait, first of all,” Zoë said. She came to stand beside Thea, facing the desk. “What
exactly
do you think it will accomplish? Sending Thea out like a hunting hawk?”

“Usually hunting hawks bring back the prey they’ve been sent after,” Larry said.

“But she can’t, Larry. Not this time. You yourself said it. If you believe that it is Diego de los Reyes who is behind this…she cannot bring him back. He never existed, not in this world. She might come back towing some lifeless shell…”

Zoë broke off, suddenly realizing that she was speaking of painful matters to the father and the older brother of both entities she was talking about, Diego
and
Beltran.

“You’re right, that isn’t going to help us,” Larry said, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “There is more to it than this. Thea, this isn’t a recon mission. It’s going into battle. You need to figure out how we can stop Diego from continuing with this—before it gets worse. You know how bad a library gone feral can be—escaped spells wreaking havoc everywhere, wild magic roosting in the rafters. If Diego loses control of his playthings, the entire world becomes one huge feral library. And you of all people know firsthand about those—your own father used to work at taming and containing the ferals when they got out of hand. If magic really gets let loose and out of control…our entire social fabric could unravel.”

“But what do you want me to do?” Thea whispered.

The professor sighed, putting his coffee down onto his desk.

“One way or another,” he said, “Diego needs to be stopped. It will be your task to find him…and
if you cannot stop him yourself, then lead us to him. As I understand it…you’ve taken reinforcements with you before, when you
wove
that other world where your encounter took place.”

“With the Nothing?” Thea said.

“She didn’t take us,” Terry said. “We came after her.”

“She left the door open for that. I know that you have taken others with you into, or at least through, those worlds. Is there a possibility that you might take, for instance, me?”

“Father,” Larry said sharply, his head snapping around. “You of all people can’t face him. You couldn’t find it in yourself to destroy him if that was necessary. And that’s only natural—he is your
son
.”

“And your brother,” the professor said.

“Who, then? The kids again? Me? Maybe we should call for FBM reinforcements and send in Luana Lilley.”

Both the Academy students actually recoiled at that name.

“I’m not taking that woman anywhere,” Thea said rebelliously.

“Then call Humphrey,” Zoë said obstinately. “You like
him
.”

“None of the above,” Larry said sharply, cutting through the discussion. “Look, if you were our quarry, would you just fling open the gates of your fortress if someone like Thea came knocking with an army at her back? No, she needs to at least lure him out by herself. If she leaves a way for us to follow and send reinforcements, that’s an advantage. But in that first instance…”

“You want me to go in alone,” Thea said faintly.

“Yes, because if you don’t you’ll never find him, because he won’t let himself be found. One thing we do know is that he’s good at hiding.”

“But what if I
do
find him?”

“Well, that brings me to the idea,” Larry said. “This sense-enhancement e-mail that he’s just sent out is calculated to be malicious and painful, and the sense ‘enhancements’ will drive the victim crazy in the shortest possible time. But what if I could figure out the spell and recast it, and give you enhanced senses of a different sort, something that will help you look for him? You said there was a green fog all around you last time, and you couldn’t see—what if I could give you enhanced vision, something to pierce the mists with?”

“I can weave that,” Thea said.

Larry blinked. “Weave what?”

“I don’t need to ‘see’ through the green mist. Last time I was trapped, and I wanted out, and so I did. But if I’m supposed to be doing something else, I can find him. I can weave a world where I can find him.”

“Even if it’s his world?” Larry said. “Do you have the power to change someone else’s vision? Would he then have the power to change yours? This is so dangerous…”

“
Now
you think about that,” Zoë snapped.

“We need to know…” Larry began, but it was the professor who leaned forward, both elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers in a gesture of emphasis.

“Too many things are telling me that this goes deeper than we realized,” he said. “There is the tutor, who has been unmasked as being the Trickster himself, an ancient spirit entity of this land. There is the nature of some of the spellspams that have been recorded so far, which seem to implicate at least a surface involvement of the Faele. There is the apparently unrelated issue that I found mentioned in one of the reports, where the witnesses to a specific spellspam started
speaking in foreign languages…one of which was Alphiri. Both Beltran and the individual of whom we speak as my lost son, Diego…may just be tools, used by the nonhuman polities for their own ends. And we have no idea as to what the politics—the Alphiri or Faele—are trying to accomplish by unleashing this kind of chaos into the world.”

“Grandmother Spider said…they were looking for dreams.”

The professor looked at Thea in puzzlement. “What was that?”

Thea tried to cast her mind back. There were times when she felt as though Cheveyo walked beside her at the Academy, when Grandmother Spider visited her dreams and spun stories, when the Trickster sat eavesdropping on her conversation in a café…and there were times when all that remained were the things she had learned from them.

Like the truth about the Alphiri. And then, the fear.

She had not known, when she was younger, that she was afraid of the Alphiri. They were everywhere she looked—she had grown up with them, they were the Trader Polity, the Messenger
Polity, they had always been a part of her world—but her point of view had changed after her visit to Grandmother Spider’s house, and the very fact that one couldn’t turn around without bumping into an Alphiri peddling something or hovering at a portal had acquired a far more ominous significance.

Especially after what she had seen last summer in the woods near her home, the three Alphiri whom she had known, beyond any doubt, to be waiting there for
her
.

Thea found her heart thumping as she let her thoughts touch on the Alphiri, and on what she might still be facing before this journey was over.

“They buy, they sell, they copy, and they polish until it shines…but they cannot create or dream,” Thea said. “Grandmother Spider said that they are searching for a legacy they can leave behind—and they want magic, and they cannot hold it.” She lifted her gaze. “They wanted me,” she said. “Before I was born, they wanted me. But my father told them that I was not for sale, that humans don’t sell their children.”

“But who would they have gone to, to bargain for Diego?” Zoë murmured thoughtfully.

“He is my son,” the professor said heavily.

“
Beltran
is your son,” Zoë said. “Diego is a lost soul. He does not belong to anyone…except, perhaps, Beltran, to whom he is linked because they were twinned in the womb.”

Larry had been chewing his lip for some time, apparently holding back from saying something, but now he shook his head, and begun to pace the study.

“It’s all speculation,” he said. “Everything we are talking about, we’re pulling out of thin air.
We need to find him
. Before things get worse…and trust me, they will.”

“What do you want me to do?” Thea said at last.

“Go into the woods and leave me a trail of crumbs to follow,” Larry said with a crooked smile. “He won’t be found except by you alone—but maybe I…or someone else…can follow the trail you leave behind, and find you both. With a bit of luck, that’s all you need to do.”

“But what if he…” Zoë began, and swallowed hard. “I promised her parents that I would look after her,” she added softly.

“It’s okay, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said. Her voice shook, but just a little. “I’ll do what I can.”

The false wall of the professor’s study was still open; Sebastian de los Reyes saw Thea’s eyes go to the Nexus terminal and, after a brief hesitation, nodded permission. Thea walked over to the keyboard and sat down in front of it, very still for a moment, and then toggled to a notepad screen and began typing.

She paused for a moment when she was done, read over what she had written, and then said, without turning around, “Terry…watch my back.”

And hit
ENTER
.

She could not use the Barefoot Road for this search—she could not weave an absence of a particular person and tell the Universe to take her to a time and place where that hole would be filled. There was nothing she could use to search. Putting in Beltran’s image might have led her to Beltran himself—but all she knew about him at that point was that he was missing, and going after him might lead her into worse trouble than she knew. Diego might have been described as Beltran’s twin, but Thea had no way of instructing her weave on how to tell the two of them apart.

She needed a void for this, something empty of
form—because she was looking for a place, not a person, because a place was all she knew how to look for. The room of green mist and mirrors.

She remembered the quiet sky she had watched from Big Elk’s back, and that was what she now floated in the midst of—a darkness flickering with thousands of diamond points of sharp light. Thea looked at them and wove into them the memory of the mist which had once surrounded her.

Green
.

The strange, unnatural green glow that had spilled into the corridors of the professor’s house that first night. The odd, glowing green mist that had surrounded her when she had first stepped into Diego de los Reyes’s world. The green ribbon she had braided into a rope to take her home.

The stars began to bleed green—fading from bright white or flickering golden into points of green in the sky, like the eyes of a legion of malevolent cats, and then the greenness pouring from them, as though they were suddenly no more than holes in something holding back the greenness from her like an arched roof. And then the firmament became crazed with cracks, and the greenness oozed through the fissures, and
then, as the black heavens crumbled away, pouring through like water, coming down all around Thea like curtains of light. The green smelled, somewhat incongruously, like the juniper bushes growing in the shadows of Cheveyo’s desert.

“I know you’re there,” she said into the greenness after a moment, sensing that she was not alone.

There was a chuckle from behind her.

“Of course I am,” the voice said, the same voice that had spoken before.

“This is childish,” Thea said. “I already know what you look like. What do you think you’re hiding?”

“Oh, you do?” the voice said, mocking gently. “Are you sure about that?”

“Of course I am. They said you’re Beltran’s twin. I know what Beltran looks like. And what did you do with him, anyway? His father…”

“His father never thought he fulfilled his potential,” the voice said.

“I can understand that,” Thea muttered. She had not meant to utter that out loud, but it slipped from her, the sentiment ingrained in her by the years of her own failures, by the still-bitter memory of her father’s eyes every time
those failures were confirmed.

“You think so?” The voice turned just a little savage, but its next words were sweet again. “As for Beltran, whatever makes you think that
I
have him? And whatever makes you think I look anything like him?”

“You’re twins,” Thea said.

“Not in this world,” Diego said. “In this world, I am who I choose to be.”

The green mists parted a little, fraying, and then withdrew to the edges of Thea’s vision as though defining an arena. And in the midst of it, on a floor of mirrored black obsidian, stood a figure dressed in a white shirt open at the throat and tight-fitting black leather pants. A dagger with a jeweled hilt glittered from a scabbard hung from his belt, his right hand, with a heavy gold ring on the ring finger, resting on it in a deceptively casual manner. He was unexpectedly tall—Thea, who had calibrated her expectations to Beltran’s size and build, found she had to revise her estimate of Diego’s height by a couple of inches, lifting her chin to look him in the eye.

It was not until he laughed, his thin aristocratic face transformed by the sudden flash of white teeth, that she realized that she had been
staring at him with her mouth slightly open.

“Oh dear, if only you could see your face,” he said, chuckling.

“But you can’t be Diego,” Thea objected instinctively. “You’re too old.”