Worldweavers: Spellspam (22 page)

“I think…the same thing they wanted from me, when I was little,” Thea whispered. “They want a source of magic. One
they
can use. They couldn’t tap into human magic, not as it was, not as they were—but if there is a way to use the computers, then they can use…someone like me. That was what they were hoping to buy when they came to my father, when I was maybe three years old. And he told them that I wasn’t for sale.”

“Your father spoke for you,” Larry said. “But Diego…”

“Diego is
my
son. I should be the one to step between him and the Alphiri,” the professor said.

“Only…in theory, Professor,” said Zoë slowly. “The Tribunal might have trouble with that. And if the Alphiri Trade Codex should be taken to apply…Diego doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone in the same way that Thea was claimed by her father. He was fathered by you…
but he was never born
, and if he belongs to anyone, it is to his twin brother, who is the other half of
his spirit…and who’s missing. Diego, in practical terms, can lay claim to himself—or so the Alphiri can argue.”

“You mean they can still get what they want? Access to magic? They can
buy
Diego?”

The raven screamed, and launched itself off the shelf, straight at the people in a huddled knot in the midst of the room. Almost too fast for the eye to see, Larry had blurred into the serval cat and was in mid-leap before any of them had a chance to react, knocking the bird off-balance with one powerful paw. The raven squawked, ricocheted off a protruding corner of a bookshelf, and tumbled into an ungraceful heap onto the professor’s desk. As it untangled wing from tail, the cat was upon it again, tail lashing, a paw pinning down each wing.

It was Zoë who ran up to grab one of the wings as Larry transformed again, the other wing in his own hand, just as the raven transformed back into the now somewhat disheveled man whom Thea knew as Corey.

“You will tell me where my brother is,” Larry said, his face still in a very catlike snarl.

“Lorenzo…,” the professor began, and
then paused.
“Larry
. I need to take urgent measures concerning this Alphiri threat. It is Diego who needs me now. May I leave Beltran in your hands?”

“Not his. Mine,” said Thea.

E
VERYONE TURNED TO LOOK
at her again.

“I will take Corey,” she said. “He will tell where Beltran is. I will take him back to the ancient light; let the sun judge him, if he has transgressed.”

“She can do it,” Zoë said, hanging on to one of Corey’s wrists.

“Wait a minute,” Corey began. “Wait just a minute…”

“If you have not broken the law, then you will not be found guilty of it,” Thea said.

“Do you need help?” Larry asked.

“Both of you, come. I can’t hold onto him and weave at the same time. Professor, the computer…?”

“It’s off the grid, right now,” Sebastian de los Reyes said, rather grimly. “But if you don’t need Terranet, you may use it.”

“No. Just a keyboard and a screen,” Thea murmured, setting her lemonade glass aside and getting up, a little unsteadily, to cross over to the computer console. “Bring him over, and make sure you hang onto him when we get across. I don’t want him escaping into the Road.”

“Whatever you say,” Larry said, making sure his grip on Corey’s right wrist was locked. “This way, if you please.”

Corey turned his head toward the professor as he was being frog-marched to the computer console. “No, wait—I’ll give you what the Alphiri gave…”

“Now, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, lifting her hands off the keyboard. She touched Zoë’s free hand with one of her own, and then they were…no longer in the study. Red mesas rose around them as they stood on the Barefoot Road. Thea’s feet were bare upon it; everyone else remained shod.

“Stay still,” Thea instructed. “Don’t move, and don’t let
him
move.”

“You’d better sit down,” Larry said to Corey, giving a firm tug on Corey’s bony wrist.

Resigned, Corey subsided into a cross-legged position on the ground.

Thea took a few steps on the Road, peering
into the scrub and tumbled rocks by the roadside.

“You have need of me?” said a voice, very close by, and where nothing had been a moment ago, Cheveyo stood leaning on his familiar staff.

“I think I will always need you,” Thea said.

Cheveyo inclined his head. “I see you bring company,” he remarked, glancing to the trio on the Road behind her.

“He’s Corey,” Thea said.

“I know him,” Cheveyo said.

“He holds knowledge that we need. More than that, he broke the law, and I bring him back here, to where his kind may hold him accountable.”

“Some might say he is his own law,” Cheveyo said. “He is the Trickster; to plot and to deceive is just his way; it is the reason for his being.”

“But betrayal is not,” Thea said. “And he betrayed more than one kindred.”

“We cannot punish him,” said a new voice, and Grandmother Spider stepped out from behind Cheveyo. “This is not a court that can hand down a sentence and enforce it with imprisonment or the lash.”

Behind her, the sunlight thickened into the tawny shape of Tawaha.

“He is what he is,” Tawaha said, in that voice that was liquid gold. “We are the Eldest, but he is part of the Elder Kin, too. We cannot punish him—but we can judge him, and we can reprimand. That carries its own weight.”

Grandmother Spider raised a hand, and Thea turned her head to where Larry and Zoë crouched beside Corey, still holding on to him. Zoë’s face was luminous with joy, which seemed strange under the circumstances until Thea remembered how her aunt had once described the “voice” of the sun to her. Hearing Tawaha speak was once more a vindication of Zoë’s curious world, and she was glowing with it.

“Let him go,” Grandmother Spider called, and Zoë and Larry let go of Corey’s wrists. He staggered to his feet, making something of a production of dusting himself off. Then he glanced at the Road, at his own booted feet.

“The Road is not mine today,” he said. “If I move, it will vanish.”

“Leap,” Cheveyo said serenely. “You didn’t come here by a straight road anyway.”

Corey eyed the gap between himself and the edge of the Road, and then shrugged, bunched his leg muscles, and launched himself into the
scree. Larry and Zoë stayed where they were, keeping very still. The Road shivered, but held. Corey appeared to consider shifting into his coyote form and bolting for the hills, but under the stern gaze of both Grandmother Spider and Tawaha, thought better of it. He sighed, hung his head, and walked over to them, dragging his heels.

“I have seen, in the dreamcatchers,” Grandmother Spider said. “There are no secrets that you can keep from me, not for long. I have found the boy you were holding, asleep in the dark, and I have sent Tawaha to wake him. He is free.”

She made a gesture, and Beltran stood, weaving a little, in the shadow of a nearby boulder. Larry’s shoulders tensed; Zoë reached out and laid a light hand on his arm, but he had already remembered where he was, and made his muscles relax. Thea stared at Beltran’s face, trying to catch his eye, to communicate, but there was nothing in his expression, nothing except an almost unearthly blankness that made her hackles rise.

Corey’s golden eyes flashed defiance. “She lies,” he said, flinging out an arm at Thea. “I have my own laws. I have broken nothing.”

“You are right,” Tawaha said, looking down at Corey with both authority and compassion. “You are a shadow between light and darkness. You are choice. You were created by the needs of the folk who made you, and you were granted dispensation from many laws because of that, a very long time ago. But there are limits to what you are permitted to do—putting a rock into the bed of a stream to make a rapid or to make it choose to run in a different streambed is permitted to you, and doing so may be considered the reason for your very existence. The kindred of the many worlds need to be tested, and it is the obstacles the Trickster throws in their path that are the trials through which their mettle is proved. But putting a stone into a streambed is different from damming the stream to create a lake. And while you are permitted to play with the manner in which a stream finds its way to the great sea, you are
not
permitted to change its nature.” He lifted his head to gaze at Thea for a moment, and then beyond her at her companions. “He will not cross your paths again for a while,” Tawaha said. “We cannot undo what the Trickster does, but we can and we will keep a closer eye on him.” He lifted a hand, limned in a golden glow. “Walk in the
light,” he said, and it was a blessing.

And then they were gone, the three of them, the Elder ones—the splendor of Tawaha, the grace of Grandmother Spider, the barely restrained defiant audacity, even in this tight corner, of Corey the Trickster.

In the absence of something that he could lean on or drape himself over, Beltran de los Reyes appeared to be practically ready to drop in a heap where he stood. Cheveyo, glancing back at him, shook his head a little.

“That one looks like he needs caring for,” he said, “and it is too long a tale that you have to tell, as I understand, to do it justice now. One day you might favor me by coming to my hearth to share it. Until then.” He raised his free hand in farewell, turned to give a small courtly bow to the two waiting on the Road, and then turned and walked away with a measured stride.

“Who,” Larry said, “was
that
?”

“Anasazi shaman,” Zoë said.

Larry’s eyes flicked to her. “Funny.”

“True,” she said. “Ask Thea about it sometime.”

“And the other two? The ones who took our trickster friend?”

“They made our world, once,” Thea said, and could not help a grin at the sight of Larry’s expression, fluctuating between purest awe and complete disbelief. “He is Tawaha. The Sun.”

Larry instinctively glanced up to the cloudless desert sky where the sun hung in molten fury. “That?”

“Yeah, that,” Thea said.

“There was a time before Thea could do this thing that she does, the computer magic,” Zoë said.

“Or
anything
,” Thea muttered. “The Double Seventh who couldn’t—remember?”

“Yes, but—then you wound up at that school and they—”

“
Before
the school,” Thea said, “they sent me here. And whatever the magic was that I had, Cheveyo helped wake it. Cheveyo, and Grandmother Spider.” She reached out—blue from the sky, red from the dust at the Road’s side, dark strands from the shadows under the mesas—and began weaving the strands between her fingers, smiling. “And I could suddenly do
this
,” she said, dropping a patch of braided light into Larry’s hand. “And after that, I could do…other things. Like make talking about magic safe
for Terry back in our world, or go looking for Diego—weaving other places, other worlds, a different reality…”

“So let me get this straight,” Larry said. “You have to use a computer, the cutting edge of modern technology, to let you reach back and touch the power of the elder days?”

“Well…when you put it like that, yeah,” Thea said.

Larry shook his head. “The mystery of the world and all its wonders,” he said. “I will
never
understand this. What’s going to happen to this Corey guy?”

“That’s out of our hands,” Zoë said. “Right now, I think you’d better get Beltran, and we should go home—there’s still all kinds of chaos waiting for us there…”

“Right,” Larry said, snapping out of his mood and taking a step toward Beltran…and the Road shimmered once underneath their feet, and promptly vanished. They stood in the midst of scrubland and red dust, with no indication that anything other than that had ever been there.

“Oops,” said Larry, who froze the moment he sensed something strange going on, but not fast enough to prevent it from happening. He looked
around at Thea, somewhat sheepishly. “Did you need that to get us home…?”

Zoë rolled her eyes. “Just get Beltran,” she said. “Thea…?”

“Under ordinary circumstances, I might have wanted it—but I brought us straight here from the computer and I can yank us straight back—is everyone accounted for?”

“Yeah,” said Larry, stooping to gather up Beltran into his arms, and then paused, peering at something at Beltran’s feet. “Looks like he was retrieved complete with baggage,” he added.

“I’ll grab that,” Zoë said, stepping up to pick up a battered leather satchel from the ground. She hefted it experimentally—the bag wasn’t heavy, but it was full of something sharp and angled, its contents sticking points out. “Seems he travels light…”

Before she had finished speaking, the red mesas faded into the familiar shelves of Professor de los Reyes’s study, which, in their absence, had become filled to capacity by people, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. It was a big room, but it was packed—and the sudden arrival of four more physical bodies did not improve matters at all.

“Thea!” It was Tess, Terry’s twin—but before she had a chance to confirm Tess’s improbable presence in this room, another all-too-familiar presence cut into her line of vision.

“There! Look! What did I tell you?” The voice was close to a screech. Thea closed her eyes for a moment.

“Oh, great,” she muttered. “
She
’s here.”

“Luana, that will be enough,” said another voice, firm and in control. Its owner turned out to be a woman in her late forties, ash-blond hair cut into a chic, swingy bob. “Thea, I’m Nancy Dane, Terry’s mother. I’ve heard a lot about you.” She glanced at Larry, in whose arms Beltran appeared to have passed out. “Do you need medical assistance?”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” Larry said. “I’m Lar…Lorenzo de los Reyes, this is my brother Beltran. Is my father here?”

“He and my brother have gone directly to the Alphiri,” Nancy said. “Clear the way there. Let them through. Sandy, Alan, get the paramedics.”

Larry glanced around. “Zoë…”

“I’ll come and fill you in later. Go,” she said.

He glanced down at his brother, took a deep
breath, and shouldered his way past the throng and out of the study.

“What’s going on?” Thea asked in a small voice.

“We were hoping someone would tell us,” Nancy said. “There’s been a veritable epidemic of those spellspam messages in the last twenty-four hours, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping; the Bureau was advised of what was happening here, but that was
before
the spellspam explosion.”

“But that shouldn’t have happened,” Thea said. “If Beltran wasn’t here…and Diego wasn’t doing it…and this computer had been taken off the Terranet…”

“I think they’re all queued,” said Terry, elbowing his way to the front of the pack. “I don’t think anyone’s in control of it just now. I can’t find the cache, otherwise I’d delete it all—but it’s in there somewhere. Maybe when the professor comes back he’ll be able to deal with it—he knows his systems, and may be able to ferret it out.”

“I am perfectly capable of doing that,” snapped Luana.

Nancy glanced at her. “We will wait,” she said, with authority.

Luana tossed her dreadlocks. “I
will
file a report,” she said.

“Luana, we are in a private residence,” Nancy said firmly. “The computer in question may be the Nexus supercomputer and thus directly under our jurisdiction, but we appointed a caretaker for it who is currently not present, and therefore we will wait before we proceed with anything further.”

“You are letting the boy fiddle with it,” Luana said.

Terry bristled.

“My son has been working under Professor de los Reyes’s supervision and has his express permission to access the machine,” said Nancy.

“Hey, Thea,” said another familiar voice into the silence. “When I suggested sending you here, I had no idea what kind of a hornet’s nest you’d stir up. Do you want to tell us which universe you’ve just popped in from?”

“Hi, Mr. May,” Thea said, smiling with relief, peering through a gap between Luana and Nancy to where Humphrey May sat perched on the professor’s office chair.

But then Zoë stirred, and Luana Lilley caught sight of the satchel slung over her shoulder.

“What have you got there?” Luana said sharply.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Zoë said, slipping the satchel off her shoulder. “When we got Beltran de los Reyes, this was left alongside him, so we just brought it along.”