Worldweavers: Spellspam (23 page)

“Let me…,” Luana began, reaching for it, but before she could grab it, Humphrey hoisted himself off his chair, slipped sideways past her, and intercepted the satchel.

“No, let
me
,” he insisted. “Let’s not be too eager, Luana—remember what happened the
last
time you just flung things open without looking…?”

Luana shot him a poisonous look, but he already had the bag in hand. He laid it on the professor’s desk, undid the worn clasp, and gently shook out its contents on the desk.

They all stared at the handful of old-fashioned tapes used to store data in early computers, and one small white cube, no more than a hand-span wide. The cube appeared featureless and blank at first, but they could see the ghost of a suggestion of patterns on its faces—the one currently facing the ceiling consisted of two wavy lines stacked one on top of the other—almost
too faint to make out.

“What is it?” Thea asked.

“Those tapes…I’m not even sure if we can read them anymore,” Humphrey murmured, stroking his chin. “We’ll have to go into the basement and dust off some
really
old machines…if we’ve still got them.”

“
Beltran
had these?” Nancy said, glancing up at Zoë. “The boy was barely born when these tapes were the cutting edge of our technology. If he was born at all. The last computer I remember that used those has to be twenty years old!”

“Whoever had Beltran had them,” Thea said.

“What would our friend the Trickster be doing with these?” Zoë said in honest bewilderment.

“Well, assuming they aren’t corrupted through improper storage or tampering, the answers are on the tapes,” Humphrey said. “
There’s
something you can make yourself useful on, Luana. Take these straight back to the Bureau and get started on them. The sooner we figure them out, the sooner we’ll be able to solve this. And I have every confidence that you will get those answers ASAP.”

“But what’s
that
?” Terry said, poking a finger at the white cube. It rolled over at his touch, like
a die; the wavy lines strengthened marginally as Terry’s hand brushed it, and then they were gone as the cube turned over and showed, on a new face, a pair of bold upright lines rather like a Roman numeral II.

“That?” Humphrey said softly, staring at the cube with a curious expression on his face. “I’ve never seen one before, but I think that is an Elemental cube.”

“Like this house?” Thea said, glancing around at the walls of Sebastian de los Reyes’s study.

“Something like that,” Humphrey said.

“But what does it do?” Tess asked, fascinated.

“As to that”—Humphrey raised his pale blue eyes from the mysterious object on the desk—“I have absolutely no idea.”

T
HE ELEMENTAL HOUSE REMAINED
chaotic for some time. Luana and another agent were quickly gone, much to everyone else’s apparent relief, taking the white cube and the mysterious, antiquated computer tapes back to the Bureau for analysis—but that left five Bureau agents still on site—Nancy Dane, Humphrey May, two paramedics, and one dour security type who slouched around muttering orders to a bevy of annoying implike winged creatures with red eyes and tiny barbed whipping tails.

Isabella was not in evidence. Larry had whisked Beltran away to a safe place somewhere, and then seemed to have vanished himself. Zoë, after reassuring herself that Thea was all right, appeared to have taken herself elsewhere, too. The professor and the twins’ uncle Kevin, the head of the FBM, were still out on their errand
to the Alphiri, and apparently incommunicado.

That left Thea, Terry, and Tess pretty much to their own devices, and the three of them spent a couple of hours catching up in Terry’s room until Thea finally growled something and flipped open her laptop.

“What are you doing?” Tess asked.

“I’m calling in reinforcements,” Thea said, typing furiously.

“Don’t you think there are quite enough people in this house?” Terry asked.

“Oh, we don’t need any of
them
,” Thea said, typing a period with a flourish. “Ready?”

“You’re going to do that
thing
, aren’t you? Off we go, ’round the mulberry bush,” Tess said.

“Something like that,” Thea said, and hit
ENTER
. And then the three of them were suddenly standing on the Barefoot Road again, Cheveyo’s country, the place that Thea had only recently left behind.

Terry and Tess, in their own world, had visited the American Southwest. They recognized its geography, but for a moment neither of them connected it to a time rather than a place, despite Thea having spoken to them of her summer with the Anasazi. Then things suddenly became
weird, fast. The sky above their heads darkened like glass into two increasingly transparent windows, and familiar if rather astonished faces peered through: Magpie and Ben.

“Where
are
you?” Magpie asked, and her voice sounded loud, like thunder, coming from straight above them. “You look like you’re in a snow globe…”

Ben laughed. “Some snow globe.”

“Want to join us?” Thea said, looking up with complete unconcern, as though she were talking to people hanging out of a second-story window and not out of a hot, washed-out summer sky.

“Sure,” Magpie said.

Thea stretched a hand out to her. “Grab my hand,” she said. Magpie appeared puzzled by this request, in much the same way that Thea had once been puzzled by an invitation to enter a spider’s home, and Thea, remembering the occasion, grinned. “Just close your eyes and stick a hand out,” she said.

Magpie’s eyebrows rose a fraction, but she obeyed; her hand came out of the sky like a giant’s, but somehow from the moment it emerged out of the blue to the moment her fingers touched Thea’s it had shrunk to its normal size and Thea
clasped it and simply pulled. In the next moment, Magpie stood beside them on the Road, her hand still clasped in Thea’s.

“Wild!” she yelped, her eyes flying open.

“Ben?” Thea said, holding out her other hand.

“Are you sure about this?” Ben asked carefully. “It looks an awful long way down…”

“I’m here, silly, it’s perfectly all right,” Magpie said, staring around her. “It’s so beautiful…”

“All right, then, if you think it’s okay,” Ben said. His hand came snaking down much as Magpie’s had done, and Thea grasped it, and pulled him down.

“And then we were five again,” Terry said. “Okay, now what? And I think you should have told somebody…”

“Who was there to tell? They were all too busy chasing their
own
tails to worry about where ours are. And we will be back before they know we’re gone, I promise you that.”

“But what can we possibly do in such a short time…?” Ben began, but Magpie looked at him reproachfully.

“Time is as time does,” she said. “It’s obvious. Here, as much time or as little as you want can
go by, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with how much time is passing on Thea’s computer…right?”

Thea nodded. “I’ve fixed it so that we’ll return less than a full minute after we left,” she said. “They won’t even know we’ve been gone. And it beats sitting around in that room waiting.”

“The house will know,” Terry said.

“Yeah but they won’t be asking the house,” Thea retorted. “Besides, I was invited…and I’m inviting you.”

“Invited by whom?” Ben said, gazing at the apparently empty country around them.

“By me,” said a voice behind them, and they turned to find Cheveyo looking at them with what might almost have qualified as a smile. “I was not expecting you back so soon, Catori, but my hearth has long been hungry for a good story. You and your friends are welcome.”

He inclined his head a fraction, indicating a direction, and then turned and walked away.

“I think he wants us to follow him,” Ben whispered, staring owl-eyed at Cheveyo’s retreating back.

“Okay, then,” Terry said, squaring his shoulders. “This should be interesting.”

Magpie fell into step beside Thea. “This is what you were telling me about, isn’t it? The Elder Days?”

“Uh-huh,” Thea said.

“Do you think…that Grandmother Spider might show up…?”

“We left the Elders with their hands full when we brought Corey back to them,” Thea said. Magpie’s face fell a little. “But you said it yourself—time can do strange things out here. You never know.”

Magpie nodded. Thea reached out and squeezed her hand, and then lengthened her step to catch up with Cheveyo, who was poling himself along at his usual pace and simply assumed that everybody would all end up at the same place together sooner or later.

“I brought them here because there are things we need to learn from one another,” Thea said quietly as she reached him. “It’s a war council, if you want to call it that. And you said you wanted a story—I figured this would be as good a time as any to tell you one.”

“As I told you, Catori,” Cheveyo said without breaking the rhythm of his stride, “you are all welcome here.”

“Even if we ask lots of questions?” Thea asked, unable to hold back.

Cheveyo bent his head a little, perhaps to hide a smile. “Even then,” he said. “After all, I have made no undertaking to answer any.”

“But I would be grateful for any advice you might give us, after you’ve heard it all,” Thea said.

“What you ask for, I will give,” Cheveyo said gravely. “You honor me by coming to me.”

Thea bent her head to acknowledge his consent and fell back again to join the other four. Ben, who was bringing up the rear, was limping.

“What happened?” Thea asked.

“I think I have a stone in my shoe,” he said.

Thea’s mouth quirked a little. “I had the same stone in my shoe when I first came here,” she said. “The ghost pebble. Don’t tell Cheveyo about it, he doesn’t believe in them.”

“How far are we going?” Ben asked.

“Not far.” Thea pointed a little way up the slope, where the path rose abruptly onto a near-vertical mesa face. A switchback path meandered once or twice as the gradient increased and then appeared to end smack against the cliff.

Ben looked up the mesa. “We’re climbing
that
?”

“There’s smoke coming out from under that overhang,” Terry said. “I don’t think we’ll be climbing.”

“That’s Cheveyo’s house,” Thea said.

“Wow,” Magpie breathed, her face full of wonder.

“I can’t see anything,” Ben said, peering in the direction indicated. “Is there a village or something? Where? Are we going to have to, uh, I don’t know…smoke a peace pipe or something?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Magpie snapped impatiently. “He’s a shaman, not Sitting Bull.”

Ben lapsed into a wounded silence.

Cheveyo had pulled ahead a little. By the time the rest of them had staggered up the final switchback to the stone house at the foot of the mesa, their host had already lit a fire on the outside hearth and was waiting beside it.

“Be welcome at my hearth,” he said. “Catori tells me that she has summoned her friends for a council. Speak freely here of the things you came to talk about. Catori has asked for such advice as I can offer, so I will remain in your circle so that I may learn what is needful for me to know.”

It was Thea who first moved, gave Cheveyo a small bow, and stepped up to the fireside to sit cross-legged on one of the skins, facing the fire. Magpie immediately did the same, and then the twins, and finally, warily, as though he was still not entirely certain as to what to expect, Ben.

After glancing at Terry, Thea delivered a condensed version of the events of the previous few days to Ben and Magpie. Ben listened in silence, sitting with his arms wrapped about his shins and his chin on his knees, frowning as she spoke. Magpie, quicksilver as always, interrupted with questions whenever they occurred to her.

But it was Ben who asked the question that stopped Thea.

“The Alphiri? Again?” he said. “Or is it more like, still? I get the feeling that it was only a matter of time before they showed up.”

“You were awfully skittish about the Alphiri when you first got to the Academy,” Magpie said.

“That obvious?”

“Not
obvious
. But just the way you reacted to stuff.”

“Yes, when we first got into Signe’s class,” Tess said.

“But how did
your
learning how to do cybermagic suddenly get the Alphiri into this?” Ben asked.

“It wasn’t even the cybermagic. Not in the beginning. That first time, when we all went back to the Hoh forest through the computer—you were all there with me. I had no idea what was going on, any more than you guys did. That was before we figured it all out.”

“But you said that Corey wanted to hand you over like a trussed Thanksgiving turkey way before that,” Tess said. “You were still here, which was way before the Academy. So why then, already?”

“Because I was Double Seventh, and the Alphiri had been watching, and
something
woke out here.” Thea reached out and snagged a thread of orange from the fire, a strand of charcoal gray from a shadow, a thin filament of blue from the pale sky above them—and in her fingers, the ribbons of colored light twined into a braided rope. “There was this. And there was the portal that I had made, back in Grandmother Spider’s world. And Corey must have figured out or overheard what Grandmother Spider said to me—that the reason I didn’t do magic in my own world was
not because I couldn’t do any, but because I chose not to do it. And the reason I chose not to do it had something to do with the Alphiri wanting me to do it. They already tried to buy me once, from my parents.”

“You
could
suddenly do magic, and they sent you to the Wandless Academy…?” Ben said. “After this?”

“I didn’t tell anyone…not then. I thought that the best place to hide would be in the last place anyone who had any suspicions about me would think of looking, and that was the place where no magic was permitted, by decree.”

Terry snorted. “And little did you know that you were at the source,” he said. “Because of the Nexus.”

“Maybe that’s why we broke through at the Academy,” Tess said thoughtfully. “None of us knew about the Nexus then. But it might have been what gave us the push into the virtual world.”

“I guess that’s how Diego de los Reyes fell into it,” Thea said, nodding. “Without the pure chance of something like him being in precisely the right place to…”

“
Before
we get to Diego de los Reyes,” Ben
said. “This Alphiri thing.”

“What about it?”

“Well, I don’t get it,” Ben said. “I don’t know what the fuss is with this Diego guy, either. I mean, all that they might really have wanted was not so much to buy
you
as buy whatever it is that you could
do
. And as far as Diego is concerned—he isn’t even really alive, is he? How can they possibly hurt him?”

“You think we should just let the Alphiri have him?” Tess said.

Ben shrugged. “It might even help matters,” he muttered. “At least he wouldn’t be our responsibility anymore. And why do we care what happens to him, anyway? He’s just a
ghost
. And one that seems more than capable of taking care of itself.”

“I wouldn’t wish the Alphiri on anyone, not even somebody like Diego. Especially not someone like Diego,” Thea said passionately. “
We
might have choices; what are his?”

Ben gave her a smoldering look. “You might find out if you stop trying to make them for him,” he said.

“I guess it would depend on what the Alphiri wanted the magic for,” Magpie said, stirring.

“They sent the Nothing,” Thea said grimly.

Ben stared at her. “Are we certain about that?” he said at last.

“Yeah, was it actually proved?” Tess said. “I know there was lots of speculation, but I don’t know if I ever saw it stated outright anywhere.”

“They sent it. Big Elk told me that much.”

“Big Elk?”

“That’s a story for another time,” Thea said. “But the Alphiri want to assimilate the magic, not just use it. This time the trade they have in mind is far more fundamental than their usual bargain—they don’t just want access to a tool, they want to become it—
they
want the magic. For themselves. They want to
be
magic, not
do
magic. Doing this for them, on their behalf, it would not be a job—it would be—” She shuddered once, briefly, calling to mind the avid gaze of the Alphiri who had been waiting for her in the woods behind her home last summer, who would have spirited her away if she had deviated an iota from the trade agreement that they had already entered into.

“The people you call the Alphiri are a long-lived race, and they existed long before your kindred emerged,” Cheveyo said unexpectedly.
“Their culture has endured for a span of time that would seem fabulous to you. They look upon humans as mayflies, ephemeral things, here one moment and gone the next. But humankind has spun a cocoon of dreams and magic for itself, and even when they vanish, as all things do in their time, that will remain behind, a memory of magic. When the Alphiri go…they will leave nothing. It is as if a cold wind will have swept in the wake of their passing, erasing the tracks they have left in the sand. They have been seeking magic for hundreds of years. Thousands. One thing after another, one failure after another. They may see a twilight approaching, and that could mean…that they are getting a little more desperate to find the spark that will let their memory endure after they are gone. They are running out of time. Your race, my children, is the closest they have come to finding something that they could take into themselves, call their own.”