Worldweavers: Spellspam (4 page)

“Terry, do you actually
want
to do this?” Thea asked softly.

Terry shrugged. “Yes, of course I do,” he said. “And at the same time…it all sounds great, but I sure wish I had someone like Twitterpat to talk this over with. I really wish he were here right now….”

T
HE AIR IN THE
shed stirred as though a breath of wind had found its way through a crack and gusted inside. Tess instinctively turned around to close the shed door—and found that it was already closed.

Outside, the whisper of the rain on the roof abruptly ceased, and another sound came in its wake—a sort of distant creak, like a tree bending in high wind.

A sense of
wrongness
settled into the small dark shed, heavy and clammy, hard to breathe through. Ben reacted first, standing up with such speed and force that he almost sent Thea headfirst into the dirt floor. Heedless of obstructions, he launched himself at Terry.

“Take it back! Take it back right now!
Unwish it!
”

“What?” Tess said, slowly, too slowly, as
though she were talking through molasses.

“The e-mail! That e-mail you got this evening, in the library, Terry! You laughed at it, but it was
spellspam
! It gave you three wishes, and you just used one—and Twitterpat’s been dead for months…”

“I wish he’d go away,” Terry said, his eyes wide. “I wish…”

“
Shut up!
Not another word!” Ben said sharply, lifting his head to listen.

The rain had returned, the solidity of the air dissipated slowly, almost reluctantly. Thea drew in a ragged breath.

“You have one more wish,” Ben said. “You’d better use it. Otherwise you’ll be looking over your shoulder constantly, until it slips out at the worst possible moment, giving you precisely the thing you don’t want. They stole this one from the Faele; it isn’t a human trick.”

“But a human wrought it into a spell,” Thea said slowly.

“A spell,” Magpie said. “How come you didn’t…you know…choke on it again…?”

“It was just ‘I wish,’” Ben said. “The magic was in intent, not the words. He got off lucky that time.”

“What if he just…said…that he wanted everything to be okay?” Magpie said hopefully.

Ben shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It has to be specific, very specific. Look what you just said—you wanted ‘someone like Twitterpat,’ and Twitterpat himself has been dead, buried, and decomposing these last few months—who knows what would have walked in here just now if you hadn’t, uh,
wussshed
it away?”

“What if I asked for…for the ability to…for the allergy to go away?” Terry said.

“Knowing the Faele, it would probably let you talk
only
about the things you had been unable to utter beforehand and nothing else—and you’ve already used two of your wishes. Don’t waste the third on something you wouldn’t be able to undo. But use it, use it on something, because we humans are wishing machines, and the Faele knew that about us long before our paths officially crossed in the history books. We can’t
help
wishing, and it gets us into trouble without even trying.”

“I wish…,” Terry began abruptly, and nodded as Ben mouthed at him,
Specific! Be specific!
“I wish we all get back to our beds safely tonight without anyone seeing us and that nobody other
than the five of us ever knows that we were here tonight.”

“Will that do?” Magpie said, weighing each word to see if it was specific enough.

“It should be pretty safe,” said Ben slowly, “although it is usually safer not to wish for anything that involves other people. You never know how things play out, and the other people in question may not be very pleased at the results.”

“But what could possibly go wrong with…,” Tess began.

“If you saw it, too, Ben,” Thea said, interrupting with sudden concern, “that e-mail, I mean—aren’t you also at risk? What are
your
three wishes? Shouldn’t you do the same thing—get them out of the way?”

“I will,” Ben said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Be careful with those wishes,” Thea said.

Ben nodded mutely, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“Pity you didn’t just…er…ask for this Nexus thing to just take care of itself, Terry,” Magpie said.

“No!” said Terry, Thea, and Ben in unison.

Magpie blinked. “It was just an idea.”

“That’s what I mean about humans being
W-I-S-H generators,” Ben said, spelling the word out. “It’s a very bad idea. Think about what the Faele could do with that wish.”

“It could make the thing come alive and turn to some agenda of its own,” Tess said.

“I didn’t say I
liked
the idea,” Magpie said, raising her hands in protest. “I was just saying—”

“And it’s a good thing
you
didn’t get that particular spellspam,” Ben said, with a crooked little grin.

Magpie bristled at that. “And what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“Nothing! Nothing!” Ben ducked his head in self-defense. “It’s just that…you’re the perfect mark for the Faele. You’d try to bend it all to the good, and be sweeping, and you’d wind up creating a bigger mess than you could possibly imagine.”

“Well, I look forward to seeing what you pick, Mister Broomstick,” Magpie said, still in a huff.

Ben winced. The nickname that Mr. Siffer had hung on him had stuck, and he was having a hard time living with it. “How I wish everyone could forget that stupid na—”

“Ben!”
everybody except Magpie squawked.

“Forget what?” Magpie said, after a beat.

Ben looked around at the others, and shook his head. “I knew that would happen. Look, I need to go away right now and deal with this thing, before I waste the last two wishes.”

“Ben, wait…,” Thea began, but he had already pulled up the hood of his parka and slipped out of the shed into the drizzle.

“We’d better all get back,” Tess said, glancing at her watch.

“Before we go…,” Thea said hurriedly, as everyone got to their feet, “Terry…where did you leave it? With the principal?”

“I’m supposed to go back and talk to him—in a couple of days, when the furor with LaTasha dies down.”

“Is there any way I can help?” Thea asked. “I know I can’t do anything that’s technical, but maybe I can spell Tess.”

“Under the circumstances,” Tess said, “that’s hardly the word to use. We really should all just go back to bed.”

“I’m for that,” Terry said. “We can figure out what to do later.”

“What if we can’t find a place to talk?” Magpie said.

“There’s always e-mail,” Terry said.

“Uh-huh,” said Tess, hunching her shoulders. “After what happened with LaTasha, they might put the lid on that.”

“They can filter and firewall and screen—but even if they shut down the library computer bank, too many of us have our own laptops,” Terry said.

“But if they shut down the server…”

“That’s the trouble—they can’t, for long—not the main trunk of it. Too much is computer-run these days. Especially here, where—” Terry stopped abruptly, biting off the sentence, apparently tasting something sour in his mouth. “I hate this,” he said. “Let’s just say that they won’t be able to keep the lid on e-mail forever…but Thea, we have to figure out what else is going on here.”

“You mean the whole spellspam thing,” Magpie said.

“But I have no idea…,” Thea said, her voice ending on a squeak of helpless indignation.

“We’d all better get an idea, and fast,” Tess said.

“You think we might get more from the Free
Gift menu?” Magpie said. “That could actually be rather fun. If anything so far has been harmless, that one has. People just get weird stuff…”

“I phoned my parents earlier and asked just casually about that gifts thing,” Tess said. “It wouldn’t be so funny, Magpie, if you had been on the receiving end of a pair of Emperor penguins, or a truckful of an obscure out-of-print novel from the 1930s, or a metric ton of paper clips—or a snowplow delivered to your Florida condo, all of which apparently happened to people my family knows. Terry’s right, it’s a cyber-epidemic—and you can’t return something that has no return address on it. So you’re stuck with the stuff.” She tried very hard to suppress a giggle, but failed, and she lowered her head to hide her face, shaking her hair down over her mirth. “Although,” she said, “I have to admit, I would rather have liked being a fly on the wall when Grandma MacAllister received her penguins,” she said.

They spilled carefully out into the drizzle, letting just enough light from their flashlights play between their fingers to light a safe path back. Terry quickly melted away into the rainy night
and the three girls pulled up their hoods and raced back to the residence hall across the wet grass and under dripping trees.

They made it to the back door of the hall and stood for a moment on the concrete porch, shaking the rain off their parkas, and then Thea nudged open the door to the laundry room.

“Come on,” she began, “quick, before anyone…”

They were all inside before they fully realized that one of the washing machines had a red pilot light on, and emitted a businesslike hum and a faint scent of suds and steam. The room was dark, but even as the three froze, a light switch was thrown and the room was awash in bright, neon-white light.

Tess moaned softly.

But the woman who had come into the laundry room, one of the junior housemistresses, was apparently oblivious of their unsanctioned presence. She crossed over to another machine, opened the lid, and started hauling laundry out without showing the least sign of awareness of the wet and shivering girls who stood not three feet from her.

Magpie lifted a hand and waved it experimentally. The woman hauling laundry didn’t blink.

“Terry said…that nobody was to see us,” whispered Magpie, in the same instant as Tess opened her mouth.

Thea nodded. “I remember this,” she said softly. “I
remember
this, when I was little, when they were reading me fairy tales from before the contact with the Faele, from the times when we thought it was all made up. There was a cantrip—
Before me day, behind me night so I may pass out of sight…
It’s an invisibility spell. Come on, before it quits.”

“But magic isn’t supposed to
work
here,” Magpie said helplessly.

“Nobody ever actually said that,” Thea said slowly as they made their way up the stairs, squelching ever so softly with each step and leaving wet footprints on the carpet. “Not in so many words. All that was ever claimed was that magic was not
allowed
at the Academy.”

“They might not see us,” Magpie said practically, “but someone will be stepping on soggy carpet tomorrow.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “Good
night
,” she said.

“We’d better get out of sight,” muttered Thea. “Who knows how long this invisibility thing will last?”

“Until we get into bed, if I remember Terry’s precise wording right,” Magpie said. “Bed is actually starting to sound awfully good, spell or no spell. I don’t think I can feel my feet.”

Magpie had always been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, discarding both memory and dream, past and future, when she crawled into her bed at night. She was asleep in moments. It was Thea who lay awake for a long time, staring up at the shadowed ceiling.

After everything that had happened, one image simply wouldn’t leave Thea’s mind; her first glimpse of the Nexus icon on Twitterpat’s computer screen, and the thing that it had reminded her of.

A dreamcatcher.

Grandmother Spider.

One of Grandmother Spider’s silvery, gleaming dreamcatchers spun in Thea’s mind’s eye, hypnotic, catching the light, weaving it all into a softness that was night and rain and love and accomplishment.

Grandmother Spider…
the words formed
in Thea’s mind, unlooked for, unexpected, but heartfelt.
You know how to live in a world that changes around you faster than you can see. I wish you’d come and remind me….

O
PEN THE WINDOW
.

The voice was soft and familiar, and hard to pin down—it seemed to come from inside Thea’s own head, from the room behind her in which Magpie was peacefully sleeping, and from out in the rainy night somewhere. But Thea knew it, and trusted it, and obeyed it without question.

The window latch resisted for a moment, but even as it gave, and the wings of the window opened into the room, Thea knew that she was no longer in quite the same space as the sleeping presence of her roommate. There was an odd moment where what she saw—a rainy night in the Pacific Northwest—clashed violently with the scent that came drifting in through the open
window, a scent of warm, dry air and desert sage and red dust. She could see that other world dimly through a fading curtain of rain. Then the rain and the wet firs were scent and memory, and then she was looking straight into the comfortable room that she had once been invited to enter by a tiny spider in the palm of her hand.

That spider, in its human form, sat curled elegantly on the pile of furs by her hearth, her hair once again snow-white and bobbed at the jawline. There was a disconcerting wrench, a moment of dizziness—Grandmother Spider looked exactly like she had looked when Thea had first set eyes on her, and she had the feeling that if a hundred years passed, or a thousand, it would make no difference at all. Grandmother Spider would look the same.

She looked up at Thea and smiled.

“Come in,” she said, as though she had been expecting Thea, as though Thea’s presence in this room was not yet another tiny miracle that Grandmother Spider seemed to be almost unaware that she was performing, something that came as naturally to her as breathing did to Thea.

“I thought…I couldn’t just
do
this,” Thea
whispered. What had been her window had elongated into a door at Grandmother Spider’s words of welcome, and Thea stepped through and into that other world. “This passing back and forth between your space and mine. It took the Alphiri, that first time, and after that it was the computers….”

She remembered the words that had shaped themselves in her mind, that had brought her here.
I wish,
she had said. She was suddenly unsure if everyone in that shed had been afflicted by the three-wishes spellspam, whether they’d seen it or not.

But Grandmother Spider didn’t appear worried.

“Child,” she said, “perhaps you have forgotten that the first thing that you raised with the touch of your own hand, back when you walked under the skies of the First World with me, was a portal. Built from your own memory, your own music, your own dreams.”

“But that was back there. And everything is possible there,” Thea said.

Grandmother Spider raised one eyebrow. “You think everyone just weaves their own doorways into a different world, just like that? No, you are
a worldweaver, whether you’re in the First World or in your own sphere—and if you have a different way of weaving there, that is part of the way that you choose to use your gift. However, this time I came to
you
. I heard you calling my name.”

Thea smiled as she settled down on the guest furs beside Grandmother Spider. “But I didn’t even say anything out loud….”

Grandmother Spider reached out with one long-fingered hand to cup Thea’s cheek. “You are troubled, child of my spirit.”

Thea opened her mouth to start explaining and stopped, wondering just how much of what she had to say would make any sense in this room—where the technology that her own world was so proud of was not only absent, but felt entirely superfluous. She felt as though she were about to start explaining algebra to a cat who was indifferent to the theory of it all but already knew how to bend dimensions of space and time and teleport through solid walls if the need arose.

“It’s all right,” Grandmother Spider said, her hair suddenly an impish shade of carrot-red, her eyes a sort of bright emerald green. “It may
surprise you to know that I’ve actually heard of computers. What you have, I gather, is a trickster storm—and those are not confined to the computer world. Tricksters have always been with us. What is it?”

“Corey and I crossed paths,” Thea said. The memory of the wayward raven feathers that had been driving Corey crazy during her last encounter with him, back on the Puget Sound ferry last summer, was still vivid in her mind’s eye. “After I left here, I mean. He was…in some little trouble.”

“He always is,” Grandmother Spider said. “It is his nature.”

“You think he has something to do with what’s been going on?” Thea asked, sitting up straighter. Corey could be extremely charming or amusing, but he was no less dangerous for all that.

“If he does, then it’s with assistance—he, like all of his kin, has little use for computers. But he could have provided material and inspiration. He was always good at that.”

“My friend Ben said that one of the spellspams they used—the three-wishes one—um, it
is
okay to talk about it out loud here? It won’t
mess things up…?”

“It’s fine. Nothing that’s said in this room can cause harm unless I will it so.”

“There is a spellspam going around right now; it asks what you would do if you got three wishes, and people could really get into trouble with that.”

“Yes,” Grandmother Spider murmured. “Wishes and hopes—your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. Your people, of all my children, can be most lethally wounded by the best in you.”

“Ben said whoever sent that one out stole the idea from the Faele,” Thea said.

“They always knew how to exploit vulnerabilities, the Faele,” Grandmother Spider said. “Yours is the only race they have ever used the weapon of the three wishes against. You’d be surprised at what works with folk like, for instance, the Alphiri.”

It was hard to keep a thread of thought going. Grandmother Spider was apparently able to keep it all in her head, to flutter from idea to idea with the ease of a butterfly. But Thea found herself easily distracted when in Grandmother Spider’s presence, if only because she came out with the
most incredible things in very matter-of-fact ways. Thea tried to wrestle the conversation back to the topic of spellspam and its fallout.

“You said if it’s Corey, he’d need human help…?”

Grandmother Spider nodded, choosing to remain silent, letting Thea navigate her thoughts until she could ask the questions she needed to ask.

“He’s kind of…hard to find if he doesn’t want to be, isn’t he?” Thea said. “But does his influence…leave a mark? Is there any way of finding that human point of contact? The person to whom the spellspam is being suggested?”

“Just trace the headers,” said Grandmother Spider tranquilly.

Thea did a double take. “What?”

“The headers,” Grandmother Spider said helpfully. “You know, the bits attached to the e-mail that tell you where it came from, who sent it, the pathways it followed from origin to destination—trace them back, from the receiving computer to the originating one.”

“I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about that,” Thea said, astonished.

“But you have friends who do,” Grandmother
Spider said. “And yes, I know, a good hacker could disguise and channel things in a different way every time—but you wouldn’t be looking for the originating server so much as for an identifying mark.”

“How do you even
know
about headers?” Thea demanded, sitting up straight.

“I told you, I know all sorts of things,” Grandmother Spider said.

“But spam is so common,” Thea said, “and we’ve all been trained that just
looking
at an e-mail isn’t dangerous. Or wasn’t, until the spellspam started. It seems it doesn’t carry viruses or any other kind of attachments or even send you to a website to look at something. It’s even been funny. The names that it comes under!”

“Trickster, all over,” Grandmother Spider said, nodding. “Never doubt that they can be dangerous, even while you’re laughing. Especially if you are laughing. But there are ways of telling the merely irritating from the potentially dangerous.”

“I do have…a friend,” Thea said. “I know it sounds strange, but he has an allergy. He can’t talk about magic without literally choking on it. And he’s the best computer mind they’ve got
at the school. He could probably track headers in his sleep.” Grandmother Spider chuckled but did not interrupt. “And the school has this huge computer called the Nexus. It used to be maintained by one of the teachers, but he was killed last year fighting the Nothing, and they haven’t had anyone else to do it ever since, and now they’re asking Terry. I know he can do it. But there’s the other aspect, the spellspam, and he’s already been caught by it once. If he’s alone with it, it might destroy him without anyone knowing, especially if it gets any worse than just jokes and teasing. If he isn’t alone, he can’t tell anyone that he’s caught on it because that would kill him anyway. Other than having one of us—one of us other four, who originally did the computer crossing, back when we lured the Nothing into the sea world—with Terry constantly, I don’t know what to tell him, how to help him…. Does any of this make any sense at all?”

“Well,” Grandmother Spider said with a smile, “I get the idea.”

“I thought of you,” Thea said, “when Terry first found the icon for the Nexus on a computer—and it looked…it looked just like one of your dreamcatchers.”

Grandmother Spider raised an eyebrow. “Precisely what I was going to suggest.”

“A dreamcatcher?” Thea said.

“A dreamcatcher. But a special one.”

“One of yours…?”

Grandmother Spider shook her head. “Ah, no. Those don’t leave this room—and if one of them did make it to your world, you’d have the Alphiri down on you so fast that you wouldn’t have the time to worry about anything as trivial as spellspam. Don’t ever get between an Alphiri and something they really want, not without a very good reason…and perhaps not even then. But I
can
give you one that will be just as useful to you. You could call it…a
spell
checker.”

Thea actually laughed out loud. “How would that work?”

“It’s a very innocuous thing,” Grandmother Spider said. “You hang it on the monitor, and it’s a pretty toy—but if you get e-mail, you look at it through the spellchecker. If there’s something dangerous there, you can see that it’s present—and you can flag the e-mail, or quarantine it, or delete it before you have to look at it with the unaided eye.”

“Would that work? In our world?” Thea
asked, sitting up eagerly.

“Your world is one that Tawaha and I made,” Grandmother Spider said. “What I decree works in it. You will have the thing before sundown tomorrow. But have you considered something else? A different solution?”

“Like what?”

“You’re a weaver of worlds. You can pass through a world lightly; you don’t always have to ring the front doorbell to announce your arrival. Sometimes you just need to open a window into another room in your mind.”

Thea’s eyes were wide. “I thought about that. I didn’t know if I could sustain it. If I can duplicate the Nexus control room and make it exist in a world in which his allergy
doesn’t
—so he’s safe, then he could work on
that
Nexus, and it would be echoed on the primary one in our world. When he’s done, he returns to our world, the real world.”

“You really have to learn,” Grandmother Spider said with an amused shake of her head, “not to cling so hard to what is
real
. Or to what you think should be real. Both those Nexus rooms are ‘real’ in their moment—reality is what you are living, the things important to you. Those
are the only things that are real. Everything else is illusions and dreams, trapped in my dreamcatchers.”

Thea found herself remembering an exchange on the subject of illusion and reality that she had had with Margaret Chen, who had been delegated to figure out how far Thea’s unexpected abilities went. Thea had taken Mrs. Chen to several very different worlds—and the Academy mage was starting to look a little green as they re-emerged into her study after one of these excursions.

“I asked my parents for a laptop for Christmas,” Thea had said, unable to hold back a grin.

“Please tell me you didn’t get it,” Mrs. Chen had said. “Keeping an eye on you in my hall is one thing, but knowing that you can type a sentence into a computer and go heaven knows where, without the remotest possibility that someone could drag you back to reality, is a responsibility I’m not ready for.”

“But it
is
reality,” Thea said. “Those other places—they’re just as real.”

“I hope not,” Mrs. Chen said firmly. “The real you is always still here, in this room, at that computer. Everything else is just mirror play.”

“But you said the safest place to hide something is behind a mirror,” Thea said. “How do you know that the place I’m in is not more real than the place where only a ghost-me remains?”

“Thea Winthrop, you’re almost fifteen,” Mrs. Chen said. “I don’t feel remotely ready to discuss the nature of reality with you right now, despite the fact that you can apparently create your own. There’s still a lot we don’t know about this thing you can do, and I prefer to withhold judgment on which reality is more real until I have more information.”

Thea blinked, and Mrs. Chen was far away again. In front of her, looking faintly quizzical, Grandmother Spider was looking at her with a tiny smile hovering around the edges of her mouth.

“Thank you,” Thea said.

“You’re welcome,” Grandmother Spider said. “I’m watching over you. If you need me, all you have to do is call. Rest and save your strength—you will need it. And I will do what I promised. Sleep, now.”

Thea woke with a start, blinking. She was in her bed, in her nightgown, her comforter wrapped
around her as it always was—an ordinary morning, even down to the small mewling sounds in the next bed that meant that Magpie was waking, too.

Except that Thea could not recall going through the motions of getting ready for bed the night before. Her memory of the clandestine gathering in the garden shed was sharp, right up to the point where she and Magpie returned to their room—and after that, what intruded as memory could not possibly have been anything but dream.