Worldweavers: Spellspam (8 page)

“No,” Tess said, glancing at her brother, who gave the briefest of nods. “But he knows. He can write it down for me. Why do you ask?”

“I need to know what happened,” Thea said. “I just want to…”

“I’ll find out later,” Tess whispered, just as Mrs. Chen turned back.

“I need to fetch some notes from Terry, Mrs. Chen,” Tess said. “I missed one class when I was sitting with Thea. Can I go do that now?”

“All right,” Mrs. Chen said.

Ben stuck his hands into his pockets, looking suddenly awkward. “I’ll see you later, then,” Ben
said, without quite meeting Thea’s eyes, and then loped off after Terry and Tess, who had peeled off already and were discussing something in low voices.

“I’ll keep you company,” Magpie said.

A
UNT ZOË ANSWERED THE
phone at Thea’s house. “Your father had to go out, and I persuaded your mother to get some sleep,” Zoë said, explaining her presence. “I’ll get her to give you a call when she wakes up—she really needs to hear you’re okay. And your father wants to know
what happened
. I think they should both just move up there so they can keep tabs on you. Anyway…are you sure you’re all right?…Do
you
know what happened?”

“Not yet, but when I do you will be the first to know,” Thea said with a hollow little laugh. “You
can
tell Dad that his friends from Washington are really awful, all of them except Humphrey May, and there’s more trouble….”

“What?” Zoë said sharply as Thea’s voice died away. “Please stay out of it for once. Go and lock yourself in your room and don’t stir until you’ve
talked to your father. If you go flitting off on some adventure again, I will send Anthony over there with instructions not to let you out of his sight,” Zoë said, her voice heavy with warning.

“I believe you,” Thea replied. “Tell Mom I’m fine. I’ll call again later, or she can.”

Magpie was in their room when Thea went upstairs, laying out a game of patience. She looked up as Thea came in, and gathered the cards up into an untidy pile.

“So,” she said, “tell me. I’m completely weirded out by the whole thing, and I don’t really understand this spellspam stuff at all—and what’s going on with Signe?”

“I have no idea,” Thea said. “I know as little as you do about the latest crisis. Probably less. At least you were awake for it—I slept through everything.”

“Spellspam,” Magpie prompted. “I know the basics—how it started with LaTasha—but please explain.”

“It’s junk e-mail. With embedded spells. That cause real damage, apparently,” Thea said. She described what she could remember from the scene in the Nexus room and the babbling in foreign languages; Magpie began by having the
giggles, but then, thinking it all through, quickly sobered up.

“And Signe? Humphrey said that she’s
gone
…gone where?”

“It sounds like another spellspam,” Thea said. “But the others were more or less practical jokes—if Signe is really gone, disappeared, because she glanced at a piece of e-mail on-screen, then we have a bigger problem than we thought. I should have asked Aunt Zoë if anyone else out there has disappeared. Tess said she’d find out from Terry what the real story was.”

“But where could she have gone?” Magpie said, frowning. “Is this anything at all like the sort of thing that you do? You know, slip off into a pocket universe of your own?”

Thea sat up. “It’s like Tess said,” she whispered. “They think it’s me—I’m the only one they’ve seen do anything like this. Even Humphrey has his suspicions. Luana will tell everyone back in Washington that the only person she’s seen do magic stuff with computers is me. But there
is
someone else out there. Someone like me.”

Magpie’s eyes were wide. “Someone else who can do computer magic?” she echoed.

“These spellspams have to come from
somewhere,” Thea said.

“So now you think it isn’t a Double Seventh thing after all?” Magpie asked carefully.

“I think this gift might be something new. It’s not a Double Seventh talent. It could be anybody—and we have no way of knowing who this other person is, the one who is doing all this.”

“Thea, where do you think Signe might be?” Magpie murmured. “If she’s been taken too far away from even a scrap of her spirit tree, the last connection to her life force…I don’t know how long she has, but the clock is definitely ticking. Humphrey may not know enough to know where—or even how—to look for her.”

Thea turned to her, startled, but anything she might have said was forestalled by a light knock on the door. Tess poked her head into the room.

“Hey,” she said. “Terry got a copy of the spellspam.” She held out a piece of folded paper.

“Is it okay to read this, just like that?” Thea asked, hesitating.

“Terry says it’s okay. He rewrote it. The original spell was in the computer version.”

“What does it say?” Magpie said impatiently.

Thea opened up the note.
“A magical mystery ride as you explore all the places you’ve only
heard of—imagine what you might find in these distant and dramatic destinations! Come travel with us and see the things you never believed possible!
” she said, reading out loud.

“Thea,” Magpie gasped, “it
is
the same thing…”

“No,” Thea said slowly, staring at the message. “
I
need to have a clear picture in my own head of where I want to go. This…it’s different. It has a different feel to it altogether. I
knew
I should have asked Aunt Zoë if anyone else—”

Tess interrupted. “If you wanted to ask if anyone else outside the school has disappeared in this way lately, the answer is yes. Apparently people have been plucked right out of their chairs and found as far away as China and Polynesia. This one’s real trouble, Thea.”

“Can Terry try and follow them in any way?” Thea asked.

“He looked at the headers, through the Nexus,” Tess said. “It’s a dead end, like always.”

“But Humphrey thinks he can find Signe…?” Magpie said in a small voice.

There was something about the wording of the spellspam that made Thea very uneasy. “This is very vague and broad,” she said, staring at the
paper in her hand. “If this is all he’s got to go on, they’re likely to end up in the opposite corners of the known universe…”

They didn’t see much of Terry over the next two days, and they saw Humphrey only once, looking drawn and haggard.

“He’s driving himself too hard,” Thea had said.

“Signe is running out of time,” Magpie said quietly.

It was only a few hours later when Thea looked up with a sense of déjà vu as Tess flung open the door to Thea and Magpie’s room.

“Humphrey’s gone, too,” she said. “Terry said that he was last seen heading toward his quarters bearing a green-leaf branch in his hand—and then nothing, and he wasn’t in his room or anywhere else…”

“Signe’s branch,” Magpie gasped. “Thea, who knows where
he
is now—do you think that the e-mail might have taken him, too? He might have thought, if he allowed himself to be voluntarily taken by the same spellspam…”

“Tess…those other people that were missing…how long did it take to find them?” Magpie asked.

“Terry didn’t say,” Tess said slowly. “Why?”

“Signe doesn’t have time to wait and be found,” Thea said, looking up. “Not without that branch. She could die, in whatever way Woodlings die. She could just…wither away. Disappear. And it’s been—what—nearly four days now?”

“Thea,” Magpie said, “could
you…
?”

“I can’t go places I haven’t been!” Thea said violently, crossing the room to stand at the window and stare out at the cedars. “I don’t know how! And I wouldn’t know where to start looking!”

“That isn’t exactly true,” Tess said slowly.

Thea turned her head to look at her friend, her eyes sparkling with tears. “Yes, it is,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“When we went to hunt the Nothing,” Tess said, “was that ocean a place you’ve been before?”

“Not really,” Thea said. “It was something I
made up
…not a real place, just a place that was
right
for what we needed…and besides…” Grandmother Spider had helped her cross into that world, but the world had been her own, had sparkled in a miniature vision in one of Grandmother Spider’s dreamcatchers before anything
else had happened. It was her own world, a place she had never been before.

A true weaver
.

“Thea,” Magpie said, “what are you going to do?”

“I need a computer,” Thea whispered. “Can you get me Terry’s laptop?”

“If Mrs. Chen saw me coming in here with a computer, she’d blow a gasket,” Tess said.

“Please,” Thea said. “It’ll be safest from right here. You two can keep an eye on things. You know how to bring me back…if it all goes wrong.”

“Thea…,” Tess began.

“I’ll get it,” Magpie said quietly. “Mrs. Chen would not even think about suspecting
me
. Are you sure, Thea…?”

“What are you going to do?” Tess asked.

“If I knew,” Thea said, “I would tell you.”

A few minutes later, Magpie slipped back into the room with the contraband laptop. Thea sat down cross-legged on her bed with it on her lap, hands poised over the keyboard. And then, suddenly, Cheveyo’s voice was in her head again.

The Road goes to where it needs to take you. Where do you choose to let the Road take you now?

“The Barefoot Road,” she murmured.

“Huh?” Tess said, leaning closer.

Thea twisted slightly to rummage briefly in a drawer of her bureau, coming back out with a length of leather thong wrapped around her knuckles. Three feathers dangled from between the fingers of one hand as she hunched her shoulders and began to type.

“No, wait,” Magpie said. “Leave her alone. She needs…”

A rush of white noise whipped the words away from the fringes of Thea’s hearing, and her surroundings—her room, her friends’ anxious faces—shimmered briefly and were gone.

T
HEA REACHED UP SLOWLY
to draw the thong necklace over her head and smoothed the three feathers down as they came to rest on her chest. The clear light of the high desert surrounded her, red mesas rising around her, and a wide, straight road unfolding from where she stood upon it with her feet bare to the earth before it vanished beyond the horizon.

“Well done,” said a familiar voice, and Thea turned her head slightly, already smiling. Cheveyo stood just a step away from the Road, but not on it.

“I was hoping I would find you here,” Thea said. “You told me once that I could choose to have this Road take me to where I want to go.”

“I did,” Cheveyo said serenely. “Are you ready to make that choice?”

“But Cheveyo…how do I make it take me
somewhere if I don’t know where I am supposed to be going?”

“The Road,” Cheveyo said, “cuts across many worlds. Weave the place you need to find as you walk. You know how to do this. You have done it before.”

“I wove light,” Thea said.

“And space,” Cheveyo said. “And even time. Grandmother Spider has told me of your achievements.”

“Time?” Thea murmured.

“You may not have been ready for that,” Cheveyo said, inclining his head a little. “It drained you. But what you do now, that is not nearly as taxing for you. Everything else stays the same, Catori—the only thing you need to do is to weave a world with a hole shaped like whatever that thing that you are seeking needs to be. Its very absence will lead you to where it is to be found.”

Thea hesitated, considering this new angle. “There are
two
things,” she said at length. “They probably aren’t together.”

“Then you have two choices,” Cheveyo said.

Thea stared at him, but it became obvious that this was all she was going to get from Cheveyo.

“I’d better get going, then,” she said, reaching up to close her hand around her feathers.

Cheveyo inclined his head, stepped back. “When you are done,” he murmured, “perhaps you can come back and tell me of it some day. Now go, and may the Road take you true.”

And then she was alone. Alone with the choices Cheveyo had laid before her.

Signe…or Humphrey? Her vulnerable teacher, or the government mage more than capable of taking care of himself?

But Humphrey held Signe’s lifeline, the branch of her spirit tree. If she found Signe first and she was in any kind of trouble, and then took too long to find Humphrey with the branch, it could all be for nothing. Her first instinct was to find the Woodling, but she quickly realized that it would be far more practical to search out Humphrey May first.

Thea reached out impulsively and grabbed a handful of the dusty red shadow pooling below a mesa she was passing, weaving it in and out with a narrow ribbon of the intense blue she had picked from the sky. The simple weaving of light had been the first piece of true magic that she had touched—a rope of light and shadow, a small
miracle. Now, faced with something far greater than she understood, it gave her courage.

It also brought to mind the precise shade of Humphrey May’s eyes; and then Thea hunted around for something that would remind her of his hair, of his stature, weaving these hints around a central gap which, under her hands, began to assume a certain kind of pattern, a certain kind of shape. She hesitated for a moment as a scent of something
green
drifted by her, a glimpse of trees and a mountain and a sky that was somehow very different from the one that arched above the mesas…and then houses, unfamiliar ones, nothing like she had ever seen before. And then she stepped onto something hard, a texture very different from the Barefoot Road, and it was cold and wet, and she realized that she stood on the edge of a platform that dropped down into a narrow concrete canyon, at the bottom of which lay a set of railway tracks, glistening in a drizzly rain.

A railway station.

With a sudden and sure instinct, Thea reached back through a hole in the air, and hung on to a thread of light from the world in which the Barefoot Road lay; that piece of sunshine now
lay beside her feet, a golden filament, out of place with her new surroundings. It was much cooler here than it had been in that other sunlit world, and Thea shivered where she stood, bare feet on damp concrete, wrapping her arms around herself to preserve what body warmth she could.

She had stepped off of the Road precisely in front of a sign bearing the name of the place where she had emerged:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndroblllantysiliogogogoch
.

Why on earth would Humphrey show up here? Would anyone here actually speak English, enough of it for Thea to ask if anyone had seen a blue-eyed mage wandering around clutching a piece of green-leaved wood…

“Thea?”

It was Humphrey May’s voice, and the rest of him followed his incredulous question as he unfolded himself from a bench beside the apparently abandoned station house, and took a step toward her.

“What are
you
doing here?” he said, and there was something wary in his voice, as though he could not believe that Thea’s arrival in this place
was pure coincidence. But when he spoke again, there was an edge to his voice that made Thea shiver with far more than cold—something wild, very close to panic. “Thank God you found me,” he said. “I hope that you haven’t trapped yourself in this place, too. How did you get here?”

“I followed you,” Thea said. “I found you, and I followed you. I wove…” She realized that whatever she said would make no sense, not without a great deal of explanation, and they had no time for that. “How long have you been here?” she asked instead.

“There’s a clock over there, but it hasn’t moved since I’ve been here,” Humphrey said. “It could have been days, for all I know. The spellspam that took Signe…I found another copy, thought I could follow. But when I first found myself in this place—it was up on the hills, I was flat on my back in a field full of sheep, and I spent some time hunting around because I thought that Signe might be somewhere close…but she wasn’t,
nobody
was, there seems to be no living thing here except the sheep. I finally came down and found the tracks, and then followed them back to this place.”

“Llanfair…
what
?” Thea asked.

“It’s a place in Wales. With the longest known name in geography, I believe. I’ve been here before.” Humphrey looked around slowly, searching the empty shadows of the station’s platforms. “But this is different. Thea,
there is nobody else here
.”

“I can see that,” she said. “Perhaps the next train…”

“No. There is no next train. There is no train, there will never be a train here. All of this…” Humphrey waved his hand at the station behind him, the empty platform. “All of it, it’s stage setting. There is nobody here except me…us. This is an empty world. It is a place something…somebody…created out of my own fears, and the spell in that e-mail took me there. The last time I came here, back in our own world, it was thronged with people—with tourists, locals…. The idea that such a place could be emptied of people—that it’s possible to be this alone…It terrifies me to see it like this, to know that my secret fears, the things that I am most afraid of, can be made this real for me. This is powerful stuff, this virtual magic you are dabbling in.”

For a moment he looked troubled again, as
though he were trying to put together an equation in his mind, trying to figure out what really connected Thea with this eerie, empty place.

“Places you never believed possible,”
Thea murmured, making her own connections.

“What was that?” Humphrey said.

“That was in the spellspam. That was the spell—places you never believed possible. Places you dreamed about, or want to go, or fear. That’s where it takes you.”
And what did that mean for poor Signe? Where did she wind up?

“I tried the phone in the station, tried to call my office, to get someone who could come and get me home…but it just rang and rang and rang,” Humphrey said. “That’s when I knew that something was really wrong. It just isn’t possible that there would be no reply on the other end. Not in the real world. Not in
our
world. The station might have just been between trains, but this…” His expression suddenly changed, and the eyes that he turned to Thea became pleading. “Thea…do you know where Signe is?”

“No, but I can find her, like I found you,” Thea said, with far more confidence than she felt.

“Can you get us out of this place?” Humphrey
asked. Thea could feel the weight of his anxiety in his voice.

She turned around and picked up the thread of sunshine that lay coiled at her feet. “With this,” she said, “yes. Come over here.”

Humphrey, pausing only to carefully gather up Signe’s branch from a bench behind him, vaulted down onto the rails even before she had finished speaking, and then up onto her side of the platform.

“Are you ready?” Thea said as he scrambled up.

He drew a deep, ragged sigh. “Never more ready to leave anyplace in my life,” he said.

Thea wrapped her fingers more securely around the thread of light, and pulled. The air opened before them; she took Humphrey’s elbow with her free hand and pushed him forward; he staggered for a moment, and then stood, astonished, as the rain-drenched little railway station dissolved around him into the warm dry heat of the high desert. Thea looked down.

“You’ve got shoes on,” she said.

He followed her gaze. “Yes,” he agreed. “That would seem to be the case.”

“Then don’t move,” Thea said, “or we’ll lose it.” She reached up and lifted her feather necklace
over her head. “Here,” she said, “this will bring me straight back to you. Stay absolutely still—I’ll try to be back as soon as I can.”

“Back from where?” Humphrey said, staring at the red mesas around him with unbelieving eyes. “What is this place? How on earth did you
get
here?”

“Later,” Thea said. “Signe.”

His face changed. “Go.”

It was harder to weave Signe out here—she was the stuff of Faele, and that was slipperier by far than Thea’s own kind. By very virtue of her identity, Signe was a sort of shape-shifter and it was hard to “weave” a Signe-shaped hole when that hole wavered between being a delicately boned woman and an elegant silver birch. Thea thought she had failed completely when the pattern in her hand began to assume a shape that was far too familiar—but not that which she was seeking.

And then she picked up one last shadow, one last thread of light, one last piece of understanding, and it all fell into place for her.

The things most feared.

An exiled Faele-kin.

The pattern in Thea’s hand was beginning
to show her the thing she herself feared—the Alphiri. She had been ignoring it, willing it to go away, because part of her was sure it was her own fears that she was weaving into the pattern, but it all made sense—the Alphiri were of a similar kindred to the Faele, but a higher caste, ones that might have judged, ones that might have had a hand in an exile…ones that might choose to hold on to some condemned soul delivered to them until such time as a ransom could be paid. The Alphiri, after all, did nothing for free.

And once she realized all this, Thea could suddenly sense Signe’s presence, a weakening light, almost at the end of her endurance…in the glittering tower of the Alphiri capital city.

I can’t do this!

It was a moment of pure panic, and she reached for her feather necklace…
courage…wisdom…patience…
even as Alphiri minds became aware of this intruding, seeking presence and reached out tendrils to capture, to hold.

She was back at Humphrey’s side in an instant, shivering violently. He reached out instinctively to steady her, and she flung out a restraining hand.

“Don’t move!” she said. “I know where she is. The Alphiri have her. Signe is in a crystal city somewhere. You will know. It should be easy to find her now that you know where to look.”