Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  Her mind did not feel tired, though. It was full of images, visions, ideas…and, inevitably, questions. Grandmother Spider didn’t seem to mind those as much as Cheveyo, and would answer willingly, but almost always cryptically.

  It might have been just another question to add to the rest, but oddly enough, it was with a sense of closing a circle, of almost a semblance of enlightenment, that Thea realized they had returned to the Portal she had woven out of song and starlight at the beginning of her visit to Grandmother Spider’s world.

  In the cold light of early dawn, the thing looked at once far more solid and yet a lot more otherworldly than Thea remembered from the moment of its creation under the First World stars. It was also…different. Under the moon and the stars, the space defined by the outer boundaries of the Portal had looked solid, dark, an impassable barrier that even light could not penetrate—the illusion of a thick oaken door with iron bolts that might have been at home in a medieval dungeon. As dawn washed over it, however, Thea realized it was nothing of the sort. It was still opaque, but it was dark blue, almost black. And it was not opaque like that oak dungeon door that she had envisioned. Rather, it was the impenetrability of very deep water, the ocean-trench depths where the sea turned black beneath the hulls of tiny boats, black with fathom upon fathom of lightless mystery leading to the heart of the world.

  “I should be afraid,” Thea murmured, staring at the doorway.

  “Why?” Grandmother Spider, back in her human form, said reasonably. “You made it.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Touch it,” Grandmother Spider suggested. “Gently. Carefully. Just brush it with your fingers.”

  There was knowledge in those words, as well as curiosity, and Thea thought she knew what lay behind them. Grandmother Spider had called the door a bridge, a gateway, a place where worlds touched and the fabric between them was thin and porous. But, as with most magic, no two things were ever exactly alike.

  This was a gate wrought from First World light and music, something created from almost the exact same raw materials that Grandmother Spider herself had used when she had first set out to spin her worlds. And it was while Thea was under Grandmother Spider’s wing, in her realm, that Thea had done this thing. That alone would have made it different from any other similar gate anywhere. Thea could understand perfectly that Grandmother Spider wanted to see what Thea had done with the building blocks, where this particular door led, what kind of link Thea had made between her own worlds.

  Thea reached out a hesitant hand and then snatched it back, as if burned, at the unexpected sound of a small diffident cough that came from the right of the two women. They were no longer alone.

  “What are you doing here?” Grandmother Spider demanded, even as Thea spun to face the newcomer.

  A shape peeled itself away from the still-dark, knife-edged shadow cast by a nearby boulder in the sharp, fresh light of early morning. The visitor was a young man, his shock of dark hair with a curious pale streak down the side framing a smooth, sharp-chinned, bronze-skinned face and eyes of pale gold.

  He inclined his head in the direction of the two women and smiled. His teeth were white, and perhaps, just perhaps, a little sharper than human teeth could have been.

  There was something about him that tugged at Thea’s memory.

  “Do I know you?” she murmured.

  “I meet most folks, sooner or later, from time to time,” he said, stepping forward. “You think you recognize me?”

  “Maybe,” Thea said guardedly.

  He laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh. “Maybe, then,” he said. “Call me Corey.”

  Grandmother Spider snorted. “Pretty name, this time around,” she said. “I ask again, what are you doing here?”

  “I come bringing warning,” Corey said.

  “You? Warning?” Grandmother Spider sounded skeptical, her wonderful eyes now dark and wary, measuring Corey from the top of his tousled head to the tips of the snakeskin cowboy boots, and eloquently finding him wanting.

  “Even I,” Corey said with a small, mockingly courtly bow, “have sometimes been known to do…good.”

  “Only by accident,” Grandmother Spider said, a touch acidly. “You’ve been more trouble than I care to remember for more years than I want to think about. So, warn.”

  “You left your dreamcatchers,” Corey said enigmatically.

  Grandmother Spider blinked. “Yes. I have been known to do that from time to time.”

  “Ah, but you always leave a part of yourself to guard them,” Corey murmured, veiling his eyes with his long dark lashes.

  “And so I have this time…shards!” Grandmother Spider straightened sharply, her eyes going distant, her vision focused somewhere very far away.

  “I thought so,” Corey said, lacing his fingers together. “You had a fascinating visitor. Even you get distracted sometimes. And the Alphiri know you’ve been double-dealing, and haven’t sold them the whole secret. They’ve been far from happy about it.”

  “I know that,” Grandmother Spider snapped. “But the dreamcatchers don’t need guarding from the Alphiri. Whatever else you can say about them, they buy. They do not steal.”

  “But the Faele do,” Corey said. “The Faele will steal anything, and leave a changed thing in its place. Give them the ghost of a chance, and they will do it—sometimes for no better reason than because they can, or because they are bored, or because a thing is pretty and sparkling and they simply want it.”

  “You would know,” Grandmother Spider said with a deceptively limpid smile. “You and the Faele, you’re cut from the same cloth. Mischief for the sake of it.”

  The Alphiri…

  “Trade Codex,” Thea whispered. “I remember. We buy from whoever sells.” Her voice took on an almost pedantic tone, as though she were standing up in a classroom being examined on recent history of the trade polities for a grade. “The Alphiri assume that the person offering a thing for sale has ownership of it, and any further disputes do not concern them—if there is doubt and strife, it’s between the original seller and whoever he might have got the thing from. As far as the Alphiri are concerned, once they pay for a thing it is theirs, and they do not care how it was obtained before that.”

  “They merely let it be known that they want something,” Corey said. He had progressed from looking a little startled, as Thea had launched into her catechism, through a moment of smirking cynicism and then into practical agreement. Now he nodded, managing to imply by that economical little motion that he thought Thea talked too much but also acknowledging what she was saying as the truth. “Somehow, it is procured—and the Alphiri ask no questions. They just pay the agreed price.”

  For some reason, those words made Thea flinch. They seemed to apply uncomfortably closely to her own situation.

  “Shards,” said Grandmother Spider again, this time far more emphatically, obviously thinking of something entirely different. “Shards and shattered webs. I’d better get back there. Thea, wait here. I’ll be back as fast as I can. You, come with me.” The last was addressed to Corey, whose hooded gaze had never left Thea.

  “Oh, but you don’t plan on leaving the child all alone out here?” he said with a commendable attempt at guilelessness. “There is danger, and she could need protection….”

  Grandmother Spider laughed, and there was an edge to the laughter that made Thea’s spine stiffen with suspicion. “You? Leave you with her? I would sooner trust the Faele with my dreamcatchers. You cared enough to come all the way out here to lure me back home. Fine, you’re coming with me, to face whatever waits there.” She held out an imperious hand. “To me!”

  Corey crept forward, a whipped dog, managing to give the impression of having his tail tucked between his legs and his large ears laid flat back in canine submission. As he reached Grandmother Spider’s outstretched hand and touched his fingers to hers, Grandmother Spider folded her long fingers around Corey’s hand. “Wait for me here!” she instructed Thea,
and then she and Corey simply winked out, one moment standing there by Thea’s fantastic Portal still shimmering with captured starlight, the next moment utterly vanished.

  Thea sank down onto the ground beside her gate, leaning her back against a large rock, taking care not to touch any part of the Portal. The urge to finger the strange deep-water darkness within the Portal had disappeared, replaced by a kind of confused dread, a feeling that touching it with bare skin would somehow be wrong, be ill-advised. The mention of the Alphiri had done that. Their name had become a dark talisman for Thea, and now it was indirectly their fault that she was left here alone in the cradle where all worlds were born.

  3.

  Once again she might have dozed off, because when she swam back into conscious awareness of her surroundings things were quite different. The sun’s light was flat and harsh, and the sky was high and blue and blazing with heat. Thea swatted ineffectually at a deerfly that buzzed around her face and sat up, blinking; she was sitting in full sun, and her skin felt as though it might blister any minute. She dragged herself into the rapidly shrinking shadow from which Corey had emerged earlier. Already, in the northeastern horizon, billows of white clouds had begun to build, harbingers of an afternoon thunderstorm.

  Summer thunderstorm

  Summer.

  Thea let out a small whimper. It seemed that a day in the First World allowed whole seasons to go by elsewhere. She remembered coming to Cheveyo’s world in what had been early spring in her own; it definitely wasn’t spring anymore. Not here, anyway—wherever here was. Her mind told her that she should have been at least two months older than when she had come to Cheveyo. Her body insisted only a night had passed since she had left him at the foot of that tall mesa he had told her to climb.

  “And so it goes,” a familiar voice murmured.

  “Grandmother Spider? You’re back?”

  “Yes,” said Grandmother Spider, in woman-form beside Thea in the shadow, looking cool and serene. Her eyes were the color of golden agates.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” Grandmother Spider murmured. “False alarm. Now…where were we before we were interrupted?”

  “We…” Thea glanced across at the Portal, still shimmering with the illusion of dark water. “You wanted me to touch it.”

  “Have you?”

  “No, you weren’t here and I was…”

  “Yes?” prompted Grandmother Spider when Thea trailed off.

  “I was afraid,” Thea whispered.

  “You do know that it could take you home?” Grandmother Spider said softly.

  The word brought her own world crashing back into Thea’s memory. Not Cheveyo’s desert—her world, the smell of wet trees, of damp ground; the sense of being inside a cloud, with drifts of mist clinging to fir-covered slopes. She almost gasped with the sheer pain of its absence.

  “You do want to go home, don’t you?”

  As if hypnotized, Thea got up and walked slowly toward the Portal. She stopped with her face inches away from its surface and stared at the thing she had wrought. And then she bent forward, very slightly, and allowed her forehead to rest against the dark surface.

  Except that it didn’t. Her face sank into the darkness, and for a moment it was as if she breathed the essence of Pacific Northwest, the consistency of liquid honey, condensed into a single long breath. As through a translucent veil, she saw things beyond the Portal—the green-colored light filtered into conifer woods through thousands of dark needles, a familiar house, someone (her aunt?) just coming out the front door, a deer making its graceful wary way along the back porch with its ears turned forward to catch every breath of potential danger….

  And then, as poised as that deer, she noticed the shadows waiting in the wood, hooded in dark green. She saw the edges of cloaks held together by elongated fingers that looked as though they had too many joints.

  One of the figures turned toward her, very slightly, as though scenting her presence. Thea glimpsed the sharp features and the bright glittering eyes, even the shape of one long, pointed ear.

  They were waiting, at the end of this road. The Alphiri were waiting for her.

  She was the prize, not the valuables left unguarded in Grandmother Spider’s house. Thea herself was the dreamcatcher, the prize that the Alphiri were hoping to win.

  She shivered, and then pulled back as slowly as she had leaned in. The hot sun from the high mesas spilled on her shoulders again, heavy, like a cloak of heat and light. If she had reached behind her, she could have woven it….

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Sure you can,” Grandmother Spider said coaxingly, her voice bright and encouraging. “You just did. I saw you do it.”

  Bright. Encouraging. Almost pushing for it.

  Before, she had urged care, gentleness, caution.

  And there was something missing in her face, in her voice. Something that Thea knew ought to have been there. There was no trace of the pure and all-enveloping love and acceptance that she felt every time that Grandmother Spider had looked at her.

  “I was asleep,” she said slowly.

  “Indeed,” Grandmother Spider said. “You were tired. It has been a long night.”

  “I was asleep, in the sun.”

  “Yes, child.”

  There was a trace of impatience, of anticipation, in her voice. Thea turned her head and met the eyes of Grandmother Spider…who was certainly not the Grandmother Spider that she knew.

  “And you left me sleeping in the sun?” she queried softly.

  “You needed your rest.” The voice seemed to be just a little strained now.

  “You’re Corey,” Thea said with certainty.

  “Grandmother Spider” sighed, blurred, and reformed into the handsome bright-eyed young man Thea had seen that morning.

  “You got me,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  “Me? Absolutely nothing—do you really think that folks such as me can do anything to her ilk?”

  “But you came here to take her from this place,” Thea said.

  Corey shrugged. “Trickery is what I do. Not even she is immune to that…some of the time.”

  “So what was it that you want with me?” Thea said, a shade defensively.

  “Me? Absolutely nothing,” he said again. Same words, different context.

  Thea began to have an idea of what was beginning to take shape around her. She was, somehow, improbably, prey—or not prey, exactly, not in the way the Alphiri thought of it. She was the bargain.

  And bargains were the Trickster’s stock in trade. He had been promised something, if he could deliver Thea to where the Alphiri wanted her to be. The Trade Codex clearly stated that the transaction was with whoever currently held the goods—and if the Trickster delivered them, then the Trickster would be the one to be paid.

  It was an irresistible game to someone like Corey.

  “Just as a matter of interest, how did you know?” he said, interrupting her thoughts, sounding just a touch aggrieved. “I thought I did a pretty good job.”

  “You did,” Thea said. “But you don’t love me.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Oh? Child, you’re wrong—I absolutely adore you….”

  “The idea of me,” Thea said, “the things that I could mean for you. I don’t know what those are. But she, she…she looked at me with love in her eyes, and all you could manage was…well…interest. Not the kind of interest that meant you cared what happened to me, but the kind of interest that I was something only valuable because you could trade me for something else. She would never have left me asleep in the sun.”

  “Curious,” said Corey, sounding a little chagrined. “I clearly need to work on my technique. I am apparently terribly rusty.”

  “What is your real shape?” Thea said suddenly.

  He glanced up, startled. “What real shape? They’re all real. Unless you mean this…”

&n
bsp; He blurred again, flowed into a smaller shape, lower to the ground. And there he was, the dog that Thea had sensed in him, except that this time he was not cowed and his tail stood high, a plume of reddish fur that blended into the rust-colored rock behind him. His ears stood forward alertly, and a pink tongue lolled out between white canines from which the lips had been drawn back ever so slightly in an approximation of a snarl.

  Or a clown’s grin.

  Thea suddenly smiled, and Corey flipped back into his human shape, scowling.

  “Your kind is supposed to be afraid of wolves,” he said, annoyed.

  “Wolves, yes,” Thea said. “You didn’t turn into a wolf. Exactly. You looked…”

  “What?” he snapped.

  “Well…cute.”

  “Oh, swell,” Corey said, leaning back against his boulder.

  “What did you do with Grandmother Spider?” Thea said conversationally, changing the subject.

  “She’ll be back all too soon,” Corey said. “Won’t you just go through that door? Don’t you want to go home?”

  “I don’t know if it leads home,” Thea lied glibly. “Besides, don’t you want to know where you went wrong?”

  “You already told me that,” Corey said. “I didn’t love you.”

  “That, and…”

  “And what?”

  “Well, there’s always the little things.”

  “What?” he said, interested in spite of himself.

  “The way she walks. The way she carries herself. The way she turns her head. The way she speaks.”