“There’s always a first time,” Thea said a little waspishly, and then gasped. She held her breath and thumbed off the flashlight just as Magpie blundered into her from behind.
“Hey! What are you…,” she began, but Thea silenced her with a gesture. Magpie subsided into silence, and then she, too, gasped as she heard soft voices ahead.
“We can’t get past them,” Thea hissed. “They’re between us and the back door.”
“Who is it?” Magpie asked, taking a careful step forward to stand beside Thea.
“I don’t know. I can’t see anything. Shhh…let’s go around to the side…that way….”
But the acoustics of the night were treacherous. They had barely started to sidle off to the edge of the woods closer to the corner of the residence before Thea came to a sharp halt and flung out an arm to stop Magpie from plowing into two people who stood less than a few paces away. Their voices were very low, but the night had the clarity of early winter to it, and sound carried as if through crystal. It was possible to make out every single word that was being said.
“I still think it will not come here,” a female voice said. “For weeks I’ve watched, and I’ve seen no sign of it. There isn’t enough here to sate its hunger.”
“You don’t know that—there is enough just in the ranks of the staff,” a male voice responded. “They’ve already called in a number of us. Who is to say there won’t be more, and there may well be those in the student body who might be in danger still.”
“But without magic…,” began the female voice.
“That’s Mrs. Chen,” Magpie hissed.
“And the principal,” Thea whispered back, making sure her own voice was muffled into her T-shirt against Magpie’s ear to prevent its own sound from carrying too far.
The principal could be seen to be shaking his head slightly. “You know how hard we have tried to keep this place clean of it,” he said. “But remember, we can’t know about everything that is brought in as contraband. Who knows what attracts the Nothing to people? We have thrown some of our best mages at it, and at least three of them have paid for it with their lives. The Nothing is impervious to magic. What’s more, it feeds on it—the more you throw at it, the stronger it becomes—but who knows that it won’t come for a hoarded bag of Sweet Spells in some junior’s bedroom? And the very worst of it is that I don’t know how to guard against that.”
“Then why are we still sending mages out?” Mrs. Chen asked. “What possible use is it to have good people lay down their lives only to strengthen the enemy for doing worse things to us?”
The principal shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands in a gesutre of helplessness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I am awaiting Patrick Wittering’s report within the hour. Perhaps then we will know more.”
“How could you send him?” Mrs. Chen said, and Thea heard her voice tremble. It was the first time she had ever seen Mrs. Chen show fear, and she felt its cold breath on her own skin, stirring the hair on the nape of her neck. She shivered, and this time it was nothing to do with the October night.
A hunger that can’t be sated…
“Everyone else thought they knew what the Nothing was. Everyone else was wrong,” the principal said gently. “It’s up to him now. We send those soldiers we can into our wars. Sometimes it is all we can do just to fight our battle; it is not given to us to choose where and how they are to be fought.”
When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield.
The echo of Cheveyo’s voice was a startling and thoroughly unexpected addition to the conversation. Thea could not suppress a small gasp.
The principal and Mrs. Chen both turned their heads a fraction. “What was that?”
An owl hooted very close to Thea, suddenly and unexpectedly, making her jump; turning around, she saw Magpie just letting her hands fall from where they had been cupped around her mouth to imitate the owl so perfectly. The girls exchanged almost invisible smiles in the dark.
“It’s late,” said the principal, relaxing the tense set of his shoulders. “You’d better get back to your charges. I still have some work to do tonight.”
“What’s going to happen, John?” Mrs. Chen said, lowering her voice even further, almost beyond the hearing range of the two in the woods.
“I don’t know,” the principal said, his voice startlingly bleak. “A day at a time, Margaret. We will take it a day at a time.”
They touched hands lightly, and turned away from each other—the principal toward the main administration block, Mrs. Chen, playing lightly with a bunch of keys on a key ring, back toward the residence.
“We’ll never get back so she doesn’t see us!” hissed Thea.
“Yes, we will! She’s going around by the front—by the time she gets there and unlocks the door, we can be halfway up the stairs! Come on!”
“Halfway up the stairs is right!” panted Thea, as she raced to keep up with Magpie across the open grassy area and into the paved yard at the back of the residence building. “She’ll throw the door open and there we’ll be, like two skinned rabbits….”
“Not if you stop talking and hurry up!” Magpie flung back.
For all her haste she opened the back door very gently, just enough for both of them to slip through, and closed it with the barest click. They skidded out of the laundry area and rounded the edge of the main staircase just as they heard Mrs. Chen’s keys in the lock. Thea had no idea that either she or Magpie could move so fast; they tore up the staircase taking two or three stairs at a time, managing to be almost unnaturally silent about it. They only just made it, hearing the front door ease open and shut as they paused at the top of the stairs, peering back the way they had come.
“Is she coming up?” Thea mouthed, her heart beating a tattoo against her chest.
“I don’t know. Let’s go,” Magpie returned. They cast final wary glances down the stairs and half ran, half tiptoed down the corridor to their room. Magpie eased the door open with a practiced touch, they both slipped through and dived into their beds fully clothed, pulling the sheets up over their heads. Thea spared a brief pang of self-pity for the mess her filthy jeans and sneakers were making of her clean bedding, and then held her breath as she waited for the door to be flung open and Mrs. Chen’s voice demanding to know just what it was they thought they were doing. But nothing happened. The night remained quiet and undisturbed, and in due course Thea drew a deep breath and realized her heart was no longer beating like a drum.
“Magpie?” she whispered from underneath her sheets. “What do you suppose it all means?”
But there was no response to her words…other than a gentle snore. Thea risked poking her head out from underneath the covers and peered over at Magpie’s bed.
Unbelievably, Magpie was fast asleep.
2.
The one class the whole group of friends had together the next day was math, and since Mr. Siffer was in a particularly unlovely mood they didn’t get much talking done. Thea and Magpie merely hinted at having important information, and it was Tess who finally got a note to everybody to meet at the computer lab later that evening after classes were over for the day. Terry was running some sort of advanced project and had been given the access code for the computer lab by Twitterpat in case he wanted to put in some overtime.
They gathered there after supper, the five of them—Thea, Tess and Terry, Ben, and Magpie.
“Did you know Mrs. Chen’s name is Margaret?” Magpie asked mischievously.
“No,” said Terry, “but I would guess that isn’t the big secret. Spill!”
Magpie glanced at Thea, who shrugged and launched into an abbreviated account of the previous night’s adventures.
“Wow,” said Ben when she was done. “And I did nothing more interesting than go to sleep last night.”
“You think poor Twitterpat and the others are in some sort of real danger?” asked Tess, nibbling on a hangnail.
�
�I have no idea where they all went, but Mrs. Chen sounded really worried,” Magpie said. “And you know how serenely laid-back she always is.”
“I was following the newspaper reports all of last week,” Ben volunteered, “and there isn’t a thing in there that I can put a finger on, but—” He sneezed, suddenly and violently, and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
Magpie threw him a startled look. “You smell something, Ben?”
“Just your skunk,” said Tess, grinning. “Honestly, Mag. The things you do.”
“Maybe we can find out another way,” Terry said, whirling around and switching on his computer.
“What are you thinking?” Thea said, as they waited for it to boot up.
“Maybe I can get this thing networked,” Terry said.
“It is, with the rest of the class….”
“No, I mean Terranet. The News-Net. Not that there’d be anything drastically different in the mainstream media, but some of the alternatives might have better info. They cracked down on the use of computers in the library as soon as this broke; I tried logging on from there once, but some sort of alarm sounded at the librarian’s desk because I was off that machine as fast as she could flip a switch. I thought it was a glitch on one machine, but I tried it three times and every time they blocked me.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they are denying the Nothing access to this place. Any way they can. If they can keep the school off the radar, then we are all out of the danger zone.”
“But we are supposed to be out of the danger zone anyway,” Magpie said stubbornly.
“You heard what they said last night,” Thea said. “You don’t know what triggers it. It could be anything at all. But Terry…how come you didn’t try it from here?”
“Because although all these computers are networked, they’re tied in to Twitterpat’s machine as the main Terranet gateway,” Terry said.
“Don’t you need his password to access that?” Magpie asked.
“Sure, but it isn’t his system password, it’s the network, and I could probably hack that—it would mean skimming off the IP address from the surface of his machine’s memory…but I hate doing that—I like the man, I don’t want to get him or me into any really hot water. It’s easy enough to do, from here—I don’t need to hack to any deep level. Besides, there’s the other thing. I didn’t want to be alone when or if I did it.”
“Why?”
“Because he could have said something inadvertently…or Twitterpat’s password is a spoken spell, or something….” Thea paused as Ben sneezed again. “See? Even you smell something.”
“I have a cold,” Ben said. He ended on a rising note, making his words come out rather more like a question than a statement, as though he was asking himself to believe his own assertion before he could convince anyone else of its truth.
“Wait a minute. It’s up. Let me figure out…” Terry tapped a few keys, focused on the changing screen.
Magpie and Tess and Ben all hung back, but Thea suddenly sat forward.
“What was that?”
“What?” Terry said, startled out of his fierce concentration.
“Go back a sec,” Thea said, pointing at the screen. “That. I thought I saw…”
“But that’s just my report of the Hoh field trip,” Terry said, annoyed and a little bewildered. “What’s that got to do with—”
Magpie looked up with a sudden start, her eyes wide. Tess’s tongue moistened her lips. Terry’s hands were frozen over the keyboard.
Thea felt a whiff of moisture-laden, forest-green air that had no business being in the computer lab.
When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield.
“Wait a minute,” Thea said. “Let me see that report.”
Terry looked up, at a complete loss.
“Just do it,” Tess said.
He brought the cursor over the file name, let it hover there for another moment, then shrugged his shoulders, and clicked the mouse to open the file.
The screen changed again, into a word-processing program, and after a moment the Hoh forest trip document appeared on the screen. Terry was not a particularly lush writer at the best of times and this prose was more spare than most, being a dry school report on an official outing, but the words that were there suddenly triggered Thea’s own memories of the trip. They sparked the images in Thea’s mind’s eye, and that was the beginning.
The rest followed, falling into place with an air of uncanny inevitability.
Thea’s images—the color washed over them, rushed in and obliterated the mundane benches and the blank computer screens that surrounded the five of them. The filtered light of an ancient forest; glimpses of a gleaming white waterfall or glassy green mountain stream; the many shades of forest green, from moss to fern to cedar fronds; the glimpses of the reddish cedar heartwood revealed by the peeling bark of old stumps; the twisted grayish burls on the spruce trees; the distant glimpse of blue sky and white clouds that was sometimes allowed to intrude like a strange vision, into this shrouded, mystical place.
Magpie’s touch, the touch of the healer’s hands that understand what they hold—the harsh ridged bark of old cedars, the feathery brush of fern fronds, the rough texture of moss-and lichen-upholstered big leaf maples.
Ben (who had sneezed one last time and then, miraculously, stopped) came in with the slightly damp green smell of the woods, the fresh rush of air beside a waterfall, the smell of sap on trees and broken branches and trampled moss.
Tess brought a slightly acrid, slightly breeze-fresh taste of the open air and the ancient wood, as well as an ancestral memory of this place being a hunting ground for a people not her own, of feasts long forgotten where elk and bear reared by this forest had offered themselves for the good of the tribe.
Terry provided the soundtrack—the whisper of wind in the treetops, the sound of rushing water, the crack of a twig breaking, the rustle of some small creature in the underbrush.
And they were there, the five of them, standing bewildered and awestruck beside a stream broken into white-water rapids, ancient trees looming over them like pillars in some long-gone but still magnificent cathedral. The computer lab had completely disappeared, as if it had never existed.
They all knew that they had created this place, somehow, together. Just how, none of them had any idea. Not a single one of them was supposed to have the ability to do anything like this—if they had, they would not have been at the Last Ditch School. But they had done it…and what was more, they had done it breaking all the rules of magic.
They had done it with a computer.
This was not possible. This was not doable. Computers were inert things used to safely store spells. They simply were not magical.
And yet, they were.
Or one of them was….
“What did you do to your computer, Terry?” Tess asked carefully, too afraid to move, standing frozen in the place where this world had set her down.
“Not a thing that I know of,” Terry said, staring at the woods as though willing himself to believe that they were not there.
“This is supposed to be magic, right?” Ben said in a small voice.
Magpie turned to look at him. “Your guess is as good as ours,” she said.
“But I am not sneezing,” he pointed out. He took a step back, craning his head to gaze at the tops of the huge trees, and then winced, looking down. He lifted his foot with a gesture of distaste. “And hold back on the hyperreality, would you? I know you had trouble with one on the last field trip, Magpie, but I could have done without the slug….”
Thea fought the urge to giggle out loud, suddenly remembering her brothers and the banana slug conversation from the afternoon of her homecoming. Aunt Zoë had been moved to comment somewhat acidly at the time, as they had abandoned the menfolk in the backyard, that whenever you got the Winthrop brothers together their average age appeared to
drop to about twelve.
“All right,” Tess said, yanking Thea back into the present. “What just happened?”
Magpie suddenly turned and smiled at Thea. “I think you know,” she said.
Thea was about to deny all knowledge, and then Cheveyo was there in her mind, smiling, and behind him Grandmother Spider and Big Elk.
There are many worlds, and you have yet to find your own.
“I suppose,” Thea said slowly, “it’s my fault….”
“Where are we?” Tess said, staring at the crowns of the towering trees.
“Hoh forest, of course,” Magpie said. “That’s what the report said.”
“What report?”
“Yours, Terry. The one on your computer. The one Thea used to build this place.”
“There’s nothing like this in my report,” Terry said frankly. “I wrote as little as I could get away with. It’s just the facts, no more. There is no imagery in it at all—there is nothing remotely like this….”
“But you do remember it like this?”
“Um, yes,” Terry said, “now that you bring it up. But not quite this. It’s…different. Just a bit. Just enough.”
“Yeah,” Magpie said. “It’s Thea-Hoh. Not the real place. It’s virtual reality. We aren’t there now, not really….”
“Oh, yes we are,” Ben said, scuffing slug off his shoe.
“Yes, but not really,” Magpie insisted. “We’re in the computer lab back at the school, aren’t we?”
“I have no idea,” Thea said softly. “Not about the details of it. But yes, there are different worlds…many different worlds…and I have walked a number of them. They told me that I had to find the one that truly belonged to me….”
Terry was staring at her strangely. “Who told you?”
So Thea told them, very briefly, about her summer in Cheveyo’s country and the things she had learned there.
And then she told them the most important thing of all.
“Cheveyo said…I could choose the battlefield,” she said softly. “What about a world that is not of our own? The Nothing feeds on the magic of our world—we heard them say so. But what if a person completely devoid of magic in that world lured it here instead and forced the real battle to take place far away from the worlds where it is strong? What if I could draw it away and fight it in a place like this?”
Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage Page 20