“You mean us,” Magpie said with a watery grin. “We all did this together, somehow.”
“Absolutely!” said Ben valiantly. “We’re all in it.”
“Loviqu’ta,” whispered Thea. “Hunters Moon…”
They were looking at her, as if she was the only one who knew what she was doing. And in a way, they were frighteningly right.
But Magpie grinned at the phrase, and suddenly the grin was wolfish. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Hunters.”
“But how is it possible?” said Terry doggedly. “Computers don’t do things like this.”
“Computers are just tools,” Tess said.
“Yeah,” agreed Ben enthusiastically. “Maybe you guys could ask Twitterpat when he gets back. I always thought he was kind of cool…for a teacher.”
“Thea,” Terry said, “how do we get back? I still have to find out…”
He blinked and his voice died mid-sentence. He was sitting in his computer chair, hands poised over his keyboard.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. How’d you do that?”
Thea was trembling and very pale. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I can. I can sense that I can. I wanted us back and I got us back. Don’t ask me how I did it.”
He stared at her, his gaze troubled, and then turned to his computer again, closing out of the dangerous field trip report that was still on screen and calling up a Terranet search engine.
“So…when were you thinking that we should do this thing? Whatever it is that we’re, uh, planning to do?” Ben said.
“We’d better wait until Twitterpat does get back,” said Tess carefully. “We might be meddling with things we don’t—What’s the matter, Terry?”
Terry’s expression had suddenly set into a mask, a mask that was equal parts fury, pity, and grief.
“I got into the Terranet,” he said abruptly. “We can’t wait to ask Twitterpat anything.”
“Why?” Tess asked. She and Magpie both leaned over the computer, craning their necks at the screen. Thea let out a small keening sound.
Terry stood, dragging both hands through his hair in a motion of pure despair.
“It’s right there, in today’s Terranet headlines,” he said, carefully not looking at any of his friends. “Patrick Wittering is dead.”
EMBER MOON
1.
THERE HAD BEEN brave talk and grand plans out there in Thea-Hoh, in the world that they had created—but the news of Twitterpat’s death seemed to have smothered those ideas right out of existence. After their return from the virtual world, Thea and the others avoided talking about their experience. In fact, for nearly a full week, they avoided one another. There was a desperate sense that if they ignored what had happened they might convince one another and the world around them that a particular moment in time had never happened at all—and if they could turn back time to before, to an instant before they knew that Twitterpat was dead, then he would still be alive.
All the students at the school knew was that Patrick Wittering had died protecting one of his fellow Academy teachers who had gone to battle the Nothing. They were not told how or where or even who that other teacher was—and all those who had gone from the school remained missing, fueling speculation that more than one of them might be dead. The specter of the Nothing had been invited into what had been the safe haven of the Academy, had become an ever-present terror that lingered invisibly in the corridors and the classrooms and the cafeteria where meals were eaten in cowed silence.
It is impervious to magic. It eats magic. The more you throw at it the stronger it becomes.
When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield.
Thea turned these words over and over again in her mind in the days that followed the announcement of Twitterpat’s death and her return from the virtual forest she had created with her friends. The principal’s interpretation of the Nothing. Cheveyo’s parting lesson.
The battle was waiting. The battlefield was obvious.
The virtual world.
The only problem was that she had no idea what exactly had happened on the night the virtual reality forest had been created. It had just…happened—and happened so fast that she had barely had time to stop and think about any of it. And the others, who had shared the astonishing excursion with her, whose presence had seemed to be so essential in creating that other world, did not seem inclined to repeat the experience.
The only other person with whom she had had any discussions at all on the matter was Magpie, in the shared moments of darkness at night before they both drifted into sleep—and these days sleep was less restful than it might have been, full of disturbing dreams and uneasy forebodings. And even these conversations were indirect; they talked around the subject, the reference to a possible plot to vanquish the Nothing referred to only in general terms, playing with ideas, not with actual plans.
“The Quilcah,” said Magpie on one of these nights, “have a Whale Hunt….”
“How does that help?” The covers rustled in the other bed as Thea turned toward her in the darkness. “Ancestral magic, Magpie?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be tradition. Not really. Only men go on Hunts; women wait on shore with the flensing knives. But maybe some aspects of it can be useful….”
“A Magpie Whale Hunt, out in virtual reality,” Thea said. “Like the Thea-Hoh woods. Tell me about it.”
“One whale feeds many,” Magpie said, her voice very soft. “When it is time, the elders call for a Hunt, and the Hunters will be chosen—many will want to go, but few are called. They are marked, after. They are the Whale Hunters forevermore. And of the small handful who are chosen to go, one is singled out even further. ‘The One Who Calls the Whale.’ There is a melody, a tune, to which the whale will come.”
“I think I know this tune,” Thea said, transported back to the red mesas of Cheveyo’s country, echoing with the First Song.
“It’s always different, for every one who is chosen,” Magpie said.
“I know,” Thea said gently. “Go on.”
“The Whale comes. Many may come, but only one will answer the Call,” Magpie said, her voice dropping into cadences of chant, of tribal wisdom being passed down the generations. “You will know the one, because that Whale will offer himself to the people—his fat for the winter lamps, his flesh to the living, his bones to the ancestors. And his spirit becomes part of the people, guarding them, helping them, and in time choosing the next Hunter who will go out and call his successor.”
“But the Nothing is exactly the opposite. It’s not likely to come up to you and roll over belly up and invite you to smite it,” Thea said. There was a voice in the back of her mind, Big Elk in the night forest, The Alphiri brought that. A hunger that will not be sated…. “The Nothing will fight back. It always has so far. Unless…” She tapped her chin with a thoughtful finger, frowning in concentration. “But…what if…what if we create a Magpie Whale Hunt?”
“Huh?” said Magpie. “You aren’t making any sense.”
“We could go back,” Thea said softly. “We could shape that world, the whale hunt world. We would be the ones to decide what laws govern it. If we can lure the Nothing there, we can make it go….” Magpie stirred again, and Thea, anticipating an interruption or an objection, spoke faster, almost gabbling. “No, it makes sense, Magpie! If we make a world into which the Nothing would come, but leave it only one way out. We can do a whale hunt. We can do what your ancestors have done for generations. We can call the whale, and the whale will respond in the way that the whale always does. It can’t help doing that, that’s the way things have always been. But if the one door we leave open for the Nothing is to become one with the whale, then once it’s there, in the body of the whale…it will have to react in the way that the whale would have reacted. It is supposed to offer itself. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen; that’s the way we can make it happen.”
“Yes, but if we kill the Nothi
ng-whale in our reality over there, does that mean we destroy the Nothing in this world, too?” Magpie asked. “And are you sure that it would come? How on earth do you call something like that and know it will come to you?”
“It comes to magic,” Thea said.
“But we don’t have any,” Magpie pointed out helpfully.
“Not here,” Thea said. “But maybe in that place—in that other place. Mag, I’ve walked in a different world and there were things I could do there that just don’t happen when I’m back in this world. Maybe it’s the same with this. Maybe we can create a place where we can do what we need to do, and it will work.”
“And if we do get it there, and it’s stuck there, and we get stuck there with it…?” Magpie asked.
Thea had no answers. The conversation sank into silence, and the silence vanished into sleep, and the dreams came again—the dreams that haunted Thea because she could never quite remember them when she woke. She recalled the dreams she had had back in Cheveyo’s house—visions of the Faele and their gifts and the Alphiri and their offers of trade. Some of her recent dreams were very similar in nature to those earlier ones; others seemed to be about the Nothing and the way it was spreading across the worlds, as Big Elk had said. Thea thought of Grandmother Spider’s sky full of living stars and an iron band tightened painfully around her heart at the thought that the Nothing had come there, too, that some of those star souls had been devoured by it, perhaps were gone forever. Here, in the less rarefied air of a world where her magic was dormant, dreams of any nature appeared less willing to reveal themselves to her or to stay in her memory for long after she woke. They merely lodged in the back of her mind, like thistles, uncomfortable and prickly.
But while she waited for some sort of sign telling her what she needed to do next, her decisions seemed to make themselves, after all.
Twitterpat’s classes were, for all intents and purposes, suspended after the news of his death, but his students were given tacit approval to complete the assignments that he had left behind—it was a sort of homage, one that the students offered without incentive and one that the school accepted without comment. The supervisory presence that Twitterpat had promised was there, in the shape of one teacher or another—hardly ever the same one, as though the teachers had chosen to give their time to this project as their own homage to one of their colleagues, but somehow by unspoken pact not one of them chose to sit at Twitterpat’s own desk. Usually the presiding teacher, whose attendance was almost unnecessary in terms of keeping the students quiet and working, would wander in quietly at the beginning of a period, find an empty station or bring out a chair and place it in a convenient corner, and read a book for the duration of the class to the quiet accompaniment of pens scratching on paper and the clatter of keyboards.
It was during one of these classes that Thea, distracted by her inner tumult, allowed her mind to wander back to Cheveyo and his house on the mesa. Outside the classroom window it was a gray and dismal November day, the windowpanes weeping rain and low clouds caught and shredded by the branches of wet cedars almost black in the dim light. But Thea could open a window in her mind and transport herself back to the liquid heat of the desert summer, Tawaha’s light, hot and heavy on her head and shoulders like a cloak. The red mesas reflected the sunshine, gave it color and weight, poured it back into the dusty scree of the sage-scented plains.
Without quite being aware of what she was doing, Thea found herself in a new document in her word-processing software, typing out fragments of sentences, words that evoked Cheveyo to her.
Red mesas. House in the rock. Sunlight hot, heavy with red and gold.
The cursor blinked at her at the end of the last word.
Thea stared at it for a moment, mesmerized, her hand hovering above her keyboard.
A breath of hot dry air stirred the loose hair around her face.
All I have to do is press ENTER.
She looked around, blinking, as though waking from a dream. Two stations away from her, Tess was bent over her keyboard, typing furiously. A little farther away, Terry sat with his hands laced behind the back of his head, staring at his screen, his expression curiously blank. Other students wrote or tapped away or stared at their work with focused concentration. The presiding teacher appeared engrossed in a thick book, marking passages with a yellow highlighter pen.
Nobody was paying any attention at all to Thea.
All I have to do is press ENTER. And I will be there.
Ah, but will I be here?
What would happen if she simply…disappeared?
She couldn’t take the chance. But something had crystallized in the back of her mind, a conviction, a decision, a firm intent. None of the others, not even Magpie, appeared to want to try to achieve that alternate reality, the virtual world, again; they had avoided even talking about it. Very well. She would try it herself. Try it first, with the familiar. With Cheveyo, the mesas, perhaps the Road. Perhaps the Barefoot Road could take her to the next place that she needed to be.
Not now.
Maybe tonight.
She mentioned her intentions to nobody, determined to pursue her own experiment, more certain than ever of what she needed to do. When she was called to the telephone after classes that day, it was almost as if she were continuing a familiar conversation, already well begun, when she heard her aunt’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Thea,” Zoë said, and her voice had an edge of urgency to it, “what is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you I can tell when you’re in trouble. I can smell it from here. I can smell the smoke. It’s like you’ve lit a torch, you’re bright with danger, I know you’re up to something and I already know nobody is going to like whatever that is. What are you doing?”
An edge of an old dream suddenly sliced into Zoë’s words. Thea could hear the echo again, the distant words of the Faele clustered around her cradle. She will be able to conquer nothing.…
Conquer nothing. Conquer…Nothing.
It all seemed so simple now, so clear.
“I know what to do now,” she said. “The Faele told me so, back in the cradle, Aunt Zoë. That’s what all this has been about—me and magic and everything I’ve learned.”
“What Faele? Thea, there were no Faele gifts at your birth. Your father made sure of that.”
“But I dreamed about them. I remember them. I don’t know how I remember them, but I do—and they did give me gifts. Like they always do. And one of them said I could conquer nothing. I thought that meant that I couldn’t actually do anything, but don’t you see? They meant the Nothing, that thing, that enemy that cannot be conquered by magic. The only person who can conquer it is someone without magic. Someone who is known to be without magic. Someone like…me.”
“Don’t be silly, Thea,” Zoë said, her voice sharp with fear. “Call your parents. Call them right now, right after you put the phone down. Promise me. Promise me you will not do anything stupid. I wish I could just use a Portal and come snatch you right now, but the school is warded against that. Thea, are you there? Are you listening to me? Stay put. Don’t do anything. Anything. People have died getting in the way of this thing. Are you listening to me? Thea!”
“It’s okay, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said gently. “This is what they made me for.”
She could hear her aunt crying out her name as she replaced the receiver in the cradle, knowing that she was running out of time. Zoë would phone her parents, her teachers, anybody she could think of—anything to try to stop whatever Thea had planned. She had maybe an hour. Maybe less.
Magpie was not in their room when Thea returned there, as if in the grip of dream or compulsion, to retrieve her necklace of three feathers—the light-and-dark-barred turkey feather that granted her patience, the black raven feather that would give her wisdom, the black-and-white eagle’s feather that carried the courage she needed now as never before. Despite the way the phone lines must have been h
eating up in her wake, in the school itself it was as if a clear passage had opened for Thea—she got her necklace, left the room, left the residence hall, crossed the grounds, and entered the building where the computer lab was—all without crossing paths with a single person. There was a sense of movement and purpose all around her, the school full of living, breathing beings, students and teachers going about their own business, but Thea moved as if alone in the universe, invisible to others, the others invisible to her.
The computer lab was locked and deserted. Thea punched in the security code, slipped through a crack in the door, heard it snick shut and rearm behind her, then made her way to where a single computer appeared to be on, its screensaver something that could have been a fireworks display, or the night sky full of shooting stars over the First World where Grandmother Spider lived. It cleared as Thea approached and slipped into the chair before it. On the screen, already open, was the document with the handful of desert phrases she had scribbled down earlier today.
She hadn’t known she had saved it. In fact, she could have sworn that she had not. She could have sworn, in fact, that the computer had not been left on in the first place.
The cursor blinked, as it had done earlier, right after the last word, inviting her to ENTER.
Her left hand reached up to wrap itself around her feather necklace.
Her right index finger brushed the ENTER key, very lightly.
The dreary gray light, which had been barely strong enough to pass through the rain-slicked windowpanes, suddenly became brighter, stronger, sharper, more golden, more solid. The world dissolved around Thea…
…and fell back into shape, like a computer photograph being resolved pixel by pixel on a slow connection, coming into sharper and sharper focus until the gray Pacific Northwest November was gone and she was in a different place, a place now ruled by what Cheveyo would have called Matay’ta, the Ember Moon, the time for coming to terms with one’s own self and spirit.
Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage Page 21