Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

“Yours,” Terry said after a pause, turning to Thea. “I came in later. I’ll pick up as we go.”

  “I…,” Thea said, and then dried up completely, skewered by both the professor’s hawk eyes and Terry’s own far more friendly gaze. She sat for a moment in her chair, hands folded in her lap, trying to corral her words. “Can’t I just show you?” she asked at last, plaintively.

  “I do believe you have done so,” the professor murmured. “However, in my classroom I have often found it useful to have a student actually put into words something that had been merely action. As far as I know, you are unique right now amongst the known mages of this world….”

  “I may not be,” Thea murmured.

  The professor sat up. “What was that?”

  “That would be my part of the story, sir,” Terry said. “The things that I suspect. The origins of spellspam.”

  “Yes,” said the professor. “I’ve had a few of those…messages. And so have other members of this household. My son’s tutor had to leave…quite suddenly. He pleaded family obligations, but I could not help noticing that he had raven feathers popping out in inconvenient places whenever he stopped paying attention. I have a suspicion that he ran afoul of one of those…spellspams…of yours—why he didn’t just say so and let me sort the problem out…”

  Thea suddenly sat up, her eyes widening. Raven feathers…? What was it that Beltran had called the absent tutor? Wiley…? Cary Wiley?

  Corey…? In this house…?

  “There is at least one mage at government level who wants to believe that Thea was behind it,” Terry said, oblivious to Thea’s reaction. “Because, as you yourself have said, she is…unique. Or so we thought. But there must be at least one other person out there who is capable of manipulating magic through the computer. And it gets worse…”

  “Go on,” the professor said.

  “I think it takes something like a Nexus to send the messages with working spells attached. It wasn’t the Academy Nexus…and the only other one…is here,” Terry said slowly, almost unwillingly. At the Academy, it had sounded perfectly feasible as just an idea; here, in this room, it sounded uncomfortably like an accusation.

  And the professor certainly took it as one. His eyes flashed in anger, and he pushed back his chair from the immaculate desk with both hands. “You’re telling me that my Nexus has been hacked?” he snapped. “Impossible. You have already discovered for yourselves what a formidable firewall this house is, by definition—over and above that, I have personally set up the security of this installation, and I have not observed any breaches in that security.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Terry, going rather white but not giving ground. “I haven’t been able to trace them back here, that is true. But I do believe that everything that we have believed about computers cannot be completely wrong—they are good storage devices, and they are good propagators…but I don’t believe that some small-time hacker playing around with a basic home computer could have unleashed something like the spellspam epidemic. That needed power. A lot of power. The sort of power only this kind of computer has. So either it’s your machine, or someone else has built a Nexus-type computer that isn’t under our control….”

  The professor’s eyes were still glittering dangerously, but he had his temper in check now. “I see,” he said, after a long pause. “It looks like we are going to have a lot of work to do. You were sent here for me to help you, but it appears that you’ll very much be returning that favor. You are telling me that you believe that the Nexus has been compromised without my knowledge?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Terry faintly.

  “If it has, then it was done by a very subtle hand,” the professor said softly. But then he collected himself. “All right,” he said briskly. “We will proceed according to the original schedule, and then we will see where we can go from there. I still need to know everything that you know. For your part, Galathea, if you can tell me the where and the why, we can figure out the how and maybe that will give us the rest of the answers. As for the Nexus…”

  “I’ve been pretty much running the one at the Academy for the last semester,” Terry said.

  “By which you are trying to tell me that those who entrusted you with that task believe you to be competent to carry it out,” the professor said. “But if you are right, and the second Nexus has been hacked in a way that left me ignorant of the state of affairs, then we will need to proceed very carefully indeed.” He smiled, and the smile was not a pleasant one. “You may know much—you are young, after all, and the cutting edge of knowledge always belongs to the next generation. But I think I may have things to teach you yet….”

  Thea looked away, because the glitter in the professor’s eyes suddenly scared her. Humphrey May had said that he would be on her side, but it was with something not entirely unlike the sensation of stepping into a cold winter from a nice warm room that Thea realized that sometimes the line between adversary and ally could be a very fine one.

  And with Corey in the game…

  She shivered, letting her gaze skitter across neat bookshelves filled with rows of books, and then past them onto the picture window that opened behind the professor’s armchair. It was only then that she saw that there was something resting against the chair, something that she had failed to notice before—the glowing polished wood of a Spanish guitar.

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  THE PROFESSOR KEPT THEM both in his study for almost another hour, but he spent most of that time talking to Terry. Thea could not seem to keep her mind focused. She kept glancing back at the guitar by the window, trying to remember what exactly she had seen and heard the night before, wishing that she could weave herself another sideslip world where she could go and investigate her misgivings without the danger of being caught in the act by the very person whom she was investigating.

  Terry could not help but be aware of her discomfort, but he tried not to draw attention to her. The professor appeared oblivious—until, some time later, he turned to her.

  “I will instruct the house to permit your laptop,” he said to Thea. “You will please oblige me by not abusing that privilege and doing anything that the house might interpret as dangerous—by which I merely mean anything done without my knowledge. I will support, and indeed encourage, exploration—seeing as that could only help in the task that lies ahead of us. But I do expect to know what you are attempting to achieve, and how. We will begin tomorrow. You may go now.” It was a dismissal, accompanied by the briefest of nods. “Terry, you will stay for a little longer, if you please. I have a few things I still need to understand about what you think you learned through the other Nexus before I can try tracking any illegitimate e-mails that may have found their way through this machine….”

  Thea slipped off her chair, fought the impulse to curtsy, and left the study as quietly as she could. All of a sudden she felt very lonely.

  She fished in her pocket for her cell phone, hoping that the professor’s fiat had stretched to all the electronics that she had been unable to use in this house, but it still read Searching for Service. She pushed the phone back into her pocket with a sigh. There was suddenly a lot that she wanted to talk over with Aunt Zoë.

  Perhaps if she could find the housekeeper, she could ask if she could use a phone to call Zoë’s hotel—but even as she hesitated, she heard a sound that froze her in place outside the professor’s study.

  Guitar music.

  Except…this was different from the night before. The sound quality was definitely more…normal, not as thin and otherworldly as the previous night’s music had been. And it seemed to be coming from the sitting room from which she had gone into the garden, or perhaps from the patio just beyond.

  Thea’s mind f
lickered with a vivid vision of that green light she had seen coming out of the upstairs guest bathroom, growing like tendrils of vine, little tentacles of light snaking out into the corridor and changing the sense of time and place…and then she shook herself.

  “Don’t be a total idiot,” she told herself squarely. “It’s broad daylight. Someone’s playing the guitar. Big deal.”

  The pep talk didn’t really help, but it made her realize she could not lurk outside the professor’s study door waiting for Terry. She needed to talk to him, but it would have to wait until the professor released him—and in the meantime, investigating the guitar music seemed as good an option as any.

  Aware that she must look awfully suspicious herself to anyone who might have been observing her, Thea crept across the hallway and tried to peer unobtrusively around the half-closed door to the sitting room.

  The room was empty, but the French doors to the patio were open, and she glimpsed someone sitting out there in one of the cast-iron chairs, a guitar laid casually across a bent knee.

  It wasn’t anybody she recognized, or had yet been introduced to in this house.

  “Do come in,” said this stranger suddenly, his voice deep and male and pleasantly courteous, as Thea hesitated at the door. “Or come out, as you please. I’m quite safe, I assure you.”

  He turned his head a fraction as he spoke, and Thea caught a glimpse of a profile every bit as aquiline and aristocratic as the professor’s own. Whoever this was, he must be family.

  Thea stepped out from behind the door. The man in the chair lifted his guitar out of his lap and laid it with an elegant little flourish against the table beside him, and then actually got to his feet as Thea entered the room, offering a little bow that seemed more in place in some old-fashioned movie than under the present circumstances. Thea had the distinct feeling that, had he been holding her hand at the time, he would have bent over it, as if he were some Spanish prince. As it was, she half turned around to see if there wasn’t someone behind her to whom the bow had been directed. Isabella, perhaps; she would probably assume it was no more than her due.

  But there was nobody in the room except herself, and she took a couple of steps into the room and hesitated.

  “You were…,” Thea began, and then gestured toward the table. “I heard someone playing a guitar….”

  He glanced down at his instrument. “Everyone in this house plays the guitar,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of drumming one’s fingers or doodling. One learns to pick it up whenever one is at a loose end.”

  “I didn’t mean to intrude…,” Thea said, beginning to withdraw. Everyone in this house plays the guitar. Then which one of you was it last night…?

  “Nonsense,” he said gallantly. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Larry.”

  The name fit his clothes, not his person. He wore neat but faded jeans and a blue T-shirt, with a bracelet woven from string and beads on his right wrist and a beat-up watch on his left. His feet were clad in a pair of high-top sneakers. A single gold hoop earring gleamed in one ear. The rest of him was an olive-skinned, dark-eyed vision of a hidalgo—one not in the first flush of youth, however. His long dark hair, which he wore loose and cascading down past his shoulders, was liberally threaded with gray, with one particularly vivid broad and almost snow-white streak falling over one temple.

  He smiled at Thea’s frank appraisal, and bowed again. “You’re not convinced, are you…? It works in most places, but why am I surprised that this house completely neutralizes that name? Anywhere else I’m Larry Starr, poet and troubadour. Here, I am Lorenzo de los Reyes, eldest and somewhat prodigal son.”

  Thea flushed. She seemed to have done nothing else since she had entered this house but be rude to the people she had met here.

  “I’m Thea Winthrop,” she said. “I’m…a student.”

  “Double Seventh,” Larry said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Thea said, startled.

  “I may write poems for a living, but I was born into one of the oldest and most highly mage-gifted families around,” Larry said. “We keep up with such things. My father might have harbored ambitions in that department, but he was not a seventh child. What, if you don’t mind me asking, are you doing in my father’s house? Not that your being who you are doesn’t answer that question, given the circumstances….”

  “What circumstances?” Thea said, torn between curiosity and suspicion. The man was utterly disarming, and yet he seemed to know far too much for comfort.

  “Your early years were…somewhat less than what the media had been led to believe would happen,” Larry said gently. “I remember the pictures in the newspapers. You, in your mother’s arms…”

  “That picture,” Thea said, rolling her eyes slightly.

  Larry grinned. “That’s okay. You’ve changed a lot since then. So—what are you doing here, in my father’s clutches? Are they letting him study you?”

  “In a…manner of speaking,” Thea said guardedly. “There have been…developments.”

  “Well, I had better warn you,” Larry said. “He wasn’t expecting me home right now. He always gets into a bit of a mood when I turn up, because he thinks I have failed him in some fundamental way—a gentleman must indeed be able to write poetry, but doing it for commercial gain should have been beneath me. So he always assumes I am here to ask for money.”

  “Are you?” Thea said, and then blushed again. It seemed an awfully personal question to pose to someone whom she had met moments ago, and of whose loyalties—everyone in this house plays guitar!—she was less than certain. But there was something engaging and open about Larry, and he fielded the question with humor and grace.

  “Not always,” he said, “and as it happens, not this time. There’s a conference I’m on my way to, and I figured I would stop by and pay my respects. I thought Papa would be around—I didn’t realize there would be students this summer.” He tilted his head, looking at Thea with slightly narrowed eyes. “Or that the students who were here would be so young. And so important.”

  Thea, about to protest, decided against it. She hooked her thumbs into her pockets, a self-conscious little gesture, and brushed against her cell phone. She pulled it out a little way, and then pushed it back in with a small frown.

  “Having trouble with the phone?” Larry said conversationally.

  “It doesn’t seem to work very well,” Thea murmured.

  “You brought it here with you from the outside? No, it wouldn’t. My father is defensive of his privacy, and this is…”

  “Yes, an Elemental house,” Thea said. “He told me it would be okay to plug in my laptop, later—but I was hoping that the phone would start working, too….”

  “If he didn’t specifically sanction it, then it wouldn’t have,” Larry said. “It’s a simple question of whatever isn’t explicitly permitted being absolutely forbidden. Whom did you want to call?”

  “My aunt is in town,” Thea said. “She said to call if I had time.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure if Father would like his secrets talked about in the streets of the city,” Larry said, and he sounded serious enough for Thea to look up in sudden panic—certain that he would go straight to the professor’s study and denounce her as some sort of traitor. But Larry was actually smiling. He dug in his own pocket and produced a tiny, razor-thin cell phone. “Let’s try this,” he said. “What’s your aunt’s number?”

  Larry had no trouble dialing the hotel; he wished the receptionist who answered the phone a pleasant good morning, and then offered the phone to Thea. “You shouldn’t have any trouble now,” he said. “I’ll leave you to your phone call; when you’re done, just leave the phone on the coffee table in the sitting room. The house will take care of returning it to me.”

  “Thank you! I mean—” She looked away, distracted. “Aunt Zoë? It’s me—hang on a sec—” But when she looked up, Larry had disappeared, together with his guitar. “Can you come and get me? I need to talk to you—there’s
all kinds of things—this house is weird.”

  “Thea, weird follows you around. What’s the matter with the house?”

  “It’s haunted,” Thea said.

  “It’s an Elemental house, as I’ve heard,” Zoë said. “It’s possibly the first one that could really be called that, and it remains one of the most sophisticated ones ever built. It would definitely seem haunted if you didn’t know—”

  “Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, “trust me, I can recognize a spell when I trip over one. But this was different. And if Terry hadn’t turned up, I might not be talking to you right now.”

  Zoë hesitated. “You think there’s some sort of danger?”

  “I don’t know. I need to tell you…I need to talk to you about this….”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” Zoë said.

  “I’ll be outside,” Thea said.

  Just leaving the phone on a table seemed a little churlish, but she was certain that the cell phone would be back in Larry’s suitcase, or even pocket, before she left the room.

  She practically ran Terry down in the hallway outside.

  “I thought I heard you talking,” he began, but Thea grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the front door, lifting her other hand to her lips to indicate silence. Terry followed her out onto the front steps. The door shut behind them with a firm click of a lock falling into place.

  “How do you plan on getting back…?” Terry began.

  “We’ll ring the doorbell,” Thea said. “Shush. Not yet.”

  “What?” he said. “What do you think you’re—”

  “I’ll tell you, when we get out of here,” Thea said.

  “Out of here?” Terry repeated, baffled.

  “That was my aunt I was talking to, on the cell,” Thea said.

  “Oh, so you got it to—”

  “No, not my cell.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Later, Terry!”

  Terry rolled his eyes, but decided to hold his peace for the time being.