Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “You destroyed them both, my mother and Dorotea,” Larry said. “And in the process…you got…oh, read the rest of that letter. It’s a perfect ending.”

  Sebastian de los Reyes looked down at the paper he still held, but made no attempt to lift it and continue to read it. Larry reached over and plucked the letter from his father’s nerveless fingers. His eyes scanned the page swiftly.

  “Here,” he said. “I’m going to have some more fun now. With the other polities helping me out, I could do something really amusing. I’m playing around with a message telling people they’ve just won the lottery—everyone likes winning, don’t they?—and I’ll even make sure they get their loot—but it will be Faele silver, fairy gold, and all that they thought they had in their grasp when the sun goes down will disappear at dawn the next day—slipping, slipping, slipping through their fingers….” Larry let the hand with the letter drop. “Just like you, Father,” he said quietly. “What you thought you had—Beltran—it was Faele silver, fairy gold, and it’s morning. And it’s time to pay the price of your dream. You wanted a son who would be an Elemental, a great mage, someone to carry your name into posterity. Well…the name of de los Reyes will certainly be remembered now.”

  “We have to stop him,” Terry said, sounding frightened. “If he does the kind of thing that Thea does—if he can exist in a world just enough like this one to influence ours—who knows what he will come up with next?”

  “We have to find him first,” Larry said quietly.

  And looked straight at Thea.

  To: Healthymind@healthybody.com

  From: Dizzy Ease < doctor@healthybody.com

  >

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  1.

  “YOU CAN’T SEND HER back there alone! She barely got out the first time!” Zoë said sharply, her words breaking the crackling silence that followed Larry’s words. Zoë had appeared to have forgotten, in the heat of the moment, to whom she had responded, and she had roused up to her full height, eyes flashing, meeting Larry’s eyes with fiery defiance.

  “As to that,” Larry said, “I must have been out of the room. Just exactly where is this there that we are talking about? And if it was something or somewhere designed to entrap, how did you get out?”

  “It was thick with light,” Thea said.

  Zoë nodded. “You wove your way out of there?”

  “Wove?” Larry echoed, puzzled.

  “Long story,” Terry said.

  “Perhaps it is time that I heard all of it,” the professor said with his old autocratic haughtiness.

  “Right now?” Thea said, taken aback.

  “As good a time as any,” Larry murmured. “It isn’t like we’ll all go to sleep easily tonight.”

  Thea hesitated, and then turned to face Larry. “You knew who I was, when you first saw me,” she said.

  “Yes. Of course I did.”

  “You certainly knew all the things I wasn’t,” Thea said. “Everybody knew that. But the things that happened…in the last year or so…not many people knew of those.”

  “You weave light,” the professor said, his voice a flat statement, his brow furrowed in a frown. “Yes. That was in your file. What does that have to do with the current circumstance?”

  “That’s only part of it. I just…weave. It started with light, and then it was…other things. That’s how I came back—I wove a hole in the fabric of the world that only Aunt Zoë could fill, and then I let the world search until it found her to fill it—and then I was there, where she was. That’s how I came back into this house, I returned to the room, upstairs, where she was.”

  “You came in together,” Larry said, nodding. “I was wondering…But I don’t understand—how did this get you…?”

  “She just told you. She weaves,” Zoë said.

  “She weaves worlds,” Terry said. “We all did, at one point, all five of us back at school—Thea, me, my sister, and two friends of ours—we did it first because we all brought in something specific, a missing sense—our friend Ben can smell…”

  He suddenly stopped, glanced back at Thea.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “In this room I haven’t set the safety to expire.”

  “What?” Larry said, swiveling his head from one to the other of them.

  “I’m…allergic,” Terry said carefully.

  “Yes, I have a file on Terry Dane, too,” the professor said. “Under normal circumstances, he can’t say anything at all that has a magic overtone—he can’t utter a magic-linked word or say a spell out loud, he cannot talk about magic at all without it shutting down his breathing. Classic allergic reaction. I am told that something similar afflicts his sister—Theresa Dane can’t taste anything magic-made without swelling up and choking on it. That is why both of them were at the Wandless Academy—it was a safe, magic-free environment for them.”

  “Our friend Ben’s father is a chemist mage who was dealing with Alphiri stuff, and Ben got infected by that—and now he can’t smell anything magic without sneezing himself into a stupor,” Terry added. “And Magpie, she’s got the touch—a healer’s touch…”

  “I get the idea,” Larry said. “But weaving?”

  “That’s what I do,” Thea said. “That’s what brought me here. They thought that Professor de los Reyes could…figure out what it is I do.”

  “What on earth would anybody think that Father would have to do with weaving? Weaving anything…let alone…light?” Larry shook his head, perplexed.

  “She uses a computer,” Terry said.

  “To do…what?”

  “To weave an alternate reality. A different world,” Zoë said, finally stepping back into the conversation. “That was what we tried to do while we were out—help Thea weave a bubble where Terry could talk to us about everything. That’s why I got the laptop…and saw that wretched spellspam.” She blushed again and pressed her lips together in frustration.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t all spellspam,” Larry murmured, tilting his head. “I haven’t seen that particular incarnation of it, and I haven’t been exactly…”

  Zoë opened her mouth to protest, and Larry lifted a hand in a defensive gesture.

  “However,” he said firmly, “back to the problem on hand. So you can step from world to world as you like…? Can Beltran?”

  Thea shot him a startled look. “How would I know?”

  “You were not in this house this afternoon,” Larry said.

  “That’s true enough…I think he can, but I don’t think he is doing it the way I am, and perhaps that’s the only reason I was able to get out of there as I did—he didn’t expect…perhaps he thought that he could trap me by not giving me anything familiar to lean on, by wrapping me in formlessness and mist and that weird light—but instead he gave me the very thing I needed…” She blinked, suddenly sleepy and worn out by the whole experience. “He said…we needed to talk.”

  “Then it might be easier than we think,” Larry said.

  “He said we needed to talk,” Thea continued. “But that was when he brought me there—and he said that he didn’t want me ‘blundering in’ where he didn’t want me to be. He has to know that once I got back here, you would all know whatever I’d learned, and what makes you think he would even let m
e back in…?”

  “Let alone out again, now that he knows that you can do what you did,” Larry murmured. “I see.” He looked up as Thea suddenly smothered a yawn.

  The professor appeared to take notice of the yawn, too.

  “It’s late,” he said. “We can do nothing useful tonight. I suggest that the best plan of action is to figure it all out in the morning.”

  “But it was last night…that it all…that he…” Thea began, her heart suddenly thumping painfully.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Zoë said. “I’ll sleep on the floor if necessary. In fact, I probably should. Right there across your door. If you tried sleepwalking anywhere, I would know about it.”

  “I consider that an excellent idea,” the professor said. “As for sleeping on the floor…that will not be required.”

  “All you have to do is ask for an extra bed in the room,” Larry said. “This is…”

  “An Elemental house,” Thea said, chorusing the words with him. “I’ll make you a deal—I’ll tell you about light weaving if someone please explains to me just exactly what an Elemental house is.”

  “I’ll give you a textbook, if you like. There will be a test in the morning,” Larry said.

  Terry laughed, a little self-consciously, and then Thea giggled, and in a moment they were all laughing. Even the professor managed a watery sort of grin.

  “Definitely time to head upstairs,” Larry said. He turned to his father. “Do you…need any help?” he asked carefully.

  “No,” the professor said, standing up. And then, with a sideways look at his older son, “Not in the way you mean, anyway. But thank you.”

  “Do you want me to deal with battening the hatches?” Larry asked.

  “That would…be good,” the professor murmured. “I find myself rather tired, after all. And you know what measures need to be taken to safeguard this place from further incursions, at least for tonight.”

  “I will take care of it,” Larry said.

  The professor gave a faint nod. “Very well, then. I will…leave it in your hands. If you will all excuse me, I have some thinking to do. We will meet in the morning.”

  “Good night, sir,” Terry said.

  The professor inclined his head in acknowledgment, and then he was out of the study, walking slowly and carefully down the hallway, making his way to the great stairs in the entrance hall.

  “Will he be all right?” Zoë said quietly.

  “He took a blow tonight,” Larry said. “Wounded pride can be a mortal wound, and with him, tonight…it’s a deep one.”

  He bent his head and ran his long fingers through his hair in a gesture that was pure weariness.

  “You should turn in, too,” Zoë said.

  “I still have…a few things to do,” Larry said. “Make sure everything is secure for tonight.”

  “Can I do anything to help?” Terry asked. “I could deal with the Nexus aspect of it…if that’s the backbone of what runs this place…”

  “Not really,” Larry said, and quirked another quicksilver grin in Thea’s direction. “It’s the Elemental thing. Go on, upstairs with all of you.”

  Zoë hesitated, but Thea suddenly smothered another jaw-cracking yawn and it broke the moment. Larry politely but firmly herded everybody out of the study and closed the door behind them, letting them find their way to their rooms.

  Thea wasn’t sure if she could go to sleep. In the darkness of the bedroom, which had somehow already acquired an extra bed, Zoë murmured a few encouraging words and then appeared to go to sleep herself—rather quickly, Thea thought.

  Thea, still awake, found herself remembering Larry’s voice, his words all mixed up and jumbled in her head.

  Dorotea was pregnant again, and this time it would be a son…except that it was not. It was two sons.

  One twin was born…and the other…was not. But lived, nonetheless.

  It wasn’t Beltran…it was Diego.

  Diego. Diego de los Reyes.

  Thea mulled the name around in her mind. Beltran’s lank hair and drooping disposition, the habit of draping himself on every surface as though he needed constant support to stay upright, kept intruding; Thea tried to invest that personality with the voice that had spoken to her out of the green mists of that other world, and could not make it fit. They might have been twins, but they were very different people, Beltran and his shadow-brother.

  There had been, initially, that reaction that she had had—the sense that she wanted, needed, to be somehow better, prettier, more personable, to have more of whatever it took to be worthy of Beltran’s notice—but that, in the end, had merely served to goad her into being annoyed with him. She had watched Beltran’s sister, because of Terry’s interest in her, and had wound up transposing quite a bit of Isabella’s imperious arrogance onto a personality that might not have been a very good fit. If someone had asked her to describe Beltran, only a few short hours ago, the word “arrogant” would definitely have been part of the description—but now as she cast her mind back over their few encounters, Thea was hard-pressed to make that particular description stick…on every occasion except one.

  Back at the front door.

  And that might have been Beltran’s body, even Beltran’s body language, but it might not have been Beltran at all.

  One twin was born…and the other was not.

  “It must have been so lonely,” Thea murmured to herself, muffled into the safety of her pillow.

  Diego. The shadow-twin.

  He was not real—not alive—not sharing her physical world at all, unless one counted him using Beltran as his puppet…but he was like her. How they had both come to use the computer as a source or a conduit of magic, in a way that none other of their kind had apparently ever been able to do, was a moot question.

  Thea felt a powerful affinity there, mixed with revulsion at what Diego de los Reyes had chosen to do in order to use his gift. And this, although it might not have been entirely unexpected, astonished her. He had done—he had the potential to do—so much harm…and she empathized with him?

  Her mind alive with questions and apprehensions, Thea lay on her back, utterly convinced that she would not sleep at all that night—but in her next moment of awareness she found herself lying on her side with her cheek pillowed on her palm and realized that she must have nodded off after all. But something had woken her now. Something had changed in the room.

  She lay very still for a moment and then hoisted herself quietly up on her elbows and peered across the room at the other bed.

  “Aunt Zoë?” she whispered.

  Thea had always had her own room at home, but a year spent as Magpie’s roommate had sensitized her to the sounds, the mere presence, of another human being in the room at night—and those sounds were absent. Zoë’s bed was empty. She was gone.

  Thea sat up sharply, suddenly far more awake than she wanted to be. Zöe’s bedclothes were pulled half-straight, relatively neatly, suggesting that its occupant had left the bed by her own choice rather than having been taken from it violently or involuntarily. It was also still warm, implying that such a departure had occurred not too long before.

  Thea hesitated for a long moment. She very much didn’t want to go in search of Zoë, or leave this room at all, and there was a deeply rational core of her that told her sharply that there had to be a sane explanation for it all, and that Zoë herself might return at any moment. But another part of her was hearing guitar music and that strange knowing laugh from out of the green mists, and was suddenly terrified of what her being alone in that room might really mean.

  “I’ll just look,” she whispered to herself at last, more for the value of hearing her own voice than for any actual need to say anything out loud to a room empty of anyone other than herself. She retrieved the bathrobe from the closet where the Elemental house had tidily stowed it, and reluctantly padded to the bedroom door in her bare feet.

  The corridor outside her room was empty when she pee
red out, and the bathroom across the hallway seemed to be its normal self. But a faint murmur of low voices did reach Thea as she hesitated in the doorway of her bedroom, uncertain of what to do next, and her old eavesdropping instincts kicked in. She sidled along the wall of the corridor toward the main stairs, where the voices appeared to be coming from.

  She craned her neck carefully around the curve of the wall, and snatched herself back very quickly when she realized that the acoustics of the place had been deceiving and the voices she had heard were coming from a couple of people sitting and talking quietly on the stairs not too far from where she was hiding.

  Larry and Zoë.

  2.

  THEA COULD SEE THEM from the back—her aunt’s hair mussed as though it had been finger-combed, a T-shirt pulled on over jeans; Larry’s half-profile, turned toward Zoë, leaning back against the stairs behind him with both elbows.

  “…hate the idea,” Zoë was saying. “It seems that we’re always on her for taking things in her own hands, and when she doesn’t, then we push her into doing stuff anyway. And the truth is, out there, she’s still on her own. Whether or not we give our permission for her to go. It isn’t as though, with our backing, she has…I don’t know…backup. We don’t know nearly enough about anything to even think about the logistics of that.”

  “But if she could take someone with her…would it matter?” Larry said softly.

  “I have no idea. It could. It did once before, apparently, when all her friends joined her in that other world she created, the place to where she lured the Nothing…but that was different…they all had a role there, somehow. Now, though…I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, Aunt Zoë,” Thea muttered, barely out loud, rolling her eyes. I can take care of myself, go talk to Humphrey May! she thought.

  She must have missed an exchange or two, because the next thing she heard was Larry’s voice, and the words didn’t make sense.

  “I know. It’s my house.”

  Thea blinked, and then realized that the voice had not come from the stairs at all…but from behind her.

  She snapped her head around and could not suppress a startled yelp as this motion brought her face to face with a large cat sitting close enough for its paws to be practically on top of her feet. The cat’s tail swished a couple of times, and then it morphed smoothly into Larry, crouching in his place, grinning at Thea.