We. If Thea went after Diego, she would have to go alone—or he might never let himself be found.
And if she found him, there would be choices. Choices that would be far, far more difficult than luring a mindless monster into the body of a willing sacrifice.
“That was different. That was not…real. It wasn’t a person.”
“We all heard it scream, in the end,” Terry said. “If that last cry was anything to go by, it understood what was happening, which made it alive enough for any given definition of sentience. It understood.”
“It may have grown into a set of senses, but I don’t think it started with them,” Thea said obstinately. “And it was a monster, in every way. Aunt Zoë said it smelled like carrion. We knew it was dangerous to our kind, that it killed. We lost people we knew to it.”
“Twitterpat,” Terry said.
“And others. Maybe they were strangers, but they were no less dead. We knew…”
“Well, it’s the same thing here,” Terry said. “Except that this time we have a monster who is like us, who has a face, who maybe has a motive we could understand.”
“Diego hasn’t killed anybody,” Thea said stubbornly.
“But is that because he won’t?” Terry said. “Or is it because he can’t yet, because he hasn’t figured out how? If he comes up with something that kills…well, he already knows how to send it. He’s had enough practice runs. He’s also had enough hits to know that it will work, that it could be devastating. It could even change our world. Permanently. He’ll be a ghost in the machine, but he could control everything from it.”
“All we need to do is switch off the computers,” Thea said, perking up. “Wouldn’t that work?”
Terry snorted. “Right. Like you could turn off every computer in the world. At the same time. Think again. It’s like trying to switch off electricity—it would be like going back to the Dark Ages. We already depend far too much on them—how would you get everyone to give up the convenience and the speed, the sense of security that they still mean to most people? And there are so many computers out there now, in so many homes, how do you police a shutdown? It would only take one twit who didn’t shut down because he knew better…”
“Well, what am I supposed to do about any of it?” Thea said.
“They’ll tell you what you need to do,” Terry said after a pause.
“I know,” Thea said bleakly. “That’s partly what I’m afraid of.”
She stabbed the last strawberry with her fork and filled her mouth with it so that she would not have to say anything more.
It was precisely at this moment that the breakfast room was graced by the presence of Sebastian de los Reyes himself.
“Good morning,” the professor said. He looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept much, but he was much more his usual self than the night before—autocratic, august, apparently in control.
Thea swallowed the last mouthful of her strawberry as Terry scrambled to his feet.
“Good morning, sir,” Terry said.
“Was Lorenzo here when you came down, by any chance?” the professor inquired.
“No, sir—haven’t seen him,” Terry said. “But we haven’t been here long…”
Zoë suddenly poked her head around the door. “I thought I heard voices,” she said. “Good morning. You have a lovely garden, Professor de los Reyes.”
“Thank you,” said the professor.
“My mother used to like it,” said Larry, following Zoë into the room. “And it’s always been pleasant in the early mornings.”
The professor chose not to pursue that remark. “I have coffee in my study, if everyone’s done with their breakfast,” he said. “We should finish our conversation from last night. There are decisions to be made.”
He swept everyone with an imperious glance, and Thea slipped off her chair, pushing her plate away. Terry was already at the door.
“Professor de los Reyes,” a voice called out in the hallway as the professor led the way out of the breakfast room, “may I have a word?”
“Yes, Mrs. Emmett, what can I do for you?” the professor said courteously.
“It’s Sam, sir…”
Larry, who had poked his head around the door, ducked back into the breakfast room with the others.
“Don’t look now, but it’s Madeline with Convalescent Boy,” Larry said quietly.
“Convalescent Boy?” Thea said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Sam is always ailing with something,” Larry said. “She had him quite late in life, and every time he clears his throat, she calls an ambulance.”
“He isn’t at all well,” Madeline was saying out in the corridor. “I’d like the morning off so I can get him to a doctor. He seems…”
“What are his symptoms, Mrs. Emmett?” Larry said suddenly, stepping out from the breakfast nook.
Thea stared at Sam, who was huddled up against his mother, shivering. His face alternated between a ghastly, pallid, waxy look and a flushed feverishness, with a scattered rash across his cheeks and forehead; he hung on to his mother’s arm as if the very act of standing upright made his head spin.
“I can’t make sense of it,” Madeline said. “That’s why I want him to see a doctor. He’s got a slight fever, a bit of a rash…he’s complaining of being dizzy, and of being nauseous, and of a ringing in his ears, and he says he couldn’t sleep a wink last night but I can’t keep him awake this morning, he actually fell asleep with his face in his cereal…”
“I don’t feel so good, Mom,” Sam said in a thin, reedy voice.
“I think he’s going to…,” Thea began urgently, but was swiftly overtaken by events. Sam’s lips trembled, his throat worked a few times as though he was fighting a rising gorge, and then he lost the battle and threw up a thin, greenish stream of vomit—some of it pooled in evil-smelling puddles on the clean tile floor, but the bulk of it landed squarely on the professor’s hand-tooled leather slippers.
The professor’s face did not change from its expression of courteous concern. He did not even look down at his feet, keeping his eyes on Sam—who stood with his head buried between his hunched shoulders, weaving slightly on his feet and looking thoroughly humiliated and miserable.
“Oh, I am so sorry,” Madeline gasped. “Let me just…Sam, do you want to sit…I’ll go get a mop…I’m so sorry, sir, I don’t know what the matter is—it could just be a bad flu, or some sort of allergy…or an overindulgence in junk food…”
“Overindulgence, but not in junk food. Tell him to spend less time in front of the computer, or at least to be more careful with it,” Larry said. “No doctor will help him. It’s no wonder you can’t pinpoint a disease—those symptoms cover half a dozen of the things listed in that spellspam e-mail last night. You’d better bring him into the breakfast room so he can sit down, and we can counter the spell. And count yourself lucky that he didn’t catch something worse. He might have prowled the halls as a werewolf last night. Er…I think I can manage a cure, Father, if you want to go and…slip into something more comfortable on your feet before we continue our meeting.”
“My son will do what can be done, Mrs. Emmett,” the professor said. “Would the rest of you like to wait in the study?”
His self-control slipped just a little as he eased his feet out of the offending slippers, a fleeting grimace of distaste on his face as he took a step back, avoiding the noxious pools on the floor. He did not even look at the ruined slippers as he turned away, leaving them in the hallway for the house to clean up, and climbed the stairs in his stocking feet.
“Go,” Larry said, shepherding Sam and his trembling mother into the breakfast room. “I won’t be long.”
“This is from last night,” Terry said. “Any more…stuff…turn up? Have you checked the mail this morning?”
“There’s at least two,” Larry said. “We’ve got more crud to deal with in the short term, but if he’s upping his output, maybe he’ll run out of practical jokes fast
er than he can keep up with it.”
“Or think of more and more dangerous ones,” Zoë said darkly.
“I always leave the worst-case scenario for the last resort,” Larry said.
“If you plan ahead for it, you might never have to deal with it,” retorted Zoë.
Larry shrugged. “Then I’d be worried all the time,” he said, heading into the breakfast room.
The other three made their way slowly to the professor’s study, but Zoë hesitated at the door, her hand hovering over the door handle and then dropping away. “I think we’d better wait for one of them to come back,” she said. “Other people’s studies always smell dangerous, like you ought to leave them unmolested, and in this house I wouldn’t want to trip any alarms.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Larry said, coming up the hallway, close enough to have overheard the remark. “You were invited.”
“You fix him?” Terry asked as they filed inside the study.
“Of course, all it took was a direct reversal, and that’s easy to do if you know what you’re up against. He’s his usual healthy hypochondriac self, and after his mother got done being worried to death about him, she got good and mad—and he’s now banned from using the computer. For three days.”
“Like that’s going to help,” Thea said. “Unless the spellspam stops…”
“Actually, one of this morning’s offerings gave me an idea,” Larry said. “Enhance your senses, the thing said, and I have no doubt it will be driving people insane. Spectacles and hearing aids are fine for people who have a deficiency in those departments, but can you imagine people with perfectly good hearing suddenly being able to hear everything—someone walking in high heels across a tile floor would be enough to send you over the edge, not to mention the sound of a faucet dripping on a different floor of your house—and the voices in your head, if you can hear every word, every whisper, maybe every thought…”
“You didn’t see that one, did you, Aunt Zoë?” Thea said, suddenly sobered. With her own exotic abilities, Zoë was already operating under a sensory overload which most ordinary people would have been hard-pressed to cope with.
“No, I was careful this time. Safety in computing.” Zoë said.
Terry was actually wincing. “Imagine trying to butter a piece of toast,” he said. The memory of the scrape of a knife on the rough surface of crisp toast suddenly made everyone shudder.
“Or touching anything,” Thea said, unable to pull her mind away.
“Or smelling everything,” Terry said. “Ow. Complete overload.”
“But you said it gave you an idea, Larry,” Zoë said, settling herself into the armchair by the window. The light fell over her face and hair like a blessing, making her faintly luminous, as though she were a visiting Woodling basking in her forest’s sunshine. Thea saw the awareness of this wash over Larry’s face before he spoke.
“Yes. An idea. About Thea.”
2.
THEA’S SMILE WAS WIPED off her face. “What?” she said, looking warily up at Larry.
“Well…when you go looking for Diego…”
“Wait a minute,” Terry said, “is she really supposed to—”
“Uh,” said Thea.
“Perhaps we’d better…,” Zoë began, getting up from her armchair.
The door of the study opened just as they all spoke at once.
“One at a time,” said the professor, “usually works better if you are actually trying to communicate. Is everything all right with Sam Emmett?”
“Absolutely,” Larry said. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Yes, thank you,” the professor said, walking around the desk to claim his high-backed chair.
“There are going to be a lot of doctors with their hands full this morning, people don’t know any better,” Larry said, pouring out a mug of strong black coffee and taking it back to the desk. “And some people won’t go at all because some of the stuff on that list isn’t symptomatic of anything specific…and just how do you cure someone of xenophobia, anyway…?”
“Someone had better call my uncle,” Terry murmured carefully.
“I already let the FBM know. I’ll update them later,” Larry said.
“Now,” said the professor, accepting a mug of steaming coffee from Larry’s hands, “what was this about an idea?”
“Wait, first of all,” Zoë said. She came to stand beside Thea, facing the desk. “What exactly do you think it will accomplish? Sending Thea out like a hunting hawk?”
“Usually hunting hawks bring back the prey they’ve been sent after,” Larry said.
“But she can’t, Larry. Not this time. You yourself said it. If you believe that it is Diego de los Reyes who is behind this…she cannot bring him back. He never existed, not in this world. She might come back towing some lifeless shell…”
Zoë broke off, suddenly realizing that she was speaking of painful matters to the father and the older brother of both entities she was talking about, Diego and Beltran.
“You’re right, that isn’t going to help us,” Larry said, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “There is more to it than this. Thea, this isn’t a recon mission. It’s going into battle. You need to figure out how we can stop Diego from continuing with this—before it gets worse. You know how bad a library gone feral can be—escaped spells wreaking havoc everywhere, wild magic roosting in the rafters. If Diego loses control of his playthings, the entire world becomes one huge feral library. And you of all people know firsthand about those—your own father used to work at taming and containing the ferals when they got out of hand. If magic really gets let loose and out of control…our entire social fabric could unravel.”
“But what do you want me to do?” Thea whispered.
The professor sighed, putting his coffee down onto his desk.
“One way or another,” he said, “Diego needs to be stopped. It will be your task to find him…and if you cannot stop him yourself, then lead us to him. As I understand it…you’ve taken reinforcements with you before, when you wove that other world where your encounter took place.”
“With the Nothing?” Thea said.
“She didn’t take us,” Terry said. “We came after her.”
“She left the door open for that. I know that you have taken others with you into, or at least through, those worlds. Is there a possibility that you might take, for instance, me?”
“Father,” Larry said sharply, his head snapping around. “You of all people can’t face him. You couldn’t find it in yourself to destroy him if that was necessary. And that’s only natural—he is your son.”
“And your brother,” the professor said.
“Who, then? The kids again? Me? Maybe we should call for FBM reinforcements and send in Luana Lilley.”
Both the Academy students actually recoiled at that name.
“I’m not taking that woman anywhere,” Thea said rebelliously.
“Then call Humphrey,” Zoë said obstinately. “You like him.”
“None of the above,” Larry said sharply, cutting through the discussion. “Look, if you were our quarry, would you just fling open the gates of your fortress if someone like Thea came knocking with an army at her back? No, she needs to at least lure him out by herself. If she leaves a way for us to follow and send reinforcements, that’s an advantage. But in that first instance…”
“You want me to go in alone,” Thea said faintly.
“Yes, because if you don’t you’ll never find him, because he won’t let himself be found. One thing we do know is that he’s good at hiding.”
“But what if I do find him?”
“Well, that brings me to the idea,” Larry said. “This sense-enhancement e-mail that he’s just sent out is calculated to be malicious and painful, and the sense ‘enhancements’ will drive the victim crazy in the shortest possible time. But what if I could figure out the spell and recast it, and give you enhanced senses of a different sort, something that will help you look for him? Yo
u said there was a green fog all around you last time, and you couldn’t see—what if I could give you enhanced vision, something to pierce the mists with?”
“I can weave that,” Thea said.
Larry blinked. “Weave what?”
“I don’t need to ‘see’ through the green mist. Last time I was trapped, and I wanted out, and so I did. But if I’m supposed to be doing something else, I can find him. I can weave a world where I can find him.”
“Even if it’s his world?” Larry said. “Do you have the power to change someone else’s vision? Would he then have the power to change yours? This is so dangerous…”
“Now you think about that,” Zoë snapped.
“We need to know…” Larry began, but it was the professor who leaned forward, both elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers in a gesture of emphasis.
“Too many things are telling me that this goes deeper than we realized,” he said. “There is the tutor, who has been unmasked as being the Trickster himself, an ancient spirit entity of this land. There is the nature of some of the spellspams that have been recorded so far, which seem to implicate at least a surface involvement of the Faele. There is the apparently unrelated issue that I found mentioned in one of the reports, where the witnesses to a specific spellspam started speaking in foreign languages…one of which was Alphiri. Both Beltran and the individual of whom we speak as my lost son, Diego…may just be tools, used by the nonhuman polities for their own ends. And we have no idea as to what the politics—the Alphiri or Faele—are trying to accomplish by unleashing this kind of chaos into the world.”
“Grandmother Spider said…they were looking for dreams.”
The professor looked at Thea in puzzlement. “What was that?”
Thea tried to cast her mind back. There were times when she felt as though Cheveyo walked beside her at the Academy, when Grandmother Spider visited her dreams and spun stories, when the Trickster sat eavesdropping on her conversation in a café…and there were times when all that remained were the things she had learned from them.
Like the truth about the Alphiri. And then, the fear.
Worldweavers: Spellspam Page 20