Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  She had not known, when she was younger, that she was afraid of the Alphiri. They were everywhere she looked—she had grown up with them, they were the Trader Polity, the Messenger Polity, they had always been a part of her world—but her point of view had changed after her visit to Grandmother Spider’s house, and the very fact that one couldn’t turn around without bumping into an Alphiri peddling something or hovering at a portal had acquired a far more ominous significance.

  Especially after what she had seen last summer in the woods near her home, the three Alphiri whom she had known, beyond any doubt, to be waiting there for her.

  Thea found her heart thumping as she let her thoughts touch on the Alphiri, and on what she might still be facing before this journey was over.

  “They buy, they sell, they copy, and they polish until it shines…but they cannot create or dream,” Thea said. “Grandmother Spider said that they are searching for a legacy they can leave behind—and they want magic, and they cannot hold it.” She lifted her gaze. “They wanted me,” she said. “Before I was born, they wanted me. But my father told them that I was not for sale, that humans don’t sell their children.”

  “But who would they have gone to, to bargain for Diego?” Zoë murmured thoughtfully.

  “He is my son,” the professor said heavily.

  “Beltran is your son,” Zoë said. “Diego is a lost soul. He does not belong to anyone…except, perhaps, Beltran, to whom he is linked because they were twinned in the womb.”

  Larry had been chewing his lip for some time, apparently holding back from saying something, but now he shook his head, and begun to pace the study.

  “It’s all speculation,” he said. “Everything we are talking about, we’re pulling out of thin air. We need to find him. Before things get worse…and trust me, they will.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Thea said at last.

  “Go into the woods and leave me a trail of crumbs to follow,” Larry said with a crooked smile. “He won’t be found except by you alone—but maybe I…or someone else…can follow the trail you leave behind, and find you both. With a bit of luck, that’s all you need to do.”

  “But what if he…” Zoë began, and swallowed hard. “I promised her parents that I would look after her,” she added softly.

  “It’s okay, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said. Her voice shook, but just a little. “I’ll do what I can.”

  The false wall of the professor’s study was still open; Sebastian de los Reyes saw Thea’s eyes go to the Nexus terminal and, after a brief hesitation, nodded permission. Thea walked over to the keyboard and sat down in front of it, very still for a moment, and then toggled to a notepad screen and began typing.

  She paused for a moment when she was done, read over what she had written, and then said, without turning around, “Terry…watch my back.”

  And hit ENTER.

  She could not use the Barefoot Road for this search—she could not weave an absence of a particular person and tell the Universe to take her to a time and place where that hole would be filled. There was nothing she could use to search. Putting in Beltran’s image might have led her to Beltran himself—but all she knew about him at that point was that he was missing, and going after him might lead her into worse trouble than she knew. Diego might have been described as Beltran’s twin, but Thea had no way of instructing her weave on how to tell the two of them apart.

  She needed a void for this, something empty of form—because she was looking for a place, not a person, because a place was all she knew how to look for. The room of green mist and mirrors.

  She remembered the quiet sky she had watched from Big Elk’s back, and that was what she now floated in the midst of—a darkness flickering with thousands of diamond points of sharp light. Thea looked at them and wove into them the memory of the mist which had once surrounded her.

  Green.

  The strange, unnatural green glow that had spilled into the corridors of the professor’s house that first night. The odd, glowing green mist that had surrounded her when she had first stepped into Diego de los Reyes’s world. The green ribbon she had braided into a rope to take her home.

  The stars began to bleed green—fading from bright white or flickering golden into points of green in the sky, like the eyes of a legion of malevolent cats, and then the greenness pouring from them, as though they were suddenly no more than holes in something holding back the greenness from her like an arched roof. And then the firmament became crazed with cracks, and the greenness oozed through the fissures, and then, as the black heavens crumbled away, pouring through like water, coming down all around Thea like curtains of light. The green smelled, somewhat incongruously, like the juniper bushes growing in the shadows of Cheveyo’s desert.

  “I know you’re there,” she said into the greenness after a moment, sensing that she was not alone.

  There was a chuckle from behind her.

  “Of course I am,” the voice said, the same voice that had spoken before.

  “This is childish,” Thea said. “I already know what you look like. What do you think you’re hiding?”

  “Oh, you do?” the voice said, mocking gently. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course I am. They said you’re Beltran’s twin. I know what Beltran looks like. And what did you do with him, anyway? His father…”

  “His father never thought he fulfilled his potential,” the voice said.

  “I can understand that,” Thea muttered. She had not meant to utter that out loud, but it slipped from her, the sentiment ingrained in her by the years of her own failures, by the still-bitter memory of her father’s eyes every time those failures were confirmed.

  “You think so?” The voice turned just a little savage, but its next words were sweet again. “As for Beltran, whatever makes you think that I have him? And whatever makes you think I look anything like him?”

  “You’re twins,” Thea said.

  “Not in this world,” Diego said. “In this world, I am who I choose to be.”

  The green mists parted a little, fraying, and then withdrew to the edges of Thea’s vision as though defining an arena. And in the midst of it, on a floor of mirrored black obsidian, stood a figure dressed in a white shirt open at the throat and tight-fitting black leather pants. A dagger with a jeweled hilt glittered from a scabbard hung from his belt, his right hand, with a heavy gold ring on the ring finger, resting on it in a deceptively casual manner. He was unexpectedly tall—Thea, who had calibrated her expectations to Beltran’s size and build, found she had to revise her estimate of Diego’s height by a couple of inches, lifting her chin to look him in the eye.

  It was not until he laughed, his thin aristocratic face transformed by the sudden flash of white teeth, that she realized that she had been staring at him with her mouth slightly open.

  “Oh dear, if only you could see your face,” he said, chuckling.

  “But you can’t be Diego,” Thea objected instinctively. “You’re too old.”

  “You think I’m more like Lorenzo?”

  Lorenzo—Larry—was indeed far more like this young Spanish aristocrat than poor Beltran had ever been…but Larry was real. Less of an idealized icon. Full of real-world laughter and pain.

  “No,” Thea said. “You’re nothing like Larry.”

  Diego took his hand off the dagger hilt and waved it in a gesture of dismissal. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I am not like anyone. I am me. And this is my world. My sphere. I can do what I want and be what I want.”

  For a moment that sounded almost painfully wonderful. The much-younger Thea, the girl who had agonized over her inability to touch magic at all, would have given much to have had this kind of ability to escape.

  “You can be who you want, too. You can choose.” He stepped back, and behind him, on a wrought-iron stand, was a full-length mirror framed in a polished dark wood. “You want to see what you look like right now, to me? Come and look.”

  “I know what
I look like. I know who I am,” Thea said, but the certainty with which she had thought to utter those words was suddenly missing from her voice.

  “Are you scared?” Diego asked.

  Thea clenched both hands into fists, and then consciously relaxed them, finger by finger. “Of course not.”

  “Then come,” he said. “See.”

  Refusing would have meant admitting cowardice—but it was not that so much as an irresistible if unwilling curiosity that drew Thea the few steps she needed to take before she faced the mirror.

  And then stood quite still, staring at her reflection in silence.

  The image began as something almost humiliating—the child that she had once been, hair in two plump braids, a mutinous expression on her face and hands stuck rebelliously into the pockets of her jeans, her feet bare and none too clean. Then the mirror changed; the image flowed and reshaped, blurring as though someone had thrown a stone into water, and when the reflection was still again quite a different person stood there. Thea found herself gazing into the eyes of a young woman, wheat-gold hair falling loose around her shoulders. A golden filet bound what looked remarkably like a miniature version of one of Grandmother Spider’s spun-glass dreamcatchers on her brow. Her face was thinner than she was used to, an image, perhaps, of what she would still become; she wore a dark-blue gown that reached to the floor, her waist cinched with silver, the off-the-shoulder neckline picked out with silver embroidery along the edges. Silver stars were scattered on the full skirt, making Thea look as though she were wearing the night sky.

  “That’s…not me,” she said at last, still staring.

  “It is,” Diego said, his voice coming from quite close, and suddenly he was standing right beside her, reflected in the mirror by her side. “This is not a mirror that tells lies.”

  We look alike, Thea thought—an incongruous thought, because it was so obviously untrue. He was dark to her fair, male to her female, opposite in every obvious way—but there was something, something she could not quite put her finger on. Something in the eyes. Something that had to do with a power that had been sleeping…and which was now awake at last.

  To: Shapechangers@shapechangers.com

  From: Ella Shazam < trickster@shapechangers.com >

  Subject: You can do it, too!

  It just isn’t true that shape-shifting is confined to nonhuman kindred. You, too, can be anything you choose!

  1.

  THEY STOOD SIDE BY side in silence for a moment, staring at the images in the mirror, and then Thea stirred.

  “So why aren’t they here yet?” she said.

  “Who?” Diego said blankly.

  Thea turned to look at him. “The Alphiri, of course. That’s what’s been bugging me all this time. They were after me from the cradle, just waiting in the wings, ready to snatch at whatever happened…”

  “The famous Double Seventh,” Diego said, a little sardonically.

  “You know about that?”

  “I may not live in your world, but that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of it,” Diego said. “Of course I know about it. But the Alphiri didn’t exactly make it public with you, did they? And anyway, they didn’t get you.”

  “Not for lack of trying,” Thea said. “And your precious tutor was already in line for a reward once, for trying to turn me in to them—so where is he now? And why hasn’t he collected for delivering you?”

  “Because he hasn’t delivered anything,” Diego said. “He never mentioned anything about Alphiri. It was never about that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Thea said, unconvinced. “Just when did he show up? Did he come to teach you things, or did he come after you’d already figured stuff out, to sniff around and see if you could be the kind of pay dirt he couldn’t hit with me? How on Earth did he find you, anyway?”

  “I didn’t have much of a life, before he turned up—we met in some empty sphere, and he figured out the real possibilities of my connection to Beltran,” Diego said. “But that was…after the first e-mail. I’d already done that much on my own. The rest of it—the campaign—that was something we cooked up together. He said…”

  “I have a good idea of what he said. He always says it—‘Do I have a deal for you…’”

  “Well, he delivered on his end,” Diego said.

  Thea glanced around her at the bare arena they were standing in—the polished floor surrounded by green light, and a single mirror in the midst of it. “Yeah, sure. If you know so much about our world, you should have realized you were unique—with your connection between magic and computers—”

  “But I wasn’t,” Diego said. “There’s you.”

  “But you didn’t know about me. Very few people knew about me.”

  “Cary did.”

  “Only because he was already in cahoots with the Alphiri, and then he tried to sell me to them. But if you were his next ticket to riches, you ought to be living in a far greater state of magnificence than this. It’s what I would—”

  She caught herself, chewing at her lip.

  “What you would do?” Diego finished for her. He took his hand from the jeweled dagger and stuck both hands as far as they would go into the pockets of his tight-fitting pants. “That’s why they wanted you. Because you can do it as you choose.”

  “So can you,” Thea said, surprised. “You’ve proved that. Good grief, I went to that hellhole you made for Humphrey May. You can surely…”

  “I didn’t make that. He did.”

  “But you set the spell…”

  “Sure. I set a general spell, and everyone who fell into that particular trap took it and ran with it. And created their own weird destination. Those are the best—you give them a push and watch them go running in every direction.”

  “You did some foul things,” Thea said.

  “I was just enjoying myself,” said Diego, shrugging. “Besides…you may notice that nothing I’ve done has actually lasted—it’s all like catching a cold, you get a few sniffles and a runny nose and then a week later you’re fine again.”

  “You made people catch things a little worse than a cold, with that disease one,” Thea said sharply. “I mean, lycanthropy?”

  “That one was Cary’s idea,” Diego said, grinning broadly.

  “The werewolf thing or the whole disease idea?” Thea asked, despite her better instincts. She knew there were better things she could be doing than chatting to the guy who had caused the biggest headache her world had known for a very long time—but there was a certain…professional curiosity.

  “Most of the spam ideas were mine,” Diego said, “inspired by Isabella’s preening, some of them, and then a few that were just…wishful thinking. But the diseases one was Cary’s, although I did come up with a few of the actual individual ones myself.”

  “Let me guess,” Thea said, rolling her eyes. “Flatulence, halitosis, diarrhea?”

  “Yeah,” Diego said, scowling a little. “How did you know that?”

  “I have six brothers,” Thea said trenchantly, without offering further explanation.

  Diego sniffed, offended.

  “But speaking of Corey…” Thea said, after a pause.

  “Cary. And were we?”

  “Yeah, we were. He picked the mean ones, remember? Speaking of him…oh, how I suddenly understand Grandmother Spider not wanting to turn her back on him!”

  “Who’s Grandmother Spider?”

  “We all have our friends,” Thea said. “Mine warned me about yours. Where is he, anyway?”

  “He said he’d be back, once he’d figured out the security situation back at the house,” Diego said. “He wasn’t entirely happy with me, before. I kind of…went over his head.”

  “You weren’t supposed to try and lure me here without him, were you?” Thea said, suddenly apprehensive, casting glances at the green shadows around her. “He was supposed to have the cavalry here…why me? Why not you? You have far more access to a powerful computer than I ever did—”

  “Becau
se he needs a physical body to make that access work, of course,” said a new voice.

  Corey materialized out of the shadows, smiling…and he was not alone.

  Behind him, three tall and unmistakably Alphiri figures came stepping delicately from the shadows. Two males, dressed in their usual weird idea of what constituted business attire—one wore knickerbocker trousers, his long-toed feet stuffed into knitted socks with every individual toe thrust into its own compartment, and the second one had pulled a straw Panama hat over both pointed ears, giving his face a strange, strained expression. The one woman wore a long gown of some sinuous, flowing golden stuff that draped elegantly over shoulder and hip. Thea glimpsed bare feet and toes adorned with individual silver rings visible underneath.

  Thea could not hold back a gasp. Diego’s expression was more inscrutable, but there was a trace of surprise there, if not his own share of sudden apprehension.

  “We meet again,” said the woman in a melodious voice, apparently speaking to Thea.

  “In good time,” said one of the men.

  “As we knew we would,” said the other.

  Thea was suddenly forcibly reminded of her dreams, of the way they had spoken before—always in triads, as though everything they said had a magical significance.

  “We come with an offer,” the woman said, apparently a leader of some sort.

  “As we did once before,” her first echo said.

  “By the power of the Trade Codex,” said the second.

  Corey cleared his throat. “As I said. Two of them, here together. According to the Trade Codex…”

  “Be silent,” said the woman.

  “We are not done.”

  “The bargain is yet to be concluded.”

  “What bargain?” Thea said, her voice high with fear and desperation. She had set it up so that she could escape from this place—but that was without taking into account the presence of the Alphiri, and she was not entirely certain if her arrangements would hold up under the changed circumstances. She turned on Corey with furious resentment. “Where do you get off, meddling in our lives, anyway? What did they give you?”