Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “Something I wanted,” Corey said, with a wolfish grin.

  “He doesn’t speak for us,” Thea said, turning back to the Alphiri, scrambling to remember what her father had told her about the polity and their trading ways. “Whatever bargain you struck with him, if it concerns me—me or Diego—it is worthless. Your own Trade Codex says you cannot steal.”

  “We do not steal,” the woman said.

  “He offered us hope,” said the first man, and Thea’s eyes widened just a little.

  “He offered us access.”

  “Access to what?” Diego burst out at last, staring at the people in his little world.

  “Perhaps you,” the woman said, turning to him fractionally.

  “Hope for a future.”

  “Power to create.”

  Diego glanced at Corey. “But you know I need Beltran,” he said.

  “That isn’t going to be a problem,” Corey said, smiling.

  “You have him,” Thea whispered.

  “I don’t waste resources. It became obvious that he would be endangered if I left him where he was—he was blown as Diego’s cover. So I made sure I had him safe, before I went to the Alphiri. I knew that they—the rest of the crew, back in the house—would send you out, Galathea. So I told the Alphiri I’d get you both.”

  “But you haven’t got either of us,” Thea said. “I am not yours to bargain away, and anything done here will be nixed at the Tribunal when this case is hauled before it—and it will be, you can believe that. And without Beltran, without access to the Nexus…”

  She shut her mouth abruptly, aware of a concentrated and focused attention that all three of the Alphiri were paying to her every word.

  “We don’t need the Nexus,” Corey said confidently. “There were lots of copycat spams…”

  “Copied. Transmitted. Not created. Not what Diego can do,” Thea said, unable to stop herself. She turned on the Alphiri. “Taken up and passed off for someone else’s work. Just like you do with the golden and glittery things you dangle before the other worlds. None of them your own.”

  “That is why we are here,” the woman said.

  “For the future,” said the first man.

  “For the dreams,” said the second.

  “Well, you can’t have ours!” Thea said. There was a part of her that trembled with pure terror and was more than ready to turn and flee, if she knew there were a place to flee to in this insubstantial world of Diego’s.

  “So it’s the Nexus, is it?” Corey said suddenly. “But there is more than one way to access the Nexus…”

  Thea had thought of the same thing, in the same instant. Isabella. Lorenzo.

  “Oh no, you don’t!” she muttered, turning just as Corey began to step back into a shadow. She whipped out a hand and closed it around his wrist, and then willed herself back, as she always did from an alternate reality she had woven for herself, back to where the computer was. Back to the office.

  For a moment she struggled, almost feeling as if she would fail this time, stuck somewhere in between worlds, in unraveled strands that she could not re-weave. It was not the first time she had traveled with a companion in tow, but this was no ordinarily companion: it was Corey, the Trickster, and although taken by surprise, he was quick-thinking enough to realize that wherever she was taking him would not be a good place for him to be. But although it felt like swimming through molasses, Thea was suddenly aware that she was back in Professor de los Reyes’s office, her hand still clutching Corey’s wrist.

  She felt hot and sweaty; her hair, damply irritating, was sticking to the back of her neck as though she had just run a race, and her shirt clung to her in miserable discomfort. But if she was feeling bad, Corey obviously felt a whole lot worse. He let out a startled yelp as they materialized in the study, his bony wrist jerking in her grip; it suddenly changed into a coyote’s angular paw, and then, as she instinctively tightened her grip on it, into the wingtip of a raven, which pulled itself out of her scrabbling fingers as the bird tore free and began to circle the room right up underneath the ceiling, uttering raucous cries.

  “Someone got spellspammed?” Larry said, staring up with an astonished expression.

  “No,” Sebastian de los Reyes said, his own eyes on the raven, “if I am not mistaken that bird used to be my son’s tutor, Cary Wiley.”

  “Are you all right?” Zoë said to Thea, who was breathing in short gasps.

  “Professor…the Nexus…you said you’ve been using it as your family’s Terranet backbone…You need to shut that down, now. Nobody gets access to Terranet through the Nexus except you, and then only when you have to…the Nexus is the reason that Diego was able to start sending out the spellspams, through Beltran…”

  “That I have already done,” the professor said, glancing at the computer console.

  “But Beltran’s disappeared,” Terry said.

  “He has him somewhere,” Thea said, pointing to the raven, which had now perched on top of a high shelf and was eyeing everyone resentfully. “And he brought the Alphiri to Diego’s world. He’s been acting as a go-between all along, and now he’s figured out that he needs access to the Nexus, and if he can’t have Beltran, he’ll take someone else. Someone with access. Family. Isabella, maybe.”

  Terry made an instinctive jerk toward the computer, as though he wanted to rip it out of the wall, before Isabella could come to any harm from it.

  “But I thought it was the connection between the twins that was the important thing here,” Larry said.

  “He can change shapes,” Thea said, settling into a chair and gulping down a glass of cold lemonade that had appeared unasked for on the table next to her elbow, provided by the Elemental house. “He can manipulate what he needs. He has Beltran; he can change him into Isabella or even you, Larry—someone with access, and knowledge. The computer…the computer needs to be shut off from all of you…”

  “I’ve already taken care of that,” the professor said quietly, standing over Thea with his hands clasped behind his back. “I have already regretted that rash act, and right now the only access password to the Nexus is mine. And I’m not about to divulge that. Now, tell me what you learned about my son.”

  “I don’t know where Beltran is, sir,” Thea said.

  “No,” the professor said heavily. “Diego.”

  “The Alphiri,” Larry said suddenly, dragging his eyes from the bird on the shelf. “You said there were Alphiri. What did they want?”

  “I think…the same thing they wanted from me, when I was little,” Thea whispered. “They want a source of magic. One they can use. They couldn’t tap into human magic, not as it was, not as they were—but if there is a way to use the computers, then they can use…someone like me. That was what they were hoping to buy when they came to my father, when I was maybe three years old. And he told them that I wasn’t for sale.”

  “Your father spoke for you,” Larry said. “But Diego…”

  “Diego is my son. I should be the one to step between him and the Alphiri,” the professor said.

  “Only…in theory, Professor,” said Zoë slowly. “The Tribunal might have trouble with that. And if the Alphiri Trade Codex should be taken to apply…Diego doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone in the same way that Thea was claimed by her father. He was fathered by you…but he was never born, and if he belongs to anyone, it is to his twin brother, who is the other half of his spirit…and who’s missing. Diego, in practical terms, can lay claim to himself—or so the Alphiri can argue.”

  “You mean they can still get what they want? Access to magic? They can buy Diego?”

  The raven screamed, and launched itself off the shelf, straight at the people in a huddled knot in the midst of the room. Almost too fast for the eye to see, Larry had blurred into the serval cat and was in mid-leap before any of them had a chance to react, knocking the bird off-balance with one powerful paw. The raven squawked, ricocheted off a protruding corner of a bookshelf, and tumbled into an ungr
aceful heap onto the professor’s desk. As it untangled wing from tail, the cat was upon it again, tail lashing, a paw pinning down each wing.

  It was Zoë who ran up to grab one of the wings as Larry transformed again, the other wing in his own hand, just as the raven transformed back into the now somewhat disheveled man whom Thea knew as Corey.

  “You will tell me where my brother is,” Larry said, his face still in a very catlike snarl.

  “Lorenzo…,” the professor began, and then paused. “Larry. I need to take urgent measures concerning this Alphiri threat. It is Diego who needs me now. May I leave Beltran in your hands?”

  “Not his. Mine,” said Thea.

  2.

  EVERYONE TURNED TO LOOK at her again.

  “I will take Corey,” she said. “He will tell where Beltran is. I will take him back to the ancient light; let the sun judge him, if he has transgressed.”

  “She can do it,” Zoë said, hanging on to one of Corey’s wrists.

  “Wait a minute,” Corey began. “Wait just a minute…”

  “If you have not broken the law, then you will not be found guilty of it,” Thea said.

  “Do you need help?” Larry asked.

  “Both of you, come. I can’t hold onto him and weave at the same time. Professor, the computer…?”

  “It’s off the grid, right now,” Sebastian de los Reyes said, rather grimly. “But if you don’t need Terranet, you may use it.”

  “No. Just a keyboard and a screen,” Thea murmured, setting her lemonade glass aside and getting up, a little unsteadily, to cross over to the computer console. “Bring him over, and make sure you hang onto him when we get across. I don’t want him escaping into the Road.”

  “Whatever you say,” Larry said, making sure his grip on Corey’s right wrist was locked. “This way, if you please.”

  Corey turned his head toward the professor as he was being frog-marched to the computer console. “No, wait—I’ll give you what the Alphiri gave…”

  “Now, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, lifting her hands off the keyboard. She touched Zoë’s free hand with one of her own, and then they were…no longer in the study. Red mesas rose around them as they stood on the Barefoot Road. Thea’s feet were bare upon it; everyone else remained shod.

  “Stay still,” Thea instructed. “Don’t move, and don’t let him move.”

  “You’d better sit down,” Larry said to Corey, giving a firm tug on Corey’s bony wrist.

  Resigned, Corey subsided into a cross-legged position on the ground.

  Thea took a few steps on the Road, peering into the scrub and tumbled rocks by the roadside.

  “You have need of me?” said a voice, very close by, and where nothing had been a moment ago, Cheveyo stood leaning on his familiar staff.

  “I think I will always need you,” Thea said.

  Cheveyo inclined his head. “I see you bring company,” he remarked, glancing to the trio on the Road behind her.

  “He’s Corey,” Thea said.

  “I know him,” Cheveyo said.

  “He holds knowledge that we need. More than that, he broke the law, and I bring him back here, to where his kind may hold him accountable.”

  “Some might say he is his own law,” Cheveyo said. “He is the Trickster; to plot and to deceive is just his way; it is the reason for his being.”

  “But betrayal is not,” Thea said. “And he betrayed more than one kindred.”

  “We cannot punish him,” said a new voice, and Grandmother Spider stepped out from behind Cheveyo. “This is not a court that can hand down a sentence and enforce it with imprisonment or the lash.”

  Behind her, the sunlight thickened into the tawny shape of Tawaha.

  “He is what he is,” Tawaha said, in that voice that was liquid gold. “We are the Eldest, but he is part of the Elder Kin, too. We cannot punish him—but we can judge him, and we can reprimand. That carries its own weight.”

  Grandmother Spider raised a hand, and Thea turned her head to where Larry and Zoë crouched beside Corey, still holding on to him. Zoë’s face was luminous with joy, which seemed strange under the circumstances until Thea remembered how her aunt had once described the “voice” of the sun to her. Hearing Tawaha speak was once more a vindication of Zoë’s curious world, and she was glowing with it.

  “Let him go,” Grandmother Spider called, and Zoë and Larry let go of Corey’s wrists. He staggered to his feet, making something of a production of dusting himself off. Then he glanced at the Road, at his own booted feet.

  “The Road is not mine today,” he said. “If I move, it will vanish.”

  “Leap,” Cheveyo said serenely. “You didn’t come here by a straight road anyway.”

  Corey eyed the gap between himself and the edge of the Road, and then shrugged, bunched his leg muscles, and launched himself into the scree. Larry and Zoë stayed where they were, keeping very still. The Road shivered, but held. Corey appeared to consider shifting into his coyote form and bolting for the hills, but under the stern gaze of both Grandmother Spider and Tawaha, thought better of it. He sighed, hung his head, and walked over to them, dragging his heels.

  “I have seen, in the dreamcatchers,” Grandmother Spider said. “There are no secrets that you can keep from me, not for long. I have found the boy you were holding, asleep in the dark, and I have sent Tawaha to wake him. He is free.”

  She made a gesture, and Beltran stood, weaving a little, in the shadow of a nearby boulder. Larry’s shoulders tensed; Zoë reached out and laid a light hand on his arm, but he had already remembered where he was, and made his muscles relax. Thea stared at Beltran’s face, trying to catch his eye, to communicate, but there was nothing in his expression, nothing except an almost unearthly blankness that made her hackles rise.

  Corey’s golden eyes flashed defiance. “She lies,” he said, flinging out an arm at Thea. “I have my own laws. I have broken nothing.”

  “You are right,” Tawaha said, looking down at Corey with both authority and compassion. “You are a shadow between light and darkness. You are choice. You were created by the needs of the folk who made you, and you were granted dispensation from many laws because of that, a very long time ago. But there are limits to what you are permitted to do—putting a rock into the bed of a stream to make a rapid or to make it choose to run in a different streambed is permitted to you, and doing so may be considered the reason for your very existence. The kindred of the many worlds need to be tested, and it is the obstacles the Trickster throws in their path that are the trials through which their mettle is proved. But putting a stone into a streambed is different from damming the stream to create a lake. And while you are permitted to play with the manner in which a stream finds its way to the great sea, you are not permitted to change its nature.” He lifted his head to gaze at Thea for a moment, and then beyond her at her companions. “He will not cross your paths again for a while,” Tawaha said. “We cannot undo what the Trickster does, but we can and we will keep a closer eye on him.” He lifted a hand, limned in a golden glow. “Walk in the light,” he said, and it was a blessing.

  And then they were gone, the three of them, the Elder ones—the splendor of Tawaha, the grace of Grandmother Spider, the barely restrained defiant audacity, even in this tight corner, of Corey the Trickster.

  In the absence of something that he could lean on or drape himself over, Beltran de los Reyes appeared to be practically ready to drop in a heap where he stood. Cheveyo, glancing back at him, shook his head a little.

  “That one looks like he needs caring for,” he said, “and it is too long a tale that you have to tell, as I understand, to do it justice now. One day you might favor me by coming to my hearth to share it. Until then.” He raised his free hand in farewell, turned to give a small courtly bow to the two waiting on the Road, and then turned and walked away with a measured stride.

  “Who,” Larry said, “was that?”

  “Anasazi shaman,” Zoë said.

  Lar
ry’s eyes flicked to her. “Funny.”

  “True,” she said. “Ask Thea about it sometime.”

  “And the other two? The ones who took our trickster friend?”

  “They made our world, once,” Thea said, and could not help a grin at the sight of Larry’s expression, fluctuating between purest awe and complete disbelief. “He is Tawaha. The Sun.”

  Larry instinctively glanced up to the cloudless desert sky where the sun hung in molten fury. “That?”

  “Yeah, that,” Thea said.

  “There was a time before Thea could do this thing that she does, the computer magic,” Zoë said.

  “Or anything,” Thea muttered. “The Double Seventh who couldn’t—remember?”

  “Yes, but—then you wound up at that school and they—”

  “Before the school,” Thea said, “they sent me here. And whatever the magic was that I had, Cheveyo helped wake it. Cheveyo, and Grandmother Spider.” She reached out—blue from the sky, red from the dust at the Road’s side, dark strands from the shadows under the mesas—and began weaving the strands between her fingers, smiling. “And I could suddenly do this,” she said, dropping a patch of braided light into Larry’s hand. “And after that, I could do…other things. Like make talking about magic safe for Terry back in our world, or go looking for Diego—weaving other places, other worlds, a different reality…”

  “So let me get this straight,” Larry said. “You have to use a computer, the cutting edge of modern technology, to let you reach back and touch the power of the elder days?”

  “Well…when you put it like that, yeah,” Thea said.

  Larry shook his head. “The mystery of the world and all its wonders,” he said. “I will never understand this. What’s going to happen to this Corey guy?”

  “That’s out of our hands,” Zoë said. “Right now, I think you’d better get Beltran, and we should go home—there’s still all kinds of chaos waiting for us there…”

  “Right,” Larry said, snapping out of his mood and taking a step toward Beltran…and the Road shimmered once underneath their feet, and promptly vanished. They stood in the midst of scrubland and red dust, with no indication that anything other than that had ever been there.