Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “Oops,” said Larry, who froze the moment he sensed something strange going on, but not fast enough to prevent it from happening. He looked around at Thea, somewhat sheepishly. “Did you need that to get us home…?”

  Zoë rolled her eyes. “Just get Beltran,” she said. “Thea…?”

  “Under ordinary circumstances, I might have wanted it—but I brought us straight here from the computer and I can yank us straight back—is everyone accounted for?”

  “Yeah,” said Larry, stooping to gather up Beltran into his arms, and then paused, peering at something at Beltran’s feet. “Looks like he was retrieved complete with baggage,” he added.

  “I’ll grab that,” Zoë said, stepping up to pick up a battered leather satchel from the ground. She hefted it experimentally—the bag wasn’t heavy, but it was full of something sharp and angled, its contents sticking points out. “Seems he travels light…”

  Before she had finished speaking, the red mesas faded into the familiar shelves of Professor de los Reyes’s study, which, in their absence, had become filled to capacity by people, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. It was a big room, but it was packed—and the sudden arrival of four more physical bodies did not improve matters at all.

  “Thea!” It was Tess, Terry’s twin—but before she had a chance to confirm Tess’s improbable presence in this room, another all-too-familiar presence cut into her line of vision.

  “There! Look! What did I tell you?” The voice was close to a screech. Thea closed her eyes for a moment.

  “Oh, great,” she muttered. “She’s here.”

  “Luana, that will be enough,” said another voice, firm and in control. Its owner turned out to be a woman in her late forties, ash-blond hair cut into a chic, swingy bob. “Thea, I’m Nancy Dane, Terry’s mother. I’ve heard a lot about you.” She glanced at Larry, in whose arms Beltran appeared to have passed out. “Do you need medical assistance?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” Larry said. “I’m Lar…Lorenzo de los Reyes, this is my brother Beltran. Is my father here?”

  “He and my brother have gone directly to the Alphiri,” Nancy said. “Clear the way there. Let them through. Sandy, Alan, get the paramedics.”

  Larry glanced around. “Zoë…”

  “I’ll come and fill you in later. Go,” she said.

  He glanced down at his brother, took a deep breath, and shouldered his way past the throng and out of the study.

  “What’s going on?” Thea asked in a small voice.

  “We were hoping someone would tell us,” Nancy said. “There’s been a veritable epidemic of those spellspam messages in the last twenty-four hours, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping; the Bureau was advised of what was happening here, but that was before the spellspam explosion.”

  “But that shouldn’t have happened,” Thea said. “If Beltran wasn’t here…and Diego wasn’t doing it…and this computer had been taken off the Terranet…”

  “I think they’re all queued,” said Terry, elbowing his way to the front of the pack. “I don’t think anyone’s in control of it just now. I can’t find the cache, otherwise I’d delete it all—but it’s in there somewhere. Maybe when the professor comes back he’ll be able to deal with it—he knows his systems, and may be able to ferret it out.”

  “I am perfectly capable of doing that,” snapped Luana.

  Nancy glanced at her. “We will wait,” she said, with authority.

  Luana tossed her dreadlocks. “I will file a report,” she said.

  “Luana, we are in a private residence,” Nancy said firmly. “The computer in question may be the Nexus supercomputer and thus directly under our jurisdiction, but we appointed a caretaker for it who is currently not present, and therefore we will wait before we proceed with anything further.”

  “You are letting the boy fiddle with it,” Luana said.

  Terry bristled.

  “My son has been working under Professor de los Reyes’s supervision and has his express permission to access the machine,” said Nancy.

  “Hey, Thea,” said another familiar voice into the silence. “When I suggested sending you here, I had no idea what kind of a hornet’s nest you’d stir up. Do you want to tell us which universe you’ve just popped in from?”

  “Hi, Mr. May,” Thea said, smiling with relief, peering through a gap between Luana and Nancy to where Humphrey May sat perched on the professor’s office chair.

  But then Zoë stirred, and Luana Lilley caught sight of the satchel slung over her shoulder.

  “What have you got there?” Luana said sharply.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” Zoë said, slipping the satchel off her shoulder. “When we got Beltran de los Reyes, this was left alongside him, so we just brought it along.”

  “Let me…,” Luana began, reaching for it, but before she could grab it, Humphrey hoisted himself off his chair, slipped sideways past her, and intercepted the satchel.

  “No, let me,” he insisted. “Let’s not be too eager, Luana—remember what happened the last time you just flung things open without looking…?”

  Luana shot him a poisonous look, but he already had the bag in hand. He laid it on the professor’s desk, undid the worn clasp, and gently shook out its contents on the desk.

  They all stared at the handful of old-fashioned tapes used to store data in early computers, and one small white cube, no more than a hand-span wide. The cube appeared featureless and blank at first, but they could see the ghost of a suggestion of patterns on its faces—the one currently facing the ceiling consisted of two wavy lines stacked one on top of the other—almost too faint to make out.

  “What is it?” Thea asked.

  “Those tapes…I’m not even sure if we can read them anymore,” Humphrey murmured, stroking his chin. “We’ll have to go into the basement and dust off some really old machines…if we’ve still got them.”

  “Beltran had these?” Nancy said, glancing up at Zoë. “The boy was barely born when these tapes were the cutting edge of our technology. If he was born at all. The last computer I remember that used those has to be twenty years old!”

  “Whoever had Beltran had them,” Thea said.

  “What would our friend the Trickster be doing with these?” Zoë said in honest bewilderment.

  “Well, assuming they aren’t corrupted through improper storage or tampering, the answers are on the tapes,” Humphrey said. “There’s something you can make yourself useful on, Luana. Take these straight back to the Bureau and get started on them. The sooner we figure them out, the sooner we’ll be able to solve this. And I have every confidence that you will get those answers ASAP.”

  “But what’s that?” Terry said, poking a finger at the white cube. It rolled over at his touch, like a die; the wavy lines strengthened marginally as Terry’s hand brushed it, and then they were gone as the cube turned over and showed, on a new face, a pair of bold upright lines rather like a Roman numeral II.

  “That?” Humphrey said softly, staring at the cube with a curious expression on his face. “I’ve never seen one before, but I think that is an Elemental cube.”

  “Like this house?” Thea said, glancing around at the walls of Sebastian de los Reyes’s study.

  “Something like that,” Humphrey said.

  “But what does it do?” Tess asked, fascinated.

  “As to that”—Humphrey raised his pale blue eyes from the mysterious object on the desk—“I have absolutely no idea.”

  To: occupant@yourmailbox.com

  From: Ima Spye < spy@iknowall.com >

  Subject: I know what you did last summer…

  But who will I tell…?

  1.

  THE ELEMENTAL HOUSE REMAINED chaotic for some time. Luana and another agent were quickly gone, much to everyone else’s apparent relief, taking the white cube and the mysterious, antiquated computer tapes back to the Bureau for analysis—but that left five Bureau agents still on site—Nancy Dane, Humphrey May, two param
edics, and one dour security type who slouched around muttering orders to a bevy of annoying implike winged creatures with red eyes and tiny barbed whipping tails.

  Isabella was not in evidence. Larry had whisked Beltran away to a safe place somewhere, and then seemed to have vanished himself. Zoë, after reassuring herself that Thea was all right, appeared to have taken herself elsewhere, too. The professor and the twins’ uncle Kevin, the head of the FBM, were still out on their errand to the Alphiri, and apparently incommunicado.

  That left Thea, Terry, and Tess pretty much to their own devices, and the three of them spent a couple of hours catching up in Terry’s room until Thea finally growled something and flipped open her laptop.

  “What are you doing?” Tess asked.

  “I’m calling in reinforcements,” Thea said, typing furiously.

  “Don’t you think there are quite enough people in this house?” Terry asked.

  “Oh, we don’t need any of them,” Thea said, typing a period with a flourish. “Ready?”

  “You’re going to do that thing, aren’t you? Off we go, ’round the mulberry bush,” Tess said.

  “Something like that,” Thea said, and hit ENTER. And then the three of them were suddenly standing on the Barefoot Road again, Cheveyo’s country, the place that Thea had only recently left behind.

  Terry and Tess, in their own world, had visited the American Southwest. They recognized its geography, but for a moment neither of them connected it to a time rather than a place, despite Thea having spoken to them of her summer with the Anasazi. Then things suddenly became weird, fast. The sky above their heads darkened like glass into two increasingly transparent windows, and familiar if rather astonished faces peered through: Magpie and Ben.

  “Where are you?” Magpie asked, and her voice sounded loud, like thunder, coming from straight above them. “You look like you’re in a snow globe…”

  Ben laughed. “Some snow globe.”

  “Want to join us?” Thea said, looking up with complete unconcern, as though she were talking to people hanging out of a second-story window and not out of a hot, washed-out summer sky.

  “Sure,” Magpie said.

  Thea stretched a hand out to her. “Grab my hand,” she said. Magpie appeared puzzled by this request, in much the same way that Thea had once been puzzled by an invitation to enter a spider’s home, and Thea, remembering the occasion, grinned. “Just close your eyes and stick a hand out,” she said.

  Magpie’s eyebrows rose a fraction, but she obeyed; her hand came out of the sky like a giant’s, but somehow from the moment it emerged out of the blue to the moment her fingers touched Thea’s it had shrunk to its normal size and Thea clasped it and simply pulled. In the next moment, Magpie stood beside them on the Road, her hand still clasped in Thea’s.

  “Wild!” she yelped, her eyes flying open.

  “Ben?” Thea said, holding out her other hand.

  “Are you sure about this?” Ben asked carefully. “It looks an awful long way down…”

  “I’m here, silly, it’s perfectly all right,” Magpie said, staring around her. “It’s so beautiful…”

  “All right, then, if you think it’s okay,” Ben said. His hand came snaking down much as Magpie’s had done, and Thea grasped it, and pulled him down.

  “And then we were five again,” Terry said. “Okay, now what? And I think you should have told somebody…”

  “Who was there to tell? They were all too busy chasing their own tails to worry about where ours are. And we will be back before they know we’re gone, I promise you that.”

  “But what can we possibly do in such a short time…?” Ben began, but Magpie looked at him reproachfully.

  “Time is as time does,” she said. “It’s obvious. Here, as much time or as little as you want can go by, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with how much time is passing on Thea’s computer…right?”

  Thea nodded. “I’ve fixed it so that we’ll return less than a full minute after we left,” she said. “They won’t even know we’ve been gone. And it beats sitting around in that room waiting.”

  “The house will know,” Terry said.

  “Yeah but they won’t be asking the house,” Thea retorted. “Besides, I was invited…and I’m inviting you.”

  “Invited by whom?” Ben said, gazing at the apparently empty country around them.

  “By me,” said a voice behind them, and they turned to find Cheveyo looking at them with what might almost have qualified as a smile. “I was not expecting you back so soon, Catori, but my hearth has long been hungry for a good story. You and your friends are welcome.”

  He inclined his head a fraction, indicating a direction, and then turned and walked away.

  “I think he wants us to follow him,” Ben whispered, staring owl-eyed at Cheveyo’s retreating back.

  “Okay, then,” Terry said, squaring his shoulders. “This should be interesting.”

  Magpie fell into step beside Thea. “This is what you were telling me about, isn’t it? The Elder Days?”

  “Uh-huh,” Thea said.

  “Do you think…that Grandmother Spider might show up…?”

  “We left the Elders with their hands full when we brought Corey back to them,” Thea said. Magpie’s face fell a little. “But you said it yourself—time can do strange things out here. You never know.”

  Magpie nodded. Thea reached out and squeezed her hand, and then lengthened her step to catch up with Cheveyo, who was poling himself along at his usual pace and simply assumed that everybody would all end up at the same place together sooner or later.

  “I brought them here because there are things we need to learn from one another,” Thea said quietly as she reached him. “It’s a war council, if you want to call it that. And you said you wanted a story—I figured this would be as good a time as any to tell you one.”

  “As I told you, Catori,” Cheveyo said without breaking the rhythm of his stride, “you are all welcome here.”

  “Even if we ask lots of questions?” Thea asked, unable to hold back.

  Cheveyo bent his head a little, perhaps to hide a smile. “Even then,” he said. “After all, I have made no undertaking to answer any.”

  “But I would be grateful for any advice you might give us, after you’ve heard it all,” Thea said.

  “What you ask for, I will give,” Cheveyo said gravely. “You honor me by coming to me.”

  Thea bent her head to acknowledge his consent and fell back again to join the other four. Ben, who was bringing up the rear, was limping.

  “What happened?” Thea asked.

  “I think I have a stone in my shoe,” he said.

  Thea’s mouth quirked a little. “I had the same stone in my shoe when I first came here,” she said. “The ghost pebble. Don’t tell Cheveyo about it, he doesn’t believe in them.”

  “How far are we going?” Ben asked.

  “Not far.” Thea pointed a little way up the slope, where the path rose abruptly onto a near-vertical mesa face. A switchback path meandered once or twice as the gradient increased and then appeared to end smack against the cliff.

  Ben looked up the mesa. “We’re climbing that?”

  “There’s smoke coming out from under that overhang,” Terry said. “I don’t think we’ll be climbing.”

  “That’s Cheveyo’s house,” Thea said.

  “Wow,” Magpie breathed, her face full of wonder.

  “I can’t see anything,” Ben said, peering in the direction indicated. “Is there a village or something? Where? Are we going to have to, uh, I don’t know…smoke a peace pipe or something?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Magpie snapped impatiently. “He’s a shaman, not Sitting Bull.”

  Ben lapsed into a wounded silence.

  Cheveyo had pulled ahead a little. By the time the rest of them had staggered up the final switchback to the stone house at the foot of the mesa, their host had already lit a fire on the outside hearth and was w
aiting beside it.

  “Be welcome at my hearth,” he said. “Catori tells me that she has summoned her friends for a council. Speak freely here of the things you came to talk about. Catori has asked for such advice as I can offer, so I will remain in your circle so that I may learn what is needful for me to know.”

  It was Thea who first moved, gave Cheveyo a small bow, and stepped up to the fireside to sit cross-legged on one of the skins, facing the fire. Magpie immediately did the same, and then the twins, and finally, warily, as though he was still not entirely certain as to what to expect, Ben.

  After glancing at Terry, Thea delivered a condensed version of the events of the previous few days to Ben and Magpie. Ben listened in silence, sitting with his arms wrapped about his shins and his chin on his knees, frowning as she spoke. Magpie, quicksilver as always, interrupted with questions whenever they occurred to her.

  But it was Ben who asked the question that stopped Thea.

  “The Alphiri? Again?” he said. “Or is it more like, still? I get the feeling that it was only a matter of time before they showed up.”

  “You were awfully skittish about the Alphiri when you first got to the Academy,” Magpie said.

  “That obvious?”

  “Not obvious. But just the way you reacted to stuff.”

  “Yes, when we first got into Signe’s class,” Tess said.

  “But how did your learning how to do cybermagic suddenly get the Alphiri into this?” Ben asked.

  “It wasn’t even the cybermagic. Not in the beginning. That first time, when we all went back to the Hoh forest through the computer—you were all there with me. I had no idea what was going on, any more than you guys did. That was before we figured it all out.”

  “But you said that Corey wanted to hand you over like a trussed Thanksgiving turkey way before that,” Tess said. “You were still here, which was way before the Academy. So why then, already?”

  “Because I was Double Seventh, and the Alphiri had been watching, and something woke out here.” Thea reached out and snagged a thread of orange from the fire, a strand of charcoal gray from a shadow, a thin filament of blue from the pale sky above them—and in her fingers, the ribbons of colored light twined into a braided rope. “There was this. And there was the portal that I had made, back in Grandmother Spider’s world. And Corey must have figured out or overheard what Grandmother Spider said to me—that the reason I didn’t do magic in my own world was not because I couldn’t do any, but because I chose not to do it. And the reason I chose not to do it had something to do with the Alphiri wanting me to do it. They already tried to buy me once, from my parents.”