Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  She left him once again, took off through a gap in the crowds into the center with long gliding motions, then took off from the back inside edge of one skate and landed smoothly on the back outside edge of the opposite foot, turning into a smooth sweep and skating back to Ben.

  “That was called a salchow,” Kristin said. “Don’t worry, you’re not required to do it on your first skate. I’d hold your hand but that would only wreck your balance. Let go of the wretched fence now.”

  “Quit bullying me,” Ben snarled, but tried to obey. He took a few tottering steps, staggered, and grabbed for the fence again.

  “Glide. Don’t walk. Try it again.”

  By this time something deeply stubborn had woken in Ben, and he was determined that whatever happened, he would not give her the pleasure of watching him fall. He set his teeth, locked his knees, and let go of the fence again.

  It took the better part of an hour for him to not only start to get the hang of things but, despite himself, to enjoy it.

  “Hey,” he called out triumphantly as he rounded a corner of the rink without slamming into the fence to make himself stop, “look—I can finally turn.”

  But Kristin was looking somewhere else, outside the rink. She came to a sudden stop, digging into the already deeply scored ice and spraying ice chips over Ben. He tried to turn his head, lost his precarious balance, and slammed into the fence again, jamming his knee painfully into the hard plastic. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing fast, trying to control the sudden lancing pain in his leg, and then turned savagely on Kristin.

  “What gives? I thought we—”

  “Look!” she said, pointing. “There!”

  He followed the line of her finger to the fifty-foot Christmas tree towering against the backdrop of the nine great arched windows in the back of the library that overlooked Bryant Park. It was true that the tree was spectacular, glowing with thousands of white lights enhanced with a layer of spell-spoken glow. But Kristin wasn’t looking at the tree. It took Ben a few seconds to notice what had really caught her eye.

  A single pigeon had landed softly on top of a street lamp not too far from the edge of the rink. To Ben the pigeon looked no different from any of the rest. But he noticed that Nikola Tesla’s ghost had moved to that particular lamppost, and the expression on his face was a mix of disbelief and fierce joy.

  “Is it one of ours?” Ben whispered.

  “We’d better get out of here,” Kristin said, skating jerkily past Ben, suddenly graceless again. “I have to get over there.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “What—” Kristin began, and then covered her mouth with her hands in shock as a flock of large black birds came down all around the pigeon on the lamppost, surrounding it. For a moment it seemed hopelessly outnumbered, but Tesla made a sudden sharp gesture with his hand, almost as though casting a spell of some kind, and the pigeon burst up and out, melting into the winter sky. And then there was no flock anymore, only one large raven. Then the raven, too, was gone, and in its place, standing practically nose-to-nose with Tesla but apparently unaware of it, was a man wearing a cowboy hat and tight jeans tucked into dusty snakeskin boots. He was looking up to the now unoccupied lamppost, frowning—and then he turned and looked straight at Ben and Kristin, gave them a wide smile as he tipped his hat in their direction, and turned away, vanishing almost as quickly as the pigeon.

  “I’ve heard Thea describe him a dozen times,” Ben said. “The raven. The hat. Those boots. That’s Corey. Coyote. The Trickster. If he’s here, the Alphiri are closing in.”

  “Come on,” Kristin said, “we’d better get to Tesla. If there was one, the others might be somewhere near. And we don’t want to make the same mistake again.”

  “I thought you wanted to shake our stalker,” Ben said.

  “I did, for a while, at least. But then I got caught up in the skating, and so did you, and I probably shouldn’t have pointed. I shouldn’t have identified it. This was my fault, and it was too close.”

  “We couldn’t have gotten to it quickly anyway, not with these things on,” Ben said, glancing down at his skates. “But you’re right, let’s take the skates back and get our shoes.”

  Kristin had already stepped off the ice and was digging through her pockets for the shoe coupons.

  Ben staggered to a bench and removed his skates, wriggling his toes in their woolen winter socks as Kristin waited impatiently for the attendant to locate their footwear.

  The rink was slowly emptying now. It wasn’t very late, but it was Christmas Eve and people were starting to wander off to warm homes. Ben watched people scurrying past, scanning the throng for any signs of the Alphiri or of Corey in his distinctive hat, but they all seemed to have melted away now that a certain objective had been achieved.

  “Are they holed up somewhere and watching us?” Ben muttered, raking the shadows for lurking spies.

  “We are running out of time,” said Tesla’s ghost, materializing beside him. “They have stopped hunting the pigeons. They are hunting us hunting the pigeons. This is not a good thing.”

  “Was that really one of yours?” Ben said curiously. “Which one? I couldn’t see any difference. How can you tell?”

  “You would know a part of yourself, if you were to lose it,” Tesla said. “They have changed, which is not something that should surprise me—they have survived out here in the wild with their kind for a very long time. They have certainly lost the edge of being completely my own and have become almost…blurred, but that particular bird carries the Water Element.”

  Kristin, who had returned with the shoes, dropped Ben’s boots by his feet.

  “I’m sorry I pointed,” she said to Tesla. “I might as well have hung a bell on him.”

  “Next time you will know better,” Tesla said, a little frostily.

  “It’s late,” Ben said, looking around. “Won’t they go and sleep? Should we come back in the morning? We’ve been at this for a couple of days now; one more day won’t make any—”

  “This is the first time we have actually seen one,” Tesla said.

  Kristin was shaking her head. “No. Tonight. The real, mortal pigeons might sleep, but the ones we are looking for might come to us faster without being distracted by the flock.”

  “But we’re losing the crowd,” Ben pointed out. “We can’t hide in masses of people anymore.”

  “Neither can the Alphiri,” Kristin said. “We’ll see them coming.”

  Ben might have pointed out that there might be very little they could do if Corey the Trickster decided to turn into a flock of crows again, but logic seemed to be useless under the circumstances. He sighed.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I want something hot to drink first.”

  Kristin glanced back across the rink. “There’s the café, right there. Or we could go grab a cup of hot chocolate; I saw a kiosk back at the other end.”

  Ben glanced back at Tesla, a look at once painfully honest, guilty, and apologetic.

  “With all due respect, sir,” he said, “we have been at this for days now. I’d really like to step outside of it for a moment and just go somewhere where I don’t need to keep an eye out for pigeons. Only for a little while. I need a break.”

  Tesla furrowed his brows in silent disapproval.

  Unexpectedly, Kristin laughed. “Okay, then. Lead on. What did you have in mind?”

  The closest exit let them out near the Avenue of the Americas and Fortieth Street intersection. Tesla paused on the corner to stare, for the fourth time since they had arrived in New York, at the signpost on the corner, which held a sign bearing his own name: NIKOLA TESLA CORNER. The first time he had appeared astonished by the concept, and had merely raised his eyebrows without comment. Now, finally, it seemed that the idea had caught up with him. He stroked his mustache with one hand and tilted his head at the sign.

  “They called me the New Wizard of the West when I came to this country,” Tesla mused, apparentl
y talking to himself. “And then…they all forgot about me, except to occasionally trot me out at special occasions. This…well, I am pleased, of course—pleased and flattered. Why would I not be? This was my city for so long, my park…” He turned away, began to drift east on Fortieth Street toward Fifth Avenue. “This was my street, even. There—my offices—the offices of the Nikola Tesla Company.” He flung out an arm to point to a building on the opposite side of the road, straight into the path of a man talking animatedly into his cell phone. The man ploughed right through Tesla’s outstretched arm without breaking stride.

  A sudden clap of a pigeon’s wings broke Tesla’s train of thought and he looked up, following the flight of a pair of birds who cleared the wrought iron fence and vanished somewhere into the park.

  Ben turned to look at Tesla. “Were those…?”

  “No,” Kristin said. “Just pigeons. Nothing extraordinary about them.”

  “See?” Ben said, shaking his head as they reached the library building and the noise and lights of Fifth Avenue rose to meet them. “We can’t get away from them, back there. We watch every bird like it’s one of Tesla’s vanished Elemental angels. I want to turn my back on things feathered, just for a little while. I swear, I’m going to start counting pigeons in my sleep.”

  They found a coffee shop a little way down Fifth Avenue, just across from Lord & Taylor, a tiny hip-looking place called The New York Minute, tucked incongruously in between one of those ubiquitous NYC T-shirt and souvenir shops liberally scattered around the tourist-frequented parts of Manhattan and a shoe store in whose ostentatiously bespelled display window its wares—tiger-striped high-heeled boots and shiny pink vinyl ankle bootees fringed with fake baby-pink ostrich feathers—strutted up and down ramps and platforms, showing themselves off for the customers. Nikola Tesla sniffed with disapproval as he happened to catch sight of them.

  “Women’s fashions were always ridiculous,” he opined. “Only the form of the absurdity has changed since my day, not the substance of it.”

  “There goes a man who spent a fortune on silk handkerchiefs,” Ben muttered to Kristin as they pushed into the warm coffee shop, unwrapping scarves and unzipping coats. Tesla, wearing an expression of fastidious distaste, followed them, and stood hovering beside the table they commandeered as two other patrons got up to leave. Kristin caught the eye of a barista, who glanced over at the newly empty table and drew a tiny circle in the air with his forefinger, writing in the number 3 in the middle. The detritus left behind on the table by the newly departed customers—coffee cups and plates piled with dirty cutlery and crumpled paper napkins—gathered itself up into a precariously teetering pile and took itself off to the side counter where it all sorted itself out neatly into different bins. A damp rag appeared above the empty table and gave it a cursory wipe, leaving it dry and bare of stray crumbs but certainly a long way below Tesla’s own high standards of hygiene.

  “Back in my day,” Tesla said, giving every impression that he wanted to run a white-gloved finger over surfaces and was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would not pass the test, “it was the Palm Room at the Waldorf-Astoria. They never could polish their silver properly, though—it got so that they’d bring me eighteen linen napkins without my asking for them so I could polish the silverware. I do not think they even have linen napkins in this establishment.”

  “Nor silverware,” Ben said. “Hey, you may not care, but it’s cold and dark out there and I’m hungry.”

  “I always,” said Tesla in a tone of mild reproof, “finish what I start before taking a break from the task at hand.”

  “We’ll get them,” Kristin murmured. She’d glanced at the display case as they had walked in and now she addressed the hovering rag that had cleared their table. “Two ham sandwiches, and a chocolate muffin. And two coffees. Cream.” The rag vanished, and a few moments later their order materialized on the table before them. Kristin pulled a plate with a sandwich toward her. “We’ll get them tonight,” she said to Tesla.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just go back to the room and wait for them to come to us?” Ben said plaintively. Humphrey May had pulled a few strings, and they had been set up in the now rather tiny room that had once been Plaza Suite 3327 at the New Yorker Hotel, the very same room that had been Tesla’s in the last months of his life. They had spent their first day in New York simply sitting in the room, waiting to see if any preternatural birds came back to a home roost—but although they had observed pigeons at the window, none of them were the ones that they were seeking. So they had left the hotel, and for the previous two days they had been combing Tesla’s old haunts in the city, coming back again and again to Bryant Park behind the Central Library, the place where he had most often gone, where even the ghosts of pigeons long gone would remember him. And that evening had been the first time they had actually caught a glimpse of the possibility that what they sought was real, was there, waiting for them.

  “The birds didn’t come to the hotel before,” Kristin said.

  “But now they, uh, know,” Ben said. “One of them came to him in the park. They might, well…be able to follow him, now.”

  “We saw that one in the park,” Kristin said obstinately. “We’ll go back there first.”

  They nursed their drinks in silence; Kristin had polished off her sandwich, finding herself surprisingly hungry, and had started on the huge muffin before Ben was done. But Tesla was getting visibly more agitated, and finally Ben admitted defeat and shrugged back into his coat.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s take another whack at it.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Tesla said abruptly as they stepped outside again and gasped at the first cutting breath of cold air.

  “Oh, right. Three times around the block,” Ben said, sighing. One of Tesla’s many idiosyncrasies, an obsession with the number three, somehow made it imperative for him to circle a given city block three times before he could actually go to his destination. The first couple of times Ben and Kristin had followed him, but they had given up on that and now waited for Tesla to join them at any given destination.

  They hesitated on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, looking around.

  “Do you see any Alphiri?” Kristin whispered.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any,” Ben said. “Why don’t we split up, and, um, meet in the park? If there’s only one of them watching, they can follow only one of us.” He hesitated. Something chivalrous in him stirred at the idea of letting Kristin trudge along by herself, but if they were being watched, and by only one entity, they might have just bought themselves a little time. “Watch your back,” he said at length. “And don’t do anything stupid. See you there.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Kristin retorted, and flounced away in the direction of the Central Library building, whose iconic lions she could glimpse from where she stood.

  Ben had the longer way to go—all Kristin had to do was walk down Fifth Avenue for a couple of short blocks, turn left onto Forty-second Street, and enter Bryant Park directly behind the library. She had every intention of doing that, but her Finder knack and her native impulsiveness turned on her. One of the first things she saw as she took her first couple of steps into the park was a pigeon sitting serenely on one of the statues. Not just any pigeon. A bird surrounded by a pale aura, a bird that turned its head to look directly at her.

  Her breath caught for a moment, and then she expelled it carefully in a long slow sigh so as not to alarm the pigeon. She glanced around, but Ben was out of sight, and Tesla’s ghost must still have been doing his laps around the block. She walked up to the statue where the bird rested, and slowly, very carefully, put out one gloved hand. The pigeon ducked a little, but allowed her to touch its head very lightly; it started to emit a low, guttural cooing, almost like purring.

  Kristin reached out with the other hand, and cupped both around the pigeon. It did not object.

  “Oh,” she whispered, look
ing down at what she now held cradled between her palms. “Oh, my God. Oh…”

  She was absorbed in her find; completely oblivious of her surroundings.

  That was a mistake.

  The hand that snaked around her from behind startled her into a recoil; she tightened her fingers reflexively around her prize, and the pigeon emitted a faint squawk of protest. But before she had a chance to do much more, another hand had followed the first, and somehow the pigeon was no longer in her grasp at all.

  It was being held a step away from her by the smiling man in cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat who had turned into a flock of crows only a couple of hours before: Corey the Trickster, Coyote, agent of the Alphiri.

  “Thank you,” Corey said, raising the now-struggling bird so that he effectively tipped his hat at Kristin with its head. “Much obliged. We were looking for this pretty thing.”

  “Give it back,” Kristin said, outraged. “It isn’t yours!”

  Corey glanced down. “Possession has always been counted as nine tenths of the law, as I recall,” he said.

  “Finders keepers, if you insist on trotting out platitudes,” Kristin retorted.

  “Why, yes,” Corey said agreeably. “You found it, and I’m keeping it. As I said, thanks.”

  “Give it back!” she said, launching herself at him.

  But he was already gone. Someone was bending over her, asking if someone had attacked her; as she was being helped to her feet, she saw Corey place the pigeon into an ornate gilded cage held by a long-fingered Alphiri hand. The Trickster turned and tipped his hat to her, and then he and the Alphiri holding the cage melted away into the night.

  “Wait,” she sobbed, “wait…”

  She heard, as if from a great distance, Ben calling her name repeatedly; heard a faint murmur of voices around her, a conversation that apparently established that she was all right and that no further assistance was required from outside sources; and then she shook her head and looked around, staring at Ben through tear-filled eyes.