Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  “And have you finally chosen to do that?” Cheveyo’s voice asked, as if conjured by Thea’s thoughts.

  “Are you here? Are you real?” she blurted, turning.

  He stood a few paces behind her, a wry smile on his face leaning on his staff and shaking his head. Always questions, Catori…

  “One thing,” he commented serenely, “has not changed.”

  “It is you,” Thea said.

  “Of course it is. It isn’t quite the same place where you left me, but I find I recognize it quite well. You are to be commended. Your powers of observation are acute.”

  “Does that mean that I’ve chosen my world? This world?”

  “You had better ask someone else that,” Cheveyo said, making a gracious gesture to his left.

  Grandmother Spider stepped out of a shadow, smiling.

  “Once upon a time, many years from now, in the web of a dreamcatcher,” she said. “Hello, my granddaughter, well met again. Your world, you will find, is one that touches many. You can live in a world where you can be anything you want—and if ever you are trapped in a world where that is impossible, all you have to do is step up to the border where those two meet—the place where you can stand in both worlds at once, and use all the power granted in the one world in whatever other place it is needed.”

  “So can I do this?” Thea whispered. “Can I go out and fight the Nothing?”

  “You can do,” Cheveyo said, “whatever needs to be done, Catori. Have you chosen the battlefield?”

  “Yes,” Thea said, and in her mind an ocean stirred.

  The same image of the empty sea trembled suddenly on a tiny dreamcatcher cradled in Grandmother Spider’s palm.

  “This path,” Grandmother Spider said gently, “holds pain, my child. It holds achievement, but also betrayal. You are using the nature of the world to fill your own needs. The need is great, but can you live with asking another to pay the price for it?”

  “I think,” Thea whispered, “that this is what I was born to do; this is why I stepped out of my own world and watched it from the sidelines. I am the last weapon in my kind’s war of survival, the only weapon there is, the only one for which there is no defense or counterblow—because nobody knows it exists….”

  “You are beginning to understand the reasons behind your choices,” Grandmother Spider said. “It will be hard, my child. It will be harder than you can believe.”

  The dreamcatcher ocean stirred, and a single small boat that had not been there a moment before suddenly bobbed upon its surface. And then Thea was in it, and the desert had gone—vanished as though it had never existed.

  She found herself sitting in a wooden craft carved with stylized depictions of whales, a single oar laid beside her feet, bobbing and drifting on a pewter-gray ocean with walls of clammy sea-fog surrounding her, almost close enough to touch.

  It was cold, bitingly cold, and she shivered violently. She seemed to be utterly alone here in the place where she was supposed to call on Magpie’s sacrificial whale, and see it come and allow itself to be taken by her harpoon (Oar? What oar? It had changed into something wickedly sharp that glimmered with an edge and a deadly point even in the blunt and suffused half-light of this strange place).

  But first she was supposed to call it.

  Her music came to her very faintly, as though sent by Cheveyo as his gift from the red hills behind his house where she had first heard it—the creation song that Grandmother Spider had said was Thea’s own melody, her own version of the First Song. She began humming it, softly at first, but then louder and louder; strands of it separated and fell away, swallowed by the mist, vanishing into the depths of the ocean, weaving together the web of worlds that Thea needed.

  The world of Cheveyo’s wisdom, her own reality, where her aunt was probably even now marshalling the authorities of Thea’s life against her.

  The world of Magpie’s ancestors and their legends, and the power of an ancient bargain.

  The world where, she suddenly realized, she could not feel or see the presence of the Nothing at all—the world of innocence, of a primeval purity, and one where the Alphiri had probably never been…and where, therefore, the Nothing had had no access.

  Until now. Until Thea Winthrop chose to defile it.

  There was a sharp pain that crept into her song at that realization. She had not, even now, even at this breaking point, been sure that she could do this—that she could call, that the Nothing would come. But now she knew that it would. It was a new world, a pristine world, and anything that had the Alphiri associated with it would not be able to resist conquering a new and untapped market.

  There were tears in Thea’s eyes and in her voice as her fingers wove the melody into a strand of the dull gray fog and then twined both into a short piece of cloud-colored ribbon. She could do this, here, in this world, her world, the world she had called into being. She had been right. This had been the right choice, the right thing to do.

  She had not bargained on the guilt…or, worse, on the solitude, the loneliness.

  In a sense she had been alone all her days, with few true friends, as though her entire life had been training her for this moment. She had been alone so long that she had not thought it would matter to her anymore. But that was before she had come to the Academy…before she had met Magpie, Tess, Terry, and Ben. The ones who had made a world with her. She suddenly missed them all, missed them fiercely, missed them with a sinking feeling of having isolated herself from a source of strength without which she would find it impossible to carry out her plans.

  Somewhere, far away from the mist-shrouded ocean on which she waited, Thea hummed an echo of the same song of power in defiance of the evil that threatened her own world, heard herself call the Nothing to her, challenge its mindless powers of destruction, focus all of it back on herself—the easy target, back in that other world, the child believed to be without magic, dabbling with things she did not understand, reaching for a power too far beyond her reach. An inconsequential insect, a gnat, an annoyance. It would be the work of a moment to sweep her aside, to swallow her whole, to roll over her with a heavy weight and obliterate her as if she had never been.

  And it would have done exactly that, if Thea had had a spark of magic in her home world, where the “real” Thea was.

  Instead, the Nothing bore down on her, focusing its full malevolence onto the lone voice of this thin and reedy magical challenge—and passed through her like she was not there, like she was a wraith. No, like she was a Portal—she was the gate through which it roared in the full knowledge that no magical barrier or power could stand before it, and Thea almost buckled with the sheer weight and force of its darkness. But she stood her ground, and it was past her, and then gone. And there was a part of her that recoiled at its passing. But another part, that which had remained in her world and had stood as bait for the thing that she hunted, watched the Nothing leave that world, and slammed the gate-that-was-herself shut behind it, barring all return.

  For a moment she thought she glimpsed a pair of glowing eyes, fierce with fury—golden eyes, Alphiri eyes—but she could not be sure. It might just have been her own fears taking shape.

  Her world was clean. There was no trace remaining of the Nothing’s dark shadow. Everything she knew and loved was safe.

  But now the Nothing was here, in this world of mist and water that she had brought into existence to trap it. Here with her, and lured under false pretenses—lured with the promise of feeding on magic, on new magic from an untapped world—and Thea suddenly knew what her aunt had meant when the two of them had spoken of the Nothing for the first time on the telephone before Twitterpat’s death…. Was it really only days ago? Like that smoky last gasp of a just-extinguished candle, Zoë had said. Like the weight of night. Like a stench of carrion. There was a smell of carrion in the air around Thea now, a smell of something long-dead, decomposing, bones showing through melting flesh.

  And here, because here her magic was
strong, the Nothing was strong, too. It had an enemy to face.

  Or was it an enemy?

  A hunger that cannot be sated.

  It feeds on magic.

  The Alphiri bring it….

  Thea had been thinking about the Nothing, and these were things she had been told about it, or had overheard recently. But there was suddenly something else there, a memory of long ago—she had been a child, curious as always, and lurking by a half-open door to the living room where her parents had been having a party. Before being whisked back to bed, Thea had heard snatches of conversation that had meant nothing to her then, which had since been buried under all the other information about the Alphiri she had gathered in the process of growing up in her world. Now those snatches of conversation returned to her and began to make sense.

  “The Alphiri don’t have an ounce of a native creativity…. They buy, they tweak or repackage, they sell…. They have nothing at all that we would call magic….”

  Her father’s voice. He had known the answers all the time.

  If the Alphiri could create their own dreams, they would never have needed the rigid framework of the Trade Codex, where everything could be bought. If the Alphiri could create their own dreams, they might begin to build their souls. But they were empty, they were beautiful vessels into which things could be poured and from which those same things, subtly changed, could be poured out—for a price—but they were empty, and that was what they were really after in all of their bargains, the small print in every bargain they made. That was why they contacted other cultures, other nations, other races. They were desperately searching for something—something that was essential, something without which any race, even one as long-lived and proficient at trade as their own, would stagnate, and then begin to die with no hope of rebirth and no legacy. Good bargains were not made for long memories.

  They were looking for their souls. For the spirit of their race.

  And for this, they had made a tool. A monster. Something that bled worlds dry of the things that the Alphiri might want, might find too expensive to buy or impossible to bargain for. And they had been doing this for a long time, in many places, to many living things in their time. What was it that Grandmother Spider had called them? World-eaters.

  The Nothing was out there to gather anything that could further this quest. It was just the bad luck of the human polity that the Alphiri wanted its magic, its dreams—and that humans were fragile enough not to be able to survive having their essence sucked out of them by this lethal instrument of the Alphiri.

  Here in this empty new world Thea had made, there was nothing else for the Nothing to focus on…except herself. Herself and perhaps the whale that was the embodiment of the bargain Magpie’s people had made with the sea and its creatures.

  But there was no whale. The still surface of the ocean was undisturbed, calm, almost oily, smooth like silk, rolling with deep heavy waves, rocking her craft gently where Thea sat in the mist humming the First Song and drawing to her the enemy of her world, of her people.

  And the Nothing gathered itself against her.

  The mist suddenly stirred, and the ocean surface rippled as though something had touched it and passed on. Without halting her calling tune, Thea turned her head a little, watching. But it was not the whale she was waiting for. Not yet.

  When the bow of another small boat emerged from the wall of sea fog, Thea could only smile.

  2.

  In the back, Terry and Tess plied a pair of sturdy oars; Ben sat in the middle, clutching a harpoon that was a twin to her own; in the front, right up in the point of the bow carved in the likeness of a whale, sat Magpie, a vividly colored woven blanket around her shoulders, something bright bound on her forehead like a star, long dangling earrings in her ears, catching even the light that was not there in that muted gray murk and glowing like a spark of sacred fire.

  Like the ribbon of fire that Thea had once stolen from the sun. Where you are and where light is, I will always be with you, Tawaha had promised. And there was light, here, now. Not the vivid hot light of the desert, but it was day—and somewhere, up above the mists, the sun was up. Tawaha. Even here, in this strange place, Tawaha.

  But first, there was that other boat, the friends she had wanted to be at her side.

  “What took you so long?” Thea murmured, breaking off her humming.

  “You’ve stirred a hornet’s nest in your wake,” Terry said. “You try doing something on the quiet that would bring everyone down on you like a ton of bricks if they knew what you were up to. And besides…you left us a pretty thin trail to follow.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Once the uproar began and the marines were called in to get you, we figured out what you’d done,” Tess said. “And we went straight for the computer lab. If you think we took a long time, you try figuring out what ‘Magpie Hunt’ means without any clues.”

  “You had clues,” Thea said. “You had Magpie herself.”

  “She came after we found the computer,” Ben said.

  There were things to be done, but Thea was fascinated despite herself. “I left a trail? On the computer?”

  “Something like that,” Tess said. “You’d better be careful where you leave your base computer, if you do this again.”

  “Or leave someone behind to watch your back,” Ben said reproachfully. “Why did you go alone?”

  “Because…it was something I needed to do, something that was left for me to do, and none of you seemed to want any part of it,” Thea said. “But, Magpie…,” she continued, “this is an empty ocean. Perhaps I didn’t do it the right way. There is only the ocean, and me, and the Nothing.”

  “The whales will come,” Magpie said, smiling.

  “Ancestral magic?” asked Thea, after a moment.

  “Yes. I think so. At last. This is for me to do,” Magpie said, and her voice was as luminous as the star she had bound on her brow.

  “Then call it. Call the whale,” Thea said.

  And Magpie sat up and closed her eyes and lifted her voice in a long keening cry that pierced the mist like a knife and traveled out over the empty ocean.

  Which was suddenly not empty anymore.

  Thea could not suppress a small gasp as a huge gray body rolled in the dark waters beside her, almost close enough to touch, and rocked her tiny boat in the wake of its passing.

  “It’s here,” Ben said, curling his hand tightly around his harpoon.

  The fog had retreated, and the ocean opened up before them. A ways away, far enough for them not to be swamped by it, close enough to see its form and shape and to call it by its spirit name, a whale’s sleek dark shape breached the water and then fell back with a spray of white foam.

  But there were more than one. A second whale breached. A third. A splash off to the side in the fog that might have been yet another.

  Thea’s eyes danced from one huge shape to the next, uncertain. “Which one is it, Magpie?” she asked urgently. “Which one?”

  “It will tell you,” Magpie said. She had broken off her cry as the whales came and now sat watching them, her eyes very bright.

  Beyond the pod of spirit-whales, revealed at last by the retreating mists, a dense dark cloud was forming, heavy with its scent of rot and corruption. Thea gagged at the memory of its presence inside her, but reached for it, hooked a strand of it with the index finger of her right hand, holding her breath. When the foremost whale breached again, Thea reached for it with the other hand, across the distance and empty ocean that separated her from the whale, and somehow touched its warm skin, feeling its life cling to her fingers much like strands of sunset light once did back in the desert. She brought her hands together, laced her fingers together into a lattice, wove the warmth and the darkness together: the whale’s gift of life with the essence of death that was the Nothing.

  “Be One,” she murmured, tangling life and death, watching the Nothing shudder and shred, watching the Whale suddenly twist and
fall back into the water with a gracelessness foreign to its kind.

  A keening cry of outrage, of betrayal, of anger and sorrow and pain, ripped the air. Thea did not know, could not tell, whether it came from the Nothing or the whale. Or perhaps from both.

  The surface of the ocean trembled, and was still.

  “It’s gone,” Ben said, scanning the quiet sea, holding his harpoon at attention. The fog was lifting; somewhere far above them there was a hint of brightening, as though sunshine was trying to fight its way through the shroud of cloud. “They are all gone.”

  “What did you do?” Tess asked.

  “How did you do that?” Terry said in the same breath.

  “It will come back,” Magpie murmured, her eyes closed, her hands together. “It will come to the call. That is its nature.”

  The waters surged beneath them as something huge and angry passed right below both boats, and then surged again as it circled around once more. They glimpsed a ridged back, a dorsal fin breaking the surface, and then it was gone again.

  Magpie began her keening song again, very softly, as if singing a child to sleep.

  “The Whale’s nature,” Ben said, and they had all started thinking of the whale as the Whale, as the opposite to the Nothing, as that in which the Nothing was now confined. “How was it changed by the Nothing? Did you even succeed, Thea?”

  “Oh, yes,” Thea said, feeling suddenly tired, as though a weight had been laid on her shoulders that made her stagger with the load.

  The need is great, but can you live with asking another to pay the price for it?

  Grandmother Spider’s gentle voice came back to Thea, and she all but wept for pity. She had taken the Whale’s gentle nature and sense of noble sacrifice and had made them into tools of destruction—it was the only way, but it was betrayal, it was a twisting of everything that was genuine and true.

  What if the Whale refused the burden she had laid upon it?