Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

“Firewalls,” Terry murmured. “They were hiding the truth behind that mirror all the time. We, the students, are a firewall. The ’dims. Who would look for the heart of magic in a place where magic is forbidden by decree…?”

  It appeared as though he had simply petered out, but Tess turned with sudden, frightened speed. “Dammit!” she said. “I knew this would happen!”

  “What?” Ben said, startled, as Tess reached for the collar on her brother’s shirt, scrabbling desperately for something underneath.

  “What can we do to help?” Thea said, stepping closer, helpless, watching Terry’s mouth open and close and realizing that no air was getting through at all.

  “He has the emergency antidote,” Tess said, fishing out a small vial and unstopping it with frantic speed. “Terry, swallow, now!”

  The vial contained no more than a mouthful of liquid. For a ghastly moment they all thought that it had come too late, but Terry suddenly drew a gasping breath and sagged against his sister, gulping down air, his eyes streaming.

  “I’m sorry,” Thea said. “I should have woven us a safety net…I should have thought—”

  “You could have woven us a safe place where nobody would overhear, tomorrow, in the daylight, too,” Magpie said. “And we would have had someone to call if he needed help.”

  “You okay?” Tess said, her arm around her brother’s shoulders.

  He straightened, his breathing still a little ragged. “Fine,” he said, his voice oddly hoarse. “I’m fine. Thanks, Tess. You can let go now. Really. I won’t keel over. What were we talking about…?”

  “Probably not something we should go back to discussing,” Ben murmured.

  “So what did the principal want?” Magpie asked. “If you can talk about it…?”

  “I can, it’s indirect,” Terry said. “You heard him mention this Nexus….”

  “I’d better,” Tess said, not looking entirely convinced that Terry was back to normal. “We don’t have another dose of the antidote handy. We’d better make sure you have more than the usual emergency supply, Terry. Under the circumstances. But about the Nexus…you know what computers are to the users of magic. Storage. Archives. The Nexus is a level above that, a supercomputer. It’s hidden right here, at the school. Twitterpat maintained it. After he was gone, it was the principal himself who worked on it, pending the authorities sending him a replacement for Twitterpat. The principal said he’s rejected at least two candidates since Twitterpat was lost. And it gets harder and harder for him to do it himself because he doesn’t have the training to do it long-term.”

  “They should offer you the job, Terry,” Magpie said with a grin.

  “They…kind of…did,” Terry said faintly.

  Thea, now perched uncomfortably on the other side of the wheelbarrow from Ben, sat up sharply. “They what?”

  “I’m a natural,” Terry said. It was said with no smugness, very matter-of-factly. “I’m already here, so they can stop looking for someone with a good cover story; I would have no teaching obligations to distract me….”

  “Just graduating high school,” Thea said. “Piece of cake.”

  “It is,” Terry said, flashing her a quick grin. “And then there’s the other beneficial side effect.”

  “Such as?” Magpie said.

  “We’re a political family,” Tess said. “Mom works at the Federal Bureau of Magic, and Uncle Kevin runs it, and apparently their stamp of approval is required on any candidate who the principal decides is good enough to consider for this job. And besides, they wouldn’t even have to administer an oath of confidentiality—he can’t talk about this to anybody, not in any meaningful way, not without endangering his life. It turns out that this wretched allergy of his is extremely convenient, didn’t it?”

  “And besides…,” Terry said.

  They all turned to him.

  “It would seem that Twitterpat had me in mind all along,” Terry said. “Apparently he spoke to the principal about me. About this.”

  “But what happens during summer holidays? When you graduate? When you leave here? If you go to college…if you get a job somewhere?” Ben said.

  “Logistics,” Terry said. “Besides, I’ll already have a job.”

  “But Terry…” Thea hadn’t taken her eyes off Terry’s face. “How useful are you if someone always has to be there as backup, just in case you forget yourself and start saying some word that has a magical underlay? What would happen if you were alone and you did that?”

  “I told you it was dangerous,” Tess said. “I’m scared.”

  “Are you supposed to be with him whenever he’s working on this Nexus thing?” Thea asked. “Because then it’s both of you who are bound by it. Is it that essential, that it needs to swallow two lives?”

  “Has he shown you the actual Nexus?” Ben asked.

  “No,” Terry said. “And you’re right, Thea. It would mean supervisory duty for someone, constantly, all the time. It’ll always be a sword hanging over my head.”

  “Terry, do you actually want to do this?” Thea asked softly.

  Terry shrugged. “Yes, of course I do,” he said. “And at the same time…it all sounds great, but I sure wish I had someone like Twitterpat to talk this over with. I really wish he were here right now….”

  2.

  THE AIR IN THE shed stirred as though a breath of wind had found its way through a crack and gusted inside. Tess instinctively turned around to close the shed door—and found that it was already closed.

  Outside, the whisper of the rain on the roof abruptly ceased, and another sound came in its wake—a sort of distant creak, like a tree bending in high wind.

  A sense of wrongness settled into the small dark shed, heavy and clammy, hard to breathe through. Ben reacted first, standing up with such speed and force that he almost sent Thea headfirst into the dirt floor. Heedless of obstructions, he launched himself at Terry.

  “Take it back! Take it back right now! Unwish it!”

  “What?” Tess said, slowly, too slowly, as though she were talking through molasses.

  “The e-mail! That e-mail you got this evening, in the library, Terry! You laughed at it, but it was spellspam! It gave you three wishes, and you just used one—and Twitterpat’s been dead for months…”

  “I wish he’d go away,” Terry said, his eyes wide. “I wish…”

  “Shut up! Not another word!” Ben said sharply, lifting his head to listen.

  The rain had returned, the solidity of the air dissipated slowly, almost reluctantly. Thea drew in a ragged breath.

  “You have one more wish,” Ben said. “You’d better use it. Otherwise you’ll be looking over your shoulder constantly, until it slips out at the worst possible moment, giving you precisely the thing you don’t want. They stole this one from the Faele; it isn’t a human trick.”

  “But a human wrought it into a spell,” Thea said slowly.

  “A spell,” Magpie said. “How come you didn’t…you know…choke on it again…?”

  “It was just ‘I wish,’” Ben said. “The magic was in intent, not the words. He got off lucky that time.”

  “What if he just…said…that he wanted everything to be okay?” Magpie said hopefully.

  Ben shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It has to be specific, very specific. Look what you just said—you wanted ‘someone like Twitterpat,’ and Twitterpat himself has been dead, buried, and decomposing these last few months—who knows what would have walked in here just now if you hadn’t, uh, wussshed it away?”

  “What if I asked for…for the ability to…for the allergy to go away?” Terry said.

  “Knowing the Faele, it would probably let you talk only about the things you had been unable to utter beforehand and nothing else—and you’ve already used two of your wishes. Don’t waste the third on something you wouldn’t be able to undo. But use it, use it on something, because we humans are wishing machines, and the Faele knew that about us long before our paths officially
crossed in the history books. We can’t help wishing, and it gets us into trouble without even trying.”

  “I wish…,” Terry began abruptly, and nodded as Ben mouthed at him, Specific! Be specific! “I wish we all get back to our beds safely tonight without anyone seeing us and that nobody other than the five of us ever knows that we were here tonight.”

  “Will that do?” Magpie said, weighing each word to see if it was specific enough.

  “It should be pretty safe,” said Ben slowly, “although it is usually safer not to wish for anything that involves other people. You never know how things play out, and the other people in question may not be very pleased at the results.”

  “But what could possibly go wrong with…,” Tess began.

  “If you saw it, too, Ben,” Thea said, interrupting with sudden concern, “that e-mail, I mean—aren’t you also at risk? What are your three wishes? Shouldn’t you do the same thing—get them out of the way?”

  “I will,” Ben said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Be careful with those wishes,” Thea said.

  Ben nodded mutely, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

  “Pity you didn’t just…er…ask for this Nexus thing to just take care of itself, Terry,” Magpie said.

  “No!” said Terry, Thea, and Ben in unison.

  Magpie blinked. “It was just an idea.”

  “That’s what I mean about humans being W-I-S-H generators,” Ben said, spelling the word out. “It’s a very bad idea. Think about what the Faele could do with that wish.”

  “It could make the thing come alive and turn to some agenda of its own,” Tess said.

  “I didn’t say I liked the idea,” Magpie said, raising her hands in protest. “I was just saying—”

  “And it’s a good thing you didn’t get that particular spellspam,” Ben said, with a crooked little grin.

  Magpie bristled at that. “And what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “Nothing! Nothing!” Ben ducked his head in self-defense. “It’s just that…you’re the perfect mark for the Faele. You’d try to bend it all to the good, and be sweeping, and you’d wind up creating a bigger mess than you could possibly imagine.”

  “Well, I look forward to seeing what you pick, Mister Broomstick,” Magpie said, still in a huff.

  Ben winced. The nickname that Mr. Siffer had hung on him had stuck, and he was having a hard time living with it. “How I wish everyone could forget that stupid na—”

  “Ben!” everybody except Magpie squawked.

  “Forget what?” Magpie said, after a beat.

  Ben looked around at the others, and shook his head. “I knew that would happen. Look, I need to go away right now and deal with this thing, before I waste the last two wishes.”

  “Ben, wait…,” Thea began, but he had already pulled up the hood of his parka and slipped out of the shed into the drizzle.

  “We’d better all get back,” Tess said, glancing at her watch.

  “Before we go…,” Thea said hurriedly, as everyone got to their feet, “Terry…where did you leave it? With the principal?”

  “I’m supposed to go back and talk to him—in a couple of days, when the furor with LaTasha dies down.”

  “Is there any way I can help?” Thea asked. “I know I can’t do anything that’s technical, but maybe I can spell Tess.”

  “Under the circumstances,” Tess said, “that’s hardly the word to use. We really should all just go back to bed.”

  “I’m for that,” Terry said. “We can figure out what to do later.”

  “What if we can’t find a place to talk?” Magpie said.

  “There’s always e-mail,” Terry said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Tess, hunching her shoulders. “After what happened with LaTasha, they might put the lid on that.”

  “They can filter and firewall and screen—but even if they shut down the library computer bank, too many of us have our own laptops,” Terry said.

  “But if they shut down the server…”

  “That’s the trouble—they can’t, for long—not the main trunk of it. Too much is computer-run these days. Especially here, where—” Terry stopped abruptly, biting off the sentence, apparently tasting something sour in his mouth. “I hate this,” he said. “Let’s just say that they won’t be able to keep the lid on e-mail forever…but Thea, we have to figure out what else is going on here.”

  “You mean the whole spellspam thing,” Magpie said.

  “But I have no idea…,” Thea said, her voice ending on a squeak of helpless indignation.

  “We’d all better get an idea, and fast,” Tess said.

  “You think we might get more from the Free Gift menu?” Magpie said. “That could actually be rather fun. If anything so far has been harmless, that one has. People just get weird stuff…”

  “I phoned my parents earlier and asked just casually about that gifts thing,” Tess said. “It wouldn’t be so funny, Magpie, if you had been on the receiving end of a pair of Emperor penguins, or a truckful of an obscure out-of-print novel from the 1930s, or a metric ton of paper clips—or a snowplow delivered to your Florida condo, all of which apparently happened to people my family knows. Terry’s right, it’s a cyber-epidemic—and you can’t return something that has no return address on it. So you’re stuck with the stuff.” She tried very hard to suppress a giggle, but failed, and she lowered her head to hide her face, shaking her hair down over her mirth. “Although,” she said, “I have to admit, I would rather have liked being a fly on the wall when Grandma MacAllister received her penguins,” she said.

  They spilled carefully out into the drizzle, letting just enough light from their flashlights play between their fingers to light a safe path back. Terry quickly melted away into the rainy night and the three girls pulled up their hoods and raced back to the residence hall across the wet grass and under dripping trees.

  They made it to the back door of the hall and stood for a moment on the concrete porch, shaking the rain off their parkas, and then Thea nudged open the door to the laundry room.

  “Come on,” she began, “quick, before anyone…”

  They were all inside before they fully realized that one of the washing machines had a red pilot light on, and emitted a businesslike hum and a faint scent of suds and steam. The room was dark, but even as the three froze, a light switch was thrown and the room was awash in bright, neon-white light.

  Tess moaned softly.

  But the woman who had come into the laundry room, one of the junior housemistresses, was apparently oblivious of their unsanctioned presence. She crossed over to another machine, opened the lid, and started hauling laundry out without showing the least sign of awareness of the wet and shivering girls who stood not three feet from her.

  Magpie lifted a hand and waved it experimentally. The woman hauling laundry didn’t blink.

  “Terry said…that nobody was to see us,” whispered Magpie, in the same instant as Tess opened her mouth.

  Thea nodded. “I remember this,” she said softly. “I remember this, when I was little, when they were reading me fairy tales from before the contact with the Faele, from the times when we thought it was all made up. There was a cantrip—Before me day, behind me night so I may pass out of sight… It’s an invisibility spell. Come on, before it quits.”

  “But magic isn’t supposed to work here,” Magpie said helplessly.

  “Nobody ever actually said that,” Thea said slowly as they made their way up the stairs, squelching ever so softly with each step and leaving wet footprints on the carpet. “Not in so many words. All that was ever claimed was that magic was not allowed at the Academy.”

  “They might not see us,” Magpie said practically, “but someone will be stepping on soggy carpet tomorrow.”

  Tess rolled her eyes. “Good night,” she said.

  “We’d better get out of sight,” muttered Thea. “Who knows how long this invisibility thing will last?”

 
“Until we get into bed, if I remember Terry’s precise wording right,” Magpie said. “Bed is actually starting to sound awfully good, spell or no spell. I don’t think I can feel my feet.”

  Magpie had always been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, discarding both memory and dream, past and future, when she crawled into her bed at night. She was asleep in moments. It was Thea who lay awake for a long time, staring up at the shadowed ceiling.

  After everything that had happened, one image simply wouldn’t leave Thea’s mind; her first glimpse of the Nexus icon on Twitterpat’s computer screen, and the thing that it had reminded her of.

  A dreamcatcher.

  Grandmother Spider.

  One of Grandmother Spider’s silvery, gleaming dreamcatchers spun in Thea’s mind’s eye, hypnotic, catching the light, weaving it all into a softness that was night and rain and love and accomplishment.

  Grandmother Spider… the words formed in Thea’s mind, unlooked for, unexpected, but heartfelt. You know how to live in a world that changes around you faster than you can see. I wish you’d come and remind me….

  To: Everyone@yourISP.com

  From: Wassat Yusay < vocabu@larry.com >

  Subject: There are words you never knew you knew…

  Flabbergast your friends! Make your enemies envious! Discombobulate anybody! Speak on any subject with panache and erudition!

  1.

  OPEN THE WINDOW.

  The voice was soft and familiar, and hard to pin down—it seemed to come from inside Thea’s own head, from the room behind her in which Magpie was peacefully sleeping, and from out in the rainy night somewhere. But Thea knew it, and trusted it, and obeyed it without question.

  The window latch resisted for a moment, but even as it gave, and the wings of the window opened into the room, Thea knew that she was no longer in quite the same space as the sleeping presence of her roommate. There was an odd moment where what she saw—a rainy night in the Pacific Northwest—clashed violently with the scent that came drifting in through the open window, a scent of warm, dry air and desert sage and red dust. She could see that other world dimly through a fading curtain of rain. Then the rain and the wet firs were scent and memory, and then she was looking straight into the comfortable room that she had once been invited to enter by a tiny spider in the palm of her hand.