Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “I was hoping I would find you here,” Thea said. “You told me once that I could choose to have this Road take me to where I want to go.”

  “I did,” Cheveyo said serenely. “Are you ready to make that choice?”

  “But Cheveyo…how do I make it take me somewhere if I don’t know where I am supposed to be going?”

  “The Road,” Cheveyo said, “cuts across many worlds. Weave the place you need to find as you walk. You know how to do this. You have done it before.”

  “I wove light,” Thea said.

  “And space,” Cheveyo said. “And even time. Grandmother Spider has told me of your achievements.”

  “Time?” Thea murmured.

  “You may not have been ready for that,” Cheveyo said, inclining his head a little. “It drained you. But what you do now, that is not nearly as taxing for you. Everything else stays the same, Catori—the only thing you need to do is to weave a world with a hole shaped like whatever that thing that you are seeking needs to be. Its very absence will lead you to where it is to be found.”

  Thea hesitated, considering this new angle. “There are two things,” she said at length. “They probably aren’t together.”

  “Then you have two choices,” Cheveyo said.

  Thea stared at him, but it became obvious that this was all she was going to get from Cheveyo.

  “I’d better get going, then,” she said, reaching up to close her hand around her feathers.

  Cheveyo inclined his head, stepped back. “When you are done,” he murmured, “perhaps you can come back and tell me of it some day. Now go, and may the Road take you true.”

  And then she was alone. Alone with the choices Cheveyo had laid before her.

  Signe…or Humphrey? Her vulnerable teacher, or the government mage more than capable of taking care of himself?

  But Humphrey held Signe’s lifeline, the branch of her spirit tree. If she found Signe first and she was in any kind of trouble, and then took too long to find Humphrey with the branch, it could all be for nothing. Her first instinct was to find the Woodling, but she quickly realized that it would be far more practical to search out Humphrey May first.

  Thea reached out impulsively and grabbed a handful of the dusty red shadow pooling below a mesa she was passing, weaving it in and out with a narrow ribbon of the intense blue she had picked from the sky. The simple weaving of light had been the first piece of true magic that she had touched—a rope of light and shadow, a small miracle. Now, faced with something far greater than she understood, it gave her courage.

  It also brought to mind the precise shade of Humphrey May’s eyes; and then Thea hunted around for something that would remind her of his hair, of his stature, weaving these hints around a central gap which, under her hands, began to assume a certain kind of pattern, a certain kind of shape. She hesitated for a moment as a scent of something green drifted by her, a glimpse of trees and a mountain and a sky that was somehow very different from the one that arched above the mesas…and then houses, unfamiliar ones, nothing like she had ever seen before. And then she stepped onto something hard, a texture very different from the Barefoot Road, and it was cold and wet, and she realized that she stood on the edge of a platform that dropped down into a narrow concrete canyon, at the bottom of which lay a set of railway tracks, glistening in a drizzly rain.

  A railway station.

  With a sudden and sure instinct, Thea reached back through a hole in the air, and hung on to a thread of light from the world in which the Barefoot Road lay; that piece of sunshine now lay beside her feet, a golden filament, out of place with her new surroundings. It was much cooler here than it had been in that other sunlit world, and Thea shivered where she stood, bare feet on damp concrete, wrapping her arms around herself to preserve what body warmth she could.

  She had stepped off of the Road precisely in front of a sign bearing the name of the place where she had emerged:

  Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndroblllantysiliogogogoch.

  Why on earth would Humphrey show up here? Would anyone here actually speak English, enough of it for Thea to ask if anyone had seen a blue-eyed mage wandering around clutching a piece of green-leaved wood…

  “Thea?”

  It was Humphrey May’s voice, and the rest of him followed his incredulous question as he unfolded himself from a bench beside the apparently abandoned station house, and took a step toward her.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, and there was something wary in his voice, as though he could not believe that Thea’s arrival in this place was pure coincidence. But when he spoke again, there was an edge to his voice that made Thea shiver with far more than cold—something wild, very close to panic. “Thank God you found me,” he said. “I hope that you haven’t trapped yourself in this place, too. How did you get here?”

  “I followed you,” Thea said. “I found you, and I followed you. I wove…” She realized that whatever she said would make no sense, not without a great deal of explanation, and they had no time for that. “How long have you been here?” she asked instead.

  “There’s a clock over there, but it hasn’t moved since I’ve been here,” Humphrey said. “It could have been days, for all I know. The spellspam that took Signe…I found another copy, thought I could follow. But when I first found myself in this place—it was up on the hills, I was flat on my back in a field full of sheep, and I spent some time hunting around because I thought that Signe might be somewhere close…but she wasn’t, nobody was, there seems to be no living thing here except the sheep. I finally came down and found the tracks, and then followed them back to this place.”

  “Llanfair…what?” Thea asked.

  “It’s a place in Wales. With the longest known name in geography, I believe. I’ve been here before.” Humphrey looked around slowly, searching the empty shadows of the station’s platforms. “But this is different. Thea, there is nobody else here.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “Perhaps the next train…”

  “No. There is no next train. There is no train, there will never be a train here. All of this…” Humphrey waved his hand at the station behind him, the empty platform. “All of it, it’s stage setting. There is nobody here except me…us. This is an empty world. It is a place something…somebody…created out of my own fears, and the spell in that e-mail took me there. The last time I came here, back in our own world, it was thronged with people—with tourists, locals…. The idea that such a place could be emptied of people—that it’s possible to be this alone…It terrifies me to see it like this, to know that my secret fears, the things that I am most afraid of, can be made this real for me. This is powerful stuff, this virtual magic you are dabbling in.”

  For a moment he looked troubled again, as though he were trying to put together an equation in his mind, trying to figure out what really connected Thea with this eerie, empty place.

  “Places you never believed possible,” Thea murmured, making her own connections.

  “What was that?” Humphrey said.

  “That was in the spellspam. That was the spell—places you never believed possible. Places you dreamed about, or want to go, or fear. That’s where it takes you.” And what did that mean for poor Signe? Where did she wind up?

  “I tried the phone in the station, tried to call my office, to get someone who could come and get me home…but it just rang and rang and rang,” Humphrey said. “That’s when I knew that something was really wrong. It just isn’t possible that there would be no reply on the other end. Not in the real world. Not in our world. The station might have just been between trains, but this…” His expression suddenly changed, and the eyes that he turned to Thea became pleading. “Thea…do you know where Signe is?”

  “No, but I can find her, like I found you,” Thea said, with far more confidence than she felt.

  “Can you get us out of this place?” Humphrey asked. Thea could feel the weight of his anxiety in his voice.

  She turned aro
und and picked up the thread of sunshine that lay coiled at her feet. “With this,” she said, “yes. Come over here.”

  Humphrey, pausing only to carefully gather up Signe’s branch from a bench behind him, vaulted down onto the rails even before she had finished speaking, and then up onto her side of the platform.

  “Are you ready?” Thea said as he scrambled up.

  He drew a deep, ragged sigh. “Never more ready to leave anyplace in my life,” he said.

  Thea wrapped her fingers more securely around the thread of light, and pulled. The air opened before them; she took Humphrey’s elbow with her free hand and pushed him forward; he staggered for a moment, and then stood, astonished, as the rain-drenched little railway station dissolved around him into the warm dry heat of the high desert. Thea looked down.

  “You’ve got shoes on,” she said.

  He followed her gaze. “Yes,” he agreed. “That would seem to be the case.”

  “Then don’t move,” Thea said, “or we’ll lose it.” She reached up and lifted her feather necklace over her head. “Here,” she said, “this will bring me straight back to you. Stay absolutely still—I’ll try to be back as soon as I can.”

  “Back from where?” Humphrey said, staring at the red mesas around him with unbelieving eyes. “What is this place? How on earth did you get here?”

  “Later,” Thea said. “Signe.”

  His face changed. “Go.”

  It was harder to weave Signe out here—she was the stuff of Faele, and that was slipperier by far than Thea’s own kind. By very virtue of her identity, Signe was a sort of shape-shifter and it was hard to “weave” a Signe-shaped hole when that hole wavered between being a delicately boned woman and an elegant silver birch. Thea thought she had failed completely when the pattern in her hand began to assume a shape that was far too familiar—but not that which she was seeking.

  And then she picked up one last shadow, one last thread of light, one last piece of understanding, and it all fell into place for her.

  The things most feared.

  An exiled Faele-kin.

  The pattern in Thea’s hand was beginning to show her the thing she herself feared—the Alphiri. She had been ignoring it, willing it to go away, because part of her was sure it was her own fears that she was weaving into the pattern, but it all made sense—the Alphiri were of a similar kindred to the Faele, but a higher caste, ones that might have judged, ones that might have had a hand in an exile…ones that might choose to hold on to some condemned soul delivered to them until such time as a ransom could be paid. The Alphiri, after all, did nothing for free.

  And once she realized all this, Thea could suddenly sense Signe’s presence, a weakening light, almost at the end of her endurance…in the glittering tower of the Alphiri capital city.

  I can’t do this!

  It was a moment of pure panic, and she reached for her feather necklace…courage…wisdom…patience… even as Alphiri minds became aware of this intruding, seeking presence and reached out tendrils to capture, to hold.

  She was back at Humphrey’s side in an instant, shivering violently. He reached out instinctively to steady her, and she flung out a restraining hand.

  “Don’t move!” she said. “I know where she is. The Alphiri have her. Signe is in a crystal city somewhere. You will know. It should be easy to find her now that you know where to look.”

  To: student@anyschool.com

  From: Dr. Nowitt Alle

  Subject: You’ve already got a diploma!

  There’s a diploma waiting for YOU—and it’s already on its way! Perfect for framing!

  1.

  THEA HAD NOT BEEN able to take Humphrey May into the Alphiri city itself, so she deposited him, after he gave her a few essential details, in his Bureau office before using her Road tendril to get back to her own room at the Academy.

  Humphrey had pulled every string at his disposal, slashing through protocol and red tape and charging into the Alphiri heartland demanding Signe Lovransdottir’s instant repatriation. The Alphiri had tried to bargain, seeing the possibility of turning the situation to their profit, and their own version of the story had emphasized that Signe was of Woodling blood, and thus Faele, therefore she belonged far more in the nonhuman polities than in the human world. That version of events collapsed when it turned out that it had been a high court of the Alphiri themselves who had exiled Signe from her own home, destroyed her spirit tree, and sent her away with a single branch of it to cling to for survival. Without the tree, Signe could not live very long in any polity, and in fact she had already been very weak when she was found. When Humphrey threatened to take the matter to an emergency session of inter-polity court and invoke possible trade sanctions, the Alphiri handed over Signe without any further spin.

  Humphrey brought Signe back to the shielded grounds of the Academy, where she could safely retreat into her spirit branch and spend time healing and regenerating. Before leaving again for Washington, he sought out Thea.

  “Signe was almost transparent by the time we got her back—but once she’s had a chance to recover a bit, I’m sure that she will very much want to thank you herself for your part in all of this,” Humphrey said.

  “You didn’t tell anyone else…?” Thea said. That was the one thing she had made him promise—that he would tell no one about her own role in the whole affair. “If the Alphiri found out…”

  “No, and I have no intention of doing so,” Humphrey said. “I keep my promises. I don’t know why you are so afraid of the Alphiri—they cannot do anything to harm you, not while we are watching over you, and we are, Thea—but quite aside from any of that, telling anybody would mean telling them about that awful, awful place I got myself trapped in, and the fact that it took a kid to spring a high-powered government mage from there. I still don’t even understand what you did, let alone how you did any of it.”

  “I’m figuring it out as I go,” Thea murmured.

  Humphrey grinned.

  “However,” he said, “I do think the time for concealment is over, Thea. If you think Luana will keep her mouth shut, you’re sorely mistaken. If she cannot find a way to pin any of this directly on you, at the very least she’ll manage to make your inability to fully understand or control your own gift a part of the plot to regain her own standing in the Bureau. Much of this Alphiri mess was Luana’s own doing, and she’ll try very, very hard to focus everyone’s attention elsewhere right now because she herself would collapse under too much scrutiny.”

  “So they’ll still think that I did it all,” Thea said.

  “I seriously doubt that a case could be made for that anymore,” said Humphrey.

  “Anymore?” Thea echoed.

  “You did some pretty strange things back in the principal’s office the first time I saw you work,” Humphrey said gently. “I had no explanation for any of it.”

  Thea simply stared at him.

  Humphrey sighed. “You seem to have been riding to everyone’s rescue from the sidelines, but it’s high time that someone came riding to yours—and now I think it’s time we let a real expert do a little digging.”

  “Who?” Thea asked. And then, hopefully, looking up at him, “You?”

  “I don’t have the credentials,” Humphrey said. “Even if I thought I had, you taught me different when you hauled me out of that appalling trap I had managed to get myself into. Let me discuss this with the principal, and I think I’ll call in your parents, too. I do have someone in mind. There’s only one man I can think of who knows enough on the background of this. Trust me.”

  It was left at that. Shortly after that conversation, Humphrey had made himself scarce again, leaving Thea alone to try to pick up the unraveled threads of her academic responsibilities. But he returned to the Academy before the end of the month, took Thea and, somewhat unexpectedly, Terry aside for a private chat.

  “You know the Nexus has been placed at the Academy because it can be well
concealed here,” Humphrey said. “All of our people here were effectively undercover agents, acting as instructors at the Academy—there were others before Patrick Wittering. You might say this school was built around the Nexus. But there are two Nexus sites. And the second Nexus is notable not for its location…but for its keeper. You’ve heard of him, no doubt—he is one of that rare breed of mage, of which Patrick was also one, who actually understands the working innards of a computer.”

  “Professor de los Reyes,” Terry said faintly.

  Humphrey nodded. “He has been known to take in students for the summer, especially since he’s supposedly retired from Amford. So I figured, we could send him both of our young stars. It will seem, to any prying eyes, to be no more than the professor taking on an interesting summer project with a couple of promising apprentices. Proximity to the other Nexus will give Terry valuable experience. And the professor can concentrate on figuring out the puzzle that is Thea…and perhaps all of you can find the answer to this spellspam problem, while you’re at it. I can’t think of a better man for the job than Sebastian de los Reyes.”

  “How long are we supposed to be there for?” Terry asked.

  “Four weeks, at the outset,” Humphrey said. “If that needs to be adjusted, it can be.”

  But Thea was thinking about what Tess had told her recently—you can forget your summer. She became conscious of a profound sense of growing up too fast—of missing her family, or even just missing a summer vacation.

  “After you’ve both had a chance to catch up with your lives,” Humphrey said gently. “Your summer internship doesn’t start until July.”

  Naturally Magpie, Ben, and Tess were all waiting impatiently to hear what the meeting with Humphrey had been about.

  “Well?” Tess said. “What did he say?”

  “We’re both being sent off to summer school,” Thea said.

  Ben blinked at her. “Why? Your grade average is better than mine.”