Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  She looked back to the stairs. Zoë was still there, but this time her face was turned back, toward the head of the stairs. There was still a Larry-like shape beside her, but that shredded even as Thea looked, proving to be a deft illusion.

  “How did you know I was here?” Thea blurted.

  “How come you’re up?” Larry asked, ignoring her question. “Any strange serenades in the night?”

  “No, I just woke up and Aunt Zoë wasn’t there, and…”

  “And you thought you’d go look?”

  “I wasn’t going to go far,” Thea said rebelliously.

  “Yes, well, you didn’t need to,” Larry said.

  “Is everything okay? Thea? What are you doing here?” said Zoë.

  “Fine,” said Thea abruptly, feeling a little mutinous at having been snagged like a novice and not as though she had spent a lifetime practicing the art of eavesdropping. “I woke up and you weren’t there, and I thought…”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I couldn’t sleep,” Zoë said apologetically, sitting down on the stairs again in a slow graceful sideways motion. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to see if…everything was all right out here, and then I got talking to Larry…”

  “Well, we aren’t all likely to go meekly to our beds,” Larry said. “What do you say I go and find us something to drink? It’s too hot for cocoa, but how about pink lemonade?”

  Zoë made a face. “I’d say it smelled like cheating,” she said. “If you’re going to conjure up lemonade, at least let it stay the color it was supposed to be.”

  “Done,” Larry said, helping Thea up and shepherding them both in the direction of the stairs.

  The lemonade, chilled to just the right temperature, was waiting for them on a tray in the sitting room by the time they came down the stairs, along with three glasses.

  “I could get used to this,” Thea said, accepting a glass that Larry poured for her. “Just think of something, and it’s there…”

  “Elemental houses,” Larry said, chuckling. “I did promise you an account. This house wasn’t so much built as…grown. It might look like brick and mortar and iron and tile and wood and glass—but all of it is Elemental, made of some aspect of Earth, Air, Water, or Fire. And Spirit, the Element that unites them all.”

  “You mean it’s an illusion?” Thea said, looking around. “It feels very solid…”

  “Nothing that Tesla did was illusion, although it might all have looked that way,” Larry murmured.

  “Tesla?”

  “There are many kinds of Elemental mages,” Larry said. “The Spirit dimension is always there, because that is the power behind this—but you can have One-Element mages, Two-Element mages, Three-Element mages…and it gets rarer and rarer as you go up that list. There was only one Four-Element mage in human history, and that was Nikola Tesla.”

  “We studied him,” Thea said, sitting up. “At school—not the Academy, back when I was doing Ars Magica, in my other school—we had an entire paper we had to do on him.”

  “He was a phenomenon, indeed,” Larry said. “Stronger in some Elements than others, to be sure—Water was not his favorite, and he understood Air but could be downright shaky on it sometimes—nonetheless, he had a degree of mastery over all the Elements, which none before or after him could command. My great-grandfather and grandfather knew him personally; my great-great-grandpa met him not long after he arrived up on our shores from the wilds of Eastern Europe.”

  “With no more than four cents in his pocket,” Thea said, the long-ago school essay coming back to her. “I remember asking Dad to tell me what four cents would have bought, even then, and he couldn’t even come up with a cup of coffee.”

  “Yes, but he had a talent that shone from him like a light,” Larry said. “They stayed in touch, Nikola Tesla and my family, throughout the ups and downs of their lives. When Tesla’s laboratory burned down, years later, it was my revered ancestor who helped tide Tesla over when nobody else would. And then, at his peak, when Tesla was getting ready to tie it all together and change our world, my grandfather was born, and they all thought he might be a nascent Elemental…”

  “Was he?” Thea asked, sipping her lemonade.

  “In point of fact, he might have been—but nothing like Tesla, maybe a One-Element mage, if that. He had a great facility with water. But it was Tesla who tested him, and Tesla who watched him grow and waited with his parents for something special to show.”

  Thea nodded in complete understanding. “I know how it feels,” she said.

  “He never quite made it to where they wanted him to be,” Larry said. “And so things went on. My great-grandpa wasn’t rich, but when the occasional disaster struck Tesla—and he was a disaster magnet, it would seem that a Four-Element mage is not at all suited to a practical existence in our world—it was he who handed out “loans,” which both of them knew would never be repaid. But those were generally good years for all of them, anyway—Tesla and my family. Tesla was eighty when my father was born, but he gave him a birth-gift—a seed of a house, one of the few true Elementals, to be kept against his coming of age.”

  “This one…?” Thea said, open-mouthed. “This house was…made by Tesla himself?”

  Larry nodded. “It was kept as a great treasure,” he said, “but after that…things went downhill fast. Tesla became obsessed with things even he could not achieve, he became more and more of a hermit, and soon not even the family ‘loans’ could help—he was living alone, penniless, and on credit—and he died without a single friend by his side, alone in a hotel room. The government seized all his books and papers after his death, but they couldn’t find the important stuff, the real Elemental stuff, all that was kept in his head—but there are photographs of him holding fire in his hands and smiling through it…”

  “I’ve seen them,” Thea said. “In school. You knew him?”

  “Well, not personally,” Larry said, grinning.

  “But this house…?” Zoë prompted.

  “The seed survived for decades,” Larry said. “They gave it to my father when he came of age, and he kept it safely stowed away…until he met my mother, and there was nothing he would not do to make that relationship happen. And that was a bad time, because…the seed needed an Elemental mage to trigger it…”

  “Is Professor de los Reyes really an Elemental?” Thea said, sitting up.

  “Well…” Larry seemed suddenly reluctant. “Let’s just say it took three tries to do it right,” he said at last, reluctantly. “The first time he tried to open that seed capsule, it nearly self-destructed, taking him with it. You might think he controls this place and is brilliant and arrogant and everything that goes with it—and it’s true, but it’s all been hard-earned, toiled for and sweated for every step of the way, and even then…he might not have triggered everything. That’s why he wanted an Elemental mage child.”

  “But you know how to deal with the house,” Thea said. “Are you an Elemental…?”

  “There are certain aspects of it that can be taught, by rote,” Larry said. “Those, I have down pat. It’s like learning a multiplication table. But the finesse…the finesse of it was always just a little bit beyond me. And when I chose to turn away from it and pursue my own path—my father saw that as a reaction to failure rather than the choice that it was, and he called me a coward and I called him worse, and it was years before we could be civil to each other again.”

  “Can either of the other two do it?” Thea said carefully, setting her glass down.

  “Isabella…” Larry frowned, thinking, shaking his head a little. “She got Father’s arrogance in full measure—but it was her mother’s magic that she got, the earthier, simpler kind—she is talented and able, and more than competent in her own field, but she is not an Elemental. Beltran…I don’t know. I never got to know him that well. He was always a bit of a loner—and while it is obvious that he is capable of functioning within an Elemental environment by the simple fact tha
t he is able to live in this house and make it do his basic bidding, I am not sure that he is an Elemental mage in the sense that he might have been able to trigger the original seed without mishap, for instance.”

  “How about Diego?” Thea asked quietly, her hands clasped in her lap with fingers intertwined.

  Larry looked at her in silence. “I honestly don’t know,” he said at last. “My God, I am still trying to grasp the idea that something like him…someone like him…is out there in the first place. A whole other world I never dreamed existed. Another brother,” he said softly.

  “How did you learn about the Elemental stuff?” Thea said.

  “Father taught me what I needed to know when I was a boy,” Larry said.

  “And did he teach Isabella and Beltran?”

  “I would guess, some,” Larry said.

  “And whatever Beltran knows, Diego knows…or can find out?”

  “I can’t be certain of that,” Larry said. “I can’t be certain of anything when it comes to this—all I have are the bare facts, but when it comes to magic, sometimes one wild or unexpected word can make a complete mockery of the facts. And I’ve been away too long. I don’t know what the wild word is, or was, or if it has been uttered at all or is still merely hanging over all of us waiting to explode. Maybe your coming here, Thea, was precisely the thing that was necessary to tip the balance. We can’t tell—nothing is linear in magic. Sometimes cause and effect can switch places without warning.”

  “What if…he can?” Thea said. “What if he can access the Elemental magic? I don’t know what it is that I do, exactly, or how it measures up—but I’m not sure that I can do anything against something that…”

  “Thea…you’ve already escaped him once,” Zoë said gently. “And if I understood you correctly—when I woke up and you were there, at the computer—you were sort of…writing yourself an insurance policy, weren’t you? Writing in an ability to sideslip out of whatever he might drag you into?”

  “But that might not work, now,” Thea said.

  “It’s like I said,” Larry replied, “magic is its own rule. All we know right now that we can swear to is that Beltran is no longer in this house, that he had been getting some sort of lessons from an unexpected and what we might consider to be an unwholesome quarter, and that Diego is still at the spellspam business.”

  “He is?” Thea said quickly.

  Larry grimaced. “I caught one just before I left the Nexus,” he said. “The filters trapped it, and your friend Terry loaned me his dreamcatcher device—nifty things, those, any way I could get one of them…?”

  “Sorry, special issue,” Thea said. “What was it this time?”

  “It’s just a list of diseases—from the mildly embarrassing and amusing to things that could be quite serious. I suspect there will be a lot of sick people in the world in the morning, although I’ve already sent out an e-mail to the FBM people in Washington, warning them. The thing is, they can’t prevent it—it’s too late for that. If I’ve seen it, it’s already out and it is possible, indeed probable, that far too many other innocents have been snagged by it. The thing is, it is so obvious—the subject line is even misspelled in a heavily hinting way. ‘The best harmacy in the world,’ something like that. Pharm without the P turns into harm. I really don’t see how we can get around it. It’s up to you to find him. The rest of us wouldn’t begin to know where to look.”

  Thea drew in a long breath, but said nothing.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” Larry said abruptly.

  Thea lifted her head.

  “Anybody would be,” Larry said, his voice very gentle. “It’s the reaction of sanity. Frankly, I would be far more worried if you were out there straining at the leash. With a touch of fear comes prudence, and I know that you won’t do anything just to prove a point. I trust you on this. You and Diego are very different—but I also think that in a lot of ways you are alike. Both young, both loose in this new field of magic, tangled in computers and in the virtual world—and I think that works both in your favor and against you.

  “There’s a little of the Elemental in me,” he added. “Maybe it’s that…and maybe it’s just that I’ve always been a good judge of character. But I think you’ve just proved to me that you’re the one to do this, to follow Diego to wherever he is holed up. Only someone who knows to be afraid of a task like that is to be entrusted with doing it.”

  “Cheveyo said…that only gods and fools are completely unafraid. Those who know they cannot be hurt and those who don’t believe they can be,” Thea said. “He said the rest of us would do well to know when it is good to be afraid.”

  “A wise man, this Cheveyo,” Larry said. “Who is he?”

  “Long story,” Zoë said.

  “Another one?” Larry said, smiling. Zoë blushed. “Well, you owe me one, after tonight. What do you think,” he said, turning to Thea, “do you feel ready to go back to your Elemental bedroom and try and get some sleep? Tomorrow…might be a long day.”

  “All right,” Thea said. She got up, freeing her hand from Zoë’s. “Are you coming up, too, Aunt Zoë?”

  “Oh, go on,” Zoë said, finally laughing out loud. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

  “Good night,” Thea said, turning to go at last.

  “Good morning,” Larry said. “In theory, at least.”

  Thea turned once, at the door of the sitting room. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she said. “The Alphiri…were watching me all the time. They tried to buy me when I was little. They wanted what I could do. But…so can Beltran…I mean, Diego…how come they’ve been content just sending in Corey? Why haven’t they got Diego already? And what if they do…?”

  To: you@sensesplus.com

  From: Hedd Spinning < superiorsense@sensesplus.com >

  Subject: Come to your senses!

  Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell…It’s all of these, but better! Enhance your senses and know all the secrets of your world that you could never comprehend before! NOTHING will be hidden from your extraordinary new powers of perception!

  1.

  WHEN THEA WOKE THE next morning, Zoë was gone from the room again—but there was a note laid on her bedside table, propped up against the Tiffany lamp.

  I’m not far, come down to breakfast when you wake up. Think of whatever you’d like to have, and it’ll be waiting for you by the time you get downstairs. It’s…

  “…an Elemental house,” Thea finished out loud, grinning, and extricating her bare feet from her covers. “Fine. I want a waffle, and I want fresh strawberries. And I mean fresh. Let’s see how you deal with that, house.”

  The house maintained a dignified silence, and Thea dressed, stuffed her feet into a pair of scuffed ballet flats, and opened her bedroom door.

  The bathroom across the corridor appeared to be occupied, but the door wasn’t closed, just pulled to and left slightly ajar. So was the door to Terry’s room; Thea paused in the middle of the corridor.

  “Terry?”

  There was a sound of rinsing and spitting from the bathroom.

  “Out in a sec,” Terry said.

  He emerged from the bathroom a moment or two later, his hair still standing up on end from being slept on.

  “Any serenades in the night that I should know about?” he asked.

  “No, I just had midnight lemonade with Larry and Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, “and found out a few more things about this place. I’ll tell you over breakfast. Wait for me, I won’t be long.”

  Terry nodded and Thea slipped into the bathroom to brush her teeth, brush her hair, and run a washcloth over her face. She inspected her chin in the mirror, but the thing she had thought was turning into a magnificent zit turned out not to be life-threatening, and she decided to leave well enough alone. Terry was waiting in the corridor when she was done, running both hands through his own hair in an effort to make it sit flat.

  “That’s what they invented combs for,” Thea said.
>
  Terry stuck out his tongue at her in a manner that suddenly forcefully reminded Thea of Frankie. She wondered what her brothers were doing with their summer while she was dreaming up her favorite breakfast in the world’s only original Elemental house and preparing to chase down cyber-ghosts. Her mood momentarily swirled into a potent mix of homesickness, smugness, and pure terror—and then she got distracted by remembering the waffles and the fresh strawberries that ought to be waiting downstairs for her. She thought she could see the smell of those strawberries, much like Zoë might have done—a faintly pink mist hanging in the air of the corridor and leading down the spiral staircase.

  The breakfast room was deserted. Terry appeared not to have thought too hard about his own breakfast because he just got bland, generic fare—eggs over easy, hash browns—but Thea’s strawberries proved every bit as fresh as she had specified, and she bit into them with gusto while they rehashed the previous day’s events.

  “Find him, they said,” Thea said. “What if I do? Do they send in the cavalry?”

  “They didn’t the last time,” Terry said.

  “You mean with the Nothing?”

  “You figured that one out. You and Magpie and Ben.”

  “And you and Tess,” Thea said. “We all shared that one. The idea, the execution.”

  “Yeah, the execution,” Terry murmured. “And the responsibility. You have no idea how long, after, Ben moped about that whale. And we all knew that it was the right thing to do, then—that he even had the whale’s blessing, that it was traditional, that it was the way things were always done.”

  They looked at each other, understanding the unspoken thoughts. We killed something. Even with the built-in absolution of a willing sacrifice…we bear the guilt of it.