Worldweavers: Cybermage (13 page)

“You mean you’ve already struck a bargain with the Alphiri?”

“For the portals. Yes.”

“When did they come to you?”

“Years ago. Many years ago, now.”

“
Before they came to the rest of the Human Polity
?”

“Perhaps. At that time I had no way of knowing
whom they had contacted, and why. It wasn’t my business. They came to me with a problem and I turned my hand to solving it. And they paid well for it. Not like some of my own kind. People cheat and they lie, but the Alphiri always deliver on their side of the bargain.”

Thea exchanged a frightened and bewildered look with the others.

“Are we too late already?” Kristin said in a small voice.

“I remember
you
,” Tesla said to Thea, but his eyes were resting on Kristin, and he wore an expression of carefully controlled distaste as he took in the prominent teeth. “But the rest of you, I have not met. I am certain of this. Who are you and why do you come here? Why do you disturb me?”

“We’re here because of the pigeons,” Tess said abruptly.

Tesla turned his haunting eyes to her, very slowly. They were no longer distant and dreamy, but very sharp and piercingly probing.

“Pigeons,” he echoed. “Continue.”

“We saw you,” she said, “back when you were in Colorado Springs…when you tried to take your magic…”

“Kaschei,” Thea said faintly. “You once told me of this, long ago. How someone in a fairy tale took his heart, the essence of his life, and kept it in a place where nobody could ever find it or harm it, so that he could live forever, that he would be safe. Was that really what you were trying to do?”

Tesla remained silent for so long, Thea began to worry that they had lost him completely to some inner reverie of regret or old age, and that the entire visit was to prove useless except for the startling information about the Alphiri. But then Tesla stood up, turned to the window, and stared outside, both hands wrapped around his glass now. When he spoke, his voice might have belonged to a different man—someone more decisive, younger, and stronger—or someone still wrestling with unimaginable pain.

“That,” Tesla said clearly, “was the worst mistake I ever made.”

“Maybe we can help,” Thea said after a pause. “If there is a way to help. Can it be reversed? What exactly did you do?”

He turned to face the five of them. His face was transformed, alight, glowing. But his voice had cooled, just a little.

“It would need,” he said, and they heard the bleak edge in his words, “an Elemental mage.”

“We have one,” Terry said.

Tesla lifted an eloquent eyebrow. “One who will understand? Who will not judge? Who will do what is necessary, even though it may be hard?”

“Yes,” Thea said, after a moment of silence.

“Well, who is it?” Tesla said. Then he blinked and refocused on Thea’s face. “You? But you are a child.”

“So were you. Once.”

“My gifts came to me full-fledged later.” Tesla cupped his fingers around Thea’s chin, lifting her face; Thea met his eyes steadily and in silence as his intense gaze searched her face. At length he dropped his arm to his side, still not taking his eyes from her, and nodded once, slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see.”

“I think you had better tell us everything,” Thea said. Her heart was pounding; it was one thing for Humphrey May to tell her that she
might
be an Elemental, quite another to have Nikola Tesla himself, the greatest Elemental mage in the history of the human race, confirm it with just a searching glance. “Those pigeons of yours have suddenly become very
important. And if the Alphiri find them before we do, you might find yourself in a position of being not the bargainer, but the bargain. And they
will
use you against humanity.”

“I never have liked humanity,” Tesla said, in a voice almost conversational. “I do, however, like human beings. And it would sit ill with me to allow one to come to harm through some action of mine.” He settled back into his armchair as if into a throne, both arms laid along the leather armrests. “You have to realize, though, you are asking about troubled times. About times when I may well have been mad. This will not…be easy.”

The story that emerged was one filled with passion and pain. Tesla had been an incredibly gifted and idealistic young man who tried to make his way in a world he never quite understood and that was quick to take advantage of him. He had been the only quad-Element mage in the history of the human race, and while he was alive that was something that everyone took for granted.

But he had to work for every achievement, and sometimes begged and scrounged for loans and for outright gifts, most of which ended up in the laboratories and workshops where he researched and
honed his Elemental talents. When he lost his New York laboratory and office to fire, he thought he had reached rock bottom.

“When the opportunity came to go to Colorado—to have a free hand—I hesitated not for a moment,” Tesla said. He kept his eyes on the birds, which still strutted and shivered on his windowsill. “And then, out there, alone…I lost my head. I panicked. I thought about how it would be to lose that, too, to some error of judgment or to accident beyond my control—and I remembered Kaschei. I came to believe that if I could keep the best of me safe, somewhere outside of me, then nothing could ever hurt me again.”

He lapsed into silence, and it was Kristin who broke it—Kristin, the only one who had not seen with her own eyes what had happened in the Colorado laboratory, had not seen the dead bird in Tesla’s hands or heard his keening cry of grief.

“But it went wrong,” she whispered.

Tesla started as though someone had broken into a reverie. “It went wrong,” he echoed.

“We saw it,” Tess said quietly. “We were there. We saw the birds in the pillar of flame. We saw one appear, then two, then three, then four…then they
were gone, all except the one.”

“The Elemental birds,” Tesla said. “And I had not taken into account that they would be free, and that they would be frightened, and that they would all go away. All except the one, as you say.”

“Which one was it, sir?” Terry asked.

“It was the Fire Elemental,” Tesla said. “The others were lost, but this one was gone. Gone. And I felt his absence inside of me like someone had ripped out my soul. I knew that Kaschei could never have felt like this. Or else the tales lied, all along, and I had believed that lie and I was now lost along with the best part of me.”

“You lost
all
of your magic?” Thea asked.

“No. Enough remained, and I could fake it for the rest of my days on Earth. But my body grew tired and old, and my mind was always searching, and my soul was gone from me. When the time came for me to lay down my earthly shape…You see, I had made the cube that you now carry, an Elemental cube, years before I had torn myself apart, and I believed that when I grew too physically frail in the earthly plane I could endure in a different form.” He paused. “But you already know this,” he said. “It was the cube that must have brought you here. It
was the only thing that could have done that.”

“No, sir,” said Thea. “It brought us into your existence that first time, the time that we saw you and the pigeons at the Colorado laboratory. And we saw other things too—we saw you in a park in a great European-looking city somewhere, and when we came close to you, you kind of collapsed….”

“I remember that,” Tesla said, sitting up. “It was Budapest, and they called it a nervous breakdown at the time, overwork, stress. But I remember that day, and I remember feeling as though the sunlight was suddenly too heavy for me to bear. Every sound was magnified until I could hear a fly buzzing a block away, and the sound of horses’ hooves out in the street felt like cannon fire in my brain. It took me a long time to recover from that. They called it a breakdown, but it was after that…it was that day that really woke the Elemental….”

The other five exchanged a puzzled look.

“You mean
we
made you into an Elemental?” Ben said.

“The powers must have been there all along, but it may well have been that encounter that woke them to fullness,” Tesla said. “So you all were my blessing and my curse, you children.”

“Do you want it all back?” Kristin asked abruptly.

“How can I have it back?” Tesla said. “At least a part of it has gone, vanished permanently, died a final death.”

“But the rest,” Kristin persisted. “The other three pigeons. We could find them. We’re on our way to look for them. But first we need to know, do you want them back?
Can
you have them back? Can it be done?”

“Reintegration? As I said, it would need an Elemental mage and all kinds of other things. The kind of thing that wasn’t even properly invented when I was still among you as a man of flesh and blood.”

“You mean computers,” Terry said, stepping forward. “There has been much done in that field. That part of the problem, you can leave up to me.”

“You?” Tesla said, looking him up and down. “But you are so young.”

“So were you, once,” Terry said, with a quick look back at Thea.

“We would need your help,” Thea said. “We don’t know nearly enough. We can go out and seek your pigeons, but you would need to guide us. Perhaps
it might be possible to return to a point that’s early enough, to a place where your Fire Element pigeon might not have perished.”

“And we’ll do it before the Alphiri find them,” Kristin said stalwartly.

“You would have to be in at least two different places at the same time, and so would I. And it would help if it was a different I for every occasion,” Tesla said.

“Tell us what we need to know, and we can always come back and ask if we need answers,” Terry said.

“No…wait,” Thea said slowly. “I mean, are you actually able to do that? Split yourself into different…avatars?”

“He did it with the pigeons,” Ben said.

“Yes, and it is not an experience I would repeat lightly, young man.”

“But if you could…” Thea said slowly. “If you could, or would be willing to, it would help. And I think I know a way.”

Tesla frowned. “I will listen,” he said.

Thea looked down and spoke, apparently, to the floor. “Magpie, are you there?”

“Yup,” a voice from nowhere replied instantly. The disembodied sound managed to be both distant
and disconcertingly present in the same room, as though an invisible person standing right next to Thea had actually spoken.

Tesla’s back stiffened, and he searched the empty air around Thea with wary eyes. “What was that? Where did that voice come from?”

“It’s a friend,” Thea said. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

She reached out behind her with her right hand, and stepped
away
. In the next instant she was standing near Cheveyo’s stone house, holding Magpie’s hand.

“Did you find him? Did you talk to him? What did he say?” Magpie said breathlessly.

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Thea said, grinning. “He said he’ll help. He said he’ll probably help best if a different him goes with different teams, and that we’ll have to split up to try and cover all the bases. So I have an idea. I need to talk to Grandmother Spider.”

“She’s way ahead of you,” Magpie said, and her own grin widened.

Thea turned her head and met the chocolate brown eyes of a dark-haired Grandmother Spider, sitting on a sun-warmed rock a few steps away.

“We’ve been talking,” Magpie said, a touch smugly.

“Indeed we have, and we’ve had much to say to each other,” Grandmother Spider said, getting to her feet. “What new venture are you planning, my child?”

“This is going to sound awfully weird,” Thea said. “But I need to know…those spellspam dream catchers you sent us…can we use them to carry different splinters of a man’s mind or spirit? So that the man could be in several places at the same time?”

“It is not,” said Grandmother Spider, “a use I have ever put them to. But true dream catchers can do and be many things. This man—is this your wizard, Nikola Tesla?”

“Cheveyo said you’d told him about this,” Thea said. “Yes. It is Tesla. I left him waiting for an answer.”

“Do you have your dream catcher with you?” Grandmother Spider asked.

Thea fished it out of her pocket. “Always.”

“Mine too,” Magpie said, offering hers on the palm of her hand.

Grandmother Spider closed one of her hands around each small dream catcher and bowed her
head over them. She began to hum softly, a gentle haunting melody that sparkled with ancient magic. Her hair, spilling over her face and her hands, turned shades of chestnut, wheat-gold, white, gray, and solid blue-black. A light began to seep through her closed fingers, as if she held a fistful of fireflies. Then she stopped humming, and the world sank into a silence; her hair turned silver-white, and stayed that shade. When she looked up, her eyes were dark blue, like a twilit sky.

“I have made them empty so that they will hold what spirit comes to fill them,” she said, holding both tiny dream catchers out on the palms of her hands toward Thea. “Use them wisely. This can be a dangerous thing, this breaking apart of a man.”

“He is already broken,” Thea said softly. “We do this in order to try and heal him.”

“Then go with blessings, and may you succeed in your quest,” Grandmother Spider said. She turned her head a little, and smiled at Magpie. “And we two shall meet again, I think.”

And then she was gone, and a small brown spider sat in the middle of one of the dream catchers. Thea carefully set the dream catcher down on one of the boulders by her feet long enough for the spider to
scurry off it and into the shadows, and then gathered up both dream catchers in one hand.

“I’d better get back,” she said to Magpie. “Do you want to come? I don’t think there’s any reason for you to wait here alone any longer.”

“I’ll wait,” Magpie said. “I don’t suppose you need to make that poor old man any more spooked than he already must be.”

“Okay. Back soon.”

Thea closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again she was back in the hotel room, with Tesla staring at her.