Worldweavers: Cybermage (14 page)

“This is a new thing,” he murmured.

Thea flushed, both with pride that she had managed to surprise someone like Tesla and with an anxious urge to explain herself, to justify the things she did to a supreme authority. “I have these,” she said, holding out the pair of dream catchers. “Grandmother Spider has made them…empty. Empty and ready to be filled.” She glanced at Tesla. “If we can figure out how to get some other version of you into these, a younger version with a better understanding of a special set of circumstances, these will hold those parts of you that we take with us. We will need the you that decided to split the Elementals, the you
that knew how to do it in Colorado. Perhaps there’s even a chance we can figure out how to go back to a precise moment, and rescue
all
the pigeons, even the one you lost.”

“Not the me of the immediate aftermath of that,” Tesla said. “I would not wish children to see me that way. The me that left New York for Colorado, perhaps. There is knowledge there. And the timing can be stretched so that a practical run at the process can happen for you to witness. But I beg you to remember that it was grief that made me as mad as you may get to see me.”

“That’s one,” Tess said. “But the Alphiri are chasing pigeons in
New York
. Do they know something we don’t? Why would the pigeons have gone to New York?”

“
Back
to New York,” Tesla said. “I had started feeding them, in the city, before I left for Colorado. And then, when I returned, I continued to do this. The city is where they knew me best. That is where they very well might have gone.”

“Two, then,” Thea said. “One for Colorado, one for New York. One for each dream catcher. And if Terry needs to ask questions, for the computer, there is always the cube, directly.”

“You’re going to give
me
the wretched thing?” Terry said. “How am I supposed to keep it safe from anybody? What am I supposed to tell Humphrey?”

“You have the notes he gave you. If he asks, tell him you are working from those.”

“So. Two. How?” Tesla said succinctly.

Weighing the dream catchers in his hand, Terry thought about the problem for a moment. And then his eyes lit on Thea’s wrist keypad.

“Can I borrow that?” Terry said.

“First I need to get us to where we need to be, to find the two personalities that we need,” Thea said, loosening the wrist-strap and dangling the gadget from her fingers. “Those parts of you, Tesla, that we need to get for this to work. But once we get there, Terry, say the word. The rest of you are going to have to wait for us here. I’ll just take the three of us who need to be there.”

“Fascinating,” Tesla said, his eyes alight as he stared at the keypad. “May I examine…?”

Thea fought the impulse to hold on to the keypad and relinquished it to Tesla, who turned it over in his hands, obviously rapt.

“Fascinating,” he said again, “absolutely fascinating. What is this thing, and what is it that it does? Is
that how you have achieved coming here to see me?”

Thea retrieved the keypad. “If you will tell me something about the moment where one of those two parts of you that we need to find exists, I’ll show you how it works.”

“What precisely do you need to know?” Tesla asked.

“Anything. Any detail. What your surroundings were like. What you looked like.”

Tesla hesitated. “Shall we try the New York one first? I feel a little queasy at the thought of returning to Colorado…at that time.” He took a deep breath. “The New York me is perhaps ten or fifteen years younger than I am at this moment. Take some of the gray out of my hair, make it darker. Give me a mustache.” His fingers twirled a nonexistent one on his upper lip as he spoke. “Perhaps a little later than that. Make me…walk with a cane. I did, after my accident. A car hit me, and after that it was easier to have a third leg. Try…this very room.”

Thea was typing as he spoke. “Okay,” she said. “Ready.”

The others appeared to fade from around them, and the three of them—Nikola Tesla, Terry, and
Thea—suddenly stood in the very room they had just left, except there was another Tesla present, a younger one. He looked much as he had described, down to a dapper wooden cane leaning against the armrest of his armchair, and he sat in almost exactly the same position that the elder Tesla had been found in when they had first seen him, cradling a glass of whisky.

“One of my little indulgences,” the older Tesla murmured, at Thea’s elbow. “I did not allow myself many. What is it that you need to do now?”

“Thea,” Terry whispered, holding out his hand for the typepad.

Thea handed it over.

Terry typed for what seemed to be an inordinately long time; fortunately, the other Tesla in the room didn’t react to their presence. But the elder Tesla’s breathing was very quick and shallow as he stared at his younger self, and Thea, sparing him a swift apprehensive glance, turned her head to look back at Terry.

“Hurry
up
,” she hissed.

“Done,” he said instantly, handing her back the keypad and one of the dream catchers. “Hold that
thing up—like this—so that you can see the whole figure within the circle,” Terry said. “And then press
ENTER
.”

Thea obeyed, squinting through the dream catcher until the Tesla in the armchair just fitted within the circle of the web, and then hit the
ENTER
key.

For a moment, nothing happened. And then, suddenly, the dream catcher started to spin in Thea’s hand, very fast, and a strange bluish light began to stream from it. They all turned their attention from the man in the chair to the spinning dream catcher, and it was only the gentle thud of an object falling onto a carpeted floor that brought their attention back to the armchair.

The other Tesla was gone. The whisky glass had fallen from the armrest, its contents pooling in an amber puddle on the hotel carpet.

The dream catcher continued to glow faintly blue in Thea’s hand.

“I think we have him,” Thea whispered. And then, glancing up at Tesla, she added, “Are you all right?”

“It feels…strange…and yet terribly familiar,” Tesla said. “It feels as though I’ve suddenly lost a memory I did not believe I could ever lose, stopped
remembering something I cannot believe I could forget.” He drew a deep shaky breath, and ran a hand through his hair—and then patted it back down into place again, tidy and dapper. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we’d better go and get the other one.”

“C
HEER UP,” SAID KRISTIN.
“It could be worse.”

“I’m cold, I’m miserable, and I’m alone in a city I don’t know, chasing pigeons that may or may not exist,” Ben muttered into the dark green knitted scarf wrapped around his neck and mouth, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jacket.

“You’re not alone; you’re with me,” Kristin said. “And there’s Tesla’s ghost.”

“You’re right,” Ben said. “It’s worse.”

They had all told their families that they needed to stay at the Academy over the short break. When they had broken up into teams, it had seemed obvious that Tess would stick around with Terry at the Academy Nexus during the Christmas break, holding down the home base, and acting as aide and a contact point for everyone else. Thea had taken on the thorny problem of the lost Fire Elemental
pigeon, and if anyone could help out on that front it was Magpie, with her ability to commune with hurt animals and her healing touch.

It was clear, of course, that Kristin, their Finder, would have to go to New York to find the rest of the pigeons. It had come as a complete and unpleasant surprise to Ben that he would be expected to go there with her. It was only when he became aware that he was being a source of both amusement and exasperation to Tesla himself that Ben folded, sulkily and with ill-grace.

And that’s where they were now, the two of them—bundled up in winter jackets, gloves, and sheepskin boots, late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Everywhere Ben looked, people were laughing, excited, enjoying themselves. Bryant Park, behind New York’s Public Library, was crowded. Women were weaving enthusiastically in and out of the Christmas shops set up in brightly lit small kiosks along the park’s outer walkways, followed closely by bags and packages floating in their wake; children were careening around and shrieking in delight; usually dour-faced businessmen wore benevolent smiles. The fragrance of roasting chestnuts mixed with spice, cocoa, pizza, and hot cider.

Above them, perching on statues, fences, and window ledges, or scurrying and ducking on the ground between people’s feet, were the pigeons. Puffed up to twice their size against the cold, pecking hopefully at some bit of debris or another or crowding expectantly around some benevolent soul who had, in defiance of park ordinance, clandestinely started scattering bread crumbs or popcorn.

And in those crowds of birds and men, pigeons flocked to what seemed to be empty space, and perched in midflight as if they were resting on something that wasn’t there—the incarnation of Nikola Tesla, whom Ben and Kristin had released from their dream catcher.

They had been given strict instructions by Terry and Thea. During the capture of the Tesla avatar the dream catcher has been spinning clockwise, and in order to release the spirit they had to spin the dream catcher counterclockwise, very fast. They could recapture their version of Tesla for the return journey by looking at Tesla’s figure through the dream catcher so that he was contained inside its circle, and then spinning the dream catcher clockwise again.

The release instructions had worked perfectly, and a shadowy, half-transparent Tesla now stood under
the light of a park lamp with a strange, dreamy smile on his upturned face. He was apparently a corporeal presence to the pigeons alone—nobody else, with the obvious exceptions of Kristin and Ben, seemed to notice or care about the presence of a hatless man with neatly parted hair, dressed in an old-fashioned and oddly formal pin-striped black suit and black patent leather shoes, oblivious of the time of year or the weather.

Tesla appeared to be equally invisible to half a dozen Alphiri who fruitlessly attempted to mingle with the human throng. The Alphiri were not necessarily a startling presence among humans—they were a common enough workday sight, often sitting politely at business lunches where they did not eat or at cocktail parties where they did not drink, mingling with humans in banks, in offices, and on city streets everywhere. But they stood out in this crowd, somehow—a head taller and slender to the point of looking emaciated when compared to the well-padded Christmas revelers. The Alphiri wore their usual assortment of not-quite-right clothes, although they at least tried to acknowledge the time of year and the occasion. One of them, whom Ben and Kristin had glimpsed several times, wore a bright
red woolen hat with an enormous pom-pom, and a headband with reindeer antlers on top of it. At least two of the others sported Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer noses over their own bony proboscises, and one was wearing snowshoes attached to his long-toed bare feet.

The one with the antlers had just surfaced again, making his way through the crowds toward where Ben and Kristin stood, and Kristin glanced around for options.

“Let’s go skating,” she said, nodding at the rink set up behind them. “I seriously doubt any of
them
know how, and it might give us a bit of a chance to just observe.”

“I can’t skate,” Ben said sulkily. “And what about Tesla? Are you just abandoning him there?”

“What, you never tried ice-skating? It’s about time, then. Tesla will be fine. If he sees something, he’ll let us know. Come on.” She stepped away, and paused when he didn’t follow, glancing back at him. “Or do you want to stand here by yourself and draw their attention to you rather than to me?”

“You just want me to make a fool of myself,” Ben said, but he dragged his unwilling feet after her anyway.

Humphrey May had made sure they had enough money, and Kristin hauled a twenty out of her pocket as they came up to the rental pavilion beside the rink. They exchanged their shoes for two pairs of somewhat battered blue skates. Kristin tucked the claim tickets into a pocket before stuffing her feet into her skates and lacing them up in a brisk, businesslike manner. She glanced at Ben, who was still frowning at his laces.

“I think this has been done up wrong,” he said.

“No, it hasn’t. Honestly, you’re such a dork.” Kristin leaned over and expertly laced up the skate closest to her. Ben wiggled his foot experimentally.

“Hurts,” he said.

“They’re
rentals
, you can’t expect heavenly comfort,” Kristin said. “Make sure the other one’s tight. You don’t want a broken ankle.”

“
Now
she thinks about that,” Ben muttered.

Kristin rose to her feet, balancing precariously on her blades. “Ready?”

“Are you sure this was such a good idea?” Ben said, making no move to get up from the bench.

“We can shake the Alphiri, at least for a while,” Kristin said.

She teetered from the bench to the edge of the ice
rink, turned once to give Ben another encouraging look, and launched onto the ice.

Ben almost missed the transformation, so intent was he on wobbling on his own unsteady feet to the edge of the rink, but when he looked up from his efforts he almost failed to recognize Kristin. The only reason he knew who she was at all, in fact, was her vivid yellow jacket, a bright spot of color in the rink. Gone was the awkward girl who was always on the edge of things. In her place was someone confident and graceful, who threaded her way through the circling skaters into the less crowded center of the rink, pirouetted twice, and then drifted back through the crowd until she hovered beside the entrance, beckoning Ben in.

“Come on, the water’s fine,” she said.

“The water’s
frozen
,” Ben retorted. But he took a deep breath and stepped out on the ice.

His feet immediately threatened to slide straight out from under him, and he hung on desperately to the plastic barrier fence, which was scarred from many previous encounters with nervous beginners.

“Not fair,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you’ve been doing this from the cradle. I’m going to make a complete idiot of myself. And look, there’s that wretched
Alphiri again. All we did was draw attention to ourselves. You’re brilliant, and I’m a clown.”

“I’ll teach you,” Kristin said breezily. “You have to let go. You can’t take the fence with you. I Find best when I’m not actually concentrating on what I’m looking for. You wait—it’ll come popping straight at me as soon as I take my eyes off it.”

“What will?”

“The pigeon, you twit. What we came here for, remember? Now come on—move your feet. One at a time. Just a little bit. You have to forget how to walk and learn how to
glide
. Watch.”

She left him once again, took off through a gap in the crowds into the center with long gliding motions, then took off from the back inside edge of one skate and landed smoothly on the back outside edge of the opposite foot, turning into a smooth sweep and skating back to Ben.

“That was called a salchow,” Kristin said. “Don’t worry, you’re not required to do it on your first skate. I’d hold your hand but that would only wreck your balance. Let go of the wretched fence now.”

“Quit bullying me,” Ben snarled, but tried to obey. He took a few tottering steps, staggered, and grabbed for the fence again.

“Glide. Don’t walk. Try it again.”

By this time something deeply stubborn had woken in Ben, and he was determined that whatever happened, he would not give her the pleasure of watching him fall. He set his teeth, locked his knees, and let go of the fence again.

It took the better part of an hour for him to not only start to get the hang of things but, despite himself, to enjoy it.

“Hey,” he called out triumphantly as he rounded a corner of the rink without slamming into the fence to make himself stop, “look—I can finally turn.”

But Kristin was looking somewhere else, outside the rink. She came to a sudden stop, digging into the already deeply scored ice and spraying ice chips over Ben. He tried to turn his head, lost his precarious balance, and slammed into the fence again, jamming his knee painfully into the hard plastic. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing fast, trying to control the sudden lancing pain in his leg, and then turned savagely on Kristin.

“What gives? I thought we—”

“Look!”
she said, pointing. “There!”

He followed the line of her finger to the fifty-foot Christmas tree towering against the backdrop of the
nine great arched windows in the back of the library that overlooked Bryant Park. It was true that the tree was spectacular, glowing with thousands of white lights enhanced with a layer of spell-spoken glow. But Kristin wasn’t looking at the tree. It took Ben a few seconds to notice what had really caught her eye.

A single pigeon had landed softly on top of a street lamp not too far from the edge of the rink. To Ben the pigeon looked no different from any of the rest. But he noticed that Nikola Tesla’s ghost had moved to that particular lamppost, and the expression on his face was a mix of disbelief and fierce joy.

“Is it one of ours?” Ben whispered.

“We’d better get out of here,” Kristin said, skating jerkily past Ben, suddenly graceless again. “I have to get over there.”

“Oh,
God.”

“What—” Kristin began, and then covered her mouth with her hands in shock as a flock of large black birds came down all around the pigeon on the lamppost, surrounding it. For a moment it seemed hopelessly outnumbered, but Tesla made a sudden sharp gesture with his hand, almost as though casting a spell of some kind, and the pigeon burst up and out, melting into the winter sky. And then there
was no flock anymore, only one large raven. Then the raven, too, was gone, and in its place, standing practically nose-to-nose with Tesla but apparently unaware of it, was a man wearing a cowboy hat and tight jeans tucked into dusty snakeskin boots. He was looking up to the now unoccupied lamppost, frowning—and then he turned and looked straight at Ben and Kristin, gave them a wide smile as he tipped his hat in their direction, and turned away, vanishing almost as quickly as the pigeon.

“I’ve heard Thea describe him a dozen times,” Ben said. “The raven. The hat. Those boots. That’s Corey. Coyote. The Trickster. If he’s here, the Alphiri are closing in.”

“Come on,” Kristin said, “we’d better get to Tesla. If there was one, the others might be somewhere near. And we don’t want to make the same mistake again.”

“I thought you wanted to shake our stalker,” Ben said.

“I did, for a while, at least. But then I got caught up in the skating, and so did you, and I probably shouldn’t have pointed. I shouldn’t have identified it. This was my fault, and it was too close.”

“We couldn’t have gotten to it quickly anyway,
not with these things on,” Ben said, glancing down at his skates. “But you’re right, let’s take the skates back and get our shoes.”

Kristin had already stepped off the ice and was digging through her pockets for the shoe coupons.

Ben staggered to a bench and removed his skates, wriggling his toes in their woolen winter socks as Kristin waited impatiently for the attendant to locate their footwear.

The rink was slowly emptying now. It wasn’t very late, but it was Christmas Eve and people were starting to wander off to warm homes. Ben watched people scurrying past, scanning the throng for any signs of the Alphiri or of Corey in his distinctive hat, but they all seemed to have melted away now that a certain objective had been achieved.

“Are they holed up somewhere and watching us?” Ben muttered, raking the shadows for lurking spies.

“We are running out of time,” said Tesla’s ghost, materializing beside him. “They have stopped hunting the pigeons. They are hunting
us
hunting the pigeons. This is not a good thing.”

“Was that really one of yours?” Ben said curiously. “Which one? I couldn’t see any difference. How can you tell?”

“You would know a part of yourself, if you were to lose it,” Tesla said. “They have changed, which is not something that should surprise me—they have survived out here in the wild with their kind for a very long time. They have certainly lost the edge of being completely my own and have become almost…blurred, but that particular bird carries the Water Element.”

Kristin, who had returned with the shoes, dropped Ben’s boots by his feet.

“I’m sorry I pointed,” she said to Tesla. “I might as well have hung a bell on him.”