Worldweavers: Cybermage (20 page)

Thea thought of the years in which she could find nothing in her father’s face except disappointment and frustration, the first time she had woven two strands of light together, the destination that the powers that first woke in Cheveyo’s country had led her to, the desperate act that had sealed one who was more like her than any other in her world into a living tomb.

The chance to set another Elemental free from a prison of his own making.

We all pay the price of our folly.

“Yes,” Thea said.

Tesla, who had not let go of her hands, now lifted both to his lips, and then dropped them, stepping away. Thea was surprised to see that his eyes were filled with tears; she swallowed hard and turned to face Tawaha.

“What is it that I must do?” she said, and was surprised, under the circumstances, to see both him and Grandmother Spider smiling.

“You have given freely, and therefore it is in my power to do so also,” Tawaha said. “Because you were willing to give the ember of your own gift, I do not have to take it from you. Do you remember, child, the day we first met?”

“In the First World,” Thea said. “Beside the portal I had made.”

Tawaha was nodding. “And do you recall what the last thing that you did in that world was, just before you stepped away through that portal back to this world, Cheveyo’s world?”

Thea found herself smiling, too, as the memory returned. “I grabbed a ribbon of fire to weave,” she said. “Your fire.”

Tawaha nodded. “You did not know it yet, not then, but it is only because you have it in you to hold the Fire Element—because you are a Fire Elemental yourself—that you were able to hold that flame at all. You have carried it within yourself ever since you first touched it, and it is not your fire; it is mine. I loaned it, and now I can take it back without harming your own gift, the part of your power that
is yours alone. The sun fire can serve as the spark to bring the other fire back to life.”

“She does not carry it,” Cheveyo said. He had not moved from his position by his hearth since this gathering had begun, but now he strode forward, leaning on his staff. “The morning she returned from the First World to my own hearth was the first and only time I have eaten breakfast cooked over a holy fire. She thrust your flame into my embers, Great One. It has long since burned away into ashes.”

“Not all,” Tawaha said tranquilly. “Enough remains. Hold out your hand to me, child.”

Thea obeyed, offering her hand, flat and palm up, to Tawaha. The Sun God raised his own burnished hand and held it a span away from her own, close enough that she felt the heat blister her fingertips.

A spark crackled between her index finger and his, and then from every finger each to the other, until a fiery arc of white and gold light spanned their two hands, leaving a bright cradle of light into which Grandmother Spider gently laid the body of the Fire pigeon.

Electricity snapped and sparked in the air around Thea and Tawaha, and the bird was suspended in air and fire between them. It hung there for an instant,
still motionless, and then it exploded in a flash of red-gold wings like a phoenix, its wingtips showering sparks as the wings beat powerfully to allow the bird to hover in place.

Tawaha broke the contact, clenching his hand into a fist. Thea staggered and nearly fell, glancing down at what she thought had to be blisters on her fingertips. She found none, even though she had literally held her hand in the sun’s own corona. But she didn’t have time to think about that, not just then. She looked up again, in time to notice the Fire pigeon fly like an arrow toward Tesla and land with grace and precision on his outstretched arm. Tesla was openly weeping, his face streaked with tears.

“Terry,” Thea said in a low voice, without taking her eyes off Tesla and his pigeon, “finish it.”

There was the sound of rapid typing, and the pigeon on Tesla’s arm brightened into a shape of light almost impossible to look at without hurting one’s eyes, and then it, too, was just a form of air and shadow like its fellows in the cage, glowing with an orange-yellow radiance. A final tap of a computer key, and the birdcage was open, the other three Elements free and clustering around Tesla in a cloud of multicolored light, bathing his
face in a luminous brightness.

“We do not understand,” the Alphiri Queen said into the rapt silence that followed.

Thea turned to look at her, and found the Queen staring straight back at her. Thea suddenly realized that the Queen’s two escorts had not spoken in her wake, as was the Alphiri custom. They were standing beside the portal through which they had arrived, one on either side like an honor guard.

“This is not the kind of bargain we can make,” the Queen said. “We sought…a legacy, something that might remain in memory of us when we pass away—as it is written that all must, in their time. We have done all that may be done within the rule of our law; we have bought all that could have been bought, and have offered payment for things that may not have been for sale—that is what we know how to do. We give fair price for what we consider to be fair service or fair trade. But we do not understand what you have just done. What was the bargain that you made? What did you choose? What was offered to you in return?”

“The things that cannot be measured or owned,” Thea said. “A sense of losing a small part of self to become part of a bigger whole. None of us is alone,
in the end; we are one, and it is not a loss to give when someone else receives.”

The Queen narrowed her eyes and looked as though she was about to speak again, but Terry’s computer was not yet done. Thea heard more keys tapping, and then something brightened to a fiery glow that rivaled Tawaha’s before settling into a luminous aura that now surrounded Tesla. There was a light in his eyes that had not been there before, and he was actually smiling.

Kristin and Tess both had their hands half-covering their faces, and their eyes gleamed with astonished joy. Cat was crying openly. Ben was standing quite still, his eyes flickering from Thea to Tesla as though he was trying to commit it all to memory.

As for Humphrey May, he was gazing on Tesla with an air of resignation, and his thoughts were as plain as the expression on his face. Whatever his plans had originally been, what had happened here had derailed everything. He was now looking at an Elemental mage—now once again the only quad-Elemental in human history—and coming to terms with the fact that whatever his ideas had been on this score, they were now confetti in the wind.

Terry had been crouching with his laptop balanced on his knees; he laid it on the ground, got up, and took a few uncertain steps toward Thea.

“Are you all right?” he whispered.

In reply she lifted a hand; her fingers trembled. “I think I might fall down in a heap if I move an inch from where I’m standing.”

He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it.

“What did you mean when you said that Tesla had named you a new thing?” he asked quietly.

“He named a new Element,” Thea said. “One you’re very familiar with. He called me a Cybermage.”

They were given no further chance to talk, as the Alphiri Queen suddenly lifted her long skirts and walked toward Tesla, pausing briefly to rake Corey up and down with a cool glance.

“Er,” Corey said. “Under the circumstances…I guess you won’t be needing me any longer, for the time being, anyway. Give me a call if there’s anything I can do for you in the future.”

He flashed a look of frustration Thea’s way, but was distracted by another feather popping into place just above his ear. He reached to pluck it with a growl.

“And I’m sure
we
will cross paths again,” he said to Thea. His face darkening into a scowl, Corey blurred his shape and dropped onto all fours, turning his sharp coyote snout in what looked like a final defiant grin at Thea and at the other Elder Spirits, and trotted off across the broken scree that spilled at the foot of the mesa.

In the meantime, the Alphiri Queen moved to stand before Nikola Tesla.

Tesla offered her a small formal bow, meeting her gaze unflinchingly.

“We needed you,” she said simply.

Her two companions said nothing to qualify that statement any further.

“Madam,” Tesla said with old-world courtesy, “without the powers that I now hold, one of which you tried to withhold from me, I would have been of little use to you. In full possession of those powers, you could never have held me against my will—because I can mold the world to my wishes. The prison does not exist that could keep me where I do not wish to stay.”

“That may be true,” she said, “though we might have proved otherwise. But we have lost here. No matter, though.”

Her head swiveled very slowly until her gaze, suddenly thoughtful and calculating, came to rest on Ben, Cat, Kristin, and Tess, who instinctively drew closer to one another, as though there was safety in that proximity. The Queen turned away from Tesla. Her two companions had left the portal, and once again fell into step beside her.

“We have found out,” the Queen said, “many important things this day.”

“We have lost a chance.”

“But we have gained knowledge.”

“We have learned that everyone has a price,” the Queen said softly, looking at Cat.

“We just have to know what you treasure, and what you want.”

The Queen let her hand brush over Kristin’s face as the third Alphiri spoke.

“And we can find out.”

The Queen paused, staring at each face as though committing them to memory, and then turned with slow and deliberate menace to where Thea stood a little way apart from the others. Terry, still holding Thea’s hand, tightened his fingers.

“We know who has what we want,” the Queen said.

“We know where it is.”

“We know how to get it.”

“We go now. We may have to start again, but we have done that many times before.”

“We have time,” said the first minion. “We have patience. We have resources we have yet to tap.”

“We will return.”

The Queen gazed at Thea’s face, then glanced, with a small enigmatic smile, at Terry, and at the still clasped hands that linked the two.

A sudden black terror bloomed in Thea’s mind.

We know what you treasure, and what you want
.

The Queen had looked at every one of Thea’s friends individually, as though each of them was prey, gazelles to a prowling lioness, to be stalked and slaughtered at a mere whim. But the look she had given Terry had been more that that, it had been a look that Thea herself had been meant to see, and understand.

She
, Thea, was the new quarry. And the Alphiri, although they would obey the letter of the law and their Trade Codex, had shown how willing they were to ignore the spirit of that law. They would bend the law into a pretzel to make sure they were
covered if challenged, but they would eventually find a way around every barrier that could be raised against them.

They had shown their hand too early this time, and had acted with more rash carelessness than prudent planning. From here on, they would lay their snares with more cunning and subtlety.

And it was entirely possible that nobody Thea cared about would ever be safe again.

Y
ou haven’t felt Alphiri fury. Not yet. Not completely.

Long after the Alphiri Queen and her escorts had stepped back through their portal and vanished from the plateau outside Cheveyo’s house, these words of the Faele Queen pulsed in Thea’s mind.

She had snatched her hand from Terry’s even as the Alphiri Queen had walked away. She felt him flinch at the suddenness and force of it, but could not look at him, or any of them, as if the mere act of taking her own eyes off them would render them invisible to the Alphiri. She stumbled half-blindly around the ridge of red rock that rose at the back of Cheveyo’s abode, and no footsteps followed her.

She felt, rather than saw, Tawaha taking his leave of the company—the day suddenly dipped into sunset around her, darkening into deeper shades
of twilight to the east.
Where you are and where light is, I will be with you
. Tawaha had promised her that, but now there seemed to be more at stake than just herself. Her mind raced with images of all the people she now needed Tawaha to watch over—her family, her friends, people like Lorenzo and Beltran de los Reyes, even random strangers off the street whose well-being she could not remotely be considered responsible for but whom she would find it difficult to simply abandon to a fate she knew to be uncomfortable or unpleasant at the hands of the Alphiri if the possibility of preventing that was dangled in front of her.

Even people who could be expected to be able to take care of themselves—Humphrey May and Nikola Tesla.

She sat on a nearby boulder and buried her face in her hands. She had been building up her world, slowly—from the inner circle of her family to the sphere of her friends at the Academy to the wider arena of people who were mentors or teachers and proud of what she was and she could yet become, but now it was crumbling around her again. What she had thought of as her strength was turning out to be her greatest vulnerability.

She suddenly understood the loneliness and isolation that she had often sensed in Nikola Tesla, who must have been faced with similar choices.

A skitter of pebbles and the soft sound of a footfall on red dust alerted Thea to the fact that she was no longer alone, but she waited for a moment before she wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked up.

Humphrey May stood above her, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

“Your friend Cheveyo suggested we eat something,” Humphrey said. “Are you hungry?”

Thea shook her head mutely.

Humphrey squatted down beside her, reaching out to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Thea, what did the Queen
say
to you? Did she threaten you? We can protect you—there are avenues—”

“They won’t come for me,” Thea said. “Not directly.”

He looked a little startled, and then nodded slowly. “I understand,” he murmured. “But we can deal with that. They can be constrained—the Polity Court has a long reach, and not even the Alphiri are beyond that.”

“
You
just granted immunity to the Faele, for doing something on our behalf,” Thea said. “There
are too many things they could do. I used to think that I was scared of them, but I never knew what that really meant, not until now.”

“I offered you a job at the FBM once,” Humphrey said. His tone was light, but when Thea looked up at him, his face was completely serious. “That still stands, you know. And if you’re part of the establishment, as it were, the Alphiri would think twice about harming you or the people close to you.”

“Still trying to recruit a tame Elemental for the FBM?” another voice said, and Tesla stepped forward from behind the ridge of the mesa. They had not heard him coming—not surprisingly, since he could choose not to have enough of a physical presence for an audible footfall.

Humphrey uncoiled from his crouch beside Thea, and turned to face the new arrival. “That’s hardly fair,” he said.

Tesla raised an eyebrow. “Fair? When I was available and physically living in this world, your predecessors at the FBM tried very hard to put a leash on me. And it would have been pleasant, in a way, I will have to admit. The safety and security of it, the knowledge that I was behind a rampart and untouchable, the idea that I could have unlimited
funds for what I needed for my work…so long as that work was done on your behalf, at your command. The ordinary, everyday magic of our kind—the kind practiced every day in our world, the one you are most closely charged with at the FBM—has been broken to saddle, and cultivated, and tamed.”

“My father used to wrangle wild magic,” Thea said. “When it escaped from its confines, and took over libraries.”

“We had a lot more of that in my day,” Tesla said. “Back then, we knew less about how things worked, but even so, we understood that there were rules, and that magic had to obey them.” He paused. “All magic, except the Elemental. You have never been able to grasp that Elemental magic
cannot be
broken to your will. Not that, and stay what it is. Your trouble is that you understand magic but no longer completely believe in it. Enchantment shorn of a sense of wonder becomes empty words. And numbers. And bookkeeping.”

“You were no stranger to bookkeeping when you lived among us, as you yourself point out,” Humphrey snapped, losing his temper. “You, too, required money in order to exist. You might have
commanded more power than any of us knew, but by all accounts you were appallingly bad at that bookkeeping you so despise. You were always letting money slip through your fingers, living off credit and beyond your means.”

Tesla gazed at him with what was almost pity. “Yes, and I lived free,” he said. “Ideas are cheap—I gave mine away for nothing, sometimes, when it seemed warranted. I often lent my power to endeavors that I found pleasing or worthy, and asked no return. But I never took money for anything that involved selling my soul.”

Humphrey threw his hands in the air. “You’re right, I don’t
get
it.” He looked down at Thea again. “Come eat something. Come back and talk to us. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

“I agree,” Tesla said unexpectedly. “But before you do, Thea, might I have a word…in private?”

Humphrey looked as though he was about to say something else, but then apparently thought better of it. He squared his shoulders and walked away without looking back.

“I cannot make up my mind about that man,” Thea said in a low voice. She turned to Tesla. “Are you…all right now?”

He smiled and opened a hand; a ball of white lightning danced on his palm. “I am whole,” he said. “And I have you to thank for that. Your friend Tawaha returned Fire to me—but Thea, when I rashly killed my own power, when my own fire died on that altar…” He smiled. “When I concocted this ill-conceived Kaschei plot so many decades ago, I had no idea that the most treasured, the most sacred, the most beloved part of what I chose to call my Kaschei’s needle would one day be carried by a child who was yet to be born, and returned to me with so much grace. That was a brave and selfless choice that you made, back there.”

“I gave you back what was yours,” Thea said. “I saw you weep over it, when you thought it gone. If it was in my power to restore that…”

Tesla reached out a hand and laid it on her shoulder.

“You are an Elemental. We are too alike. You
do
understand,” he said. “The Elemental power is vast, and with this new gift that you have, with so much of it spanning the globe in your day, your own powers can be even greater than I can now imagine. But you are still at the beginning of your journey, and I sense that there is much left for you to learn.”

“But who is there to teach me?” Thea said. “Should I go with Humphrey May’s people, after all?”

Tesla was shaking his head. “The choices you make are yours,” he said, “but always remember what I have said about the FBM. If you do not wish to belong to anyone, then that is not the way to go.”

“But other than them, who is there?” Thea asked again. “I seem to have run in front of the pack, and there’s nobody out here but me…and maybe you.” She paused. “What do you plan to do now? What do you want me to do with the cube?”

“There are…a number of things I have been discussing with Terry, among other people,” Tesla said. “There is always the option of simply escaping into your cyberworld, and existing within your machines, for as long as they do.”

“But that would not be any less of a prison than your cube ever was,” Thea said. “You would be constrained by what the machines could do. You don’t want to be like that hologram that our computer teacher left behind in the Nexus. Before Terry fixed that…”

“I helped out,” Tesla said. “I could see the inner workings that were hard to see from the outside.”

“Yes, but it still remains just a shadow,” Thea said. “Something he left behind when he died. A bit of personality, maybe, and a limited ability to learn as an artificial intelligence, but Twitterpat himself is gone, and that thing will never be alive in the way that you are alive. I think you would find that there are many ways to raise prison bars around yourself.”

“Even if I were to exist not in a single machine, as that other entity does, but in the space that Terry has described to me as cyberspace, which doesn’t exist until you call upon it…Ah, yes, I begin to see your point.” He frowned. “This is your world, not mine, this Cyber Element. It is you who must teach
me
in this regard, and there is much that I still do not understand.”

“When you first made the Elemental cube, and you thought about what would come afterward, what were you planning to do?” Thea asked.

“I suppose it is inevitable that the future changes in unexpected ways,” Tesla said. “But what I called my future has turned into your present; you know it better than I ever could, you know what is possible and what remains a dream. There were some things that I knew would happen, others I only hoped
for—I dreamed of talking to the stars, once upon a time.”

That drew an inadvertent smile from Thea, and Tesla lifted a questioning eyebrow.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just that…talking to stars is not what you might have expected it to be.”

“You speak as one who has done this,” Tesla said.

Thea lifted her eyes to the darkening sky above her, where now a few of the stars were beginning to show their faces. “In a way,” she said. “It seems a long time ago now. Back before I met the Trickster. Or Tawaha. Or knew anything about Elemental magic.”

“Would you like to see them again?”

Grandmother Spider’s approach had been soundless. She was suddenly there, beside them, with long, pale hair swept up in a kind of style that might have been familiar to Tesla on the women of his own time. He gave her a small bow.

“Would they come?” Thea asked.

Grandmother Spider glanced up in time to notice a shooting star fall across the sky. “Not here,” she said. “But
that
—” She tilted her chin toward the
falling star. “That tells me that they might well return. To the place where you first crossed their path. Do you want to come back to the First World, Thea?”

Thea glanced at Tesla. “Might I bring a companion?”

“It could be arranged,” Grandmother Spider said. “You will have to carry him there, as you have already done through many portals. Do you still have your dream catcher?”

“That,” Tesla said, with a faint smile, “is beginning to seem only right. I am getting comfortable with this manner of traveling. And if permitted, it would mean much to me to be able to see this marvel.”

Grandmother Spider inclined her head by way of permission, and Thea fished out her little dream catcher from her pocket, spinning Tesla into it. When only she and Grandmother Spider stood in the shadow of the mesa, she realized that a hole had opened in the ground at her feet. She looked up, her face alight with memory.

“Through a
sipapu
, again?” she said.

“That is the gate into the First World,” Grandmother Spider said. “All the other worlds that you
have seen, or been in, or woven into your life, are like a deck of cards—you can shuffle them, and stack them, and go from one to another with the ease of stepping sideways and finding yourself in a shadow cast by a different sun. But the First World…is the First World. There is nothing beyond it, nothing before it. It is a beginning. There is only one way in.”

“I made a portal there once,” Thea said, and the words were a question.

“It is still there,” Grandmother Spider said. “But it is a way
out
, not a way in. Not even you can step back into that world through such a portal. When you are ready, step into the
sipapu
.”

Without any further hesitation, Thea raised her foot over what seemed to be an impossibly small opening in the ground—and stepped through it, onto a ledge under a different sky, velvet-black and full of huge, bright stars. Some streaked across the heavens like comets and trailed streams of light in their wake, which cast shadows edged in improbable shades of amber, pale blue, red-gold, or pure white. It was the First World she remembered, where she had first walked with Grandmother Spider and had first met Tawaha. And the Trickster.

The place where she had learned to be afraid of the Alphiri.

She fought a sense of panic at that last thought, and busied herself with restoring Tesla’s presence, shutting her mind to all else except the presence of Tesla, and Grandmother Spider, and stars in the sky.

“I think I may have dreamed of this place,” Tesla said, looking around him with fascinated curiosity.

“Many do,” Grandmother Spider said. “You, of all others, might have done—you, who have held in your hands the Fire of the World and were not burned by it. Now, if you will give me a moment…”

Thea touched Tesla’s elbow and motioned him back while Grandmother Spider lifted her face and her hands to the skies. Tesla watched with keen interest as first one of the stars overhead, then another, then a third and a fourth, seemed to leap out of the sky and come streaking down toward the three of them on the rocky ledge, bathing them in colored light.

Tesla lifted a hand and watched it cast different-colored shadows on the ground as the stars came closer.