Gift of the Unmage (22 page)

“I have a cold,” Ben said. He ended on a rising note, making his words come out rather more like a question than a statement, as though he was asking himself to believe his own assertion before he could convince anyone else of its truth.

“Wait a minute. It’s up. Let me figure out…” Terry tapped a few keys, focused on the changing screen.

Magpie and Tess and Ben all hung back, but Thea suddenly sat forward.

“What was that?”

“What?” Terry said, startled out of his fierce concentration.

“Go back a sec,” Thea said, pointing at the screen. “That. I thought I saw…”

“But that’s just my report of the Hoh field trip,” Terry said, annoyed and a little bewildered. “What’s that got to do with—”

Magpie looked up with a sudden start, her eyes wide. Tess’s tongue moistened her lips. Terry’s hands were frozen over the keyboard.

Thea felt a whiff of moisture-laden, forest-green air that had no business being in the computer lab.

When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield.

“Wait a minute,” Thea said. “Let me see that report.”

Terry looked up, at a complete loss.

“Just do it,” Tess said.

He brought the cursor over the file name, let it hover there for another moment, then shrugged his shoulders, and clicked the mouse to open the file.

The screen changed again, into a word-processing program, and after a moment the Hoh forest trip document appeared on the screen. Terry was not a particularly lush writer at the best of times and this prose was more spare than most, being a dry school report on an official outing, but the words that
were
there suddenly triggered Thea’s own memories of the trip. They sparked the images in Thea’s mind’s eye, and that was the beginning.

The rest followed, falling into place with an air of uncanny inevitability.

Thea’s images—the color washed over them,
rushed in and obliterated the mundane benches and the blank computer screens that surrounded the five of them. The filtered light of an ancient forest; glimpses of a gleaming white waterfall or glassy green mountain stream; the many shades of forest green, from moss to fern to cedar fronds; the glimpses of the reddish cedar heartwood revealed by the peeling bark of old stumps; the twisted grayish burls on the spruce trees; the distant glimpse of blue sky and white clouds that was sometimes allowed to intrude like a strange vision, into this shrouded, mystical place.

Magpie’s touch, the touch of the healer’s hands that understand what they hold—the harsh ridged bark of old cedars, the feathery brush of fern fronds, the rough texture of moss-and lichen-upholstered big leaf maples.

Ben (who had sneezed one last time and then, miraculously, stopped) came in with the slightly damp green smell of the woods, the fresh rush of air beside a waterfall, the smell of sap on trees and broken branches and trampled moss.

Tess brought a slightly acrid, slightly breeze-fresh taste of the open air and the ancient wood, as well as an ancestral memory of this place being a hunting ground for a people not her
own, of feasts long forgotten where elk and bear reared by this forest had offered themselves for the good of the tribe.

Terry provided the soundtrack—the whisper of wind in the treetops, the sound of rushing water, the crack of a twig breaking, the rustle of some small creature in the underbrush.

And they were there, the five of them, standing bewildered and awestruck beside a stream broken into white-water rapids, ancient trees looming over them like pillars in some long-gone but still magnificent cathedral. The computer lab had completely disappeared, as if it had never existed.

They all knew that they had created this place, somehow, together. Just how, none of them had any idea. Not a single one of them was supposed to have the ability to do anything like this—if they had, they would not have been at the Last Ditch School. But they had done it…and what was more, they had done it breaking all the rules of magic.

They had done it with a computer.

This was not possible. This was not
doable
. Computers were inert things used to safely store spells. They simply were not magical.

And yet, they were.

Or one of them was….

“What did you do to your computer, Terry?” Tess asked carefully, too afraid to move, standing frozen in the place where this world had set her down.

“Not a thing that I know of,” Terry said, staring at the woods as though willing himself to believe that they were not there.

“This is supposed to be magic, right?” Ben said in a small voice.

Magpie turned to look at him. “Your guess is as good as ours,” she said.

“But I am not sneezing,” he pointed out. He took a step back, craning his head to gaze at the tops of the huge trees, and then winced, looking down. He lifted his foot with a gesture of distaste. “And hold back on the hyperreality, would you? I know you had trouble with one on the last field trip, Magpie, but I could have done without the slug….”

Thea fought the urge to giggle out loud, suddenly remembering her brothers and the banana slug conversation from the afternoon of her homecoming. Aunt Zoë had been moved to comment somewhat acidly at the time, as they had
abandoned the menfolk in the backyard, that whenever you got the Winthrop brothers together their average age appeared to drop to about twelve.

“All right,” Tess said, yanking Thea back into the present.
“What just happened?”

Magpie suddenly turned and smiled at Thea. “I think
you
know,” she said.

Thea was about to deny all knowledge, and then Cheveyo was there in her mind, smiling, and behind him Grandmother Spider and Big Elk.

There are many worlds, and you have yet to find your own
.

“I suppose,” Thea said slowly, “it’s my fault….”

“Where
are
we?” Tess said, staring at the crowns of the towering trees.

“Hoh forest, of course,” Magpie said. “That’s what the report said.”

“What report?”

“Yours, Terry. The one on your computer. The one Thea used to build this place.”

“There’s nothing like this in my report,” Terry said frankly. “I wrote as little as I could get away with. It’s just the facts, no more. There is no
imagery in it at all—there is nothing remotely like this….”

“But you do remember it like this?”

“Um, yes,” Terry said, “now that you bring it up. But not
quite
this. It’s…different. Just a bit. Just enough.”

“Yeah,” Magpie said. “It’s Thea-Hoh. Not the real place. It’s virtual reality. We aren’t there now, not really….”

“Oh, yes we are,” Ben said, scuffing slug off his shoe.

“Yes, but not
really
,” Magpie insisted. “We’re in the computer lab back at the school, aren’t we?”

“I have no idea,” Thea said softly. “Not about the details of it. But yes, there are different worlds…many different worlds…and I have walked a number of them. They told me that I had to find the one that truly belonged to me….”

Terry was staring at her strangely. “
Who
told you?”

So Thea told them, very briefly, about her summer in Cheveyo’s country and the things she had learned there.

And then she told them the most important thing of all.

“Cheveyo said…I could choose the battlefield,” she said softly. “What about a world that is not of our own? The Nothing feeds on the magic of our world—we heard them say so. But what if a person completely devoid of magic in that world lured it here instead and forced the real battle to take place far away from the worlds where it is strong? What if I could draw it away and fight it in a place like this?”

“You mean
us
,” Magpie said with a watery grin. “We all did this together, somehow.”

“Absolutely!” said Ben valiantly. “We’re all in it.”

“Loviqu’ta,” whispered Thea. “Hunters Moon…”

They were looking at her, as if she was the only one who knew what she was doing. And in a way, they were frighteningly right.

But Magpie grinned at the phrase, and suddenly the grin was wolfish. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Hunters.”

“But how is it possible?” said Terry doggedly. “Computers don’t do things like this.”

“Computers are just tools,” Tess said.

“Yeah,” agreed Ben enthusiastically. “Maybe you guys could ask Twitterpat when he gets
back. I always thought he was kind of cool…for a teacher.”

“Thea,” Terry said, “how do we get back? I still have to find out…”

He blinked and his voice died mid-sentence. He was sitting in his computer chair, hands poised over his keyboard.

“Hey,” he said. “
Hey
. How’d you do that?”

Thea was trembling and very pale. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I can. I can sense that I can. I wanted us back and I got us back. Don’t ask me how I did it.”

He stared at her, his gaze troubled, and then turned to his computer again, closing out of the dangerous field trip report that was still on screen and calling up a Terranet search engine.

“So…when were you thinking that we should do this thing? Whatever it is that we’re, uh, planning to do?” Ben said.

“We’d better wait until Twitterpat
does
get back,” said Tess carefully. “We might be meddling with things we don’t—What’s the matter, Terry?”

Terry’s expression had suddenly set into a mask, a mask that was equal parts fury, pity, and grief.

“I got into the Terranet,” he said abruptly. “We can’t wait to ask Twitterpat anything.”

“Why?” Tess asked. She and Magpie both leaned over the computer, craning their necks at the screen. Thea let out a small keening sound.

Terry stood, dragging both hands through his hair in a motion of pure despair.

“It’s right there, in today’s Terranet headlines,” he said, carefully not looking at any of his friends. “Patrick Wittering is dead.”

1.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
brave talk and grand plans out there in Thea-Hoh, in the world that they had created—but the news of Twitterpat’s death seemed to have smothered those ideas right out of existence. After their return from the virtual world, Thea and the others avoided talking about their experience. In fact, for nearly a full week, they avoided one another. There was a desperate sense that if they ignored what had happened they might convince one another and the world around them that a particular moment in time had never happened at all—and if they could turn back time to
before
, to an instant before they knew that Twitterpat was dead, then he would still be alive.

All the students at the school knew was that
Patrick Wittering had died protecting one of his fellow Academy teachers who had gone to battle the Nothing. They were not told how or where or even who that other teacher was—and all those who had gone from the school remained missing, fueling speculation that more than one of them might be dead. The specter of the Nothing had been invited into what had been the safe haven of the Academy, had become an ever-present terror that lingered invisibly in the corridors and the classrooms and the cafeteria where meals were eaten in cowed silence.

It is impervious to magic. It eats magic. The more you throw at it the stronger it becomes
.

When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield.

Thea turned these words over and over again in her mind in the days that followed the announcement of Twitterpat’s death and her return from the virtual forest she had created with her friends. The principal’s interpretation of the Nothing. Cheveyo’s parting lesson.

The battle was waiting. The battlefield was obvious.

The virtual world.

The only problem was that she had no idea
what exactly had happened on the night the virtual reality forest had been created. It had just…happened—and happened so fast that she had barely had time to stop and think about any of it. And the others, who had shared the astonishing excursion with her, whose presence had seemed to be so essential in creating that other world, did not seem inclined to repeat the experience.

The only other person with whom she had had any discussions at all on the matter was Magpie, in the shared moments of darkness at night before they both drifted into sleep—and these days sleep was less restful than it might have been, full of disturbing dreams and uneasy forebodings. And even these conversations were indirect; they talked around the subject, the reference to a possible plot to vanquish the Nothing referred to only in general terms, playing with ideas, not with actual plans.

“The Quilcah,” said Magpie on one of these nights, “have a Whale Hunt….”

“How does
that
help?” The covers rustled in the other bed as Thea turned toward her in the darkness. “Ancestral magic, Magpie?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be tradition. Not really.
Only men go on Hunts; women wait on shore with the flensing knives. But maybe some aspects of it can be useful….”

“A Magpie Whale Hunt, out in virtual reality,” Thea said. “Like the Thea-Hoh woods. Tell me about it.”

“One whale feeds many,” Magpie said, her voice very soft. “When it is time, the elders call for a Hunt, and the Hunters will be chosen—many will want to go, but few are called. They are marked, after. They are the Whale Hunters forevermore. And of the small handful who are chosen to go, one is singled out even further. ‘The One Who Calls the Whale.’ There is a melody, a tune, to which the whale will come.”

“I think I know this tune,” Thea said, transported back to the red mesas of Cheveyo’s country, echoing with the First Song.

“It’s always different, for every one who is chosen,” Magpie said.

“I know,” Thea said gently. “Go on.”

“The Whale comes. Many may come, but only one will answer the Call,” Magpie said, her voice dropping into cadences of chant, of tribal wisdom being passed down the generations. “You will know the one, because that Whale will
offer himself to the people—his fat for the winter lamps, his flesh to the living, his bones to the ancestors. And his spirit becomes part of the people, guarding them, helping them, and in time choosing the next Hunter who will go out and call his successor.”

“But the Nothing is exactly the opposite. It’s not likely to come up to you and roll over belly up and invite you to smite it,” Thea said. There was a voice in the back of her mind, Big Elk in the night forest,
The Alphiri brought that. A hunger that will not be sated….
“The Nothing will fight back. It always has so far. Unless…” She tapped her chin with a thoughtful finger, frowning in concentration. “But…what if…what if we create a Magpie Whale Hunt?”

“Huh?” said Magpie. “You aren’t making any sense.”

“We could go back,” Thea said softly. “We could shape that world, the whale hunt world. We would be the ones to decide what laws govern it. If we can lure the Nothing there, we can make it go….” Magpie stirred again, and Thea, anticipating an interruption or an objection, spoke faster, almost gabbling. “No, it makes
sense,
Magpie! If we make a world into which
the Nothing would come, but leave it only one way out. We can do a whale hunt. We can do what your ancestors have done for generations. We can call the whale, and the whale will respond in the way that the whale always does. It can’t help doing that, that’s the way things have always been. But if the one door we leave open for the Nothing is to become one with the whale, then once it’s there, in the body of the whale…it will have to react in the way that the whale would have reacted. It is
supposed
to offer itself. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen; that’s the way we can make it happen.”

“Yes, but if we kill the Nothing-whale in our reality over there, does that mean we destroy the Nothing in this world, too?” Magpie asked. “And are you sure that it would come? How on earth do you call something like that and know it will come to you?”

“It comes to magic,” Thea said.

“But we don’t
have
any,” Magpie pointed out helpfully.

“Not here,” Thea said. “But maybe in that place—in that
other
place. Mag, I’ve walked in a different world and there were things I could do there that just don’t happen when I’m back in
this world. Maybe it’s the same with this. Maybe we can create a place where we can do what we need to do, and it will work.”

“And if we do get it there, and it’s stuck there, and
we
get stuck there with it…?” Magpie asked.

Thea had no answers. The conversation sank into silence, and the silence vanished into sleep, and the dreams came again—the dreams that haunted Thea because she could never quite remember them when she woke. She recalled the dreams she had had back in Cheveyo’s house—visions of the Faele and their gifts and the Alphiri and their offers of trade. Some of her recent dreams were very similar in nature to those earlier ones; others seemed to be about the Nothing and the way it was spreading across the worlds, as Big Elk had said. Thea thought of Grandmother Spider’s sky full of living stars and an iron band tightened painfully around her heart at the thought that the Nothing had come there, too, that some of those star souls had been devoured by it, perhaps were gone forever. Here, in the less rarefied air of a world where her magic was dormant, dreams of any nature appeared less willing to reveal themselves to her
or to stay in her memory for long after she woke. They merely lodged in the back of her mind, like thistles, uncomfortable and prickly.

But while she waited for some sort of sign telling her what she needed to do next, her decisions seemed to make themselves, after all.

Twitterpat’s classes were, for all intents and purposes, suspended after the news of his death, but his students were given tacit approval to complete the assignments that he had left behind—it was a sort of homage, one that the students offered without incentive and one that the school accepted without comment. The supervisory presence that Twitterpat had promised was there, in the shape of one teacher or another—hardly ever the same one, as though the teachers had chosen to give their time to this project as their own homage to one of their colleagues, but somehow by unspoken pact not one of them chose to sit at Twitterpat’s own desk. Usually the presiding teacher, whose attendance was almost unnecessary in terms of keeping the students quiet and working, would wander in quietly at the beginning of a period, find an empty station or bring out a chair and place it in a convenient corner, and read a book for the duration of the class to
the quiet accompaniment of pens scratching on paper and the clatter of keyboards.

It was during one of these classes that Thea, distracted by her inner tumult, allowed her mind to wander back to Cheveyo and his house on the mesa. Outside the classroom window it was a gray and dismal November day, the windowpanes weeping rain and low clouds caught and shredded by the branches of wet cedars almost black in the dim light. But Thea could open a window in her mind and transport herself back to the liquid heat of the desert summer, Tawaha’s light, hot and heavy on her head and shoulders like a cloak. The red mesas reflected the sunshine, gave it color and weight, poured it back into the dusty scree of the sage-scented plains.

Without quite being aware of what she was doing, Thea found herself in a new document in her word-processing software, typing out fragments of sentences, words that evoked Cheveyo to her.

Red mesas. House in the rock. Sunlight hot, heavy with red and gold.

The cursor blinked at her at the end of the last word.

Thea stared at it for a moment, mesmerized,
her hand hovering above her keyboard.

A breath of hot dry air stirred the loose hair around her face.

All I have to do is press
ENTER
.

She looked around, blinking, as though waking from a dream. Two stations away from her, Tess was bent over her keyboard, typing furiously. A little farther away, Terry sat with his hands laced behind the back of his head, staring at his screen, his expression curiously blank. Other students wrote or tapped away or stared at their work with focused concentration. The presiding teacher appeared engrossed in a thick book, marking passages with a yellow highlighter pen.

Nobody was paying any attention at all to Thea.

All I have to do is press
ENTER
. And I will be there.

Ah, but will I be here?

What would happen if she simply…disappeared?

She couldn’t take the chance. But something had crystallized in the back of her mind, a conviction, a decision, a firm intent. None of the others, not even Magpie, appeared to want to try
to achieve that alternate reality, the virtual world, again; they had avoided even talking about it. Very well. She would try it herself. Try it first, with the familiar. With Cheveyo, the mesas, perhaps the Road. Perhaps the Barefoot Road could take her to the next place that she needed to be.

Not now.

Maybe tonight.

She mentioned her intentions to nobody, determined to pursue her own experiment, more certain than ever of what she needed to do. When she was called to the telephone after classes that day, it was almost as if she were continuing a familiar conversation, already well begun, when she heard her aunt’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Thea,” Zoë said, and her voice had an edge of urgency to it, “what is going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I
told
you I can tell when you’re in trouble. I can smell it from here. I can smell the smoke. It’s like you’ve lit a torch, you’re bright with danger, I know you’re up to something and I already know nobody is going to like whatever that is. What are you doing?”

An edge of an old dream suddenly sliced into Zoë’s words. Thea could hear the echo again, the distant words of the Faele clustered around her cradle.
She will be able to conquer nothing.
…

Conquer nothing. Conquer…
Nothing
.

It all seemed so simple now, so clear.

“I know what to do now,” she said. “The Faele told me so, back in the
cradle
, Aunt Zoë. That’s what all this has been about—me and magic and everything I’ve learned.”

“What Faele? Thea, there were no Faele gifts at your birth. Your father made sure of that.”

“But I dreamed about them. I
remember
them. I don’t know how I remember them, but I do—and they did give me gifts. Like they always do. And one of them said I could conquer nothing. I thought that meant that I couldn’t actually
do
anything, but don’t you see? They meant the Nothing, that thing, that enemy that cannot be conquered by magic. The only person who can conquer it is someone
without
magic. Someone who is known to be without magic. Someone like…me.”

“Don’t be silly, Thea,” Zoë said, her voice sharp with fear. “Call your parents. Call them right now, right after you put the phone down. Promise me. Promise me you will not do any
thing stupid. I wish I could just use a Portal and come snatch you right now, but the school is warded against that. Thea, are you there? Are you listening to me? Stay put. Don’t do anything.
Anything
. People have died getting in the way of this thing. Are you listening to me?
Thea!
”

“It’s okay, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said gently. “This is what they made me for.”

She could hear her aunt crying out her name as she replaced the receiver in the cradle, knowing that she was running out of time. Zoë would phone her parents, her teachers, anybody she could think of—anything to try to stop whatever Thea had planned. She had maybe an hour. Maybe less.

Magpie was not in their room when Thea returned there, as if in the grip of dream or compulsion, to retrieve her necklace of three feathers—the light-and-dark-barred turkey feather that granted her patience, the black raven feather that would give her wisdom, the black-and-white eagle’s feather that carried the courage she needed now as never before. Despite the way the phone lines must have been heating up in her wake, in the school itself it was as if a clear passage had opened for Thea—she got her necklace,
left the room, left the residence hall, crossed the grounds, and entered the building where the computer lab was—all without crossing paths with a single person. There was a sense of movement and purpose all around her, the school full of living, breathing beings, students and teachers going about their own business, but Thea moved as if alone in the universe, invisible to others, the others invisible to her.