Gift of the Unmage (23 page)

The computer lab was locked and deserted. Thea punched in the security code, slipped through a crack in the door, heard it snick shut and rearm behind her, then made her way to where a single computer appeared to be on, its screensaver something that could have been a fireworks display, or the night sky full of shooting stars over the First World where Grandmother Spider lived. It cleared as Thea approached and slipped into the chair before it. On the screen, already open, was the document with the handful of desert phrases she had scribbled down earlier today.

She hadn’t known she had saved it. In fact, she could have sworn that she had not. She could have sworn, in fact, that the computer had not been left on in the first place.

The cursor blinked, as it had done earlier, right after the last word, inviting her to
ENTER
.

Her left hand reached up to wrap itself around her feather necklace.

Her right index finger brushed the
ENTER
key, very lightly.

The dreary gray light, which had been barely strong enough to pass through the rain-slicked windowpanes, suddenly became brighter, stronger, sharper, more golden, more solid. The world dissolved around Thea…

…and fell back into shape, like a computer photograph being resolved pixel by pixel on a slow connection, coming into sharper and sharper focus until the gray Pacific Northwest November was gone and she was in a different place, a place now ruled by what Cheveyo would have called Matay’ta, the Ember Moon, the time for coming to terms with one’s own self and spirit.

“And have you finally chosen to do that?” Cheveyo’s voice asked, as if conjured by Thea’s thoughts.

“Are you here? Are you real?” she blurted, turning.

He stood a few paces behind her, a wry smile
on his face leaning on his staff and shaking his head.
Always questions, Catori…

“One thing,” he commented serenely, “has not changed.”

“It
is
you,” Thea said.

“Of course it is. It isn’t quite the same place where you left me, but I find I recognize it quite well. You are to be commended. Your powers of observation are acute.”

“Does that mean that I’ve chosen my world?
This
world?”

“You had better ask someone else that,” Cheveyo said, making a gracious gesture to his left.

Grandmother Spider stepped out of a shadow, smiling.

“Once upon a time, many years from now, in the web of a dreamcatcher,” she said. “Hello, my granddaughter, well met again. Your world, you will find, is one that touches many. You can live in a world where you can be anything you want—and if ever you are trapped in a world where that is impossible, all you have to do is step up to the border where those two meet—the place where you can stand in both worlds at once, and use all the power granted in the one
world in whatever other place it is needed.”

“So can I do this?” Thea whispered. “Can I go out and fight the Nothing?”

“You can do,” Cheveyo said, “whatever needs to be done, Catori. Have you chosen the battlefield?”

“Yes,” Thea said, and in her mind an ocean stirred.

The same image of the empty sea trembled suddenly on a tiny dreamcatcher cradled in Grandmother Spider’s palm.

“This path,” Grandmother Spider said gently, “holds pain, my child. It holds achievement, but also betrayal. You are using the nature of the world to fill your own needs. The need is great, but can you live with asking another to pay the price for it?”

“I think,” Thea whispered, “that this is what I was born to do; this is why I stepped out of my own world and watched it from the sidelines. I am the last weapon in my kind’s war of survival, the only weapon there is, the only one for which there is no defense or counterblow—because nobody knows it exists….”

“You are beginning to understand the reasons behind your choices,” Grandmother Spider said.
“It will be hard, my child. It will be harder than you can believe.”

The dreamcatcher ocean stirred, and a single small boat that had not been there a moment before suddenly bobbed upon its surface. And then Thea was in it, and the desert had gone—vanished as though it had never existed.

She found herself sitting in a wooden craft carved with stylized depictions of whales, a single oar laid beside her feet, bobbing and drifting on a pewter-gray ocean with walls of clammy sea-fog surrounding her, almost close enough to touch.

It was cold, bitingly cold, and she shivered violently. She seemed to be utterly alone here in the place where she was supposed to call on Magpie’s sacrificial whale, and see it come and allow itself to be taken by her harpoon (Oar? What oar? It had changed into something wickedly sharp that glimmered with an edge and a deadly point even in the blunt and suffused half-light of this strange place).

But first she was supposed to call it.

Her music came to her very faintly, as though sent by Cheveyo as his gift from the red hills behind his house where she had first heard it—
the creation song that Grandmother Spider had said was Thea’s own melody, her own version of the First Song. She began humming it, softly at first, but then louder and louder; strands of it separated and fell away, swallowed by the mist, vanishing into the depths of the ocean, weaving together the web of worlds that Thea needed.

The world of Cheveyo’s wisdom, her own reality, where her aunt was probably even now marshalling the authorities of Thea’s life against her.

The world of Magpie’s ancestors and their legends, and the power of an ancient bargain.

The world where, she suddenly realized, she could not feel or see the presence of the Nothing at all—the world of innocence, of a primeval purity, and one where the Alphiri had probably never been…and where, therefore, the Nothing had had no access.

Until now. Until Thea Winthrop chose to defile it.

There was a sharp pain that crept into her song at that realization. She had not, even now, even at this breaking point, been sure that she could do this—that she could call, that the Nothing would come. But now she knew that it would. It was a new world, a pristine world, and
anything that had the Alphiri associated with it would not be able to resist conquering a new and untapped market.

There were tears in Thea’s eyes and in her voice as her fingers wove the melody into a strand of the dull gray fog and then twined both into a short piece of cloud-colored ribbon. She could do this, here, in this world, her world, the world she had called into being. She had been right. This had been the right choice, the right thing to do.

She had not bargained on the guilt…or, worse, on the solitude, the loneliness.

In a sense she had been alone all her days, with few true friends, as though her entire life had been training her for this moment. She had been alone so long that she had not thought it would matter to her anymore. But that was before she had come to the Academy…before she had met Magpie, Tess, Terry, and Ben. The ones who had made a world with her. She suddenly missed them all, missed them fiercely, missed them with a sinking feeling of having isolated herself from a source of strength without which she would find it impossible to carry out her plans.

Somewhere, far away from the mist-shrouded ocean on which she waited, Thea hummed an echo of the same song of power in defiance of the evil that threatened her own world, heard herself call the Nothing to her, challenge its mindless powers of destruction, focus all of it back on herself—the easy target, back in that other world, the child believed to be without magic, dabbling with things she did not understand, reaching for a power too far beyond her reach. An inconsequential insect, a gnat, an annoyance. It would be the work of a moment to sweep her aside, to swallow her whole, to roll over her with a heavy weight and obliterate her as if she had never been.

And it would have done exactly that, if Thea had had a spark of magic in her home world, where the “real” Thea was.

Instead, the Nothing bore down on her, focusing its full malevolence onto the lone voice of this thin and reedy magical challenge—and passed through her like she was not there, like she was a wraith. No, like she was a Portal—she was the gate through which it roared in the full knowledge that no magical barrier or power could stand before it, and Thea almost buckled
with the sheer weight and force of its darkness. But she stood her ground, and it was past her, and then gone. And there was a part of her that recoiled at its passing. But another part, that which had remained in her world and had stood as bait for the thing that she hunted, watched the Nothing leave that world, and slammed the gate-that-was-herself shut behind it, barring all return.

For a moment she thought she glimpsed a pair of glowing eyes, fierce with fury—golden eyes,
Alphiri
eyes—but she could not be sure. It might just have been her own fears taking shape.

Her world was clean. There was no trace remaining of the Nothing’s dark shadow. Everything she knew and loved was safe.

But now the Nothing was
here
, in this world of mist and water that she had brought into existence to trap it. Here with her, and lured under false pretenses—lured with the promise of feeding on magic, on new magic from an untapped world—and Thea suddenly knew what her aunt had meant when the two of them had spoken of the Nothing for the first time on the telephone before Twitterpat’s death…. Was it really only days ago?
Like that smoky last gasp of a just-
extinguished candle,
Zoë had said.
Like the weight of night. Like a stench of carrion.
There was a smell of carrion in the air around Thea now, a smell of something long-dead, decomposing, bones showing through melting flesh.

And here, because here her magic was strong, the Nothing was strong, too. It had an enemy to face.

Or was it an enemy?

A hunger that cannot be sated.

It feeds on magic.

The Alphiri bring it….

Thea had been thinking about the Nothing, and these were things she had been told about it, or had overheard recently. But there was suddenly something else there, a memory of long ago—she had been a child, curious as always, and lurking by a half-open door to the living room where her parents had been having a party. Before being whisked back to bed, Thea had heard snatches of conversation that had meant nothing to her then, which had since been buried under all the other information about the Alphiri she had gathered in the process of growing up in her world. Now those snatches of conversation returned to her and began to make sense.

“The Alphiri don’t have an ounce of a native creativity…. They buy, they tweak or repackage, they sell…. They have nothing at all that we would call magic….”

Her father’s voice. He had known the answers all the time.

If the Alphiri could create their own dreams, they would never have needed the rigid framework of the Trade Codex, where everything could be bought. If the Alphiri could create their own dreams, they might begin to build their souls. But they were empty, they were beautiful vessels into which things could be poured and from which those same things, subtly changed, could be poured out—for a price—but they were empty, and that was what they were really after in all of their bargains, the small print in every bargain they made. That was why they contacted other cultures, other nations, other races. They were desperately searching for something—something that was essential, something without which any race, even one as long-lived and proficient at trade as their own, would stagnate, and then begin to die with no hope of rebirth and no legacy. Good bargains were not made for long memories.

They were looking for their souls. For the spirit of their race.

And for this, they had made a tool. A monster. Something that bled worlds dry of the things that the Alphiri might want, might find too expensive to buy or impossible to bargain for. And they had been doing this for a long time, in many places, to many living things in their time. What was it that Grandmother Spider had called them?
World-eaters.

The Nothing was out there to gather anything that could further this quest. It was just the bad luck of the human polity that the Alphiri wanted its magic, its dreams—and that humans were fragile enough not to be able to survive having their essence sucked out of them by this lethal instrument of the Alphiri.

Here in this empty new world Thea had made, there was nothing else for the Nothing to focus on…except herself. Herself and perhaps the whale that was the embodiment of the bargain Magpie’s people had made with the sea and its creatures.

But there was no whale. The still surface of the ocean was undisturbed, calm, almost oily, smooth like silk, rolling with deep heavy waves,
rocking her craft gently where Thea sat in the mist humming the First Song and drawing to her the enemy of her world, of her people.

And the Nothing gathered itself against her.

The mist suddenly stirred, and the ocean surface rippled as though something had touched it and passed on. Without halting her calling tune, Thea turned her head a little, watching. But it was not the whale she was waiting for. Not yet.

When the bow of another small boat emerged from the wall of sea fog, Thea could only smile.

2.

I
n the back, Terry and Tess plied a pair of sturdy oars; Ben sat in the middle, clutching a harpoon that was a twin to her own; in the front, right up in the point of the bow carved in the likeness of a whale, sat Magpie, a vividly colored woven blanket around her shoulders, something bright bound on her forehead like a star, long dangling earrings in her ears, catching even the light that was not there in that muted gray murk and glowing like a spark of sacred fire.

Like the ribbon of fire that Thea had once stolen from the sun.
Where you are and where light is, I will always be with you
, Tawaha had
promised. And there was light, here, now. Not the vivid hot light of the desert, but it was day—and somewhere, up above the mists, the sun was up. Tawaha. Even here, in this strange place, Tawaha.