Worldweavers: Spellspam (12 page)

“What?” he said. “Would you like some hash
browns? Help yourself.”

“But it wasn’t there,” Thea said. “When I came in.”

“You probably weren’t thinking about it,” Beltran said. “This is an Elemental house. It will come up with what’s necessary.”

Thea had heard the term, but it had been buried in adult conversation to which she had not been paying attention. She now filed it away under “Ask Aunt Zoë.” In the meantime, she was aware that Beltran was staring at her.

She flushed again, and hated herself for it. She had never been particularly self-conscious about her appearance—she had grown up the only girl in a family of brothers, and she had never been primpy, self-obsessed, or vain. But now, in the house where Isabella de los Reyes lived and under the scrutiny of Isabella’s brother, she found herself suddenly wishing she were taller, or blonder, or somehow more worthy of notice on a purely physical level.

Which confused and annoyed her, because she had met this particular young man only the night before, had formed no special opinion of him other than perhaps a faint dislike, and the very idea that she had felt even the least need to
appear agreeable to him made her feel suddenly crabby.

“What?” she said, more sharply that she had intended. “Have I got omelet on my nose or something?”

His thin lips stretched into a strange smile, and his eyes glittered behind his glasses. “Not at all,” he said. “I was just…curious.”

Thea bent over her mandarin, peeling it with studied attention, letting her hair fall forward to cover her face. “Anything I can help you with?” she said, aware that she was coming across as appallingly rude, but seemingly unable to help herself.

“I was just wondering what it was about you that made Wiley run,” Beltran said conversationally.

“Who’s Wiley?” Thea asked, looking up, bewildered.

“My tutor. Cary Wiley. He was supposed to be here all summer, and then we got notification that you and that other kid were coming. At the moment your name came up, all of a sudden, Wiley had business elsewhere…business that would last precisely the length of your stay here.” He gave Thea a sharp look, but his voice
was as light and unconcerned as though he were discussing the weather forecast. “Anyone would think he was running away.”

“So what makes you think it was me?” Thea said. “Maybe it’s Terry he’s afraid of.”

“That’s just it; he isn’t usually afraid of anyone,” Beltran said, his tone still as lightly conversational. “But it was
your
name that did it. I was just curious. You don’t look dangerous to me, but Wiley may know things from your dark past that even my father wasn’t told….”

“I don’t have a dark past,” said Thea, exasperated. “I don’t have a clue why your tutor decided to leave.”

“Double Seventh,” Beltran murmured.

Thea stared at him. “Yeah, so?”

“So nothing,” he said. “My father might be the authority on a lot of things, but odd magic is something that’s right up his alley, having had me.”

“Odd?” Thea said, frowning a little.

“Odd,” Beltran said, shrugging his shoulders. “You know,
strange.
Weird. I’ve always been schooled by tutors, in this house—I’ve been known to…forget where I was, sometimes. I guess they just don’t think I could be trusted to
find my way home from, you know, an actual
school
, not without a nanny. Even if the rest of it didn’t make the idea of sending me out into society a little scary.”

“Why would it be scary?”

“Like I said,” Beltran said, and crossed his eyes, sticking his tongue out. “I’m
strange
.”

“We’re all strange, when it comes to that,” Thea said.

“Well, yeah,” Beltran said, returning his face to its normal parameters. “I suspect that’s the reason you washed up here.”

Suddenly acutely self-conscious under his apprising gaze, Thea put the remnants of her mandarin on her plate and pushed her chair back with such force that she nearly overturned it.

“I have to go,” she said in a high-pitched voice she barely recognized as her own. “The professor is expecting me at nine.”

She picked up her plate and the dirty silverware, looking around for somewhere obvious to put them. Beltran laughed softly, as though he had won some sort of a game.

“Just leave them there,” he said. “The house will take care of it. And you don’t want to keep Father waiting.”

Thea all but threw the plate on the table and fled his uncomfortable presence, pursued by the sound of soft, mocking laughter as she made her way across the tiled floor of the entrance hall toward the professor’s office.

S
HE AND TERRY, WHOM
she discovered loitering self-consciously outside the closed double doors that led into the professor’s inner sanctum, entered together. Sebastian de los Reyes held court in a room paneled in Spanish oak and redolent with the scent of leather-bound books and a whiff of wood polish. He greeted the two of them with a regal nod from behind a vast antique desk, inlaid with leather. A couple of neat manila folders and a red leather journal book lay in front of him, together with a bronze desk lamp with an antique patina and a green shade, a pewter cup containing a single fountain pen, a couple of small photographs in silver frames, and a brass egg-shaped ball on an elaborately carved pedestal with tiny dragon-claw feet at each corner.

“Come in,” the professor said, “you are punctual and this is good. We will have a talk before
we decide what needs to be done with the two of you this summer. Terry Dane, shall we start with you?”

“Sir,” Thea said, her heart beating rather fast, seeing as she was basically derailing the professor’s plans for the morning, “there’s a problem that we need to fix first—before Terry is free to speak….”

She quailed a little, as the professor’s bright raptor eyes turned a sharp glance on her.

“Oh?” he said. The voice was a little cool, but not as forbidding as Thea had been expecting. She took a deep breath.

“You’ve probably been told that he cannot speak of…of anything magic,” Thea said. “It’s an allergy.”

“An allergy. Yes.” The professor steepled his fingers before his face, his elbows on the desk, the golden signet ring on his finger glinting.

“I can…fix it,” Thea said, her throat dry. “I was able to, back at the Academy. But the problem is…”

“Yes?” the professor prompted.

Thea swallowed. “I need a computer to do it,” she said. “I brought a laptop, but it needs to be plugged in to recharge the battery, and when
Terry and I tried to do it, the thing just…”

“Ah,” the professor said, one eyebrow rising. “You ran afoul of the Elemental framework. My house does not permit devices capable of potential…damage…without my express permission, and without them being under my control.”

“Sir, that’s the reason they sent me here,” Thea said bravely, lifting her chin. “What I do, I do with a computer. If not my own, then I need access to one that works in this house, with your permission.”

“This isn’t insurmountable, but it will take a little bit of time to deal with,” the professor said. “In the meantime…Terry, too, was sent here because he is connected to the Academy Nexus.”

Thea inadvertently glanced around for eavesdroppers; Terry, however, merely nodded.

“I have here letters of reference from a number of people, including your principal and at least two high-ranking Washington people,” the professor said to Terry. “Your connection to this Nexus has already been approved. This is one of the hubs of known magic in this world, but I think that it has already been established not
to cause you any of your usual…difficulties. We will deal with the laptop situation later—but under the circumstances…” He frowned slightly, tapping one long finger on his desk, and then rose from it in one elegant fluid motion. “I have had students staying here with me before, working on certain aspects of their chosen field where I could mentor and assist them—but neither of you is quite the store of student that I am accustomed to. I was hoping to spend some time getting to know the special circumstances that brought the two of you to me, and to postpone the Nexus itself until at least our next interview, but it seems that if we are to get anywhere today those plans need to change. Please do me the courtesy of staying silent and in your seats.”

“Yes, sir,” Thea said meekly.

The professor crossed the office to a wall completely covered with bookshelves. He stood before the shelves for a few moments, his hands clasped behind his back, looking for all the world as though he was scrutinizing the shelves for a particular volume. Then he casually let his hands fall away from each other and reached for a book with his right hand while his left rose in a tiny, arcane motion too fast for the eye to follow.
As the book he had extracted fell into his hand, the bookshelves shimmered gently, as though a veil had been dropped between the wall and the professor, and then dissolved away altogether to reveal a wall bare of both decoration and any working parts, other than a small niche that contained a built-in desk barely large enough to contain a flat monitor, a slim keyboard, and a tiny cordless optical mouse. There was only just enough room left over for the professor to lay down the book he was still holding; he did so, and tapped something on the keyboard. The monitor blinked and came to life. The professor tapped some more and then turned his head marginally.

“Well,” he said. “Bring a chair over, if you please, and let me see what it is that we are up against here.”

“Thea,” Terry murmured, rising slowly out of his chair.

“May I?” Thea said, getting up off her own chair and carrying it over to the keyboard. The professor made room for her, but hovered over her shoulder, still within arm’s reach of the keyboard.

“Tell me what you are doing as you do it,” he instructed.

“I’m just…writing it down,” Thea said, settling down to type. “Nothing different—this room, you, us…but one sphere removed, a world where Terry’s allergy doesn’t exist.”

“Fascinating,” the professor murmured, bending slightly at the waist in order to read over Thea’s shoulder.

She hesitated for a moment when she was done, her hand hovering over the
ENTER
key. “Will your house…accept this?”

“I have no idea,” the professor said. “The exact circumstances have never come up. However, I am present, and I am able to countermand any erroneous responses on the house’s behalf.”

“What
is
an Elemental house?” Thea asked.

“Now is hardly the time to discuss that particular issue,” the professor said, with just a hint of rebuke. “Please proceed.”

Thea flinched at the cool reprimand in his voice, and hunched over the keyboard. The wraith of Cheveyo stood at her elbow, shaking his head.
Questions, always questions with you, Catori…

She closed her eyes when she hit
ENTER
, but nothing happened—beyond the now-familiar tiny shiver as the worlds she had shuffled settled
back down around her, in the new and different conformation.

“Say ‘spellspam,’” Thea said over her shoulder to Terry.

He cleared his throat. “Spellspam,” he croaked. The professor looked up in professional curiosity, waiting to see if Terry would choke on his own words—but the house had apparently accepted Thea’s instructions and was happy to allow the existence of the world-bubble Thea had created.

“Fascinating,” the professor repeated. “I do believe you are something I had lost all hope of seeing before I die. Something genuinely new. I have never, in any aspect of my professional capacity, seen this done before. I have had a suspicion that maybe…” He had been about to say something, perhaps something confidential, but caught himself, breaking off in mid-sentence and striding back to his desk. “All right,” he said, briskly businesslike once again. “I have the basic information in these folders, but it is clear to me already that they have told me nothing at all of what I really wish to know. So—we will talk. Start at the beginning, please, and tell me everything. Even the
things you consider unimportant.”

“I didn’t really start—,” Terry began.

“I was always—,” Thea said at the same time.

The professor sighed and lifted a finger.

“One at a time,” he said, “would be infinitely more useful.”

“Yours,” Terry said after a pause, turning to Thea. “I came in later. I’ll pick up as we go.”

“I…,” Thea said, and then dried up completely, skewered by both the professor’s hawk eyes and Terry’s own far more friendly gaze. She sat for a moment in her chair, hands folded in her lap, trying to corral her words. “Can’t I just show you?” she asked at last, plaintively.

“I do believe you have done so,” the professor murmured. “However, in my classroom I have often found it useful to have a student actually put into words something that had been merely action. As far as I know, you are unique right now amongst the known mages of this world….”

“I may not be,” Thea murmured.

The professor sat up. “What was that?”

“That would be my part of the story, sir,” Terry said. “The things that I suspect. The origins of spellspam.”

“Yes,” said the professor. “I’ve had a few of those…messages. And so have other members of this household. My son’s tutor had to leave…quite suddenly. He pleaded family obligations, but I could not help noticing that he had raven feathers popping out in inconvenient places whenever he stopped paying attention. I have a suspicion that he ran afoul of one of those…
spellspams
…of yours—why he didn’t just say so and let me sort the problem out…”

Thea suddenly sat up, her eyes widening. Raven feathers…? What was it that Beltran had called the absent tutor? Wiley…?
Cary
Wiley?

Corey…? In this house…?

“There is at least one mage at government level who wants to believe that Thea was behind it,” Terry said, oblivious to Thea’s reaction. “Because, as you yourself have said, she is…unique. Or so we thought. But there must be at least one other person out there who is capable of manipulating magic through the computer. And it gets worse…”

“Go on,” the professor said.

“I think it takes something like a Nexus to
send the messages with working spells attached. It wasn’t the Academy Nexus…and the only other one…is here,” Terry said slowly, almost unwillingly. At the Academy, it had sounded perfectly feasible as just an idea; here, in this room, it sounded uncomfortably like an accusation.

And the professor certainly took it as one. His eyes flashed in anger, and he pushed back his chair from the immaculate desk with both hands. “You’re telling me that
my
Nexus has been hacked?” he snapped. “Impossible. You have already discovered for yourselves what a formidable firewall this house is, by definition—over and above that, I have personally set up the security of this installation, and I have not observed any breaches in that security.”

“Nevertheless,” said Terry, going rather white but not giving ground. “I haven’t been able to trace them back here, that is true. But I do believe that everything that we have believed about computers cannot be completely wrong—they are good storage devices, and they are good propagators…but I don’t believe that some small-time hacker playing around with a basic home computer could have unleashed something
like the spellspam epidemic. That needed power. A
lot
of power. The sort of power only this kind of computer has. So either it’s your machine, or someone else has built a Nexus-type computer that isn’t under our control….”

The professor’s eyes were still glittering dangerously, but he had his temper in check now. “I see,” he said, after a long pause. “It looks like we are going to have a lot of work to do. You were sent here for me to help
you
, but it appears that you’ll very much be returning that favor. You are telling me that you believe that the Nexus has been compromised without my knowledge?”

“Yes, sir,” said Terry faintly.

“If it has, then it was done by a very subtle hand,” the professor said softly. But then he collected himself. “All right,” he said briskly. “We will proceed according to the original schedule, and then we will see where we can go from there. I still need to know everything that you know. For your part, Galathea, if you can tell me the
where
and the
why
, we can figure out the
how
and maybe that will give us the rest of the answers. As for the Nexus…”

“I’ve been pretty much running the one at the
Academy for the last semester,” Terry said.

“By which you are trying to tell me that those who entrusted you with that task believe you to be competent to carry it out,” the professor said. “But if you are right, and the second Nexus has been hacked in a way that left me ignorant of the state of affairs, then we will need to proceed very carefully indeed.” He smiled, and the smile was not a pleasant one. “You may know much—you are young, after all, and the cutting edge of knowledge always belongs to the next generation. But I think I may have things to teach you yet….”

Thea looked away, because the glitter in the professor’s eyes suddenly scared her. Humphrey May had said that he would be on her side, but it was with something not entirely unlike the sensation of stepping into a cold winter from a nice warm room that Thea realized that sometimes the line between adversary and ally could be a very fine one.

And with Corey in the game…

She shivered, letting her gaze skitter across neat bookshelves filled with rows of books, and then past them onto the picture window that
opened behind the professor’s armchair. It was only then that she saw that there was something resting against the chair, something that she had failed to notice before—the glowing polished wood of a Spanish guitar.