Worldweavers: Spellspam (21 page)

“You think I’m more like Lorenzo?”

Lorenzo—Larry—was indeed far more like this young Spanish aristocrat than poor Beltran had ever been…but Larry was real. Less of an idealized icon. Full of real-world laughter and pain.

“No,” Thea said. “You’re nothing like Larry.”

Diego took his hand off the dagger hilt and waved it in a gesture of dismissal. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I am not like anyone. I am me. And this is my world. My sphere. I can do what I want and be what I want.”

For a moment that sounded almost painfully wonderful. The much-younger Thea, the girl who had agonized over her inability to touch magic at all, would have given much to have had this kind of ability to escape.

“You can be who you want, too. You can choose.” He stepped back, and behind him, on a wrought-iron stand, was a full-length mirror
framed in a polished dark wood. “You want to see what you look like right now, to me? Come and look.”

“I know what I look like. I know who I am,” Thea said, but the certainty with which she had thought to utter those words was suddenly missing from her voice.

“Are you scared?” Diego asked.

Thea clenched both hands into fists, and then consciously relaxed them, finger by finger. “Of course not.”

“Then come,” he said. “See.”

Refusing would have meant admitting cowardice—but it was not that so much as an irresistible if unwilling curiosity that drew Thea the few steps she needed to take before she faced the mirror.

And then stood quite still, staring at her reflection in silence.

The image began as something almost humiliating—the child that she had once been, hair in two plump braids, a mutinous expression on her face and hands stuck rebelliously into the pockets of her jeans, her feet bare and none too clean. Then the mirror changed; the image flowed and reshaped, blurring as though someone had
thrown a stone into water, and when the reflection was still again quite a different person stood there. Thea found herself gazing into the eyes of a young woman, wheat-gold hair falling loose around her shoulders. A golden filet bound what looked remarkably like a miniature version of one of Grandmother Spider’s spun-glass dreamcatchers on her brow. Her face was thinner than she was used to, an image, perhaps, of what she would still become; she wore a dark-blue gown that reached to the floor, her waist cinched with silver, the off-the-shoulder neckline picked out with silver embroidery along the edges. Silver stars were scattered on the full skirt, making Thea look as though she were wearing the night sky.

“That’s…not me,” she said at last, still staring.

“It is,” Diego said, his voice coming from quite close, and suddenly he was standing right beside her, reflected in the mirror by her side. “This is not a mirror that tells lies.”

We look alike,
Thea thought—an incongruous thought, because it was so obviously untrue. He was dark to her fair, male to her female, opposite in every obvious way—but there was something,
something she could not quite put her finger on. Something in the eyes. Something that had to do with a power that had been sleeping…and which was now awake at last.

T
HEY STOOD SIDE BY
side in silence for a moment, staring at the images in the mirror, and then Thea stirred.

“So why aren’t they here yet?” she said.

“Who?” Diego said blankly.

Thea turned to look at him. “The Alphiri, of course. That’s what’s been bugging me all this time. They were after
me
from the cradle, just waiting in the wings, ready to snatch at whatever happened…”

“The famous Double Seventh,” Diego said, a little sardonically.

“You know about that?”

“I may not live in your world, but that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of it,” Diego said. “Of course
I know about it. But the Alphiri didn’t exactly make it public with you, did they? And anyway, they didn’t
get
you.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Thea said. “And your precious tutor was already in line for a reward once, for trying to turn me in to them—so where is he now? And why hasn’t he collected for delivering you?”

“Because he hasn’t delivered anything,” Diego said. “He never mentioned anything about Alphiri. It was never about that.”

“Uh-huh,” Thea said, unconvinced. “Just when did he show up? Did he come to teach you things, or did he come after you’d already figured stuff out, to sniff around and see if you could be the kind of pay dirt he couldn’t hit with me? How on Earth did he find you, anyway?”

“I didn’t have much of a life, before he turned up—we met in some empty sphere, and he figured out the real possibilities of my connection to Beltran,” Diego said. “But that was…after the first e-mail. I’d already done that much on my own. The rest of it—the campaign—that was something we cooked up together. He said…”

“I have a good idea of what he said. He always
says it—
‘Do I have a deal for you…’
”

“Well, he delivered on his end,” Diego said.

Thea glanced around her at the bare arena they were standing in—the polished floor surrounded by green light, and a single mirror in the midst of it. “Yeah, sure. If you know so much about our world, you should have realized you were unique—with your connection between magic and computers—”

“But I wasn’t,” Diego said. “There’s you.”

“But you didn’t know about me. Very few people knew about me.”

“
Cary
did.”

“Only because he was already in cahoots with the Alphiri, and then he tried to sell me to them. But if you were his next ticket to riches, you ought to be living in a far greater state of magnificence than this. It’s what I would—”

She caught herself, chewing at her lip.

“What you would do?” Diego finished for her. He took his hand from the jeweled dagger and stuck both hands as far as they would go into the pockets of his tight-fitting pants. “That’s why they wanted
you
. Because you can do it as you choose.”

“So can you,” Thea said, surprised. “You’ve
proved that. Good grief, I
went
to that hellhole you made for Humphrey May. You can surely…”

“
I
didn’t make that.
He
did.”

“But you set the spell…”

“Sure. I set a general spell, and everyone who fell into that particular trap took it and ran with it. And created their own weird destination. Those are the best—you give them a push and watch them go running in every direction.”

“You did some foul things,” Thea said.

“I was just enjoying myself,” said Diego, shrugging. “Besides…you may notice that nothing I’ve done has actually
lasted
—it’s all like catching a cold, you get a few sniffles and a runny nose and then a week later you’re fine again.”

“You made people catch things a little worse than a cold, with that disease one,” Thea said sharply. “I mean,
lycanthropy
?”

“That one was Cary’s idea,” Diego said, grinning broadly.

“The werewolf thing or the whole disease idea?” Thea asked, despite her better instincts. She knew there were better things she could be doing than chatting to the guy who had caused the biggest headache her world had known for a very long time—but there was a certain…
professional curiosity.

“Most of the spam ideas were mine,” Diego said, “inspired by Isabella’s preening, some of them, and then a few that were just…wishful thinking. But the diseases one was Cary’s, although I did come up with a few of the actual individual ones myself.”

“Let me guess,” Thea said, rolling her eyes. “Flatulence, halitosis, diarrhea?”

“Yeah,” Diego said, scowling a little. “How did you know that?”

“I have six brothers,” Thea said trenchantly, without offering further explanation.

Diego sniffed, offended.

“But speaking of Corey…” Thea said, after a pause.

“Cary. And were we?”

“Yeah, we were. He picked the mean ones, remember? Speaking of him…oh, how I suddenly understand Grandmother Spider not wanting to turn her back on him!”

“Who’s Grandmother Spider?”

“We all have our friends,” Thea said. “Mine warned me about yours. Where
is
he, anyway?”

“He said he’d be back, once he’d figured out the security situation back at the house,” Diego
said. “He wasn’t entirely happy with me, before. I kind of…went over his head.”

“You weren’t supposed to try and lure me here without him, were you?” Thea said, suddenly apprehensive, casting glances at the green shadows around her. “He was supposed to have the cavalry here…why me? Why not you? You have far more access to a powerful computer than I ever did—”

“Because he needs a physical body to make that access work, of course,” said a new voice.

Corey materialized out of the shadows, smiling…and he was not alone.

Behind him, three tall and unmistakably Alphiri figures came stepping delicately from the shadows. Two males, dressed in their usual weird idea of what constituted business attire—one wore knickerbocker trousers, his long-toed feet stuffed into knitted socks with every individual toe thrust into its own compartment, and the second one had pulled a straw Panama hat over both pointed ears, giving his face a strange, strained expression. The one woman wore a long gown of some sinuous, flowing golden stuff that draped elegantly over shoulder and hip. Thea glimpsed bare feet and toes adorned with
individual silver rings visible underneath.

Thea could not hold back a gasp. Diego’s expression was more inscrutable, but there was a trace of surprise there, if not his own share of sudden apprehension.

“We meet again,” said the woman in a melodious voice, apparently speaking to Thea.

“In good time,” said one of the men.

“As we knew we would,” said the other.

Thea was suddenly forcibly reminded of her dreams, of the way they had spoken before—always in triads, as though everything they said had a magical significance.

“We come with an offer,” the woman said, apparently a leader of some sort.

“As we did once before,” her first echo said.

“By the power of the Trade Codex,” said the second.

Corey cleared his throat. “As I said. Two of them, here together. According to the Trade Codex…”

“Be silent,” said the woman.

“We are not done.”

“The bargain is yet to be concluded.”

“What bargain?” Thea said, her voice high with fear and desperation. She had set it up so
that she could escape from this place—but that was without taking into account the presence of the Alphiri, and she was not entirely certain if her arrangements would hold up under the changed circumstances. She turned on Corey with furious resentment. “Where do you get off, meddling in our lives, anyway? What did they give
you
?”

“Something I wanted,” Corey said, with a wolfish grin.

“He doesn’t speak for us,” Thea said, turning back to the Alphiri, scrambling to remember what her father had told her about the polity and their trading ways. “Whatever bargain you struck with him, if it concerns me—me or Diego—it is worthless. Your own Trade Codex says you cannot steal.”

“We do not steal,” the woman said.

“He offered us hope,” said the first man, and Thea’s eyes widened just a little.

“He offered us access.”

“Access to what?” Diego burst out at last, staring at the people in his little world.

“Perhaps you,” the woman said, turning to him fractionally.

“Hope for a future.”

“Power to create.”

Diego glanced at Corey. “But you know I need Beltran,” he said.

“That isn’t going to be a problem,” Corey said, smiling.

“
You
have him,” Thea whispered.

“I don’t waste resources. It became obvious that he would be endangered if I left him where he was—he was blown as Diego’s cover. So I made sure I had him safe, before I went to the Alphiri. I knew that they—the rest of the crew, back in the house—would send you out, Galathea. So I told the Alphiri I’d get you both.”

“But you haven’t got either of us,” Thea said. “I am not yours to bargain away, and anything done here will be nixed at the Tribunal when this case is hauled before it—and it
will
be, you can believe that. And without Beltran, without access to the Nexus…”

She shut her mouth abruptly, aware of a concentrated and focused attention that all three of the Alphiri were paying to her every word.

“We don’t need the Nexus,” Corey said confidently. “There were lots of copycat spams…”

“Copied. Transmitted. Not created. Not what Diego can do,” Thea said, unable to stop herself. She turned on the Alphiri. “Taken up and passed
off for someone else’s work. Just like you do with the golden and glittery things you dangle before the other worlds. None of them your own.”

“That is why we are here,” the woman said.

“For the future,” said the first man.

“For the dreams,” said the second.

“Well, you can’t have ours!” Thea said. There was a part of her that trembled with pure terror and was more than ready to turn and flee, if she knew there were a place to flee
to
in this insubstantial world of Diego’s.

“So it’s the Nexus, is it?” Corey said suddenly. “But there is more than one way to access the Nexus…”

Thea had thought of the same thing, in the same instant. Isabella. Lorenzo.

“Oh no, you don’t!” she muttered, turning just as Corey began to step back into a shadow. She whipped out a hand and closed it around his wrist, and then willed herself back, as she always did from an alternate reality she had woven for herself, back to where the computer was. Back to the office.

For a moment she struggled, almost feeling as if she would fail this time, stuck somewhere in between worlds, in unraveled strands that she
could not re-weave. It was not the first time she had traveled with a companion in tow, but this was no ordinarily companion: it was Corey, the Trickster, and although taken by surprise, he was quick-thinking enough to realize that wherever she was taking him would not be a good place for him to be. But although it felt like swimming through molasses, Thea was suddenly aware that she was back in Professor de los Reyes’s office, her hand still clutching Corey’s wrist.

She felt hot and sweaty; her hair, damply irritating, was sticking to the back of her neck as though she had just run a race, and her shirt clung to her in miserable discomfort. But if she was feeling bad, Corey obviously felt a whole lot worse. He let out a startled yelp as they materialized in the study, his bony wrist jerking in her grip; it suddenly changed into a coyote’s angular paw, and then, as she instinctively tightened her grip on it, into the wingtip of a raven, which pulled itself out of her scrabbling fingers as the bird tore free and began to circle the room right up underneath the ceiling, uttering raucous cries.

“Someone got spellspammed?” Larry said, staring up with an astonished expression.

“No,” Sebastian de los Reyes said, his own eyes on the raven, “if I am not mistaken that bird used to be my son’s tutor, Cary Wiley.”

“Are you all
right
?” Zoë said to Thea, who was breathing in short gasps.

“Professor…the Nexus…you said you’ve been using it as your family’s Terranet backbone…You need to shut
that
down, now. Nobody gets access to Terranet through the Nexus except you, and then only when you have to…the Nexus is the reason that Diego was able to start sending out the spellspams, through Beltran…”

“That I have already done,” the professor said, glancing at the computer console.

“But Beltran’s disappeared,” Terry said.

“
He
has him somewhere,” Thea said, pointing to the raven, which had now perched on top of a high shelf and was eyeing everyone resentfully. “And he brought the Alphiri to Diego’s world. He’s been acting as a go-between all along, and now he’s figured out that he needs access to the Nexus, and if he can’t have Beltran, he’ll take someone else. Someone with access. Family. Isabella, maybe.”

Terry made an instinctive jerk toward the
computer, as though he wanted to rip it out of the wall, before Isabella could come to any harm from it.

“But I thought it was the connection between the twins that was the important thing here,” Larry said.

“He can change shapes,” Thea said, settling into a chair and gulping down a glass of cold lemonade that had appeared unasked for on the table next to her elbow, provided by the Elemental house. “He can manipulate what he needs. He has Beltran; he can
change
him into Isabella or even you, Larry—someone with access, and knowledge. The computer…the computer needs to be shut off from
all
of you…”

“I’ve already taken care of that,” the professor said quietly, standing over Thea with his hands clasped behind his back. “I have already regretted that rash act, and right now the only access password to the Nexus is mine. And I’m not about to divulge that. Now, tell me what you learned about my son.”

“I don’t know where Beltran is, sir,” Thea said.

“No,” the professor said heavily. “Diego.”

“The Alphiri,” Larry said suddenly, dragging
his eyes from the bird on the shelf. “You said there were Alphiri. What did they want?”