Worldweavers: Cybermage (10 page)

“Stop, you’re making me dizzier than the stairs,” Thea said. “But are you starting to come around to the idea that there
is
a Trickster involved?”

He glared at her. “That’s not fair.”

“I think we’ll go that way,” Thea said, coming to a decision.

“You sure—
Heeey!
” Terry yelped as she suddenly bent her knees and leaped off the landing they were standing on, sailing straight across the empty space in the middle of the whole puzzle and coming to rest in a half crouch on the landing they had been looking at.

Now that Thea was there, the perspective was quite different; it didn’t seem that far away. “It’s this way,” she said, bending to pick up the feather at her feet and running it through the fingers of her other hand. “Come on, jump.”

“This gets worse at every turn,” Terry muttered. He took a couple of running steps and leaped across to where Thea waited.

“Feel better now?” Thea said. “See, it is this way. Come on.”

The stairs led down from the landing, and then took a sharp right under an archway, vanishing behind it. When Thea and Terry arrived at the archway and stepped through, there was a brief buzzing sound behind them—and when they turned to look back, they found nothing but a dirty whitewashed wall.

“Whatever,” Terry said. “We’re here now. There seems to be no going back.”

“We’re fine,” Thea said, pointing with her feather. “Look there.”

In front of them, a short stretch of linoleum-lined corridor away, stood a set of heavy oak double doors. They were closed, with no less than three heavy brass bolts, all locked down with large, old-fashioned padlocks.

“Okay,” Terry said carefully. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a key for that?”

“I told you,” Thea said. “No keys are needed.”

She was typing on her keypad as she spoke, and Terry suddenly realized that the double doors were at his back.

Open.

With another set in front of him. This time steel.

Thea grinned and typed some more.

And then the steel doors were open behind them. And something that looked like a veil of pure energy rose ahead, crackling like high-voltage electricity and arcing tiny blue-white lightning.

“Ooh, that’s actually pretty,” Thea said, typing into her keypad. “Tesla would have liked that one.”

And then they were past. The open maw of a great dragon faced them instead, its glistening, foot-long sharp teeth surrounding an entrance into what looked like the back of a throat.

Terry wrinkled his nose. “They didn’t have to be quite so realistic,” he muttered. “That thing is suffering from a thousand years of untreated halitosis.”

“Hold your nose,” Thea said, flashing him a quick grin. “And down the gullet we go…”

And then, with startling suddenness, the entire corridor appeared to end abruptly, with nothing in front of them except stars and faraway galaxies glowing dimly and double-spiraling in the distance.

“Thea,” Terry said, standing on the edge of this vista and staring at it with wide eyes, “
how are you doing this?
”

“There is nothing in front of me,” Thea said, “but air.”

“This cube could not be safer if it was on Mars,” Terry said. “Only you can get this far. You’re using Elemental magic. How many people can claim to—”

“If someone has a key—a
real
key, be it iron or just spoken word—nothing stands between them and the cube,” Thea said. “I’m not trying to hide it from the people trying to break the system, Terry. I’m protecting it from someone already
in
the system.”

“But what if…”

Thea lifted the feather she still held in her right hand. “I know,” she said. “There’s the name. There’s this.”

Terry looked at yet another barrier looming before them. “How many of these…”

“As many as they thought they needed,” Thea said. “I think it’s geared to how good you are at getting past them. Without a key, that is. At seeing past the illusions. Or weaving past them.”

“So the better you are at that, the more they fling at you?” Terry said, appalled. “We could be here
until we die of old age!”

“Uh, no,” Thea said, smiling at something ahead of them. “I don’t think so.”

They were standing before a narrow door, its top half paned into nine squares of dirty glass, peeling paint hanging in pitiful strips from the stained and cracked wood beneath. A spiderweb hung from the corner of one of the glass panes to the edge of the lintel, and a small mound of dust and debris was piled up against the door at the bottom.

“Looks like that hasn’t been opened for twenty years,” Terry said.

“I know,” Thea said. “This is the only real one. The only one for which I
don’t
have a key.”

“All this way and you can’t open it?” Terry said. “Now might be a time to try some more of that Elemental—”

“That
,” Thea said, “I don’t know how I would hide from anyone. If this was opened by Elemental magic—by any sort of real magic—it would be better than a fingerprint, I suspect.”

“So what, then…
Wait
a minute.”

“What?”

“Something my mother said. ‘You only need a key
if you believe that there is something worth locking away.’”

“Um, yes,” Thea said, and then her own expression changed. “Oh, my,” she said. “Mrs. Chen said the same thing, really, last year—the best place to hide something is usually in plain sight.”

Their eyes met, in sudden comprehension.

“The only people the FBM would expect to get this far,” Terry said, “would already have permission to enter. Anyone else would have dropped by the wayside, and would probably still be throwing up somewhere at the memory of that dragon breath. It’s the illusion gates that are the key to this place.”

“And this door?”

“This door isn’t locked at all,” Terry said. He shook down a bit more sleeve, enough to cover his hand, and touched the handle. At Terry’s light tap it swung open, creaking just a little; the pile of dirt and the cobweb remained unaffected, leaning disconcertingly against nothing and attached to some point in thin air.

“Wow,” Terry said, hesitating. “I wouldn’t have believed…”

“You still sure that it would be safer here than
anywhere?” Thea slipped into the room behind the ancient door, carefully kicking it open a little wider with her air-booted foot.

The place was much larger than it had any right to be, stretching away into deep shadows in the back, with shelves upon shelves of boxes and scrolls and books, and an entire wall covered by a bank of computer monitors, currently switched off.

“This is amazing,” Terry breathed, following her in and staring around.

Thea was typing something into her keypad, and as though in response, a small pale glow occurred somewhere far back in the stacks of shelves.

“That way,” Thea said, pointing. As they approached the glow, they saw that it was emanating from a closed briefcase, suffused in a kind of dull white light.

Thea reached out for the briefcase; the light wound itself around her arm like a tentacle, wrapped itself around her shoulders, and hovered around her hair and face, eerily lighting up her features. With the briefcase in one hand, she reached out with the other and gently laid the raven feather she still carried into the space that the briefcase had occupied. Then she
looked up at Terry, her face wreathed in pale light.

“One last stop,” she said, “before we go back.”

And the shadowy safe, the deepest repository of all the secrets of the Federal Bureau of Magic, sank into utter darkness around them.

“I
SHOULD HAVE FIGURED
,” T
ERRY
said, after a moment of silence.

He stood beside Thea on the flat, hard ground that was the Barefoot Road. They had materialized at the foot of the mesa that held Cheveyo’s home; it glowed russet and dark gold in the honey-colored light cast by a sun low in the sky, hurrying toward sunset. From somewhere far away the cry of a hunting raptor came echoing out of the open sky. Except for the bird, they appeared to be alone. There was no other sign of life stirring in Cheveyo’s abode.

Thea shifted her grip on the briefcase. There was nothing extraordinary about it now, nothing to point to the treasure it contained. It had ceased to be luminous, or at least its pale white glow had faded into insignificance in the presence of Tawaha, the sun god who had once taken human form in these
lands to speak to Thea.

“You planning on leaving the cube here?” Terry asked.

“It will be safe with Cheveyo,” Thea said. “At the very least, nobody will be looking for it here.”

“Uh,” Terry said, “the moment they figure out who took it, this is the
first
place they will look. And isn’t this where your Coyote friend actually lives?”

“But with any luck they won’t figure out who took it,” Thea said. “And besides, Coyote is watched here. Grandmother Spider and Tawaha said they would watch him.”

“They might have meant anywhere. That includes our own world.”

“Yes, but they have
real
power here,” Thea said stubbornly.

“Are you sure Cheveyo will take this thing?” Terry asked. “Did you actually
ask
him?”

“He always said I ask too many questions,” Thea said.

But she had hesitated a moment too long before she answered, and Terry picked up on it immediately.

“You’re still making this up as you go along,” he said. “Asking why the sky is blue is a question.
Wanting to know if he’ll take on babysitting duties on a cube-bound wizard who’s technically been dead for fifty years is hardly the same thing. What are you going to do if Cheveyo says no?”

“You return, Catori.”

Cheveyo’s voice, coming from above and behind them, made both Terry and Thea turn sharply to look. Terry, who knew enough about the properties of the Barefoot Road to be aware that the fact that he was standing upon it with shoes still on his feet was blessing enough, stayed where he was. He looked back over his shoulder to where Cheveyo stood beside a rocky outcrop, leaning on his staff. Thea, not constrained by any such considerations, had turned and already taken a step toward her old teacher.

“I come to ask a favor,” she said. She thought she could hold his eyes, but under his shrewd, penetrating gaze, she dropped her own, suddenly uneasy.

“And so once again you come to my world with a burden that you carry,” Cheveyo said softly.

“This time, it isn’t just my own,” Thea said. She hefted the briefcase. “There is something, some
one
, in here who needs protection. Perhaps just for a little while, maybe for longer; I don’t know. But the
place I took this from wasn’t safe. If the Trickster has found a way to slip past the defenses…well, I did not want this falling in the wrong hands.”

“And what do you say, friend of Catori?” Cheveyo said, turning his eyes on Terry.

“There are some things of which Thea seems certain,” Terry said. “But they are not the sort of things it is possible to prove beyond any doubt—not to me. Not to anyone in our world, I guess. At least not yet.” He paused, and Thea could feel his eyes resting on her. “But I trust her instinct,” Terry said at last, making his choice, betting on Thea and friendship and gut feeling rather than pure logic and cold hard fact.

Thea, suddenly aware that she had been holding her breath, allowed it to escape with a small sigh and threw Terry a quick, grateful look. Then she turned to face Cheveyo again.

“When you first came to me, Catori, you came bearing nothing but that instinct,” Cheveyo said slowly. “You had no way of knowing that it had been by your own choice that you were deprived of magic in your world, where magic matters so much. But you had your instincts, and your instincts were true—it was a time to hide rather than to reveal. Here, you could be protected. It was a place of
awakening…but it was also a place to hide.”

“They think they have figured her out at last, in our world,” Terry said. “She isn’t hiding anymore.”

Cheveyo shook his head slowly. “True, but not completely true,” he said. “That light you have glimpsed—it’s something that escaped through the cracks. You are still locked away in your tower, Catori—the things you have done, you did in secret. Only a handful of people know of this; you are still hiding. And you cannot hide forever, least of all here.” His eyes were luminous with a dark fire, a fire that was vision and dream and certainty and wisdom. “I will do this thing that you ask of me, for a short while. If you would protect something or someone dear to you in your own world, it will soon have to be your own power that does it—and that choice is coming for you, in a nearness of days. But until then, I will hold your treasure. And I will keep it safe.”

Thea held out the briefcase without another word, and Cheveyo reached out and took it.

“Thank you,” Thea said. She had run through a dozen phrases expressing her profound gratitude in her mind, but in the end nothing but simplicity would do.

Cheveyo, one hand holding the briefcase, lifted
his staff with the other in a gesture that was both blessing and dismissal. “Go, and pursue what destiny the Road takes you to,” he said. “I will be here when you return.”

Thea bowed her head in respectful acknowledgment, and turned back to Terry.

“Time we were getting back,” she said, giving him a small smile as she lifted her wrist and tapped at her keyboard.

“I thought you didn’t need that here, that the Road—”

They were back in the Nexus room, very suddenly, the mesas and the sunset and Cheveyo’s dark eyes just fragments of a dream.

Terry shook his head sharply.

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re weird?” he said. “How long have we been gone, anyway? It’s always hard to tell, in here.”

“Twenty-seven seconds,” Thea said.

“What? But you…we couldn’t…” Terry leaned over and stared in disbelief at the computer clock at the bottom of one of his monitors.
“How?”

“We couldn’t very well have come back tomorrow midafternoon,” Thea said. “People would have wondered.”

“Sometimes you really scare me,” Terry said. “Thea, are you absolutely sure about all this?”

“You said you trusted my instincts.”

“I do, but it all feels like an insane dream right now, and I’m not certain that I believe any of it actually happened. Exactly what do you want to do next?”

“Absolutely nothing, until I figure out what I already did,” Thea said.

Terry stared at her for several long moments with his mouth hanging open, and then shook his head sharply. “I suppose you’ll let me in on the secret, when you do.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” she promised with a grin. “I’d better get back to my room now. It’s been a long night.”

“Yeah,” Terry said. “All twenty-seven seconds of it.”

She smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and tapped
ENTER
.

Magpie wasn’t in the room when Thea materialized there. Thea was grateful; there was far too much she needed to think about.

Thea slipped into bed with one of her Tesla books, and was quickly absorbed. Pigeons had played an
increasingly essential part in Tesla’s later life; when he could not make his daily feeding time in one of New York’s parks, he sent other people to take his place. Tesla once disappeared from a formal dinner at which he had been the guest of honor, and was found a short time later in his favorite park, late at night, standing quite still, completely covered with pigeons, who had settled on his head and shoulders and outstretched arms.

It was an arresting image. Unable to read much past that point, Thea put the book away; it was very near to lights-out, anyway. Magpie still hadn’t returned, and Thea lay awake for a while, but she fell asleep before she saw any signs of Magpie’s return.

Her dreams were full of a rush of wings, glimpses of gray pigeon feathers, and the sound of distant cooing. At one point she stood in a rain of feathers, all gray and silver-pale except for one that was black as night and twice the size of the pigeon plumage, falling like an omen, a dark premonition. But there was nothing coherent in those dreams, nothing that she could have interpreted as a message of any significance. She woke suddenly, with a start. The only thing that remained was an odd sense of anticipation, and a fading memory of
the rustle of many wings.

Magpie was in her bed, grumbling and knuckling her eyes. They were both late and didn’t exchange more than a couple of words in passing.

It was one of those breathless days when Thea felt she was running as fast as she could just to stay in the same place. She simply seemed to be late for everything. Classes backed up and stacked up on top of one another, the few spare moments between them spent juggling books and notes and homework assignments and running down corridors with her backpack bouncing painfully against her legs as she rummaged through it for the things that she would need for the next class.

Somewhere during the third class of the day, mathematics, Ben passed a note to Thea while Mr. Siffer had his back turned for a moment.

Can you tell the Walrus to quit making faces at you? People are starting to wonder.

Thea looked up, startled, and looked around for Kristin. Ben was quite correct; her face was a mask of blazing curiosity, and her eyes glittered. She brightened as she realized she finally had Thea’s attention, and mouthed something like,
Well?

Thea, glancing at Mr. Siffer, who was starting to
turn, managed a swift and unequivocal gesture of drawing her index finger across her throat accompanied by a suitably ferocious scowl.
Cut it out. Not now!

Mr. Siffer turned fully around, sweeping the class with a gimlet gaze, and Thea dropped her eyes and stared studiously at her notebook. But the escape was only temporary. After class, Kristin stuffed her books untidily into her backpack and made a bee-line for Thea’s corner.

“Well?”
Kristin asked breathlessly.

“Not now,” Thea said, glancing meaningfully at the other students. “You know I can’t.”

Kristin eyed Thea’s wrist hopefully. “You could…”

“No.
Later,
Kristin!”

“That exciting, was it?” Kristin said with a grin.

“All right, what did you
do
?” Ben demanded, leaning across his own desk.

“Terry didn’t tell you?” Thea asked carefully.

Ben’s shoulders hunched up defensively. “Tell me what?”

Thea rolled her eyes. “Look,” she said, “I promise I’ll catch you up, but first I need to figure out a few things myself. I’m not holding out, and I’m not
going to simply disappear, so you can stop watching me like a cat at a mouse hole, Kristin, because right now I’d rather everyone’s attention was focused somewhere
else
.”

“Yes, well, it was my idea,” Kristin said.

“And full credit will be given, if you absolutely insist,” Thea shot back. “But wouldn’t you rather wait and see just how much trouble you’d be in?” She hoisted her backpack on one shoulder and turned to give Ben and Kristin one last indignant look before flouncing out of the classroom.

“Is she always that snippy?” she heard Kristin ask.

“Not before
you
turned up,” said Ben.

But they both backed off, and she had a breather, a space in which she simply sat back and waited to see what would happen next. She
had
been winging it, as Terry had pointed out, and she had finally run out of impulses, waiting to see what the response would be to the things she had set in motion.

Nearly forty-eight hours later, crossing the quad on her way to the library, she saw Terry hurrying toward her across the lawn, waving urgently. Even as she slowed her pace, she saw his expression change to one of resignation, and another familiar
voice spoke behind Thea.

“Ah, good,” Humphrey May said. “Just the two people I wanted to talk to.”

There had been no warning that Humphrey May was at the school, or on his way—no time for Thea and Terry to get their stories straight.

“I had hoped,” Humphrey continued pleasantly as Terry reached them, “to just let you two get on with trigonometry and Shakespeare for a while, but I need to pick your brains.”

He was smiling slightly, professionally, but the smile never reached his serious blue eyes. Thea stole a quick glance at Terry. Humphrey sounded as though he was simply there for a pleasant chat, not to confront them over breaking and entering. On the other hand, there was something to be said for avoiding a scene, and they had no way of knowing if FBM agents were waiting just out of sight to take them both in.

“What’s up?” Thea asked. She managed to keep her voice level, but her heart was beating very fast and a flush was creeping into her cheeks.

“It seems,” Humphrey began, almost unwillingly, “that somehow it was let slip that…” He looked Thea straight in the eye. “You’d better make sure we
aren’t overheard,” he said, nodding at her keypad. “I could shield us, but in this place that would reveal rather than conceal if anyone was watching.”

Thea obligingly tapped a couple of words into her keypad, hit
ENTER
, and looked up again without saying a word.

“I think we’re in trouble. Again.” Humphrey hesitated once more, and when he spoke again it was to utter a name that Thea had not been expecting—or at least not so soon. “The Alphiri,” he said.

Thea felt the familiar sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. “What about them?”

“Let me just say that I appear to have a somewhat loose-lipped assistant,” Humphrey said, with a touch of acid. “One who has a weakness for a pretty face, at any rate. Rafe was there when we talked of…of what you and your friends had come to the professor’s house to help out with. Mention was made of pigeons. Rafe was mightily amused at the idea of hunting down individual birds in New York City. He mentioned something along those lines to my other intern, a comely young woman by the name of Kay Otis. Next thing we know, Miss Otis has vanished. And as of yesterday…the Alphiri have been observed stalking pigeons in New York.”