Spellspam, page 1
Spellspam
World Weavers (Book Two)
Alma Alexander
Sky Warrior Book Publishing, LLC.
Copyright ©2013, by Alma Alexander
Published by Sky Warrior Book Publishing, LLC.
PO Box 99
Clinton, MT 59825
www.skywarriorbooks.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.
Editor: Phyllis Irene Radford.
Cover art by Peter Bradley.
Publisher: M. H. Bonham.
Printed in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Spellspam (Worldweavers, #2)
ONE
TWO
Dedication
The second book for Sonja, the second sister
***
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Ben Crowell, Piret Loone, Helen Hall, Irina Rempt, Phil Tourigny, RK Bose, and Ari Nördstrom—and their various secondary sources—for their help with Chapter 5.
To Phyl, who sees the importance of small things.
And, as always, my thanks to Deck. For everything.
To: person@thisaddress.com
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To: anyone@openthisnow.com
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<<>>
ONE
The first hint of serious trouble came, as trouble always does, unlooked for, stealthily, catching everyone by surprise. It was the day that LaTasha Jackson suddenly turned into an Anatomy Teacher’s Aid.
Things came to a head during a free-study hour, individual work done in the comfortable, plush silence of the school library, each student to his or her own cubicle, doing whatever work felt most pressing or pleasing. For some, that meant finishing homework due for the very next class; others were reading college textbooks on chosen subjects, way beyond what the Academy was supposed to be covering. Still others sat furtively hunched over their desks, with loose hair covering contraband earphones, trying to hide a music-player-shaped bulge in their pocket. One or two, bored, drew cartoons or wrote snatches of deathless prose which they fondly imagined would turn into a novel someday. The incorrigible chatterboxes found a way to whisper and giggle softly to one another from adjoining cubicles, or pass notes with the occasional rustle of tearing and a scritch of pencils on paper.
But, on the whole, everything was quiet, and Thea Winthrop liked it that way. She wasn’t doing anything particularly scholastic, but that wasn’t because she was goofing off—she usually managed to have most of her work done in reasonable time, and hardly ever needed to resort to trying to write an essay five minutes before it was due. What she used her free study periods for was simply reading. She would meander down the library stacks at the beginning of the hour, pulling out a book here and there to check it out as a title caught her eye, and finally settle on something that interested her. Her reading tastes were wide-ranging—the books that found their way to her cubicle ranged from almost pristine art history hardcovers to dog-eared fat fantasy novels that had passed through many hands.
She was engrossed in a book about the social customs of chimpanzees when a bloodcurdling scream rent the air from the coveted north corner of the library, where the bank of library computers slated for student use were situated. Thea jumped, dropping her book on the desk with a thump and losing her place. She pushed her chair back on its castors to peer around the edges of her cubicle.
Dozens of heads popped out from other cubicles, and they were all in time to watch in appalled horror as something ghastly leaped back from a computer screen, overturning the chair and sending it flying into a bookcase which staggered under the impact, and raced down the length of the library and out through the double doors at the far end.
The only reason Thea even remotely recognized this apparition was LaTasha’s trademark hairstyle, lots of tiny braids finished off by bright trade beads in garish shades of pink and mustard yellow. The face that she’d glimpsed beneath those braids, however, was something else indeed.
She looks like she’s been skinned! Then she shuddered as she realized that this, precisely this, was what LaTasha was. Skinned. Or at least giving a reasonably good imitation of it. But there was no blood, Thea followed up her own thought, frowning. Surely there should have been... but no... there was just...
That was it, in a nutshell. Instead of LaTasha’s skin, the color of coffee leavened with a touch of cream, her face had been a striated, complicated mass of red muscle, striated bands of it coming down from her temples to wrap around her mouth, neat folds of it across her nose and cupping her chin, round orbs of it around her alarmingly protruding eyeballs, with startling and somewhat unnerving glimpses of stark bone structure underneath it all. Her hands, held out in front of her, had been the same way—a naked, tangled mass of tendon and sinew.
But no blood.
It was like her skin had just gone see-through, somehow, revealing the building blocks of the body which lay beneath, usually safely hidden away.
There was a swelling of noise in the library as students surged out of their chairs, clustered in tight little knots. The librarian on duty was frantically whispering something into a telephone, her hand cupped protectively around the mouthpiece.
For some reason it was only Thea who finally backed away from all the pandemonium and edged almost furtively towards the computer LaTasha had been using.
She wasn’t sure herself what she expected to find there, but what she did discover left her blinking owlishly at the computer monitor for a few moments. The screen showed a webmail gateway, something that many students used while at school while away from easy access to their own home email accounts. An email was open on the screen, an email that LaTasha should have known better than to open—anything addressed to person@thisaddress.com should have been immediately suspect, at the very least as an advertisement, unwanted junk mail, spam. But what followed was fatal:
Having trouble keeping your skin blemish-free? Troubled by zits, lines, old scars? Try our incredible product for 30 days for FREE! We guarantee that we will leave your skin clearer than you could ever have dreamed of....
LaTasha was fourteen years old, and painfully self-conscious of the imperfections of her skin, which was cursed with large pores and periodic zit infestations that made her look like she was coming down with the measles—and that was without an unfortunate scar left behind by her brush with the real measles, which she’d had as a toddler and which sat, a small but (to LaTasha) eye-wateringly obvious pit, underneath and to the side of her left eye.
“It makes my eye droop,” she had complained to friends, often. “Look, it makes me look like a Saint Bernard puppy, all mournful and woebegone. Who’d want to date that? They probably all think I’m going to bore them silly with family tragedies. Like I’d had a twin who was stolen by the Faele or something and never came home. Oh, it’s hopeless!”
Perfect skin. The thing had offered perfect skin. That would have been irresistible to someone like LaTasha, who blamed hers for all the injustice of her life—if she could only get perfect skin, she’d be happy, she knew she’d be happy...
Something surfaced briefly in Thea’s mind, and then submerged again before she’d had a chance to grab at it. Instead, she sighed and reached out instinctively to clear the screen, as though that email could be used as some sort of evidence against poor LaTasha. And even as her hand hovered above the red X that would close the email screen, that thing that had briefly come up for air suddenly did so again, and this time it had a word in its mouth.
Not perfect. The word was clear.
“Clearer than you could ever have dreamed of,” muttered Thea to herself as she hastily clicked on the red X. “Oh, my fur and whiskers...”
Clear.
Transparent.
“But that is a spell,” Thea muttered to herself, frowning.
She lifted her head to look back across the library, where some sort of order was being restored to the chaos of milling students by a couple of staff members who had arrived to back up the librarian. The librarian herself, still cradling the telephone receiver, was staring straight back at Thea and at the now blank computer on the desk beside her. With a sinking feeling which she was still unable to properly articulate, Thea bent her head to hide the sudden color in her cheeks and inched away from the computer desk toward the sanctuary of the stacks.
Everyone knew, of course, that computers were impervious to magic. That was the foundation of the world. Computers were where magic was stored, because it could do no harm there. And besides, this was the Wandless Academy, magicless, shielded. There could not have been a spell which broke those two defenses—could not have possibly been such a spell. And yet, Thea had seen the evidence streak out of the library before her very eyes. And other people’s eyes. And obviously LaTasha herself had been affected—Thea paused for a moment to consider how she would have reacted if she had happened to look down on her hands on the computer keyboard and seen something that looked more like it belonged on a butcher’s block or an anatomy dissection board than the familiar limb she was used to.
It had to have been a very competent illusion spell... and it had been transmitted by computer.
Which, of course, was impossible.
<<>>
Computers couldn’t do magic.
They had talked about the problem of computer magic a lot, Thea and her friends. When they had returned to the Academy for the new semester after their brush with cybermagic, Thea’s unexpected abilities in that department had topped every conversation. Terry, the computer genius, had naturally asked questions which were practical and to the point.
“Are you saying we can all do this tripping-between-the-worlds thing?” he asked Thea, tapping his fingers on a desk. “By ourselves? That first time, we all seemed to be involved...”
“Well, you all came after me into the Whale Hunt, when we were after the Nothing, and I wasn’t there to start it,” Thea said.
“Yeah, but that time I found the thing on the computer screen and just hit Enter again, so it was you who started it, we just followed.”
“Do you think anyone could have followed?” Magpie said, sounding frightened. “I would hate for people who don’t care or understand to be able to blunder around in a world like that—it was the sea of my own ancestors...”
“We could try it again...” Tess began.
“They locked up the computer room,” Ben said, shaking his head.
“I was supposed to get a laptop for Christmas,” Thea said. “Didn’t quite happen. I think they’re afraid of what I would do with one.”
“Beside the point—we have mine,” Terry said.
“...and anyway we would just get into real trouble,” said Ben, scowling at the interruption. “Besides, they made Thea promise...”
“Yeah,” Thea said morosely, “they made me promise.”
“Promise what, exactly? And who made you, anyway?” Magpie said.
“That I wouldn’t do anything that would be considered...” Thea began, but Terry waved an impatient hand to interrupt her.
“That can’t last,” Terry said. “They—you know, anybody in any sort of direct authority—teachers, parents, whatever—want to know, they’ll come and rope you back in—maybe all of us, for all I know—before too long. This whole thing is too big for just a handful of people. Sooner or later it’ll come to the attention of the politicians. And then it’s anybody’s game.”
“You think the Federal Bureau of Magic will get involved in this?” Ben asked.
“Principal Harris said something about shifting the balance of trade,” Thea muttered. “If the Alphiri get wind of this...”
“I’ve always thought,” Magpie said, turning to stare at her roommate, “that you were a bit obsessed on the subject of the Alphiri.”
“Oh, yeah?” Thea said, rounding on Magpie with some asperity. “I’m telling you, they’re everywhere. Every time I turn around, outside the school, I see them—they’re all over the place, in the banks, in the coffee shops, in the streets. They’re just waiting for something to happen, to confirm whatever it is that they think they already know, and the moment they think they do that...”
“You really think they’re going to snatch you?” Magpie asked, chastened.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” Thea muttered. “ But I’m afraid of them.”
“The Alphiri have always been everywhere,” Terry said. “But all that aside, Thea’s right. If any of this comes to threaten our relationship with the Alphiri or any of the other polities, you bet the Feds will come in. And if they can’t use you, Thea, they will probably...”
“Terry,” Tess said sharply. “You are starting to sound awfully like Dad at his most pompously pessimistic.”
“Caught between the Government and the Alphiri,” Thea muttered. “Terrific.”
Terry shrugged. “Some day I’d like another opportunity to have a stab at it,” he said, “see if I can’t figure out what’s going on. But until then—just do what they want, and lie low, and stay out of people’s way.”
“Double Seventh at last? The whole bag of tricks? Seventh child of Two Seventh Children?” Ben asked, with a curious little smile. “Coming into your own?”
Thea tossed her head. “Sometimes,” she said trenchantly, “I wonder if I shouldn’t have just shut up about everything and been content to keep Frankie company. Nobody’s thought about me in those terms for a long time, not since I was a baby—and now all those wasted years are back, and it’s all ten times as intense as it should have been. I wish I’d never figured out how do any of this.”
“Hiding a light under a barrel doesn’t put it out,” Magpie said.
“You are starting to sound like Cheveyo,” Thea said, but her mouth had quirked into a wry grin. Cheveyo, the Anasazi shaman teacher who had been the first to unlock Thea’s real magical potential and whom she had firmly left behind in his own time and her distant past, was proving to be a persistent presence in her everyday life.
“It’s big,” Tess said, “and yeah, it’s unusual, but there’s all kinds of weird and unusual talents amongst those of our kind—this might turn out to be no more than an aberration, after all. An accident of magic. We all know that computers are inert; all that you might have done, when they get around to finding out what’s behind it all, is discover how to use one to focus what’s already inside you. The fact that you were anywhere near a computer might have been a complete accident...”
“Still,” Terry said doggedly. “Watch yourself.”
“Computers can’t!” Tess said. “We all know that!”
That was the foundation of it all, of course—the truth that their world was built on. Computers were impervious to magic and safe from it. It was what all five of them still believed, despite evidence to the contrary, until the day in the library when an honest-to-goodness spell transferred by computer turned LaTasha transparent.
<<>>
None of the others had been in the library on the day of LaTasha’s transformation. When Thea rounded up her friends, less than an hour later, and told them of what she had observed, it was hard for all of them to accept the obvious.
“It must have been something else, something you missed,” Tess insisted.
“Tess, she was... she... she ran out of there screaming, looking skinned. I saw it, the librarian saw it and it scared the living daylights out of her, a whole bunch of other kids saw it, and we all saw the same thing. LaTasha must have gone straight to the nurse with this, and the nurse would have realized that it wasn’t anything physical that she could actually treat, and by now they all know what it was. And what it wasn’t. And they will trace it back and figure it out. And as far as they know there is no way to use a computer to do this sort of thing, and if there was then the only person they know of who can do anything remotely similar is me—and they will know I was in the library at the time...”
Terry gave her a startled look. “You think they’ll blame you...?”
“But you weren’t at a computer,” Tess said.
Thea looked up. “Oh, yeah, I was,” she said, a little desperately. “I should have known better than to meddle, with everything else that’s going on, but she ran from the computer... and I... wanted to see... The librarian saw me, Tess. I turned off the computer. I have no idea why I did it, but I did it, and the librarian saw me.”
“She couldn’t possibly have known what you were doing, or even that you hadn’t been there all the time...” said Ben.
Thea threw him a grateful but exasperated glance. “That just makes it worse,” she said. “The librarian might not have known anything, but if they investigate what happened—and they will have to—she will tell them that she remembers seeing me at that computer. And then everyone else will jump to their own obvious conclusions. It’s all tied in.” She looked at all of them then, one by one, pleading with her eyes. “I need to talk to my parents.... I need your help...”
“Thea,” Terry said, understanding immediately, “no.”
“What?” Ben said, bewildered.
“She wants to go back, go home... go back that way. Thea, you promised them you wouldn’t.”
